Homelessness Isn’t Inevitable
by Maddalin Zimmermann-Stevens
Maddalin first shared these words at Beacon’s congregation convening on December 9, 2021. They are republished here with her permission.
My name is Maddalin Zimmermann-Stevens and I’m the Chair of the Beacon Leadership Team at Waconia Moravian.
As most of us know, the world we are in right now has a huge housing crisis. Stable housing is the foundation of our lives and too many of our neighbors are either currently experiencing homelessness, or are on the edge of homelessness – and the pandemic has made this crisis exponentially worse. This housing crisis also reflects and perpetuates the racial disparities that plague our state.
To really capture the big picture – we need to reflect on who falls into the category of homeless. The first thing many think of when we hear about the homeless is our neighbors in tents or on the corners and we often don’t think of the couch surfers, those temporarily housed in programs or shelters, or those living in their cars. There are also many on the edge of homelessness: two out of every five renters in Minnesota pay more than they can afford towards housing. One small event could push them over the edge into homelessness.
I know this because it happened to my husband, Jesse, and me – twice in a four-year span.
A year after getting married a sudden Epilepsy diagnosis for Jesse stopped his ability to work and drive. We reached out to local family and co-workers for help as we tried to prepare for what this looked like. With regular bills, large medical bills, and a huge loss of income, money ran out really quick and no one was able to help us stabilize and we moved to Minnesota to live with my parents, but, without my parents there would have been nowhere to go.
It would take three years to get Jesse on a good treatment plan and back into the work force and took us three and a half years to get back to a place where the dream of home was within reach, and we purchased our second home in July of 2020.
We were prepared this time and we set ourselves up so we wouldn’t have to experience losing home again. Or, so we thought.
We closed on a Tuesday, moved in on a Thursday. Then on Saturday, a routine eye exam lead to the diagnosis of Papilledema – the eye doctor told us to go to the ER. Three hours later the Doctor called me back to deliver the news: Jesse had a brain tumor that was pushing part of his Cerebellum into his spinal cord and he needed immediate transport to Abbott and would need emergency surgery.
Jesse would spend the next several weeks in the ICU up to and after his surgery. A few months later all resources from church, work, and family had run out and it was time to give up home again and move back in with my parents, where we currently are, still sorting through medical bills.
The thing is, Jesse and I are far from the only ones who have experienced this, especially in the middle of a pandemic.
In Minnesota, 10,000 people are experiencing homelessness every night, and over 550,000 people are living in households paying too much of their income to rent. People experiencing homelessness or housing instability can be found everywhere in our state, in every community. And, because of systemic racism, our neighbors of color are much more likely to experience the things I have gone through.
Any number of life changing events could be the thing to push so many in our state into homelessness and in the middle of a pandemic there’s even more added risks and challenges for so many.
While my experiences and these statistics are hard to hear, what makes them tragic is that it is all avoidable. None of this is inevitable. The world does not have to be this way.
Our faith and our values call us to believe in the vision that all people have a home, but we have a society that doesn’t prioritize that and doesn’t acknowledge the importance of home.
That is where we all come in: we need to create homes for those at the lowest incomes and ensure everyone can afford their home through rental subsidy.
Beacon focuses on creating homes for 30% AMI households. That means people earning less than 30% of the area median income, those making the least income in our communities, which is $31,000 for a family of four.
Beacon is focused on creating homes at this level because we live in a world where our neighbors at this level are not priorities. Right now there are 105,000 families at this level in Minnesota and 64,000 homes that are affordable to them. That means we only have a little over half of the homes our neighbors most in need require.
We know homelessness exists. We know the resources needed and we know the solutions. We know that rent subsidy, through vouchers, could solve this crisis, but instead it’s funded at such a level where only one in four are able to get a voucher and many wait four or five years.
We need to keep the pressure on and push the needle further in the right direction! Systems and structures need to urgently change and supportive resources need more funding. We need more local and state funding to be shifted to prioritize providing stable and supportive housing.
We need more project-based vouchers and individual vouchers for everyone who qualifies. It’s not one type of voucher against the other. Together we need to continue to raise our voices, live our faith and values, and keep pushing to help our neighbors get what they need to get affordable and stable housing.
