Linda Ketcham: People’s Affordable Housing Vision Comments

October 5, 2010 10:11 am

The rest of the round up on our press conference, the vision and the signatures are here. Along with the other great speakers on video. But I wanted people to see these comments from Linda Ketcham, from Madison Urban Ministry, which she graciously passed along to me. Enjoy! Enrage! Engage!

There’s a lot to be said for asking the right questions. Reverend Jim Wallis writes that it doesn’t matter how good the answer is, if it’s the wrong question, it won’t get us where we need to go.” And too often we ask the wrong questions.

The People’s Affordable Housing Vision is the result of individuals from diverse neighborhoods and communities coming together to ask the right questions. And today we’re here to talk about some answers to the growing issue of homelessness and affordable housing in our community.

I have been rereading some of the writings and speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., lately and have been struck by how his words still ring true. Dr. King’s last address as president to the Southern Christian Leadership Council speech was entitled “Where to we go from Here?” It was a speech focused on economics, on poverty, on action. Hear his words from 1967:

“Now we’ve go to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

“John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.”

Not only are we spending billions of dollars on war, we are now spending 35 billion dollars a year to incarcerate over a million individuals, stripping them of their right to vote, passing legislation that makes it difficult for them to find housing and work. The number of children living in poverty in our community is rising, children comprise 1/3 of those who are homeless in our community and the number of individuals without a home in our community is increasing. At the same time the work of the government is held prisoner by politicians more in debt to special interests than to constituents, more concerned with tax cuts for those making over $250,000 a year than to the real threat to economic security faced by individuals and families reaching unemployment benefit cut offs and justifying it by suggesting people who have been laid off are lazy. Now this isn’t political rhetoric, we’re just speaking truth to power and getting righteously indignant about the status quo.

In the conclusion of his speech, Dr. King charged his listeners to go forth with a divine dissatisfaction. He said “let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history and every family is living in a decent sanitary home.”

It’s about asking the right questions.

Are we satisfied with the reality that that on a daily basis men, women and children can find no shelter because we are not adequately addressing poverty and homelessness?

Are we satisfied that we can spend millions of dollars on development projects but not adequately fund our social service safety net, including education, which we know is one of the most effective routes out of poverty?

What would this city, this county, this state and this country look like if we were willing to invest in all of our neighbors at the same level we are willing to invest in development and war?

What would our community look like if we effectively reduced homelessness, expanded mental health and substance abuse services, provided greater support for families and children in need, and focused on creating jobs that offered livable wages, heath insurance and paid sick leave?

Where do we go from here? The People’s Vision offers answers to that question and it is up to each of us to respond to this vision, to ask the questions of elected officials and candidates for office: how do you plan to address the growing pain and suffering in our community?

Now some people will argue that we’re getting political, I think it is that we’re getting personal, we getting righteous and we’re asking those we put in public office and those who represent us on committees and board that they hear what we are saying and to respond in a personal rather than political way.

William Sloane Coffin wrote that Hope criticizes what is, hopelessness rationalizes it. Hope resists, hopelessness adapts. This vision is a statement of hope, and as Studs Turkel once said, hope has never trickled down it has always sprung up, it’s up to us.