Amid the current crisis of housing in our city and around the world, two simple priorities rise above the others: build housing and build community.

This is my primary takeaway from Kevin Adler and Donald Burnes’s important book, When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America. The book is so insightful that I’d like to talk with you about it over lunch! Can you join us Wednesday June 26? Details here.

In last week’s email, I highlighted “three engines of crisis” driving our predicament: housing costs, systems dysfunction, and relational poverty. This week, we take a hopeful turn to what actually can and does work.

Build Housing

There is no solution to homelessness that does not include building more housing—a LOT more housing. Most critical is new housing that is affordable and accessible for both the unhoused and the much larger group of our neighbors with lower incomes. As we learned from building Clara Brown Commons, it is NOT an easy task. The cost of land, materials, and labor—plus costs associated with zoning and other local requirements—mean that there is no cheap or fast way to build in a metro area like Denver.

There is also no way to build such housing without large subsidies from all levels of government, more tools like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and Housing Choice Vouchers, and more generosity of people who care. Our hearts must be open enough to welcome affordable housing into our communities and to put our own resources toward viable pathways for those most vulnerable.

Build Community

 A shelter, a transitional housing program, or an affordable apartment building does not automatically create supportive and caring community. It requires elements such as loving presence, vulnerability, and hospitality—the beautiful work of God’s Spirit in our lives. Churches and faith groups have an especially important role to play in solving the twin crises of homelessness and social isolation. At its best and truest, our spiritual life has prepared us “for such a moment as this.”

Maybe I just liked When We Walk By because these two key solutions are the very things we are about at Mile High Ministries: housing and relationships. We believe—because we see it happen over and over—that people flourish when they are truly at home in supportive and compassionate communities that cultivate a sense of belonging. It’s a movement you’ve been part of with us, and it gives us great hope.