A Christian Case for Housing Abundance, Christianity Today, Thomas Irwin, October 7, 2026
Both locally and nationally, the numbers are sobering: From 2022 to 2025, nationwide homeless PIT [a survey method] counts rose 28 percent to 745,652. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in Los Angeles, where data published in July found that more than 73,000 people are homeless across the county. That amounts to almost 10 percent of all homelessness and 18 percent of unsheltered homeless in the entire United States.
This argues, from a Christian rather than purely technocratic perspective, that housing policy needs to be part of how we think about homelessness:
If your town had an epidemic of swimming accidents, at some point you’d have to stop contenting yourself with pulling people out of the river. You’d need to ask why so many people are falling in.
What does it look like for Christians to think that way about homelessness? I believe it would lead us to a response that has largely been neglected by the church: housing abundance as a way of loving our neighbors.
Housing scarcity is not the only reason people become homeless, but researchers with different ideological backgrounds have consistently found that housing costs are the strongest predictor of homelessness at the regional level, explaining up to 78 percent of the variation between cities.
As far as I can tell, this data is basically correct. Obviously many other issues contribute to homelessness, but housing costs, and the availability or lack thereof of “last-rung” housing for people in insecure positions, is a huge factor in who actually ends up living on the street. Denying this is not about being factually correct, but about trying to preserve the idea that people “deserve” their misfortune.
Importantly, Irwin notes that most of the people who eventually find themselves homeless would not be buying or renting homes at the median market price. Rather, a lot of people remain insecure but not outright homeless, and high housing costs shrink this bottom-level in particular:
Suppose a family who lives in Pico-Union has an uncle who has just lost his job and his housing. If that family already has six people living in a two-bedroom apartment, they almost certainly will not be able to fit the uncle in too. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to be hospitable. It’s just the reality in a housing market as expensive as LA. Housing scarcity has squeezed their capacity for compassion.
In other words, squeezing into a crowded home via a couch or small spare bedroom is not ideal, but it’s not homelessness. The absence of that spare capacity is how a general housing crunch drives actual homelessness.
Those who insist that Christianity not inform public policy—not because they distrust religious influence, but because they believe that Jesus’s words are only for individuals and not for policy or governments—are reading him too narrowly. Irwin says this perfectly, in my view:
Being a good neighbor also means shaping our cities into places where sufficient housing can be built, housing that gives communities room to put radical hospitality into practice. In a very practical way, we can love our neighbors by making it possible for families to turn extra yard space into accessory dwelling units (ADUs)—or for builders to add more “chairs” to the game.
Read the whole thing.
This is very nice: an organization that helps people who are homeless get new skills and also a chance to help others and hopefully alter the hopelessness of homelessness:
Cooking is a skill you can use to get a job, but it’s also a path to confidence. That means the course can help participants even if they don’t end up working in food service.
When I visited CSTP’s kitchen, former students emphasized that cooking is something you do for other people. That means it can be a way to reverse roles when you’re homeless, food insecure, or underemployed. While you’re over the stove, you aren’t asking for help, you’re helping others. Eric McCown, one of CSTP’s recent graduates, smiled when he recounted how his mother now asks him to poach her eggs in the morning.
And this is a good example of the kinds of things you might face:
Shepherd’s Table’s found its ghost kitchen in the Silver Spring United Methodist Church (SSUMC) on Georgia Avenue. Chef Gary Bullock, who goes by Chef Gary, teaches the CSTP course and told me he likes SSUM’s kitchen better than the main kitchen at Shepherd’s Table. “It’s much bigger!” he said, and it’s attached to a fellowship hall so students can learn to serve meals for large groups of people. Because the landlord is a church, the rent is also reasonable.
But the kitchen does have a few drawbacks. SSUMC’s kitchen has four ovens, each with multiple burners, but they’re all 50 years old. And, because they’re old stoves, each one has multiple pilot lights, many of which are hard to reach. “You need to be a gymnast to get to some of those pilot lights,” Moore told me. It takes Chef Gary about 15 minutes to get all of them lit.
It’s not like that’s the biggest adversity, but it is a reminder of the way in which little inconveniences can pile up to make life frictional and difficult in a way that is less true of people with more money to throw at little problems.
But really, this sounds like a great program and a genuine service:
If Shepherd’s Table scales up its Beyond the Table program, Chef Gary’s days may get busier, but he’ll be ready to teach more people how to cook, serve others, and help themselves.
This publication runs some really interesting stuff on the manufacturing/hardware issues in the background with regard to legacy consumer electronics.
This one is about the gradual disappearance of CD-player mechanisms. Of course, these were once so common you’d never even think about the actual drive parts as being scarce or even as anything more than a commodity. But there are fewer and fewer makers of these parts, and that “strands” high-end manufacturers who can no longer make or source parts because the general disc-drive ecosystem has fallen apart.
This has been true of cassette players for 20 or 30 years now, and it’s becoming true of CD players—despite the resurgence in interest in physical media. That resurgence, however, may never be enough to resurrect obsolete manufacturing and supply chains which no longer survive.
A Piece of Thailand in an Inconspicuous Spot, New York Times, Karla Cook, January 13, 2012
This mostly positive review is interesting to me, because I’ve been to this place a couple of times, which is about a five-minute drive from my parents’ house (it’s in the strip plaza with a supermarket where we used to go all the time when I was a kid). It’s a pretty unremarkable Thai restaurant, in my experience. It’s also one of relatively few in the county, which number four or five.
This isn’t really about the restaurant review, as much as it’s about 1) newspaper articles don’t always paint an accurate picture, and 2) even in New Jersey an hour from two major cities, there are places where completely ubiquitous international cuisines are still not quite ubiquitous.
I read, in some 1990s restaurant reviews of Chinese restaurants we used to go to in neighboring Somerset County, that Chinese-Americans were fanning out from the New York City area into central New Jersey. The 1990s seems pretty late for that, but apparently that phenomenon of the dispersal/suburbanization of an immigrant/ethnic community was still ongoing even that recently. I suppose it is ongoing now, for other communities. Interesting stuff.
Related Reading:
Thank you for the shout-out!