Spiritual Reflections: We must welcome affordable housing around community – SW News Media

Looking around at our young, still developing suburbs, I see wide, wild fields being dug up for the foundations of new, large single-family homes with sloping driveways, expansive roofs and well-lit, grand entrances. Or large, multi-story luxury senior apartments and condominiums with beautiful walkways and underground parking. Or lovely, new, smaller one-story homes for those ready to downsize.

What I dont see is investment in housing for those who have more modest income or additional housing for those who need rental assistance or, least of all, housing for those in danger of homelessness.

Choosing where to live and with whom has been a point of pride in our democracy. For generations, immigrants to this country would live where others who spoke their native language and shared their customs settled. That is why our state has so many families who share German, Swedish, Norwegian, Somali and Hmong heritage. We have lived where our people live.

But as our young country has moved through waves of new immigrant settlement, national expansion to the Pacific coast, the ruinous Civil War and shifts in our basic economy from agriculture to industry to technology, the social supports of living among familiar people has mostly collapsed. We are now a mobile society, focused less on the importance of social welfare and support for everyone, black or white, young or old, that smaller, established communities afforded to most everyone.

American emphasis on personal independence, competition and effort have eroded our social safety nets of community and necessary cooperation, values that for generations saw the establishment of hospitals, universities, nursing homes, public transportation and housing projects that addressed our common needs together.

Most of us think that people get the housing they deserve and live where they do because of their individual effort or lack of it. Its a simplistic and incomplete view of a basic human right.

This past November, the entire editorial team of this newspaper devoted time and energy to a series of stories helping readers come closer to the human cost of homelessness in Scott County.

Nearly every week, one or more stories in this paper mention the struggle of teachers working with homeless students, law enforcement encountering people without adequate or stable shelter, churches confronted daily with requests for cash, shelter or food assistance, and our various county social services struggling to keep up with the multiple causes of homelessness: low basic wages, skyrocketing rents, family crises, drug abuse and addiction, medical debt, chronic severe mental health and joblessness.

Our country depends on all our willingness, financially and socially, to address this serious housing crisis together. The greatest problem that advocates for low-cost and transitional housing face in America is the social resistance local homeowners have to placing these alternative housing buildings in their own neighborhoods.

Those who resist these lifesaving efforts believe that their own economic security is at stake, either by lowering the value of their own property or threatening what they believe is the safety of their chosen neighborhoods.

Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative, a coalition of 100 congregations in the metro area, is dedicated to growing solutions to our chronic homelessness problem by advocating for public projects and managing housing for people in transition. One such project is in development in Shakopee called Prairie Pointe. Using money from personal donations, private funding and county dollars, this proposed 50-unit permanent housing project would not only provide housing but also child care, career and food supportive resources necessary to help people move toward self-sufficiency.

Housing for all is no threat to our own economic status. People living out of their cars in rural parking lots, children moving between area shelters trying to get through third grade or others recently released from county jails with no job or housing are the real threats to our suburban quality of life.

The solutions are available to us, but we must all be willing to create affordable housing near our own homes and neighborhoods. Its incumbent upon us to challenge our unspoken assumptions about people in poverty, about what we consider basic human needs and how we meet them, and upon what we really base our personal and financial security.

I hope you will join me in being open to learning more about the causes of American homelessnes and how we can continue to work to address this in our suburban communities. Every one of us needs and deserves a home.

Rev. Lynne Silva-Breen, M.Div., M.A., LMFT, served for over 20 years as a Lutheran parish pastor. Shes currently a family therapist/pastoral counselor and can be contacted at inspiringchange.us. She is one of several area pastors who write for Spiritual Reflections, a weekly column appearing in this newspaper.

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Spiritual Reflections: We must welcome affordable housing around community - SW News Media