Julian Forth: As we start this discussion on homelessness, I think it’s important to note that “homelessness” can look like a variety of things. For instance, homeless can refer to someone who is living on the street. It can refer to someone who is staying in a shelter, or couch surfing, or squatting in an otherwise vacant building. We can also include those who might have a regular place to sleep, but their housing is run by a program that keeps the tenant from having control over their space. So when we speak of homelessness, we have in mind the various forms that housing precarity might take.
Susie Triffitt: Exactly right. And just because someone has a place to stay, does that mean they feel at home? Does the person feel safe, connected, and have a sense of belonging? Many state accommodations are temporary. For the people I worked with in Bradford, temporary accommodation most often felt unsafe, grim, and unhygienic due to bedbug problems or high risk of being brought into prostitution or drugs. One elderly man I know has a house but doesn’t have electricity or water. For this reason, I maintain the term “homeless” instead of “unhoused” in my work. It means something different to lack a “home” than it does to lack a “house.”
Julian: The state of homelessness is different between our contexts, you in Bradford, UK, and me in Washington, D.C. How would you describe the state of homelessness in Bradford?
Susie: According to the statistics, the UK has the highest percentage of people who are homeless in the Western world. It is reportedly worse than in the US and France. It is very hard to quantify homelessness because those on the streets need to stay hidden for their own protection, and we can only have rough estimates for those sofa surfing. Acknowledging that, the problem in the UK is a lot worse than one might think, particularly when we consider homelessness as not being limited to rough sleepers. Homelessness has increased massively in the UK since austerity in the 2010s and Covid, and this is part of what drives my research.
Julian: I had no clue that homelessness was such a prevalent issue in the UK. In Washington, D.C., homelessness is a very visible issue. There’s also a disproportionate number of people experiencing mental health challenges or struggling with histories of substance use. However, as you know, those factors are not always present. There are people experiencing homelessness who do not use substances or have mental health crises and are even employed, but they’re still experiencing homelessness. There are also people who lack resources, social networks, or family support.
Race also plays a large role in US homelessness. Not only are black and brown people disproportionately represented among those experiencing homelessness, but we are also most vulnerable to homelessness because of lower incomes, processes of gentrification, and eviction.
Susie: I recently moved to New Jersey from the UK. I always knew there was racism in the US, but I’ve been struck by how obvious it is here. I’ve found that homelessness in America is so visibly racial in a way that it isn’t in Bradford. Or at least the racial dynamics are very different here than in the UK. In Bradford, most of the homeless people I was working with were white working-class men, although the city is incredibly religiously and ethnically diverse. It’s about a third Christian, a third Muslim, and a third non-religious, with a small Sikhi and Hindu population.
The Muslim community is quite separate from the non-Muslim community in Bradford. In the 1960s, the British empire sought out cheap labor for industrial cities like Bradford and provided many work visas for Pakistanis. After the Mirpuri flooding in the late sixties caused by the construction of the Mangla Dam, many within the Mirpuri community were offered British visas as compensation for the loss of their homes. Sadly, this influx became a source of years of racial tension in the city. However, this seems different from what I’ve seen in the US. In Bradford, the racial dynamics determine how and where people get help.
And, as a generality, within the Pakistani community in Bradford, due to a stronger sense of community and family, there are fewer people from that group visibly on the street. This means that the poverty and deprivation being experienced by this community are more hidden—yet another reason why we shouldn’t limit discussion of homelessness to those without houses.
Julian: Would it be correct to say that in Bradford, the majority of resources for people experiencing homelessness come from religious organizations?
Susie: Yes and no. In England, homelessness is largely dealt with at a local level, and local charities often provide food via soup kitchens and food banks. In the UK, our government is based in London and, put simply, often the needs of more deprived Northern areas get ignored or misunderstood. In Bradford, about 97% of daily food provision for people experiencing homelessness in the city center comes from religious organizations, and they are struggling to sustain themselves financially.
Julian: In Washington, D.C., a lot of the services for homeless people come through local and federal government grants to nonprofit organizations. This creates a complex situation. Undoubtedly, nonprofits provide essential services to people experiencing homelessness, but it often comes with a level of surveillance and policing given the large amount of data, restrictions, and directives about what organizations can and cannot do that are tied to the grants. Moreover, the fact that our money comes from the very institutions that might be perpetuating the problem we’re trying to address means that nonprofits usually cannot speak out about the root causes of homelessness. I think that’s why many nonprofits put a lot of focus on the outcomes of individuals but can’t really speak to structural or policy-level problems.
Susie: What was a significant event or moment that challenged you in your work in homelessness?
