Long long ago before covid, a friendly homeless guy named Jerry started camping in the yard of an old white apartment house on Government Street. It was a quiet place, next to the National Cemetery and across the street from the sale barn where the neighbors were mostly cows. One of the tenants asked the landlord if Jerry could stay, and they all struck up a friendship. They were friends for a long time, until the tenant got sick and died. But Jerry and the landlord are still friends.
Then covid came. With it came a lot of wild and crazy things. Nobody could go to work, remember? If you were rich or retired, unless you got the virus, life was ok. But for workers and poor people things got bad quickly. Not just that workers were exposed to the virus. Some couldn’t go to work, so paying rent suddenly got harder. So did groceries, medicine, doctor visits, utility bills, fixing the car, gas for the car, school clothes for the kids…. Never mind that. The kids couldn’t go to school either. Which also made it harder for parents to go to work.
In a kinder world we might have thought of more caring ways to manage this very hard time. There were lots of government help programs and mandates that people couldn’t be evicted from their homes during the pandemic. But since it’s not a kind world, landlords kept evicting people anyway. When covid was declared over it was a wild west of evictions that’s still going on.
Guess where those evicted people went? There are precious few low-income apartments left, so they took what they could carry and set up camp in the woods. They joined the company of homeless people already out there.
If you like camping you might think it could be like a long vacation. But that’s not what it feels like when you have no home to go home to. When it’s hot you can’t escape the heat. When it’s cold the cold seeps into your bones and never leaves you. When it rains you get wet and your clothes don’t dry out for days. When you’re sitting on the ground, it’s really hard to stay clean and you never get a shower. When you’re hungry you have no fridge, stove or microwave to cook anything. You depend on the kindness of strangers to give you a hotdog.
The worst thing is that you don’t belong anyplace. Wherever you camp you need to hide. You’re trespassing on life no matter where you go. At any time, some city official can show up and tell you to leave. “Pack your stuff and get out of here…” You might ask “where am I supposed to go then?” but they’ll only tell you “I don’t know but you can’t camp here.”
So you find other people who have to hide and you hide together.
That’s why the old white house was important to the people who came there. Nobody drove them away. That’s all.
Here’s a story one of the people at the white house told me.:
Rachel’s family has been homeless before. When Rachel was 13 she remembers the first time she came to the old white house. A nice lady lived in the front apartment and gave her cookies. She didn’t mind when Rachel came back and visited her. Rachel could pretend she lived there. It was nice then.
When she came back to the white house this time, it had gotten older and more beat up. But she remembers it as a place where she belonged for a while. It’s still a place where she feels she kind-of belongs. What does it mean to a child to grow up knowing they don’t belong? Anywhere?
Rachel’s only 28, but she has health problems. Last year she had a stroke. She can’t walk and sits in a wheelchair in the yard most of the day. But she can talk and read and do most stuff she wants to do, just slowly. Because she’s very friendly she has lots of friends, and they help her a lot.
That’s how homeless people survive. They help each other.
This week a conditional use permit to continue allowing homeless people to camp at the old white house was denied by the Fayetteville Planning Commission. They said it’s incompatible with the neighborhood to have homeless people camping there. They’re a mess. And probably criminals.
One of the commissioners said this: “We’re not going to come up with the wherewithal to secure safe space for homeless people or ourselves. There’s no way to enforce it. It breaks down into chaos. there are no guardrails. We wish we were there, but there’s no way to compare this to the standards we generally hold.”
What good are standards if they hurt people? That’s junk standards.
Fayetteville is a Compassion City and most of us are proud of it. A Compassion City will weave standards that have a heart for people in deep need. They won’t stand for junk standards that take good care of parks and nice neighborhoods but abuse people for being poor. That’s what happened in Fayetteville this week. Abuse of people for being poor. Jesus would not be amused.