1. Religious Communities Are Already Engaged in the Housing Struggle

By directly providing housing for people in need, religious communities and religion-motivated individuals are already “walking the walk” on housing. In my own community of Indianapolis alone, the Episcopal diocese, the Roman Catholic diocese, and evangelical churches all operate their own homeless shelters and housing programs. So does another organization that relies deeply on an interfaith network of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindi congregations and organizations. As described in chapter 6, just up the road from us in South Bend, a Catholic Worker community, in partnership with other local churches, renovated a former Knights Inn motel to create Housing First–inspired low-barrier housing for the community’s homeless.¹⁰ At a national level, religious housing efforts include the programs of Catholic Charities USA, whose affiliates provide homeless services to more than four hundred thousand people a year and operate more than thirty-seven thousand affordable housing units.¹¹ Multiple Black-led churches across the country are both developing affordable housing on church property and advocating for more affordable housing investments by local and state governments.¹²

That kind of direct service and expertise provides a platform for meaningful advocacy. The federal HoUSed campaign led by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which features a call for universal housing assistance and strong renter protections, is joined by multiple religious groups, including Catholic Charities chapters, the Union for Reform Judaism, and the national leadership of the Episcopal and Methodist Churches.¹³

Similarly, there are many examples at the local levels of religious communities combining service and advocacy. One of these is happening in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, where several homeless people live on the grounds of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church.¹⁴ The congregation welcomes and supports them. At the same time, St. Martin’s works with the advocacy organization Action NC in its campaign to bring accountability to corporate landlords.

St. Martin’s efforts are coordinated by its mission board president Kay Miller, who has seen housing struggles before.¹⁵ When she was a teacher and administrator at Central Piedmont College, a community college in Charlotte, Miller taught students who were living out of their cars, sometimes with their families. But the mission board she leads at St. Martin’s has not always focused on housing. For many years, the parish had a wide array of ministries that supported multiple community needs. Then its rector, Rev. Josh Bowron, challenged the congregation to do something different, to dive deeper into a few focused projects. Mostly, he challenged the congregation to reconsider its overall approach to responding to community needs.

“We have always sort of punched above our weight class when it comes to mission,” Bowron told an Episcopal Diocese publication.¹⁶ He and Miller say the parish has long been guided by the iconic story of St. Martin cutting his cloak in half to share with the poor, along with the Matthew 25 Gospel admonition of “whatsoever you do for the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it for me.”

These guideposts demand something different than just charity, Bowron told his congregation. “He challenged us to truly be with the people in our community who are struggling, not just deciding for ourselves what kind of handout or service we wanted to give,” Miller told me in an interview. “And that is harder to do. It is a lot easier to just give money or food and get some immediate gratification from it.”

So, Miller, the mission board, and the broader St. Martin’s congregation spent months talking to different community groups and studying service options. After a group visit to the local eviction court and conversations with several of the Action NC leaders, they decided to focus on housing justice. “We wanted to see how we could be of help before a family becomes evicted, before someone becomes homeless,” Miller says.

Now St. Martin’s has a team of volunteers following the lead of Action NC tenants and organizers. Parishioners have staffed a tenant crisis hotline, recruited pro bono attorneys to help families facing eviction, and are pulling together a team to do phone canvassing of tenants living in some of the worst corporate-owned housing in Charlotte. They are discussing the possibility of following other churches’ leads in helping low-income homeowners pay off the property tax bills and fines that often causes a family to lose a home, and even exploring how to help create more affordable housing units.

“I give credit to the people of St. Martin’s for showing us how community and faith-based groups can really help the movement,” Action NC organizer Apryl Lewis says. “I try to push faith groups into action, not just praying. And St. Martin’s is definitely taking action.”¹⁷

When religious communities and individuals like the congregants at St. Martin’s “walk the walk” with direct services and also speak out with calls for broader solutions, their voices carry far and wide. Andrea Palumbo provides an example from the Catholic tradition. Palumbo, an attorney, spends her days giving legal advice to Minnesota tenants who are facing eviction, and working with her colleagues at the nonprofit advocacy group Homeline to push for more affordable housing and improved tenant rights.¹⁸ “We are trying to level the playing field, because there is usually a short timeline to eviction, tenants don’t have counsel, and it is often a very high bar for them to pull together the rent they owe,” she told me in an interview. “We are working on the side of the underdog.”

That is the side of the struggle Palumbo has always been most comfortable with, a trait she traces back to her Catholic childhood in New Jersey. One of her earliest memories is her church hosting a dinner to benefit the striking United Farm Workers fighting for living wages and safer working conditions.

Like many other cradle Catholics, Palumbo drifted away from the church in her young adulthood. Then, in the mid-1990s, she learned that St. Joan of Arc parish in south Minneapolis had responded to the AIDS crisis by converting its rectory into a care and hospice home. First, Palumbo volunteered at Grace House, cooking meals and providing personal care to patients. Then she joined the St. Joan congregation.

Even when Palumbo was separated from the church, she insists she never lost her belief in the mandates of Romans 13:10—love is the law—and James 2:14’s call for all to show their faith through deeds. (“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”) The works of mercy pulled Palumbo back to Catholicism. Then, after seeing Grace House patients struggle with legal issues, they pushed her to law school.

While volunteering for a law school clinic representing women reentering the community after prison, she discovered how the struggle to afford housing interacts with so many other challenges of poverty. “Housing is so key. If it falls apart, so many other pieces of your life fall apart with it,” Palumbo says. “It goes the other direction, too. When I talk to people who are behind on their rent, you hear about the medical and transportation and child care challenges that siphoned off the limited resources they had. And then there’s nothing left.”

In God’s eyes, Palumbo insists, this is an unacceptable state of affairs. She cites Catholic social teaching, papal encyclicals, and Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonard Boffo, and Oscar Romero, heroes of the liberation theology movement that emphasizes the Gospel mandate to prioritize the rights and needs of the poor. From them, Palumbo finds support for both her direct service and her demands for systemic reform like rent control.