Julian: I was the Director of Street Outreach for a local nonprofit prior to and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Director of Street Outreach, I oversaw teams that conducted outreach to people who are living on the street throughout downtown Washington, D.C. Part of that outreach work included conducting assessments using the VI-SPDAT, a tool to map a person’s vulnerabilities and risks—for example, one’s age, mental health challenges, social connection, and substance use. Using the outcomes of the VI-SPDAT, members of our nonprofit would sit in a room with others to determine who would be eligible for the limited housing vouchers and who would not. While we sat in a room comparing clients and their vulnerabilities for limited resources, we could see through the window new high-end luxury apartments and construction cranes across the city’s skyline. That contrast struck me as absurd and dystopian.
I remember when, in the winter of 2020, the D.C. government enacted a permanent clean-up of an encampment below an overpass on K Street Northeast. The encampment community provided safety for each other and the overpass sheltered people from the weather. At the prompting of the neighborhood Business Improvement District, the D.C. government enacted an unprecedented permanent disbanding of the encampment, scattering the people across the city without resources in the middle of winter. The nonprofit organization I worked for was required by the D.C. government to help people move from the encampment, but we were powerless to act or even make a statement about the city’s actions. The K Street cleanup made me think about the collusion of private interests and government policies. Was my role in street outreach providing real help or was it an extension of state violence? How are service and policing commingled in the nonprofit sector?
Susie: This work and navigating these dynamics is difficult and frustrating. As Christians, we are called to be in these spaces as graciously as possible. This work is prone to causing burnout, and soft-hearted people do burn out. A challenge for us is this: How can we, as Christians, remain soft-hearted people while working with the homeless? I think one of the best answers to this I’ve seen is from the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal I worked with in Bradford. The friars explained that, in their Order, prayer comes first, fraternity comes second, and service comes third. This might seem counter-intuitive for those of us working alongside homeless people, who feel that we must constantly be putting out fires. But that hierarchy is what enables the Order to keep doing their work. We have to acknowledge the extreme toll this work can take on us, but one of our challenges as Christians and as theologians is figuring out how we can keep doing it and keep turning up for this community.
Julian: What is something about working with homeless people that is often misunderstood?
Susie: When someone thinks about homelessness and how we serve, they often think about needs like physical hunger. This is part of it, but there is also a deep hunger for intimacy in this community. Of course, people should not go hungry physically, but loneliness and longing for connection is an often-overlooked need. Meeting that longing for intimacy means moving beyond sanitized care work toward forming real friendships and making space to listen. I often think of it as the Mary and Martha problem. It’s easy, like Martha, to spend all our time working with the homeless rushing around feeding and clothing them, but actually, they also really need us to sit and listen to them, like Mary. This latter need is often greater than the former.
Julian: This question of misunderstanding homeless people made me think of my relationship with Bernard, a homeless person in D.C. who has since passed away. He was a brilliant, talkative guy who suffered from schizophrenia and paranoia. We met when I was in a cafe talking with someone about theory, and Bernard interrupted us excitedly asking, “Are you talking about Gilles Deleuze?”—that’s just how it started. We built a friendship over the years. He would come by my office, or I would see him in a cafe and we would talk about what he’s reading, thinking, or his frustrations with other people. I visited him in the hospital toward the end of his life and attended his funeral.
Susie: Similarly, I’ve had chats about Freud, art history, and moral relativism with people at the Bradford soup kitchens. There is a stereotype that homeless people aren’t clever, which is complete rubbish. They are often some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. These stereotypes work to make individuals faceless—defining them by addiction, hunger, or their position. But friendship includes reciprocity. For me, when doing this work, we are called to friendship. This requires us to be aware of our positionality, our bodies, and also to acknowledge both how easy it is to mess this balance up and how important it is to still just keep turning up. Academia often calls us towards perfectionism, and this work destroys any attempt at being perfect.
There’s a homeless woman I got to know while in Bradford who struggles with alcoholism and grief, and who had fled her war-torn country. One day, she had gotten into an argument with others at the soup kitchen and was really angry and upset. I went and sat outside with her, and she said to me, “Susie, you are a good person, but you’re naive. These are bad people.” And she’s right. Of course I’m naive. I haven’t lived her life, although I have experienced grief and abuse myself. But simply to garner the appearance of anti-naivete, I’m also not going to stop being hopeful for her and for these people. As Christians, we don’t stop hoping in people when they do bad things, and we will always be naive because we worship a big, incomprehensible God.
Julian: It’s important to lean into feeling stupid, to lean into feeling out of one’s element, a little lost, to be told how much we don’t know. It’s challenging to remain in such an uncomfortable space, but maybe there’s value in stupidity.
