Steubenville’s Homeless have Nowhere to Go

Sometimes, the cruelty of our society takes my breath away.

Here in Steubenville, we’re about to get our first big snowfall of the year.  There’ll be a dump of one to three inches by the time school starts in the morning, so several of the schools are on a two-hour delay. It’s going to stay cold all week, and get bitterly cold next week. My family will be irritated but safe. We’re stapling construction worker plastic over the drafty places in the old windows. We’re getting a warm outdoor cat house with a heating pad for our porch cat, Charlie. We have the ability to do this, because we have a house to live in. Others aren’t so lucky.

For the first time this year, Steubenville no longer has a single homeless shelter.

This happened at the end of October. The church charity keeping them open couldn’t afford to do it anymore, due to funding cuts. They’ve managed to keep their thrift store and food pantry open, but the shelters are closed, and nothing is taking its place. I’ve seen homeless people camping out in the doorways of abandoned buildings all over town.

The Friendship Room, our beautiful little Catholic Worker House, started out as a winter warming center in the first place, and they’re doing their best. But they’re not big enough to take the place of the homeless shelters. They’re just a duplex house with a porch and a backyard. I have visited there in the winter and seen people standing packed like sardines in the living room to keep warm, and that was before the shelters closed. There’s much more demand now.

Three weeks ago, I saw that the Friendship Room was building “mangers,” little shelters about the size of a twin bed with straw bales for walls and a tarp for a roof. Not very fancy or appealing, just places for homeless people to crawl inside and keep warm on a freezing cold night. Certainly not a permanent or even a long term solution, but something. Anything to keep people alive.

And they’ve just now posted to social media that they’re being threatened with criminal charges. They’re supposed to stop letting the homeless sleep in the mangers or they’ll be charged, supposedly because the mangers are a fire hazard. I don’t know anything about this except what’s been posted online. It makes me sick to even imagine.

There are human beings living in this city, humans with every bit as much right to exists as you do, who can’t go anywhere to get out of the snow. And a charity which is attempting to keep them alive, on private property, at no cost to the city government, is being told they can’t do that.

Human beings have to go somewhere. They can’t just cease to exist when they’re not given a place to stay.

If you make a human being leave one place, they’ll go someplace else. In a society like ours, where housing is harder and harder to afford, your poor neighbors won’t disappear if they can’t afford a house. They’ll  become your homeless neighbors. If you stop those homeless people from squatting or camping in your neighborhood, they’ll go to a different neighborhood. If you close the homeless shelters, they’ll go anywhere they can for a little bit of shelter. If you forbid a charity from letting them camp on their own private property, I don’t know where they’ll go next. But you’re not going to get rid of them. The way to stop the homelessness crisis is to house people.

And if you can’t house people, you ought to at least give them a place to come in and warm up in the worst weather.

In such a heartless, unjust society as this, it’s common for a person sleeping in a park or on a sidewalk to be treated like a criminal. Just now, in my town, the people who are trying to keep their neighbors alive are also being treated like criminals.

I don’t know what to do about this.

I just know that, as Christians, we have the responsibility to help however we can.

Let’s all try to make this a better world.