“The Gospels give us very clear instructions for what we are supposed to do, and that includes resisting greed,” says Palumbo, who is active in the Religion and Socialism Working Group of the Democratic Socialists of America. “Christ showed us when he cleared the temple that he was here to shake things up. People being homeless is not God’s way, and he wants us to put a stop to it.”

2. Religious Communities Have Been Pushing for Justice for Generations

The activism of Andrea Palumbo, St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, and Rabbi Aaron Spiegel are current additions to the long and storied history of religious community advocacy for human rights. In perhaps the best US example, the movement to abolish slavery was in significant part grounded in Black and white religious communities. Groups like the American Anti-Slavery Society and leaders like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and William Lloyd Garrison built the movement with Christian-themed messages, often delivered in religious venues and/or to overtly religious gatherings.¹⁹

After abolition was achieved, Protestant clergy and congregations fueled the Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Social Gospel activists saw universal guarantees of adequate food, shelter, and living wages as the tangible manifestation of God’s “Kingdom, on earth as in heaven.”²⁰ At the turn of the twentieth century and beyond, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and other religious organizations helped lead the successful fight for women’s suffrage.²¹

Several US religious groups, especially the Catholic Church, provided theological and logistical support to the workers’ rights movement of the early twentieth century.²² As Andrea Palumbo learned in her childhood, churches did the same for the Latino farmworkers movement a half century later.²³ The US civil rights movement, one of history’s best-chronicled and impactful social movements, drew much of its strength from religious communities. Its most iconic leaders, including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and most significant organization—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—arose from the Black Social Gospel tradition.²⁴

These Black leaders and organizations received key support from white religious counterparts in the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish traditions. “The movement’s rhetoric abounded with biblical references. Churches often served as sites of communication, training, and solace for movement participants,” the Encyclopedia of Religion in America states. “Religion energized black and white protesters, gave them confidence they were fighting for the right thing, and made them feel confident that they would eventually win.”²⁵ That template for a religious community bolstering a US human rights movement was copied in the peace movement of the Vietnam War era of the 1960s and 1970s and the resistance to South African apartheid in the 1980s and early 1990s.²⁶

A recent example of impactful advocacy by religious communities presents several parallels to the current housing challenge: activism for health care as a human right. Multifaith coalitions played a key role in mobilizing support for the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which expanded health care to tens of millions of Americans.²⁷ When efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act seemed close to victory in 2017, dozens of religious denominations and organizations responded by issuing joint statements, mobilizing their congregations, and conducting a Capitol Hill vigil.²⁸ They also published a March 2017 letter signed by leaders of forty faith organizations, stating, “The scriptures of the Abrahamic traditions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, as well as the sacred teachings of other faiths, understand that addressing the general welfare of the nation includes giving particular attention to people experiencing poverty or sickness.”²⁹

With this health care effort, US religious communities followed in the footsteps of their counterparts in Canada, where Baptist-minister-turned-provincial-governor Tommy Douglas mobilized religious community support to create Canada’s universal health care system.³⁰ One Canadian religious community advocate calls that system “the Good Samaritan writ large.”³¹ Douglas explained the connection between religious beliefs and political action for human rights: “You’re never going to step out of the front door into the kingdom of God. What you’re going to do is slowly and painfully change society until it has more of the values that emanate from the teaching of Jesus or from the other great religious leaders.”³²

“Government Has a Social Responsibility”

Tommy Douglas’s reference to a multiplicity of great religious leaders was on target, because religious human rights activism has always been a multifaith effort. For example, Jewish leaders like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel joined with Christian clergy to play important roles in the US civil rights movement. Heschel famously responded to a question about whether he found time to pray during the historic march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 by saying, “I prayed with my feet.”³³

Muslims have been at the forefront of global human rights activism, with women’s rights activists like Malala Yousafzai, Jawakkil Karman, and Shirin Ebadi all recognized with Nobel Peace Prizes for their efforts.³⁴ During the middle to late twentieth century, a series of Buddhist leaders of Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and other Asian countries cited the dharma as the foundation for reforms that included guarantees of housing and other subsistence needs for all.³⁵

In US history, this multifaith commitment to taking action for human rights was perhaps most dramatically demonstrated in the iconic 1963 March on Washington. The march was organized by labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister, and Bayard Rustin, a Quaker who had gone to prison rather than violate his faith’s antiwar beliefs by fighting in World War II.³⁶

Randolph and Rustin turned to church communities to recruit participants and build momentum for the march, which was widely credited with tipping the scales toward passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.³⁷ Among the featured speakers were a Catholic archbishop, the leader of the Presbyterian Church USA, and two rabbis.³⁸ The speaker immediately preceding Dr. King and his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech was Holocaust survivor Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, who said, “The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem is silence.”³⁹

Access to good housing was one of the ten demands of the march. Those demands were formally pressed by Rustin in his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the crowd of 250,000 and a live television audience, including President John F. Kennedy.⁴⁰ In the final months of his life, King followed up on that demand via the Poor People’s Campaign, which called for a massive increase in government-subsidized housing.⁴¹

King died before that campaign reached fruition, but its themes helped inspire the St. Louis Rent Strike of 1969, the year after King’s death. It was the first and largest US public housing rent strike, and it helped shape the Brooke Amendment of 1969, which capped public housing tenants’ rent at 25 percent of their income (later increased to 30 percent by Congress in 1981) and increased federal subsidies for housing.⁴² The strike was led in part by United Church of Christ minister Buck Jones, and buttressed by broad support from the local religious community.⁴³

This is an extraordinarily rich legacy, and it can serve as the foundation for a twenty-first-century US religious movement for housing as a human right. Already, there is meaningful religious community advocacy for housing, blooming in part from the exposure and credibility of religious communities and individuals involved in the direct provision of housing to those in need. A prominent example is Catholic Charities USA, which points out that the tens of thousands of affordable housing units it provides still leave an unmet need that demands a government, rights-based response. “Housing is a human right. Each person must have safe, affordable housing,” Curtis Johnson, vice president of housing strategy at Catholic Charities USA, told me in an interview. “For the common good, we believe that government at all levels has a social responsibility to ensure that persons are adequately housed.”⁴⁴

