Home

Do you ever have a concept on your mind that seems to come up over and over?  That concept for me, this week, is the idea of "home".  I just read a book about people being evicted from their homes, then thought about some of my old jobs involving housing, then read a Tim Keller devotional about home.  That's really a lot of things *very loosely* tied together, so this stream of consciousness blog is probably going to be more of a demonstration of pregnancy brain than anything else, but each blurb is a subject that has been on my mind lately 

1.  Evicted Book Review

I just read "Evicted:  Poverty and Profit in the American City" by Matthew Desmond and would highly, highly recommend it.  It describes a problem that most of us have heard of, but few realize the scope of:  evictions.  Some of the main points of this book:

• Low-income tenants are often paying 80-100% of their monthly income on housing costs.  (This is where the private market prices are at, and public housing is unavailable even for most people who financially qualify.)  This makes it almost impossible not to get behind at some point.  And once you're behind, even just a little bit, landlords can evict you at anytime.  
• Evictions are not just the result of poverty but can also be a contributing cause of poverty.  Having an eviction on your record makes it harder to get into a new home, and it can cause depression, job loss, involvement in the child welfare system, loss of possessions, etc.
• Groups that are most highly affected by evictions are single women of color and single parent families with children.  (You'd think children in the home might cause landlords to treat a family more sympathetically, but nope, it's very much the opposite:  adults with children are WAY more likely to get evicted - statistically, having children has the same effect as being 4 additional months behind on your rent.)
•  When a family grows up with a stable home, rather than being forced to move from place to place, studies show that it can nurture the following things:  happiness and mental health, school success, steadier employment, savings, and safer / stronger / more thriving neighborhoods. 
• Two of the main solutions this book proposes are:  better access to justice for low-income tenants (who could often fight or at least delay evictions if they had the same kind of protections as their landlords), and a more robust public housing assistance program (so that everyone who qualified could actually receive help staying in their home).  

2.  My old jobs / legal passion

One of the things I hoped to do with my career was to help with some of the problems highlighted in the Evictions book.  This was primarily because of 3 jobs I worked during my college and law school years:

• In my "gap year" between college and law school, I worked as a homeless prevention outreach worker at La Puente in rural Colorado, where I talked to hundreds of people who were nearly homeless (facing an eviction or foreclosure notice, or utility shutoff) and tried to help figure out a plan that would help them stay in their homes for at least a little while longer.  
• For law school summer clerkship #1, I worked at Bread for the City in Washington DC - I assisted in the department that provided direct legal assistance to tenants.  I got to see the huge volume of people going through landlord-tenant court, and how most of the landlords had lawyers, while practically none of the tenants had legal assistance (and the people with lawyers virtually always won).  I saw the homes that some of our clients lived in, and the lack of bargaining power these tenants had if they needed improvements made (because they could always be evicted, and could not necessarily find a new home quickly).  I saw Section 8 tenants lose their homes as the owners of their buildings sold to luxury condo builders.  
• For law school summer clerkship #2, I worked at the National Housing Law Project in Oakland, CA - they focus on "systemic" problems - problems that affect a large group of people, and that can be fixed with a change to a particular rule or system.  My main summer project was helping with a manual on rural public housing, but I learned about all kinds of systemic issues in the public housing world (such as prisoner re-entry, domestic violence, etc.).  

I loved all 3 of these jobs and learned a TON from all of them, and had hoped to launch into a legal career that would somehow focus on housing justice.  But when I graduated law school, I couldn't find a job in this field.  I was lucky to work two other jobs that I really liked and found meaningful, and now I'm blessed to be able to stay home with our kids for awhile (not that there aren't some days i would give anything to be back in an office...).  But reading the Evictions book reminded me how much I care about housing issues, and how much I would someday, in some capacity, like to be able to work on them again.  

3.  Christianity and home

It never occurred to me before, but "home" is a major theme of Christianity - yearning for a home, the pain of being away from home, the promise of someday living in a perfect home.  Here is an excerpt from Tim Keller's excellent devotional "The Songs of Jesus" (which is another book I would highly recommend) on the topic of home:  "God's promise to give Abraham's descendants a homeland (Genesis 12:1-5) is central to understanding the plan of redemption.  We long for home, a place of security, comfort, and love.  We were made
for a world without death or parting from love, a world in which we walked with God and knew him face to face.  The world has been marred by sin and is no longer home, and we are restless exiles since our expulsion from Eden.  So when the Son of God came he had no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58) and was crucified outside the city.  He took the great exile we deserved so we could be brought into God's household (Ephesians 2:17-19).  And someday he will turn the world back into our home indeed (Revelation 21:1-8)."  - From the devotional for September 22

So those are the thoughts that have been floating around in my head this week related to home.  Would love to hear your thoughts on either of these books, or any other thoughts about the topic of "home".