Shalom and Right Relationship

The housing system in America is broken. Over 770,000 people in the United States are currently unhoused, 18 percent more than in 2023. In 2022, over half of all renters spent a third or more of their income on rent and utilities. Eviction rates continue to climb (over 10 percent from 2022 to 2023 alone), disproportionately affecting low-income renters, People of Color, single mothers and families with children, and other vulnerable people. Where the cost of housing has increased faster than incomes or the availability of affordable housing for lower income ranges has diminished, homelessness has increased.

Those are some of the numbers. What our caches of data, think-tank position papers, and government studies and reports don’t convey is the massive human toll that roils behind the numbers. Many unhoused persons are dehumanized by desperate living conditions and constant encampment sweeps. Personal accounts by unhoused persons and service providers alike are searing in their expressions of despair and futility as more and more resources are drawn to the crisis with less and less apparent effectiveness. In some regions, as one service provider laments, a “homeless industrial complex” has arisen to add intractable service delivery structures to the challenge. Quaker moral compasses should be spinning.

These conditions are not simply a post-pandemic hangover that will soon go away. They have been developing in earnest since the 2008 financial meltdown that affected millions of homeowners, especially in the lower income ranges. And they are here to stay until we take sufficient action as individuals, as meetings, and as a nation. As people of faith sharing deep concern for those who suffer injustice—in this case, housing injustice—Quakers are called to discern both our individual and corporate responses to homelessness, unaffordability of housing for large swaths of the population, and racial injustice in the housing system. We are called to bring housing justice where housing injustice prevails in our communities.

Our first step in doing so should be to understand the nature and some of the dynamics of the housing crisis to discern more clearly our leadings in response to them. Then we should seek moral and spiritual perspectives on the issues to equip ourselves for sustained focus on the areas of concern that arise. Let us begin with a deeper understanding of the problems we seek to address.

Our first step in doing so should be to understand the nature and some of the dynamics of the housing crisis to discern more clearly our leadings in response to them. Then we should seek moral and spiritual perspectives on the issues to equip ourselves for sustained focus on the areas of concern that arise. 

When we encounter unhoused persons, individually on the street or in camps, many of us are inclined to wonder what situations, behavioral health issues, addictions, traumas, or failure to keep a job or pay the rent led to this condition. As a nation, we tend to blame the unhoused for their condition, though the primary cause of homelessness is a lack of adequate and affordable housing, a simple truth made starkly evident by Gregg Colburn in Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns (2022). The United States simply does not have enough housing for middle and lower incomes—so-called working-class housing—to sustain rents at affordable rates; to house those struggling with behavioral or addiction issues while they are addressing such challenges; or to provide safe landings for those whose precarious financial situation is decimated by the loss of a job or transportation, a serious injury, or an expensive medical diagnosis.

Housing that is affordable to own or to rent is essential for stable households, vibrant neighborhoods, and flourishing communities. Affordable housing at all income levels is a social good on par with education, water, electricity, and healthcare. Indeed, a resilient and broadly accessible housing system is essential for realizing such other social goods as education and healthcare. The current systemic shortage of affordable housing in the United States, accompanied by alarming rates of eviction and numbers of unhoused persons, is indicative of an unjust scarcity of a vital social good: adequate and affordable housing. 

When coming to understand housing as a social good, we must recognize that affordable housing historically has also been distributed unevenly across races in America. Home ownership since World War II has been the leading factor in the determination of household wealth. The current racial disparity in household wealth is ten-to-one, White to Black (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021), so it should be no surprise that the homeownership rate is much higher for White households than for Black households, a greater disparity even than prior to the fair-housing legislation of the early 1970s. With the replication of these disparities in home ownership and household wealth in other communities of Color, it should be equally unsurprising that those who rent, those who are evicted from rentals, and those who are unhoused are disproportionately People of Color. 

These disparities in housing and household wealth, moreover, were created quite intentionally through government policies at all levels, including residential zoning codes to preclude home ownership by People of Color in affluent White neighborhoods beginning in the 1920s, redlining to undermine Black home ownership by limiting access to home loans beginning in the 1930s, exclusion of over a million Black veterans from participation in the G.I. Bill’s home loan guarantee programs in the 1950s and 1960s, and literally hundreds of thousands of racial covenants across the country that prohibited Black and other People of Color from living in select White neighborhoods and accruing property value equity since the concept of neighborhood began. As we ponder and respond to injustices in our housing policies, practices, and systems, we must also be keenly aware that race and racial injustice are tightly bound up in the U.S. housing system.