“As Long as There Are Homeless People, Our Work Is Incomplete”

One of the most visible religious responses to US housing needs has been the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day during the Great Depression with a guiding principle of hospitality, especially for the homeless poor. It is from this tradition that the Motels4Now Housing First program described in chapter 6 performs its housing justice work. The same is true for Mark Colville.⁴⁵ In the early 1980s, after Colville moved to New York City to complete college, his parish in the South Bronx, St. Luke’s, responded to that period’s alarming spike in homelessness by creating an emergency shelter at the school gym. Colville ended up running it.⁴⁶

He now lives at the Amistad Catholic Worker community in New Haven, Connecticut. Colville and his wife Luz Caterineau Colville helped found the community, and they raised six children there. Amistad’s daily schedule is built around common table meals shared with New Haven residents who are living on the streets. Whenever the house has room, unsheltered people are taken in to stay.

“The scripture passages that really influence and motivate me in this work have to do with hospitality,” Colville told me in an interview, echoing the theme of Richard Kearney’s and James Taylor’s Hosting the Stranger anthology. “Looking back on the encounters with God in both the Old and New Testament, so often they are related to people giving hospitality to one another. Beginning with the prophets and going through the Good Samaritan story, sheltering those who need it is a primary concern.”

Colville’s and the Amistad community’s response to that concern has been a combination of the works of mercy and pushing for a better government response to the need. “Our work comes out of our Catholic faith and trying to be as close as possible to the experiences of low-income people,” he says. “For them, housing is a crisis. And the emergency is tonight.”

One of the unhoused people Colville and Amistad are in community with is sixty-nine-year-old Kathleen McKenzie, who goes by the name Gypsy. One January morning in 2023, McKenzie woke up on the steps of a New Haven church, her sleeping bag completely covered in snow. She considers herself lucky that she survived the night.

That same winter, Christina Del Santo spent most of her nights in New Haven drop-in shelters, perpetually wary of the often-intoxicated men surrounding her. Del Santo had been attacked in shelter settings before, so she tried to get some sleep with her shoes and coat on and the proverbial one eye open. Each morning at 6:15, she and the others were ushered back out into the cold.⁴⁷

McKenzie and Del Santo are among the millions of Americans whose incomes are too low to afford market-rate rent, yet also among the three of every four who are eligible for federal housing subsidies but don’t receive them.⁴⁸ Over thirty thousand people sit on New Haven’s subsidized housing waiting list.⁴⁹ For many of these people, there seem to be only two options: exposure to the elements by sleeping outdoors, or risking the danger and indignities that often come with congregate shelters.

Then, during the early months of the COVID pandemic in 2020, a third option emerged. In New Haven and in dozens of other US cities, the shuttering of shelters contributed to the growth of large encampments, often established on public land. The largest New Haven encampment, called “Tent City” by its residents, was located at a park alongside the West River.

Conditions in Tent City were far from ideal, but the residents looked after one another’s needs and helped keep everyone safe. Colville and other Catholic Worker community members provided support. For a few years, local officials left the residents alone. But in March of 2023, the city sent in a backhoe, trucks, and dozens of police officers to destroy the encampments and force all the residents out.⁵⁰ Colville was one of the people arrested for refusing to leave the area.

New Haven mayor Justin Elicker justified the evictions and destruction on health and safety grounds.⁵¹ The residents found the rationale ironic, given that a study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that displacement of unhoused people from encampments actually exacerbates health crises.⁵² The night after the New Haven tent city was bulldozed, one of the evicted residents died after a car in which he was sleeping caught fire.

With the city providing bulldozers but not housing, the Colvilles felt their longtime practices of hospitality were no longer enough. So they tacked up a sign in the Amistad backyard declaring the area a “Human Rights Zone.” The pronouncement cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights commitment to housing for all, along with the multiple human rights documents that prohibit the criminalization of homelessness. Then the Colvilles invited people who had been evicted from the encampments to set up their tents in the backyard and offered daily food and support.

“We realized that we don’t have quote-unquote homeless people in New Haven: we have economic refugees,” Colville says. “These are people who have been excluded from the economy because of jobs that don’t pay living wages, and excluded from the housing market that has become a capitalist venture focused on favoring the rich and the wealthy developers that serve them.”

Among those who came to stay behind the Amistad House were McKenzie and Del Santo. “When I first arrived, I slept almost constantly for three days. I was exhausted, and it was the most safe and most stable I had felt in years,” Del Santo told me in an interview. “This place saved my life, definitely.”

When she references safety and stability, Del Santo makes it clear that she is referring to something more than the limited protection from the elements provided by her backyard tent. Government officials may look at encampments and see only health code violations and shelter needs they believe are better met in institutional settings. But those officials are missing a lot, Del Santo and McKenzie and others insist.

“Encampments can offer community, safety, security, companionship, autonomy, and pooled resources to meet other practical needs,” says the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. “Encampments prevent the need to carry around one’s belongings all day and can offer a stability that overnight shelters cannot. Encampments also allow families to stay together and will accommodate pets. Hence, there are many practical, rational reasons why people would prefer to live in an encampment than stay at a shelter.”⁵³

Of all these factors, the residents of what they have named the Rosette Neighborhood Village (Amistad House is located on Rosette Street) emphasize the value of community. They established a self-governing structure with shared responsibilities, including with the pay-it-forward practice of preparing and serving meals to other unhoused individuals. During their first summer together, Rosette residents revived a long-dormant community garden on their street.

They also worked with the Colvilles and other supporters to launch a fundraising and friends-raising campaign, culminating on a late October Saturday when nearly a hundred volunteers helped install six tiny homes in the backyard. Now, eight people are living in the tiny homes, and about a dozen more are in adjacent tents. Portions of the Amistad House are being renovated to include community kitchen and shower areas for the Rosette Village residents.

