Sheltering the Body, Comforting the Soul
Sermon on Affordable Housing

Good morning. I'm Andrew Kleine. I've been a member of UUCSS for five years, and I represent our congregation on the board of the Unitarian Universalist Affordable Housing Corporation, UUAHC for short.

Phillip Moffitt wrote, "A house is a home when it shelters the body and comforts the soul." I would submit that in order to shelter the body and comfort the soul, a house must be decent, safe, sanitary, and affordable. Unfortunately, millions of Americans live in housing that lacks one or more of these attributes, and millions more manage to be adequately housed only by living far from where they work and suffering commutes that steal time from their families, cause aggravation and stress, and even dirty the air -- hardly comforting to the soul. If you believe, as I do, that every person is entitled to a home, then our current condition should deeply trouble you. It motivated me to get involved with UUAHC and to deliver this sermon today.

The affordable housing shortage has reached crisis proportions in many parts of this country, including our region. It hits hardest at the poor, but it impacts everyone, regardless of income. Closing the affordable housing gap will require painful tradeoffs, because some of the solutions seem to pit one UU principle against another, while others might force us to modify our version of the American dream. At stake are monumental issues: human dignity, racial integration, environmental preservation, neighborhood stability, child health, and transportation congestion, to name a few. My purposes this morning are to give you my personal perspective on the importance of a home, explain the scope and parameters of the affordable housing crisis in the Washington, D.C. area, and tell you how you can help to shelter bodies and comfort souls by putting homes within reach of more people.

As I contemplated this sermon, I found myself reminiscing a great deal about the home I grew up in. In classified ad parlance, it is a four bedroom, three bathroom colonial with a fireplace, finished basement, and garage, located at 3332 Christine Drive in Lansing, Michigan. The ad leaves out some important details, though. It doesn't say, for example, that when I was five years old, I pooped down the laundry chute. Or that my parents never replaced the wallpaper in the basement bathroom, even though it featured what I can only describe as scantily clad barmaids, circa 1850. Or that the rec room played host to innumerable table tennis battles between my father and me. Or that for many years I was afraid to go into my bedroom closet, because I thought an evil clown lived there. Or that our backyard was an ideal venue for my friend Scotty Olsen and I to play with Star Wars action figures.

The ad also fails to mention that we never felt the need to lock our front door, that we walked around the neighborhood at night without fear, that we each had our own rooms to retreat to for private time, that my parents were ten minutes from work, that we were warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and that we were a stone's throw from an expanse of undeveloped land where kids could ride bikes and catch snakes.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have grown up where I did. It may not have had central vac or a media room, but it was a home, and its influence on the quality of my childhood, and in turn on who I am today, was profound. Children who are trapped in unhealthy, overcrowded housing in unsafe neighborhoods are deprived of much more than laundry chutes, table tennis, and spacious backyards - they are deprived of dignity, opportunity, and happy memories of home.

In writing this sermon, I must admit I fought my policy wonkish tendencies every step of the way. I could regale you for hours with data about the affordable housing problem, but I think one statistic should suffice to give you a sense of the nature and scope of what I am talking about: 13.7 million American families, including 265,000 families in our area, have critical housing needs, meaning that they spend more than half of their total income on housing and/or live in a severely inadequate unit. Millions more families spend over 30 percent of income on housing, which is the government's affordability threshold. These numbers include many working families and they have grown dramatically over the last five years, as housing prices have outpaced income gains.

It's safe to say that the affordable housing problem affects every one of us on some level. The go-go economy we have enjoyed over the past several years has driven housing prices to head-shaking levels across the board. A recent Washington Post series on Fairfax County's affluence told of how many Fairfax teachers, police officers, and other municipal workers can't afford to live in the county they serve. Renters are especially vulnerable in today's housing market - as vacancy rates plummet, they have little choice but to pay the higher rates demanded by landlords.

