It's 7:30pm and already -1 degree Fahrenheit. In Arkansas. Which is, even for those from northern climates, “real cold.”
Yesterday our family made the ten hour drive back from eastern Iowa, coming home early from a Christmas holiday trip visiting family. We wanted to avoid the storms fixing to blanket the mid-west and mid-south.
I ask my family, my mom in particular, forgiveness for leaving early. But it was the right call.
I hope the way I'm spending tonight makes up for it a little bit. A group of us are staffing the cold weather shelter at Genesis Church in downtown Fayetteville. Genesis has staffed up to provide overnight shelter and also trained volunteers from various communities (including a handful of volunteers from our congregation).
During the organizing phase for this year’s shelter I signed up to drive volunteers to and from the shelter in the case of inclement weather. I’ve got a 4-wheel drive Nissan Titan and am pretty confident driving in snow (did I mention I’ve lived in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin prior to Arkansas?)
So about 4:30 p.m. this afternoon I picked up my neighbor Bonnie and we made our way downtown to Genesis in the dark and blowing wind.
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The basic design for the shelter: there’s a small main room, a kind of lobby in the secondary building of the church, set up for intake. Even with a low barrier shelter like ours you need to take some basic information down to satisfy the queries of grant-giving agencies. And we take temperature and ask a few other questions to ensure the safety of everyone staying the night. After that a volunteers takes those checked in over to the main church building where they can eat and secure their cot for the night.
Already at 5 p.m. a queue was forming outside (officially the shelter was opening at 6 p.m.). When we opened the doors, we had about fifty people immediately enter and completely fill the small space. It was really crowded, way more people than we had anticipated. So we adjusted, took down the center coffee table and instead placed the coffee in the corner. I started taking orders for coffee, delivering hot cups of good strong brew mixed with cream and sugar to some very cold neighbors.
My volunteer mode: If I don’t have another assigned role in a volunteer space, I often like to jump into the hospitality role. Maybe I missed my calling as a waiter. Anyway, I try to find something to do, and I like to think such hospitality is a kind of warming. It also gives you a chance to check in with people, see how they're doing, answer any questions they have.
So the check in process got started (this was a bit of a bottleneck, but again, more people than we anticipated and also did I mention it was so cold?) and generally speaking the community wrapped itself around itself and prepared to eat, shower, find cots, and get some rest in the relative warmth of a church basement. Many who are living unhoused are friends and know one another, so there was also a lot of conversation and strategizing reviewing who might still need a call or a visit to help them feel comfortable coming in for shelter.
Eventually we got a call that required my truck. I made my way south of town to a place along the creek in a holler where a group of folks have a campsite. Probably about eight tents down in there. On a lot of nights a good tent, some reflective plastic, a space heater and some sleeping bags will get you through the night, but most of us had concern that tonight is not the kind of night to try that. So our goal was to try to get those still out in the tents to come in.
I walked out the bike trail with the man who had called, and we stood at the top of the ridge and started calling people up for a ride. It’s hard for me to describe how cold this feels standing exposed in the wind and looking down into a little holler full of tents and hoping they’ll choose to come in to the warmth rather than stay in the tents (last year we lost a couple of folks on a really cold night and the community doesn’t want that to happen again).
Brought five men back to the church, then we worked on a strategy to convince the rest of the crew to also come in (plus their puppies). As we stood in line I chatted with a few folks who had also been working to cajole their neighbors staying in tents a quarter mile upstream to come in. But he hadn't had success either. In their case, they were afraid that if they left all their stuff out there (generators, gear, etc.) and came in for shelter it wouldn't be there when they got back.
I live in a house, and this made me pause.
Imagine: You go on a trip and stay in a hotel and when you get back to your house someone else has moved in. Would you begin to fear staying in hotels?
Cold weather shelter isn’t just for humans. We also have a lot of dogs, more dogs than we had small or mid-sized kennels for. I made a trip back up town to find some kennels. Petco had closed early (because of the cold and blowing snow), but Walmart was open, so I picked up four kennels plus some shoes for a guy who came in wearing only soccer slides. He needed size 12.
Side note: at least at our shelter, it’s easier for them to keep the mid-sized shoes on hand than the large or small shoes. Same goes for coats. So if you have extra XL coats to spare, or men’s size shoes 10 and above (women’s 9 or above) I bet the shelter would take those donations anytime!
While I was at Walmart, the guy in line behind me was buying multiple Coleman propane canisters. Wondering whether he was also sleeping outdoors tonight I mentioned the shelter. Also made me wonder how many other hollers have folks camping tonight, and how many others will try to sleep in their cars.
After Walmart I stopped back at church, grabbed ALL the coats already donated for our Christmas Eve coat collection, and headed back to the shelter. As I walked back into the facility, multiple coats were claimed immediately, and the staffer who sorts clothes at Genesis asked me if I also had a box of gloves or mittens.