Del Santo, Colville, and others point out that there is a great deal of unused or rarely used public space in New Haven and beyond, much of which could be used to house unsheltered people. And they align with housing experts like Jenny Schuetz of the Brookings Institution, who have long advocated for the relaxation of regulations that block shared housing and temporary structures.⁵⁴

Rosette Village is showing how it can be done. “This is successful, and we are changing the way people think about the unhoused,” Del Santo says. “This can happen anywhere, and we are showing an example of how things can be different.”

Gypsy McKenzie agrees. The pushback against Rosette Village from city officials continues, but McKenzie decided during a local radio show interview to respond by singing her own adaptation of a Tom Petty classic:

Reflecting on all this activity, Colville traces it to biblical teachings. “At the common table in the Catholic Worker, we form our own individual and collective conscience about what the times are demanding of us. What is God doing in the world, and how are we being called to respond?” he says. “The conclusion is clear: In terms of a New Testament understanding, as long as there are homeless people existing in our community, our work is incomplete.”

3. Religious Communities Can Build on Deep Scriptural and Historical Foundations to Advocate for Housing Justice

It is no accident that religious housing activists like Mark Colville, Rabbi Aaron Spiegel, and Andrea Palumbo say that both scripture and their traditions’ histories provide a mandate to take action for housing rights. Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists alike can cite chapter and verse to support their housing advocacy.

Christianity and the Human Right to Housing

Christianity launches with the origin story of Jesus Christ being born into homelessness. No room at the inn was Jesus’s first earthly struggle, one that millions of Americans share every day.⁵⁶ The infant Jesus’s state of homelessness was renewed in his itinerant adulthood. Jesus told a would-be follower in Luke 9:58 that the life was one of struggle: “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”⁵⁷ (When the city government here in Indianapolis bulldozed an encampment a few years ago, one of its residents held up a sign, “How can you worship a homeless man on Sunday and persecute one on Monday?”)⁵⁸

Beyond his own personal unhoused condition, Jesus made it clear in Matthew 25:38 that he embodied all others who are left without a roof over their head: “I was a stranger, and you invited me in.”⁵⁹ These messages should come as no surprise, since Jesus framed his agenda in his very first public address in the synagogue in Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor,” he said, citing the prophet Isaiah.⁶⁰

So how are Christians to respond to the needs of those who are unhoused? As Mark Colville says, the parable of the Good Samaritan provides an unequivocal answer: stop what we are otherwise doing and prioritize an immediate and full response that provides shelter and other basic needs, even to those people we find undeserving or even objectionable. “Go and do likewise,” was the action item Jesus delivered in the conclusion of the parable.⁶¹

Helpfully, Jesus also provided a what-not-to-do illustration in another parable, the story of Dives and Lazarus. Dives was a rich man who ignored the poor Lazarus at the gate of his home, leading to Dives being condemned to eternal torment in Hades.⁶² Simply put, it is unforgivable to enjoy abundance while others are unhoused. “Again, I tell you,” Jesus said in Matthew 19:24, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”⁶³

The earliest Christians took Jesus’s admonitions to heart, ensuring that housing and all other essential needs were met for all: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need,” was the community described in the Acts of the Apostles.⁶⁴ Further along in Acts: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”⁶⁵

The early church leader James—who some believe was Jesus’s brother—said that the practice of ensuring that essential needs are met far exceeds the value of worship: “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?”⁶⁶

This was not a throwaway line. Theologian David Bentley Hart insists that these maxims and the practices that followed them were the core of the early church. “The church was a kind of polity, and the form of life it assumed was not merely a practical strategy for survival; but rather the embodiment of its highest spiritual ideals.”⁶⁷ In the era where the small group of Christians came together, community support for the needs of those who cannot otherwise meet them was not a foreign concept: historians estimate that more than three hundred thousand people in the city of Rome were receiving some sort of public assistance during this period.⁶⁸

As Christianity grew, exhortations continued to ensure that housing and other essentials were provided to all. Saint Basil of Caesaria famously condemned the possession of any excess when others go without: “The bread in your hoard belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your wardrobe belongs to the naked; the shoes you let rot belong to the barefoot; the money in your vaults belongs to the destitute. All you might help and do not—to all these you are doing wrong.”⁶⁹ One can only imagine how Basil would react to the 7.5 million American households who own multiple homes—and receive generous tax breaks for doing so—while a half million of their neighbors are homeless.⁷⁰

Basil was not guilty of empty sermonizing. He gave away his inheritance to the poor, created housing for those in need, and provided health care through a hospital.⁷¹

During the same era, Saint Jerome reminded the faithful that Jesus’s condemnation of the wealthy continued to be in force. “All riches come from injustice. Unless one person has lost, another cannot find… . The rich person is either an unjust person or the heir of one.”⁷² Saint Augustine of Hippo would later agree: “Riches are neither real nor are they yours… . Assisting the needy is justice.”⁷³

Christians in the Middle Ages acted in accordance with these admonitions, with the church bearing a primary societal responsibility of aiding the poor, particularly shelter when needed.⁷⁴ As social worker and Professor Alan Keith-Lucas writes in The Poor You Will Have with You Always, the church of the era was the go-to provider of “hospital, hospice, and sanctuary.”⁷⁵

Thomas Aquinas, widely regarded as the most influential theologian in the Roman Catholic tradition, lifted up the early church leaders’ message in his thirteenth-century seminal work, Summa Theologica: “According to natural law, goods that are held in superabundance by some people should be used for the maintenance of the poor… . ‘It is the bread of the poor you are holding back; it is the clothes of the naked that you are hoarding.’”⁷⁶ When Aquinas recognized that the government plays a critical role in the provision of those necessities like food and clothing, Keith-Lucas says he “came within measurable distance of calling for a welfare state.”⁷⁷

That small distance between Christian doctrine and a welfare state was later fully bridged by a series of post-Aquinas Christian clergy, laypeople, and organizations, who spent generations issuing full-throated exhortations for societal guarantees of universal housing and other necessities. Baptist minister George Washington Woodbey, born into slavery in the US and later known as “the Great Negro Socialist Orator,” said that the financial struggle to afford a house and other needs should be in the past: “You will not have to worry about how you live any more than you need to worry now about whether you can walk on the street from this meeting.”⁷⁸