My wife Kelly and I are currently in the process of buying our first house, so we are getting an up close and personal look at the rising cost of home ownership. Once we recovered from the sticker shock, we had to make the difficult choices that have confronted countless families before us. Does affording a comfortable house in a quiet neighborhood with good schools mean that Kelly has to go back to work, instead of staying home with our 7 month old daughter, Sara, as we had planned? Or that I have to add another hour to my daily commute? Or do we stay put in our apartment, which seems smaller each day as Sara becomes mobile and accumulates an astonishing array of toys? Luckily, we did find a house in our price range that will not force us to rearrange our lives. There's not enough room for a Ping Pong table, but I'll manage.

Of course, the decisions we faced during our house search are petty when you think of all the families for which affordable housing is a matter of health, safety, basic human dignity, and, in some cases, having any permanent shelter at all. These families must wonder why the fantastic economy everyone talks about has left them out in the cold.

Nowhere is the complicated relationship between economic growth and affordable housing more evident than in the District of Columbia. In two neighborhoods in particular - Cordozo-Shaw and Columbia Heights - long awaited and much celebrated revitalization is having the perverse effect of displacing lower income residents. In a September 2000 report, Robert Moore, President of the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights, wrote:

"[R]ental and sales prices have dramatically increased as in-migrant higher income households compete for homeownership opportunities in a formally stagnant but now fast moving housing market. In a growing number of instances single family housing prices have risen to over $250,000, eleven times the neighborhood's median income … Long-term African-American households who faithfully stayed with the area through hard times and often served as civic activists pushing government officials for positive change, are effectively being priced out of their own neighborhood."

Moore raises the issue of race and housing, which goes far beyond inner city gentrification. For decades in this country, homeowners in exclusive neighborhoods signed covenants pledging that they would not sell to racial or religious minorities. Real estate agents and mortgage lenders also conspired to keep minorities out of white neighborhoods, a practice known as "red-lining." Even today, many jurisdictions practice exclusionary zoning, which effectively prevents the mixture of affordable and market rate housing and isolates poor minorities. And, as much as we hate to admit it, many of us self-segregate in the housing decisions we make. We rationalize our behavior by telling ourselves that we can't sacrifice our children's education or safety to social ideals, but the truth is we are most comfortable living among people like ourselves.

One of the goals of affordable housing is to promote racial and economic integration. Experience has proven that poor families living in low poverty areas enjoy better employment and educational outcomes than those in high poverty areas, and that low poverty areas are not harmed by the presence of poor families. Sadly, this kind of experience is rare, limited to court-ordered housing desegregation projects and a few enlightened communities. In general, housing is becoming increasingly segregated, a phenomenon that has huge social implications, not the least of which is the demise of school desegregation orders across the country, including in Prince George's County.

According to a recent article on the Education Week web site, "[School] [d]istricts and courts alike [have begun] to distinguish between 'de jure' segregation - segregation actually caused by government action - and 'de facto' segregation, caused by such things as housing patterns. One is still illegal; the other is considered just a fact of life." The article concludes that, "the energy seems to have gone out of the school-integration movement."

I'm sure we all believe that everyone should have a decent, affordable home and access to economic and educational opportunity, but how do we make this a reality? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. The most obvious strategy - building more housing - is fraught with controversy.

The latest version of this controversy has been sparked by the smart growth movement. You have probably heard about this movement, because our governor, Parris Glendening, is one of its leading advocates. If you're not sure exactly what it means, don't feel bad, because it has become a convenient label for any number of slow growth and no growth policies, smart or otherwise. I ran across an article not too long ago entitled, "What Does Smart Growth Mean for Housing?" The article says that at its core, smart growth is a strategy to limit suburban sprawl and its attendant consumption of greenspace, while at the same time preserving economic growth and affordable housing. This can be achieved, according to smart growthers, by creating higher density housing. Without the higher densities, growth controls would drive up housing prices, as they have in Portland, Oregon and other cities. The article's conclusion is blunt: "Americans appear to hate two things: density and sprawl. Smart growth's fate may depend on which they ultimately hate more."