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A simple call to action: If you want to help, donate as many gloves, mittens, coats, and sleeping bags as you can. Especially larger coats and jackets, and if you have them, cold weather sleeping bags. Then also get online and make a financial donation.
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A more complex call to action:
Since it’s Christmas, can we talk about shelter? I mean, it’s getting cold outside and we tell ourselves the story this time of year about the infant Jesus with “no crib for a bed.”
The State of Arkansas brought in $1.6 billion in surplus income tax revenue last year. It spent a large portion of it on a $75 million jail expansion in Calico Rock. The state spent none of the surplus on housing.
Washington County, the county in which I reside, has been sitting on millions of dollars of CARES and other relief funds and is now considering using the majority of the surplus to build a larger jail. The county is doing nothing about housing for the unsheltered.
Meanwhile, the city of Fayetteville, where I live and pastor, has failed to set housing and homelessness as a key priority. The HEARTH program funds are exhausted, the housing authority under-resourced, and when the city set a series of bond priorities two years ago to fund projects in our community, millions of new tax revenue from the bond was focused on a fancy downtown arts corridor and parking, but none on housing.
Also meanwhile, we live in a region where billionaire philanthropists fund extensive bike lanes and modern art museums, even buy historic homes of famous architects and move them to the Ozarks, but not one of the foundations funded by these billionaire families has set housing and homelessness as a key grant program area (with the exception of Walmart, which mentions “shelter” for grants of less than $5000 under the sub-heading “health and human services”... but that just further substantiates the point I’m making here).
The Salvation Army is full. The domestic abuse shelters are full. New Beginnings is full. Public housing currently has a four-year waiting list. And one of our largest non-profits serving the homeless, 7 Hills, though impactful and needed, doesn’t actually even provide emergency shelter. There’s literally no emergency or long-term shelter in our region for families with children, and no plans in the works anywhere to expand shelter for the unhoused.
Meanwhile corporations are buying up all the houses and renting them out as pricey AirBnB’s. And many of the new apartments going up (that are rented by the room) are not suitable for families. Housing options are more limited than ever for families in Fayetteville.
I was at a meeting a week ago preparing a cold-weather shelter for our community. The organizers mentioned that 15 degrees as a day’s high temperature had been set as the threshold for opening the shelter because frankly that’s what they had the funding for. Make it 32 degrees, for example, and they can’t afford to be open the extra number of days for the winter that would represent.
How much, you might ask, would it cost in additional funding to open those extra nights? Answer: $50,000.
$50,000 is a pittance. It’s less than many people spend on a new vehicle, less than the amount major foundations give out as typical grants for moderately sized programs, and when compared to any municipal budget, it verges on a statistically insignificant amount.
Neither the county nor the city can come up with such small amounts to improve shelter resources for our unhoused neighbors. Nor can the state, our regional governments, or major foundations, be bothered to come up with clear and compelling plans that would provide affordable housing for all and emergency housing for those who need it.
But you know what we do have an imagination for, and spend time and resources doing? Drawing up plans for more jails. We can draw up plans to fund a $130 million jail expansion here in Washington County. Benton County is working on similar plans.
Jail is, I guess, a kind of housing, although it’s terrifying all our best systemic ideas for free housing are carceral. As if we only care if someone has shelter if they’ve been accused of a crime.
Attributed to Martin Luther King Jr., it’s often said “budgets are moral documents.” That we don’t budget enough for housing in our community tells us everything we need to know about our current moral condition. As we prepare to celebrate Christmas, we find ourselves in the position collectively of being like that innkeeper who said to the Holy Family, “Sorry, there’s no room here at the inn.”
Since Jesus told his disciples repeatedly they could find him in the face of the neighbor, in particular those who are poor, without shelter, without clothes and food and drink, we might recognize again this Christmas--Jesus is here among us and again we have not housed him.
I do not say this out of apathy, as if our religious traditions teaches us that we are to always have homeless infants among us, just like Jesus.
On this Christmas I say to us all, it’s not a personal moral failure of a few individuals, that you haven’t given enough sleeping bags or coats away. Although almost every one of us could and should do more of that.
No, our sin is a political and community sin. Systemic, social, if you will. That a region as wealthy as ours can’t build enough emergency shelter for the unhoused and affordable housing for all proves that as a people we don’t care, and we don’t want to help.
That’s who we are. That’s who we’ve elected. Our current budgets teach us our morals. We’ll build beds for jails but not shelter. The solution? Walk shelter and housing onto every single governmental meeting you can, and don’t stop until there is enough housing for all who seek it. Consider housing an essential utility like water or electricity or heat. The solution is collective action, starting with the largest organizations best poised to plan and fund what we need.
We need housing for all.
Pastor Clint
Here in Deland Florida, we have a major issue with homelessness, and cold night shelters. A few years ago, a lot of local organizations got together and built The Bridge. https://www.deland.org/209/The-Bridge maybe something like this would help in your corner of Arkansas.