Later in the twentieth century, Roman Catholic John Cort helped found the Religion and Socialism working group of the organization that came to be known as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—the same organization Andrea Palumbo belongs to today. Cort delighted in delivering speeches at Catholic parishes where he would read from the many papal encyclicals that called for ambitious welfare guarantees and restrictions on wealth accumulation. When he completed reading the excerpts, Cort would ask his audience to guess the author. Their most common response: Karl Marx.⁷⁹

Judaism and the Human Right to Housing

For as long as he can remember, Alex Slabosky has felt an obligation to work for justice. His mother Molly chaired the social action committee at Congregation Ohabai Sholom, known as “the Temple,” the Reform Judaism congregation in Nashville, Tennessee, where Slabosky grew up. While Molly coordinated projects like the purchase and renovation of homes for low-income families, Slabosky’s father David reached out to ailing veterans along with fellow members of the B’nai B’rith service organization.

Molly Slabosky was also active in the National Council of Jewish Women, which cites as the guide for its long legacy of civil rights activism the straightforward admonition of Deuteronomy 16:18: “Justice, justice, shall you pursue.”⁸⁰ The Temple was so actively involved in the historic movement to desegregate Nashville restaurants and stores that its rabbi was physically attacked by white separatists. The Temple received bomb threats, and dynamite destroyed the front of the Jewish Community Center. The Temple still has a social action fund in the elder Slaboskys’ names.

Such were the topics of discussion at both the Slabosky family dinner table and at temple. “Reform Judaism talks about justice, justice, justice—and going out and taking action,” Slabosky told me in our interview. He quotes Isaiah’s admonition: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?

“These are the messages we would hear constantly at religious school and services,” Slabosky says. So it was natural for him to close out his career as the leader of Indiana nonprofit health organizations by cochairing a statewide push to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That campaign succeeded, making Indiana one of the first Republican-led states to expand Medicaid. Then, Slabosky turned his attention to the affordable housing crisis.

Slabosky and his wife Marcella helped lead the Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation’s involvement with Family Promise of Greater Indianapolis, a partnership of congregations and community groups providing housing and other services to homeless families. Slabosky served as Family Promise’s board president and now is a member of the steering committee of the statewide housing needs coalition. He helped persuade the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance to dedicate itself to housing, which resulted in the Alliance helping to coordinate the local eviction court watch program—and Slabosky to join the organization’s board of directors. Diving deep into advocacy comes naturally, Slabosky says. He is just following the charge he has heard all his life: “The message I’ve been given is very clear: we as a community have an obligation to support these people who are struggling.”

Abraham’s radical act of hospitality in Genesis 18:1–15, where he rushed to welcome three strangers and in so doing welcomed God, has a special and enduring impact for Jews. Rabbi Stephen Lewis Fuchs, formerly president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, says that Abraham’s founding example, along with the Jewish experience of spending extended periods in collective exile, inspired the commandment to welcome the stranger. That commandment is stated in the Torah no fewer than thirty-six times, the most-repeated mitzvah in the scripture.⁸¹

“With this interpretation of the narrative structure of Genesis 18, Jewish tradition expressed one of its own majestic ideas,” writes Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. “Greater is the person who sees God in the face of the stranger than one who sees God as God in a vision of transcendence, for the Jewish task since the days of Abraham is not to ascend to heaven but to bring heaven down to earth in simple deeds of kindness and hospitality.”⁸²

An annual reminder of the heaven-to-earth task is provided in the Passover celebration, where Jews reflect on their history as a people who have needed some kindness and hospitality themselves. Starting with Adam and Eve’s eviction from the Garden of Eden, through the forty years of Israelites wandering after the Exodus, to extended periods of being without a homeland after each destruction of the Temple, the Jewish people have too often struggled to find a home. It is this collective experience that triggers an obligation stated in Leviticus 19: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

To that broad obligation the Law of Moses affixed tangible tasks. Jews are instructed to leave for the poor a portion of their harvests from fields, olive trees, and grapevines. Interest-free loans must be provided to those in need, and the Sabbath (shmita) and Jubilee (yovel) years require debt forgiveness and free access to harvests for the poor. Tithes shall go to widows, orphans, and the homeless.

Multiple passages in the Torah make it clear that practices that redistribute wealth are not just acts of charity by those with excess. Isaiah affirmed that the poor have human rights that must be enshrined in the law. He condemned leaders who “make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right.” More explicitly related to housing, Isaiah called Jews to “bring the homeless poor into your homes.”

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, a Conservative rabbi writing on “Judaism and the Homeless,” says that Jewish law, halakah, includes the rights of the poor to housing. “Housing [is] one of the obligatory types of tzedakah. The Bible commands that a poor person be granted ‘sufficient for what lacks, according to what is lacking to him,’” she writes. “One Talmudic text understands each phrase in that command as referring to a specific type of assistance one might grant a poor person: ‘Sufficient for what he lacks’—this is a house. ‘What is lacking’—this is a bed and table.”

(Jacobs also addresses the fact that most texts of the era—in multiple religious traditions—focus on the requirement to feed the poor, rather than housing the poor. In these eras, Jacobs notes, housing was quite a bit cheaper and easier to obtain than a consistent food source. Those feed-the-poor mandates translate today to a house-the-poor mandate, she says.)⁸³

As Rabbi Jacobs and other Jewish scholars point out, these requirements trigger obligations for Jews today under the concept of tzedakah, a term whose root word tzedek literally means justice. “Tzedakah is sometimes translated today as charity, but it’s not charity,” Rabbi Michael Knopf of Temple Beth-El in Richmond, Virginia, says. “The analogy is to our current tax system. People had obligations to give to tzedakah in a graduated way—people who had more had to give more, people who had less were required to give less. And there were priorities for how it should be used, chief among them providing for the physical well-being of persons in the community who were in need.”⁸⁴

“The term ‘human rights’ does not appear in the Bible or in rabbinic literature,” Rabbi Knopf says. “But when you distill down to the essence what a community has an obligation to provide people, and the claim people can make on the community, it boils down to rights by another name.”

