Feeling homeless when a house is not a home changed me forever. Professor John Haldane says that discovering what we need in life to flourish is like gardening. As you work in the earth with daffodils or trees, you discover what hurts them and what is conducive to their flourishing. The same applies to human beings. By discovering what we are as human beings, we can then know what is conducive to our flourishing and well being, and what is harmful to our well being. I have learned how important a land and a home is for human beings, community, and a society flourish and experience well being. I have also seen how damaging it is when this is missing.
Land, shelter, house, and home are necessary to flourish in life. Not all people will have the capabilities and means to own a house easily or at all. Yet, everyone needs a place to call home.
In 1999-2001 I lived and worked in Florida. I lived there when a job opportunity and ministry role in a church converged. The church role was a parish built around a mission to the homeless of Sarasota. They asked me to pastor the church, so the founder could focus on the homeless mission.
To do that, we rented our house in New York out, and became renters in Florida. The difference was stark and shocking. There, I learned the true meaning of house and home. I learned that moving to another state and renting after five years of ownership had negative impacts on our family, my mental health, and overall well being. In the end , we returned to house and home in New York.
When I moved to Australia in 2016, I once again went through the hardship of losing not only house and home, but this time my homeland. I felt dispossessed and homeless. It is a painful experience most immigrants go through to one degree or another.
In Australia, on a temporary partner visa, I experienced the feeling of being homeless in a different way than Florida. Here, finding a place to live was helped by my wife’s parents renting us a house they own. Had they not given us the benefits of a stable and secure home base, we simply wouldn’t have made it. Australia is a land where it is hard to find a place in which to live.
This week, I read an article by Andrew Hamilton at Jesuit Family Services about homelessness. I thought deeply about it. Having ministered to the homeless I immediately was back in Florida at the mission in my memories. I started to connect my experiences of housing and home that resulted in this essay. Building on some of his main points, I share my own meditation about houses, home, and the sense of homelessness that occurs when we change locations in life. In my case, from the USA to Australia as an immigrant.
Here in Australia, and right now America, government housing policy is changing homes from being places of shelter to being assets necessary for wealth. Here, people take out massive loans to buy houses, which in turn raise prices. I was advised when new here to just get into property market by purchasing a “unit” or apartment you buy. I was told start in a poorer neighbourhood and work your way up. I was thinking in my fifties I do not have time for that.
I quickly felt as though we had made a mistake coming here. I had moments of doubt and looking back. In America, houses are not the storehouses of wealth assets they are in Australia. Houses are still homes. That is when home sickness hit me hard, and despondency became an obstacle. I grieved the loss of house, home, and hearth.
As the years went by, I learned government once took responsibility for housing the people of Australia with little or no income. Much like healthcare, there was a collective approach to basic needs for the good of the whole. Shelter and housing is a basic human need. Government stopped building these homes and sold off what was already built. “Stack and pack” housing policy in the capital cities here is very dehumanising.
Government here chooses to not develop infrastructure to unlock a land rich continent. Instead, they pack everyone into the exisiting coastal infastructure. As an immigrant from America, I now have a large concern that when immigration resumes en masse after Covid shut it all down, there will be incredible market pressure on shelter and rental prices.
In my case, I was blessed to be employed by my wife’s family family here. It led to my immigration permanency and the ability to own a house again. As destiny would have it, my wife’s grandfather started a company selling building supplies, hardware, and tools to largely residential home builders. Her father and his brothers and sisters in the second generation have continued growing the business. My prior management and executive experience causes me to do my best to preserve and grow the family business in the role I play.
Yet, I feel a larger sense of purpose and mission driving my work. I see what I do within my experience of working with the homeless, and experiencing both the security of being a homeowner and insecurity of feeling homeless in Florida and Sydney.
After owning my own house for 21 years, then not living in my house on a piece of land that was my own, I experienced what is on my heart to share in this essay.
As a minister, I saw homelessness as a social and economic policy failure leaving human beings destitute and homeless. For them, the American dream was a nightmare. I loved those people. I listened to the stories of people like me going from success and normal lives to heartbreak.
Job loss, sickness, death of a spouse and depression, addiction, health issues, and other life altering events can strike any of us resulting in homelessness. My heart broke for them. I advocated directly with the Mayor of Sarasota to work with us to decrease homelessness. Politicians see homelessness as a blight and send police to round up those living on the streets and in the woods in camps to get rid of them. It’s not good for business, and taxpayers complain.
Some, though, like me see through the eyes of compassion and care for their fellow human beings. They sense a political responsibility to deliver the material provision of a basic shelter to all in their city, state, or country. I vividly recall the moment in Sarasota that it dawned on me that I had given up house, hearth, and home to be a renter in exchange for a job and ministry opportunity. It made me feel sick inside. At that moment I knew that is what being homeless feels like. I felt that sick feeling again in 2016. It can break you or make you.
It is easy to view homelessness from a distance as only a failure of economic policy and of the political responsibility to deliver material goods. Here are some lessons I have learned about land, houses, homes, and homelessness:
A home is more than a house. A house connects us to others. Connection is central to the human experience. Without a home people are deprived of more than bricks and mortar. They are diminished in their humanity. Look at what happens without our association to a home.
A larger view of a home sees it first of all as a shelter. Whether a tent for nomads or a palace for kings it protects us from wind, rain and sun, from wild animals and from robbers. It is a source of security. Without this intermediary between ourselves and the world of the stranger we are left insecure and exposed.