Justice is vitally important to Quakers. We want all to have housing they can comfortably afford, housing that enables stable households, healthy neighborhoods, and vibrant communities. Even as we prop up major portions of our housing system with inadequate and underfunded programs and services, we ask why there must always be a shortage of affordable homes. Why, too, must we accept an economy that seemingly requires an underclass of poverty, generates large profits from competition for an insufficient supply of housing, and commodifies essential social goods like housing for the financial gain of a few at great cost to a very large share of those who are most in need?

Looking at the U.S. housing crisis with eyes wide open is one thing. Making meaning of what one sees and discerning how to respond, first spiritually and then through action, is quite another. When we look unflinchingly within ourselves and our communities of faith to understand better the pathways by which we approach housing justice, it becomes apparent that there are some underlying spiritual values that take us deep into our moral perspectives on housing justice.

A good place to begin exploring the moral dimensions of housing justice is to consider affordable housing as a human right. From antiquity to the present, moral philosophers have sought to ascertain the fundamental rights that humans derive from the nature of their existence within society, quite apart from rights granted by civil society. A major turn in this centuries-long dialogue occurred immediately after World War II when, in direct response to the horrors of that worldwide experience, the United Nations (UN) forged the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Adopted by the UN in 1948, the UDHR has since served as a frequent and invaluable moral measure for the status of human rights (perhaps also understood as applied social justice) in various ways at various times. 

Adequate housing is specifically identified in UDHR Article 25 as a basic human right in association with several other material needs that directly affect the quality of human life: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care…” The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR), in its Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1998), later defines adequate housing as having legal security of tenure, availability of services (including materials, facilities, and infrastructure), affordability, habitability, accessibility, location, and cultural adequacy. 

From a secular foundation of universal human rights, we then rise to understand housing justice through our distinctive Quaker lens. For this we go beneath conventional Quaker testimonies to excavate the spirituality from which they arise even as we go behind “that of God in every one” by checking still deeper values. Paula Palmer, for example, notes in her 2023 QuakerSpeak.com video, “The Lasting Trauma of Quaker Indigenous Boarding Schools,” that, yes, Quakers who ran Indian boarding schools in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries likely did see that of God in Native children, but White supremacy blinded them from also seeing the value of Native culture and way of life. Likewise, seeing that of God in an unhoused person, and then ministering to that person with the expectation of their becoming like those who are ministering, can lead to outcomes that present lasting benefit for neither the server nor the served.

Justice in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, the faith tradition most broadly understood and experienced by Quakers, is most richly expressed as shalom in the fullest biblical sense of the ancient Hebrew concept. (Consider, too, the Islamic equivalent salaam.) Walter Brueggemann speaks to our concern in Living Toward a Vision: Biblical Reflections on Shalom (1976) when he traces the enduring theme of shalom throughout the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, stressing the consistent representation of justice as equality, wholeness, and reconciliation of rich and poor within a covenant of shalom. Far more than its conventional translation into English as “peace,” shalom represents alignment of human and divine interests within the harmonious household, community, and nation. Shalom thus deepens and expands our notion of justice as fairness and equality. The “haves” within the biblical concept of shalom, for instance, hold special responsibility to the “have-nots.” In contemporary context, the justice values of fairness and equality can perhaps best be understood as wholeness, inclusion, and right relationship among individuals and communities within housing, healthcare, and other social systems. 

The concept of right relationship is a corresponding moral imperative for Quakers that deepens and enriches our understanding of shalom. Found in multiple ethical and moral systems from Indigenous cultures to such major faith traditions as Buddhism and Christianity, the natural state of cooperation, respect, and mutual benefit is a powerful impetus for understanding right relationship in great measure as loving one’s neighbor, serving the best interests of the community, and spiritually aligning one’s behavior and beliefs with the Divine. These sensibilities are manifest in Quaker morality, derived appreciably from Christian values and ethics, in ways that enable us to readily respond to contemporary moral challenges.