This is not to say there is no personal Jewish obligation to those who struggle for housing. For example, medieval rabbinic scholars Moses Maimonides and Jacob ben Asher both outlined landlords’ obligations to treat their tenants well.⁸⁵ But, as Rabbi Knopf points out, there is a collective responsibility as well. The Mishnah—the first major work of rabbinical literature—makes it clear that the obligations to assist the poor can and should be discharged by the collective.

“This is the rabbinic moment: the move from a personal obligation for each and every person, to an obligation upon each and every person, which is mediated by the city,” says Professor and Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, writing on “Justice, Wealth, Taxes: A View from the Perspective of Rabbinical Judaism.” “Formerly, each person had an individual obligation which was fulfilled by transferring resources to a specific poor person. Now, each person’s obligation is fulfilled by transferring resources to the city, which distributes them to the poor in an equitable manner… . This is a move from the personal to the political.”⁸⁶

Advocacy for that kind of government-provided, society-wide assistance has long been a path for Jews to fulfill their obligations to pursue justice. The early twentieth-century Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland, and their heirs in the US, made improvements in housing a central demand of their movement.⁸⁷ The twentieth-century tenant rights movement in New York City, the most consistent and insistent such movement in US history, was led at multiple stages by Jewish communities.⁸⁸ Today, the Union for Reform Judaism has formally affirmed in its adopted resolutions that housing for all should be a societal goal.⁸⁹

“Starting with Genesis and all the way through rabbinical literature and more recent response literature, Jewish text and traditions tell such a clear story of commitment to centering the widow, the stranger, the most oppressed, and building a society of norms, laws and values to protect the most vulnerable,” Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, which advocates for the right to housing, told me in an interview. “The physical house, along with things like health care and food security, are the tangible, concrete ways we actualize this vision God had for us.”⁹⁰

Rabbi Pesner’s call, and the scriptures he cites, continue to resonate with Alex Slabosky. Although religious groups in Indiana already provide emergency services and eviction interventions, he is challenging them to do more. “We are not going to solve the homelessness and eviction problems until we create more affordable housing,” he says. “And that means pushing for more government investment, at not just the federal level but at the local level,” he says.

“The community together has an obligation to see that justice is done.”

Islam and the Human Right to Housing

Like Judaism, Islam embraces Abraham as a patriarch, and also as a model for ensuring that all people have a safe and secure place to lay their heads. Both Islamic and Jewish traditions hold that Abraham designed his tent with four entrances, facing north, south, east, and west, just so he could welcome guests coming from all directions of the compass.⁹¹ In Islam, Abraham is known as Abu-l-Dhifan, the father of hosts, the example to be followed by future generations.⁹²

The Quran features multiple unequivocal mandates that Muslims must ensure that the needs of all people are met, including the core requirement of safe and secure shelter. “Hast thou seen the one who denied religion? That is the one who drives away the orphan and does not urge feeding the indigent.”⁹³ Also: “In their wealth is an acknowledged right for the needy and destitute.”⁹⁴

Multiple hadiths expand on those statements, including, “He is not a Muslim who goes to bed satiated while his neighbor goes hungry.”⁹⁵ The Prophet’s servant, Anas ibn Malik, said, “A house which is not entered by a guest is not entered by angels.”⁹⁶ And the Prophet himself stated “It will be taken from their rich and given to those in the community in need.”⁹⁷

The tangible application of these mandates is evidenced on an individual level by zakat, one of Islam’s five pillars. Zakat requires that Muslims contribute a significant share of their wealth to the needs of others who struggle.⁹⁸ On a systemic level, the earliest days of Islam, dating back to the Prophet-founded state of Medina, showed a commitment to meeting the shelter needs of all. The first caliphate, Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s father-in-law, instituted a guaranteed minimum income.⁹⁹ Caliph Umar issued a similar mandate that all in need have their necessities met by the community.¹⁰⁰

Islam’s prohibitions against hoarding are colorful and unequivocal: “Woe to every slanderer backbiter who gathers wealth and counts it over, thinking that his wealth has made him immortal. By no means. He will be thrown into the Crusher.”

These antihoarding admonitions have been the inspiration for multiple Islamic societies that functioned as welfare states, guaranteeing that shelter and other needs were met for all.¹⁰¹ That practice was codified in the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam in 1990, Article 17(c): “The state shall ensure the rights of the individual to a decent living that may enable him to meet his requirements and those of his dependents, including food, clothing, housing, education, medical care, and all other basic needs” (emphasis added).¹⁰² Modern-day Muslims find that same obligation in their scriptures. The organization American Muslim Healthcare Professionals was part of an interfaith advocacy coalition that worked in 2017 to stop the attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act. “There is a verse in the Holy Qur’an that if you save one life, it is as if you have saved all humanity,” AMHP’s director, Arshia Wajid, told me in an interview. “All faiths have similar sayings where human beings are prompted to fight for social justice and help their fellow brethren.”¹⁰³ Specifically targeting housing, the US congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Muslim, has taken on the role of chief sponsor of the Homes for All Act, which would dramatically expand the public housing stock in the United States and guarantee housing as a human right.¹⁰⁴

Iman Javed, a medical resident and active member of the Muslim Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, says that support for guarantees of all human needs is spurred on by the Muslim faith. “There’s so many different statements in the Quran and in the hadith that clearly point to the goal of the society being to provide for the needs of everyone, and discussing how can we create a more just society,” he told me in an interview. “The Quran itself says, ‘Work toward justice, even if it means justice against yourself.’ So, any step we take toward a more socialist society is taking a step toward that goal of being able to provide for everyone’s needs. It’s just really clear as day.”¹⁰⁵

