The “Roadmap to Affordable Housing, 2019-2025” report — delivered by the non-profit Pagosa Housing Partners (PHP) to the Town of Pagosa Springs earlier this month, and currently being considered for adoption by the Town Council — lays out 54 pages of suggestions for addressing the housing crisis in Archuleta County.
You can download the report, here.
Many of the suggestions, though not all, will require the participation of local governments. And we’ve already seen signs that our governments are open to helping — with recent donations made to the Archuleta County Housing Authority and to PHP.
But donations of a few thousand dollars, here and there, will not solve this crisis. Even donations of vacant public land cannot solve the crisis. The solution — if one can be found — will require the people of Archuleta County to change their hearts.
The solution will require us to care about our neighbors.
Fifty years ago, I was a teenager growing up in a racially divided city: Oakland, California. The older homes in West Oakland were gradually decaying into slums, and were typically occupied by poor black families, while the neighborhoods in the East Oakland hills remained almost completely white, and wealthy. My family lived on MacArthur Blvd, midway between these two very different socio-economic landscapes, in a neighborhood that was becoming gradually more Asian in composition.
For whatever reasons, we saw no rioting in Oakland when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, such as took place in other major cities around the US, including Washington DC, Chicago and Baltimore.
Much of Dr. King’s life was spent fighting racial segregation — fighting for equal treatment for all people, regardless of their skin color. In the South, that fight focused on the right to sit at a restaurant counter and receive service… the right to sit in the front of the bus… the right to attend a neighborhood school or a state university.
In 1965, Dr. King and his family moved to Chicago to address the racial discrimination in that city’s housing market. This was a time when Dr. King’s understanding of Christian love was undergoing a transformation. His speeches and sermons became less focused on racial distinctions and racial inequality, and more focused on the problem of poverty, in general.
Poverty, affecting people of every ethnicity. Poverty, pervasive in a nation of great wealth.
From Dr. King’s 1967 speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a few months before his assassination:
Through violence, you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.
And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. And I have seen too much hate…
I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality…
I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about ‘Where do we go from here,’ that we honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society.
There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth… We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised…
One night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying…” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop cheating…” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery…” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor…”
He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic — that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.”
He said, in other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.”
A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will [objectify people] — make them things. Therefore, that nation will exploit them — and poor people generally — economically. And a nation that will exploit economically, will have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military to protect them.
All of these problems are tied together.
What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!”
If we were to be born again, how would we approach a housing crisis in our Pagosa Springs community?
How would our hearts be changed?