Building Homes, Building Hope
by Rabbi Ron Stern
The scene is all too familiar: we stop for a light at a busy intersection and a homeless person walks from car to car looking for a handout. This is Los Angeles, it’s 2018, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Fifty-thousand people were not supposed to be sleeping in their cars, on our streets, in our parks, coming up to us when we stop for a red light, but that is the city that we have inherited. Whether you live in Beverly Hills or Boyle Heights you cannot escape the scourge of homelessness. While the face of the homeless is often the disheveled, disoriented individual pacing the sidewalk, the truth is that thousands of families are also sleeping in cars, garages, wherever they can find shelter.
Fortunately, a significant majority of our citizens are committed to alleviating the root cause and two initiatives have recently been passed by voters to build affordable and supportive housing. Supportive housing provides those who cannot care for themselves housing and the support they need to treat their conditions and hopefully re-enter society. Affordable housing allows those who may work but simply don’t earn enough to secure housing. The money is beginning to accumulate and the units must be built.
In cooperation with the LA Mayor’s office, the United Way, a range of organizations (some Jewish, others secular) we are mobilizing and equipping a grass-roots faith-based association of Angelenos to advocate for the housing that is sorely needed and reduce opposition that might surface. Training sessions are beginning within weeks. Learn more here. So far a number of Wise members (including me) have signed up for the session at Valley Beth Shalom to learn how we can marshal our resources to get the housing we need built in our city. Once we have completed the training we’ll work as a community to reach out to Wise members and beyond to teach them about the benefits of housing our city’s homeless.
Together, we can devote our energy towards creating create a city that fulfills the great words of Isaiah that we read each Yom Kippur morning: it is our Jewish responsibility “to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home.” That those words are thousands of years old speaks to us about the persistence of homelessness; to live in a city that is committed to reversing such a trend provides us with the reassurance that can actually make a difference in the lives of others.