Buddhism and the Human Right to Housing

Buddhism embraces as a core notion the interdependence of all beings. “Your suffering is my suffering,” a saying attributed to the Buddha goes. “Your happiness is my happiness.”¹⁰⁶ Buddhists like Kenneth Inada, professor of philosophy and longtime editor of the SUNY Press Buddhist Studies Series, conclude that interdependence is deeply connected to the idea of human rights: “It can be asserted that the Buddhist sees the concept of human rights as a legal extension of human nature. It is a crystallization, indeed a formalization, of the mutual respect and concern of all persons, stemming from human nature.”¹⁰⁷

Since they believe that necessities like housing must be guaranteed at the societal level and that unrestrained wealth-gathering jeopardizes universal welfare, many Buddhists have concluded that the dhamma, the teaching of the Buddha, points toward socialism. They include monks and political leaders in the “Dhammic Socialism” movement, supporters of a tradition called Buddhist Economics, and current-day socialist activists.¹⁰⁸

Among this group is Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. The Dalai Lama has said, “Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability… . For those reasons, the system appeals to me, and it seems fair.”¹⁰⁹

More specifically on the question of housing, Inada identifies the struggle of the unhoused as a struggle that is borne by all beings, which in turn must inspire actions to make dramatic change: “Our eyes turn away from homelessness as if it were somebody else’s problem,” he writes. “But, guided by Buddha’s eyes of loving-kindness, our eyes can be opened and transformed into kind and gentle ones, eyes that see the suffering of others, because we know we are part of the cause of that suffering. The actions that naturally flow from this transformation create new causes and conditions that will inevitably change our society and our world.”¹¹⁰

As the editors of the Buddhist journal Buddhistdoor Global have written, citing United Nations declarations and Finland’s Housing First model, “No one should accept the lack of safe and stable housing as a natural or inevitable part of human society.”¹¹¹ Buddhists across the world act on these mandates, including a US collaboration working with Catholics to create green affordable housing projects.¹¹²

4. Religious Communities Can Still Have a Powerful Effect on Public Policy

As we learned in previous chapters, the US’s default approach to housing is to treat it as a commodity. Many are able to afford it, sometimes in opulence and abundance. Others go without. To mitigate these tragic outcomes, people from religious communities often choose charitable responses. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim congregations and organizations provide direct charitable housing support across the country.¹¹³

That response is fine, as far as it goes. But, as minister and housing advocate Peter W. Peters has written, “In my experience faith communities are far more comfortable with doing works of charity and reluctant to get into the work of advocacy.”¹¹⁴ Peters’s observation lines up with survey data showing US religious communities and people lean toward philanthropy rather than pushing for systemic change.¹¹⁵ Too many religious individuals and communities in the US prefer personal, voluntary, small-scale responses to poverty.

This approach reflects a US attitude that goes back at least as far as the early nineteenth century, when Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans were eager to form and support volunteer efforts.¹¹⁶ Still today, more US households give to charity than households in comparable nations.¹¹⁷ (Interestingly, the poor in the US are more charitable than the wealthy, when measured by the percentage of income they donate to those in need.)¹¹⁸ But the US also spends far less on government social programs than comparable countries: only 19 percent of gross domestic product on assistance with essentials like housing, health care, and food, compared with 25–30 percent or more of GDP spent on those programs by Western European nations.¹¹⁹

The US being more charitable individually and less so on a societal level would be fine if the balance evened out. But it doesn’t. That was demonstrated most disastrously in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan colorfully invoked the US soft spot for charity. “The truth is that we’ve let Government take away many things we once considered were really ours to do voluntarily out of the goodness of our hearts and a sense of community pride,” Reagan pronounced. “I believe many of you want to do those things again.”¹²⁰ Reagan said the housing crisis could be solved if only “every church and synagogue would take in 10 welfare families” each.¹²¹

Then, as we saw in chapter 2, Reagan and the US Congress used the cover of charity to justify slashing the US funding for subsidized housing by over 80 percent, throwing thousands of families and individuals into homelessness and chaos. The US charity system Reagan praised never came close to compensating for this devastation. As we know, more than a half million people are homeless across the country, and millions more are at the risk of losing their homes.¹²²

In her 1998 book Sweet Charity?, the sociologist Janet Poppendieck reported on her study of the volunteers and structures of the food pantries and soup kitchens that sprang up in the 1980s as federal housing and other antipoverty programs were being scaled back. That spike in charitable efforts was laudable. But it was not matched by a similar increase in advocacy, which Poppendieck says was not a coincidence. “The growth of kindness and the decline in justice are intimately interrelated,” Poppendieck writes. “This massive charitable endeavor serves to relieve pressure for more fundamental solutions.”¹²³

In other words, charity is not very effective at alleviating poverty, especially the grinding, every-month housing struggle that can’t be fixed with a free meal or a winter coat donation. But charity does do a great job of alleviating the guilt over the suffering that is going on every day in our communities.

On a more tangible, fiscal, level, the US policy preference for charity robs the cupboard of what could be resources applied to government programs. Since 1917, US law has allowed individuals, corporations, and estates to deduct as much as half of their annual taxable income in an amount equal to charitable gifts made to qualified nonprofit organizations.¹²⁴ The US deduction provides the most generous incentive for charitable giving of any developed nation.¹²⁵

As a result, the US Treasury estimated that the annual cost of those deductions in 2021 would be $56 billion, nearly the amount it would cost to give every eligible household in the US a housing voucher.¹²⁶ In addition, the so-called “plutocratic bias” of replacing government programs with tax-deductible donations has been demonstrated to favor charities that either don’t target poverty—such as symphony sponsorships or college sports donations—or are inefficient at doing so. Those donations are especially deficient when compared to government programs—like housing assistance—that are proven to be remarkably effective at improving the health and well-being of the Americans that benefit.¹²⁷

Religious Communities and Transcending Charity

Because of their direct service to the poor, religious communities are in an ideal position to persuasively point out that the US charity emperor has no clothes, especially when it comes to housing. From their front-line vantage point, these religious actors can point out that even their sometimes herculean charitable efforts are nowhere close to meeting the need.¹²⁸