Susie: Yes, part of doing homeless ministry and work is accepting that you’re going to mess up all the time. And yet we don’t give up on hope. Every person I know who’s gotten out of addiction has done it by having hope. And I think it’s okay for us to look naïve, because often hope and naivete wear the same clothing but are very different. Hope involves labor: it means continuing to push towards God and goodness, despite things being really tough.
Julian: Honestly, I don’t resonate with the concept of hope, and I think a type of despair is important. I do not mean despair as in paralysis and inaction. I think there’s a type of despair that allows us to detach from what Laurent Berlant calls “cruel optimism.” Despair allows us to give up on the idea that the current political and economic arrangement will one day work for us. I think the belief that the current politico-economic order is essentially just, that it will give us what we deserve and what we need if we just work hard enough, is a liberal or bourgeois version of hope. For Paul Tillich, doubt is not the opposite of faith, but doubt is part of faith. Likewise, despair can be part of hope by purifying hope of naivete and cruel optimism, by purifying hope of idolatry.
Susie: I want to push back on this a little. I do think that despair is part of hope and part of what makes hope labor. I also think that oftentimes, people argue against hope because they don’t want people to have ridiculous hopes. But the most incredible changes in human history have come from ridiculous hopes. I want to allow for gorgeous, ridiculous, and extreme hope in the spaces within which we’re working. And I’ve found through my work with homeless people that they are generally not despairing. In fact, they are often invigorated by the success of daily hopes—for example, finding food and clothing and supporting the people around them. When I interview homeless people and ask them specifically about hope, the answers are often incredibly practical, such as, “I woke up today, and I got food.” If we look at this, remembering the Lord’s Prayer in which we pray for our daily bread, this means that hope is not entirely about expecting something in the far future. It is also about our daily needs and our daily striving.
Julian: You say you haven’t found homeless people necessarily drawn to despair: Neither have I. Drawing on the more existentialist language of Paul Tillich, I’ve seen the daily work of homeless people through the framework of self-affirmation. When I see homeless people building encampments, finding food, and forming communities, l look at this as a form of self-affirmation and self-love. It is an insurgent self-affirmation when people build, find, and create for themselves the dignity, home, and care our society has denied them. This is not to romanticize homelessness, but in that daily activity I see a self-affirmation that is wonderfully impatient. If we grant the distinction between optimism and hope, could we say that our position within society affects our understanding of hope? Maybe we can’t understand hope when we’re comfortable, when we are not in places of struggle or in solidarity with those who struggle.
Susie: When I first started writing about homelessness, I thought hope and despair were completely different. Then I realized that they’re not, partly because hopeful people are drawn to places of despair. Hopeful people are not necessarily sitting in beautiful places without pain. They are often spiritual paramedics drawn to the crime scenes of despair. Some of that work may look super naive, but it isn’t. Hopeful people just keep turning up and doing Kingdom work. This is one of the ways hope and despair are intertwined. I also think, from personal experience, that one of the best ways to confront depression is to help someone else. I think this sometimes helps us find hope and step out of liberal bourgeois bubbles.
Julian: Given that the UK and the US are arguably Christian countries, why should Christians in our countries care about homeless people?
Susie: The Bible tells us that humans are made in the image of God, and, through Christ, people have become dwelling places of the Holy Spirit. If we believe these things, they are also true of homeless people whom we allow to live in tents. This is the scandal of homelessness, that our countries allow people to live without homes and in deplorable conditions despite the proclamations of Christian faith. We allow people who are literal dwelling places or tents for the Spirit to exist without a dwelling place.
Julian: You’re absolutely right. Yet, I also feel that Christianity in America, particularly evangelicalism, can be an obstacle to caring about homelessness. In America, I think evangelicalism does two things: It creates an in-group for who is worthy of being truly American, and it creates a sense of profound isolation in people. I think of evangelicalism as the religious complement of neoliberalism which at once destroys a sense of community, safety nets, and social bonds and puts responsibility for success, failure, salvation, and even homelessness on the individual.
Susie: You have a point about isolation and lack of community. I often think about what it means to dwell with other people, how to be in a space and have relationships, disagreements, and dignity across power dynamics. While speaking with a friend, a friar in Bradford, I asked his advice when working alongside people who have done questionable, sometimes egregious, things. The friar said, “How can we ever judge? We ourselves are broken, and we are all starting from a place of brokenness.” One of the things that strikes me is that people in the US are not at the same table as people who are homeless. They don’t dwell in a relationship with homeless people. In our world, we spend so much time around people who are like ourselves. But when we are confronted with our own naïvete, brokenness, imperfections, and stupidity, judgment gradually disappears. I wish we made ourselves deeply uncomfortable sometimes. I wish we had to sit around a table with each other, the way Jesus would have made us do.