A home also connects us to a place. I have learned in America and Australia that native peoples connect to land spiritually. A home defines our little place on earth that is our own. It connects us. It is our environment like a sea is to a fish. It anchors us to place. Without it we never put down roots. We become wanderers. In Judeo-Christian religions, heaven is compared the land Abraham was promised. Wandering in the wilderness on the way to the land is the path of the sojourner. We seek a land of our own. It is compared to a mansion whose builder and maker is God himself. That is why when I came to Australia I felt like a nomad, a wandering sojourner. I was disconnected from my land and my people. I felt as though I could not survive without a place. It is my sense of connection, belonging, and my tribal identity. Leaving my clan of 22 in America almost killed me, literally.
A home is also a place of connection to neighbours, merchants and shops, schools community, worship, and society. It gives us an address that links us to government and enables us to live connected to community and society. A lesson I learned with the homeless at Throne of Grace Mission in Sarasota was how vital it is for the homeless to have an address in order to receive government assistance. Without an address, you do not exist.
At a deeper level a stable home connects us with our personal and family history. A house we buy may have been a home to others before us. A home is where significant persons and events in our lives happen. For that reason leaving a home can be experienced as painful. There is an ache for home when we are removed from our place. When we remember home, it is rich in sentiment. I often experience this still living in Australia.
In the movie, “It’s A Wonderful Life,” George Bailey’s “Bailey Park” development outside Bedford Falls was built in the timeline of his just, tolerant good life. It was a vivid portrayal of loiving your neighbour. When George didn’t exist, Pottersville replaced Bailey Park. Mr. Potter personified greed, injustice, and intolerance in building housing that was for his investment and wealth only. George Bailey saw housing as necessary for personal and family well being as the foundation of community and society.
Coming from America’s Northeast, most of us who live there see ourselves in Norman Rockwell’s paintings of post-WWII life. In his paintings, homes are open places that encourage trusting relationships with people in neighbouring homes. A Norman Rockwell view seems a distant memory in the era of identity politics and division. The economic inequality and insecurity in today’s cities and suburbs is causing people to long for community again. That is why people fled the cities for the country during Covid. It is an opportunity to live a wholesome life of connectedness again.
Finally, a home signifies a possession whether secured in purchase, loan, rent or other forms of agreement. That sounds so transactional. Yet, the transaction brings about a sense of stability of place, even if temporary, in the relationship between a home and those living in it. When we can decorate inside, garden outside, and make a house the face of our home and family to the world that drive by knowing we live there, it gives us roots.
Besides leading to the good life, owning possessions like real property can also lead to greed and pride. That is what happens when housing markets turn into investments. Developers, investors, and others can destroy society and community when land and housing sees the home purely in terms of money value or status. In Australia, housing has been adrift in a sea of vice and corruption. It is Potterville, not Bailey Park.
Awhile back in my work, I started seeing a vision providing a sense of purpose in the business of buying and reselling building supplies and tools. I saw what I do as helping people realise the dream of owning a home on their little piece of the earth. It is the place we call home. Where our kids are born. Where we celebrate life, holidays, and make memories. It is where we are part of a community and build relationships. It is where we grow old, rest from our labours, and can rest in a sense of well being. We have lived the good life, our best life. For many of us, it is where we will take our last breath surrounded by love. That is what I am thinking every day while selling lumber, and sheetrock, nails, and hammers (and 90,000 other product lines) to tradesman.
Where we live is rich in what it means to be human. Home ownership is more than property investing to build wealth. I think that is extremely dehumanising. Home is also a foundational aspect of our well being as persons. If we have no place to live, no place to call home, it is traumatic and damages us. As a company President back in New York, I considered the one night experiences of homelessness many CEOs participate in. I didn’t take part. I had worked with the homeless and saw it as well intentioned, useful, but not for me. I appreciate the social awareness these events bring by evoking empathy and evoking large scale generosity to help those who live in danger on the cold streets every day and night. I think they are good events. Yet, the pressures of being homeless, or feeling threatened with losing our homes go beyond socially responsible business.
Right now, tens of thousands of people are experiencing anxiety and fear due to rising interest rates in an adjustable rate mortgage housing market like Australia. The cavalier and bad decisions by politicians and central planners to the pandemic have wreaked havoc on the economy. They are destroying dreams, house ownership, home, and hearth to reset the economy which was still bouyant from GFC era stimulus. Once again, the evils of central banking and planners are inflicting harm on marriages, families, children, community, and society.
Homelessness is growing. More people are on the streets. To be homeless, or having to move all the time as renters cuts connections. As the Jesuit Family Services remind us, “if you have no fixed address you will miss mail, will find it hard to have things delivered, to have friends and family visit you, and to access government services. You will move often from place to place; your children will change schools, miss friends and experience only passing relationships. Even connections with the internet will become more difficult and expensive. With no kitchen, food will be expensive, hospitality impossible; with no laundry or bathroom it will be hard to maintain hygiene and clean clothing.”
Secure housing is a foundational life need. Housing insecurity contributes to mental illness and distance from society. I used to hear a gospel singer sing “we have clothing, shelter, and food, we are blessed.” In modern societies human beings have a right to shelter. Housing stability is required to live fully as human beings with our dignity respected. Without it we wither as persons. We lose touch with friends and family, and the interdependency and bonds with society central to being human grow dangerously weak.
As I often say, government is responsible to create the conditions for all of society to flourish and thrive. Today, I am calling for each of you reading this to write or call your government representatives at the local, state, and national levels. Tell them you want them to represent you by taking responsibility for shaping an economy that will discourage people from treating property as an investment, and will allow people to buy or rent housing affordably. In America, people can afford a house when they work hard because housing and bank regulation see home ownership as essential to a healthy, strong country. In Australia, government has lost the plot with housing.
Governments should also make it a priority to build social housing for those who need it. Our old, disabled, sick, and poor are our neighbours, our community, and often our own family. Where government fails, non profits fill the gap. This is why we must not tax non profit organisations.
Please forward this to others and start a conservation in your world about the importance of housing and home to living our fullest, best life.