Affordable housing seemed like a no-brainer until just now, didn't it? So how do we reconcile our desire for everyone to be adequately housed with our concern for protecting our greenspace and our greenbacks (read: our property values)? There are a number of creative urban planning ideas out there, but I thought I'd turn to the UU Principles for guidance.

One of our principles is "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." This principle calls upon us to live in harmony with the natural environment. One way to do this is to preserve our built environment, by rehabilitating dilapidated and abandoned houses. But this strategy is not enough to meet the need for affordable housing in our region; we also need to build new houses on previously undeveloped land. UUAHC's executive director, Barbara Warren, reminds me all the time that affordable housing and greenspace can co-exist harmoniously. She envisions environmental groups and affordable housing developers pooling their resources to purchase land that might otherwise fall into the hands of speculators and profiteers. The land could then be used for low-density affordable housing that is carefully integrated with its natural surroundings.

While I am sympathetic to environmental concerns, for me, the affordable housing issue comes down to another UU principle: "Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations." Allowing children to grow up in dilapidated, unsafe housing or to bounce from shelter to shelter is unjust. Segregated neighborhoods are unfair. And putting home ownership out of the reach of working families is heartless.

In March, I toured several Baltimore neighborhoods where UUAHC has financed rehabilitation projects. One of our stops was the Light Street neighborhood, in the shadow of Camden Yards. There I met a woman named Betty, who was showing off the recently refurbished row house that she had been living in for a few months, but had just closed on the day before. Betty described herself to me as a recovering drug addict who never dreamed that she would own a home. I wish each and every one of you could have been there, because the pride in Betty's voice and in her face as she pointed out her tidy kitchen and urged us to "check out the upstairs" said far more than I have said this morning about why affordable housing matters. For one thing, it said that home ownership is a vital part of Betty's continuing recovery; it connects her to a supportive community and gives her another reason to stay sober. People like Betty are why I care about affordable housing.

When I hear a sermon about a social problem, I want to know what I can do to be part of the solution. Here are three ways that you can help to increase the supply of affordable housing in our region:

First, generously support the Unitatrian Universalist Affordable Housing Corportation. UUAHC was founded in 1989 by the Washington-area UU churches. In its 12-year history, UUAHC has made 53 low interest loans to non-profit developers, resulting in 430 units of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families. UUAHC's revolving loan fund recently surpassed $2 million, nearly half of which comes from individual UU investors, including several of our members, such as Mark and Deb Ferrenz, Ed and Cathy Johnson, Elaine Miller, Don and Daisy Grubbs, and Lucile Rowe.

Historically, UUAHC has mainly financed construction and rehabilitation of single-family houses, but now we are venturing into new territory, such as child care centers and transitional and supportive housing. Just last month, we approved a project that will house mentally ill women who are currently living in tractor trailers that were converted into emergency shelters. For more information about investing in the UUAHC loan fund or contributing operating funds, please visit the UUAHC table in the Community Hall after the service.

The second way you can help is to volunteer your time on an affordable housing project - get your hands dirty, so to speak. I am organizing a UUCSS group to landscape a property in the Palmer Park neighborhood of Prince George's County on Saturday, May 19. The property is being developed by a UUAHC borrower called Housing Initiative Partnership -HIP for short - and will be sold to a low- or moderate-income family. If this interests you, you can sign up after the service.

The third thing you can do is urge your elected officials to provide more funding for affordable housing. In Montgomery County, County Executive Doug Duncan has proposed more than doubling the amount the county puts into it Housing Initiative Fund, from $7 million to $15 million, and then dedicating 2.5 percent of county property tax receipts - about $15 million a year - to the Fund. Approval of this plan is no sure thing, given the county's budget constraints and the aversion of some council members to dedicating funds to anything, but the need is clear. To house its low- and moderate-income residents, Montgomery County must add 1,000 affordable housing units a year; however, only about 500 such units were built in each of the past two years. If you are compelled to write a letter to your council member - and I sure hope you are, at this point - you can find their addresses, plus suggested text, in the Community Hall after the service.

I'll close with the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little."

Amen