Religious people should insist that, as Saint Augustine said, “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.” In so doing, they can point out that this kind of justice comes from large-scale, community-wide efforts that can be accomplished only by governments acting in our name.¹²⁹ There is a strong biblical foundation for this position, Professor John D. Mason writes in Biblical Teachings and the Objectives of Welfare Policy in the U.S.:

Assistance from the wider community becomes necessary. This is the consistent message of the entire Bible. It is taught clearly in the Law of Moses in the provisions to be considered immediately below. It is repeated systematically in the wisdom literature and by the prophets in their instructions to the princes of Israel (Job 29:7–12, Ps. 72, Jer. 22:15f, Ezek. 34, Micah 3). It is there in the well-known judgment scene of Matt. 25:31ff, and in Paul’s admonitions for wealthier churches to provide economic assistance to their poorer brothers and sisters (II Cor. 8). Indeed, the fundamental message of the New Testament is that each one of us, however self-sufficient we may think we are, is so unable to avoid all the adversities of life, and thereby to resolve our ultimate problems on our own, that we need outside assistance.¹³⁰

The point: it is clearly not enough for religious Americans to settle for the good vibes of individual charity. Vida Dutton Scudder, the early twentieth-century educator, activist, and writer honored with a feast day by the Episcopal Church USA, called philanthropy “a sedative to the public conscience.” Fundraising efforts only “squeezed a little more reluctant money from comfortable classes, who groaned and gave but changed not one iota,” Scudder said.¹³¹

Saint Basil in the fourth century cast the same side-eye toward charitable donations that came from the excess of the giver: “Whoever loves his neighbor as himself owns no more than his neighbor does. But you have a great fortune. How can this be, unless you have put your own interests above others?”¹³²

So, instead of just writing a check from their surplus, religious people are called to raise their voices loud for justice. Croatian Christian theologian Miroslav Volf calls for a “public faith” of Christians vigorously advocating for the common good: “An authentic religious experience should be a world-shaping force.”¹³³ In agreement with this demand for advocacy are Catholic popes like John Paul II in 1995 (“The Gospel of life [should] be implemented also by means of certain forms of social activity and commitment in the political field”) and Francis in 2013 (“We need to participate for the common good… . Good Catholics immerse themselves in politics by offering the best of themselves so that the leader can govern.”).¹³⁴

In fact, Pope Francis has explicitly called for the human right to housing to be implemented, a call based on the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which describes housing as a human right.¹³⁵ During his 2015 visit to the US, Francis lunched with several hundred homeless and low-income people at St. Patrick’s Church in Washington, DC. “Let me be clear,” he said on that visit. “There is no social or moral justification, no justification whatsoever, for lack of housing.”¹³⁶

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has stated that “housing is a fundamental human right.”¹³⁷ The Episcopal Church in 2018 adopted a resolution similarly affirming housing as a human right.¹³⁸ The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church supports equal access to housing for all.¹³⁹ The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ Doctrines and Covenants requires church bishops to gather the collective’s resources and redistribute them as the Acts of Apostles society did, “according to their wants and needs.”¹⁴⁰

Congresswoman Cori Bush, an ordained minister, slept on the steps of the US Capitol in August 2021 as part of her successful advocacy for an extension of the COVID-era eviction moratorium.¹⁴¹ Her motivation, as she explained later: “Housing is a human right.”¹⁴² Bush’s sleep-in was joined by several other members of Congress and faith-motivated activists, including Representative Jimmy Gomez of California. Gomez told the National Catholic Reporter, “Growing up Catholic, but also my parents looking out for the community, just taught me that when somebody’s suffering, when someone’s hurting, you want to try and go and relieve that suffering and that hurt… . Caring for other people is how my parents raised me and how I was raised in the church.”¹⁴³

Every week, versions of that same message are delivered in synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship. Jews are directed to push for a systemic response to the housing crisis, says Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner. “I would argue that the whole framework of biblical literature is an attempt to set up a system of justice in which the marginalized are centered,” says Pesner, who has written on the Jewish history of creating social welfare systems dating back to the Talmudic period.¹⁴⁴ “There are all these regulations behind that such as the gleaning of the fields and not delaying payment to workers. There are systems and legal frameworks that don’t hinge on the individual grace of one who has [food, shelter, money, etc.] choosing to share with one who doesn’t.”

Rabbi Jill Jacobs agrees that Jewish teaching recognizes that full provision of basic needs like housing can be accomplished only by government institutions acting for the collective. “What is the most effective way for us to create the society envisioned by Jewish law? Charitable donations to organizations that help house the homeless are one obvious way,” she writes. “But with a problem this large and complex, a more effective means of working to end homelessness might be political action, advocating for governmental policies and programs that provide housing to those in need and/or give people the means to afford housing on their own.”¹⁴⁵

US Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists are provided with an abundance of opportunities to act on these mandates to elevate housing as a human right. Representative Omar’s groundbreaking legislation and the broader call to treat housing as a human right are supported by a wide range of advocacy groups, including the National Low Income Housing Coalition, People’s Action, the Center for Popular Democracy, and tenant unions across the country.¹⁴⁶

The campaigns for universal affordable housing access, rent control, tenants’ rights, and decriminalizing homelessness all take important steps in the direction of decommodifying housing. Active religious community support would significantly bolster the cause. Religious communities can persuasively make the case that a market-driven approach is no more sufficient in housing than it is in infrastructure like roads and sewers, or for public safety like fire responses, or with schools, the postal service, parks, and justice systems—all core societal requirements that are considered common goods.

Instead of inadequate, patchwork charity, a public guarantee of housing for all should be the destination all religious communities push us toward. As Saint Gregory said in the sixth century, indelibly framing the struggle of the unhoused in human rights terms, “When we furnish the destitute with any necessity we render them what is theirs, not bestow on them what is ours. We pay the debt of justice rather than perform the works of mercy.”¹⁴⁷

Today, we are blessed with a vibrant, growing movement, led in significant part by tenants themselves, demanding that this debt of justice be paid. That movement is the subject of this book’s final two chapters.