Shalom, a desire for wholeness and inclusion of all in community, is the spiritual essence of a Quaker understanding of justice, social justice, and by extension housing justice. 

Two contemporary uses of the concept of right relationship by Quakers reinforce both this meaning of right relationship and its importance for Quaker moral understanding of social justice:

Deep engagement with Indigenous history and justice issues by Paula Palmer and Jerilyn DeCoteau explores what right relationship among Native and non-Native peoples of North America entails. As one of several Friends Peace Teams, their “Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples” program has developed a range of publications, workshops, and other learning opportunities in their quest for understanding, reconciliation, and realization of right relationship among Indigenous peoples and descendants of European colonizers. 

In 2003, the Quaker Institute for the Future launched its Moral Economy Initiative, an undertaking to explore possibilities for a more human-centered alternative to our current profit-centered economic system. An early product of the initiative was Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver’s Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy (2009), which seeks “an ethical guidance system based on ‘right relationship’” that can lead the gradual transformation of our profit-oriented economic system to a more human-centered one. 

While these expressions of right relationship are not articulated as social justice per se, they do indicate how right relationship informs the inclusionary quest for wholeness of individual and community that rests at the core of Quaker morality and sense of justice.

Shalom and right relationship thus unite in the clarion call of social justice that echoes throughout both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and takes residence in our Quaker heritage. Shalom, a desire for wholeness and inclusion of all in community, is the spiritual essence of a Quaker understanding of justice, social justice, and by extension housing justice. Right relationship imbues communities; systems; and, indeed, all of creation with harmony, integrity, and mutual benefit: a moral perspective that fuels much of Quaker activism in the world today. Combined with our understanding of a basic human right to adequate and affordable housing, we are inspired to engage our concern for adequate and affordable housing as a social good that speaks to the inherent dignity and worth of every person, to make individuals and communities whole, and to enable additional social goods like education and healthcare for households, neighborhoods, and communities alike to prosper.

Invested with this vision of wholeness and inclusion rooted in a Quaker yearning for justice, we pursue housing justice on many fronts: housing that is adequate and affordable, rental rate fairness, direct service to and in support of the unhoused, equitable balance in the tenant-landlord relationship, fair housing laws, and more. Individual Quakers and Quaker meetings have long been involved in service to the unhoused, working against the racism we see deeply embedded in our housing system and in the operation of food kitchens, street ministries, and shelters. Yet our moral foundation of human rights, shalom, and right relationship call us to do more. 

We recognize there is no magic elixir to cure this disease of housing injustice, and there will be no sudden turnabout in a predatory economy that seemingly must always exploit an impoverished underclass. We must now do more of what our conscience and our faith call us to do: what our means, our opportunities, and our discernment allow us to do. Perhaps we are called to contribute time and skills for standing up a service program when previously we simply gave money to the parent organization. Perhaps our meetinghouse is near an encampment or can serve as an emergency shelter overflow for a larger facility. As we await the large-scale social and economic changes that will remedy the ills we see, we seek to be of greater service still. 

As has famously been attributed to the prophet Micah, we seek “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with [y]our God” (Mic. 6:8).

Resources on Housing Justice

Data on affordable housing and homelessness is plentiful yet frequently difficult to isolate for particular needs. For national data that can also be narrowed to regional and local views, begin with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “Annual Homeless Assessment Report” and the U.S. Census Bureau’s “American Housing Survey.” Also consider Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) and the National Low Income Housing Coalition. 

Secondary sources that informed parts of this essay, and which point to additional interpretations and information sources, include:

• Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination (Fortress Press, 1978) and Living Toward a Vision: Biblical Reflections on Shalom (United Church Press, 1976);
• Gianpaolo Baiocchi & H. Jacob Carlson’s “Housing is a Social Good,” Boston Review (June 2, 2021);
• Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright Publishing, 2017); and 
• Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Broadway Books, 2017). 

An excellent national nonprofit for both conceptual and data-driven approaches to housing issues is Alliance for Housing Justice (allianceforhousingjustice.org). And for those who care to work with other Quakers on a national approach to housing and homelessness issues, consider Quaker Institute for the Future’s Circle of Discernment on Unhoused Persons and Housing Justice (quakerinstitute.org/cod-on-homeless-people-and-housing-justice).