The following is a transcript of Episode 156 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer and we’re recording on Friday, September 22nd, 2023. 

I gave a sermon a few years ago at my synagogue on Sukkot, which is the Jewish holiday coming up this week. I’ve actually done this a few times at my synagogue at this time of the year because the rabbis are worn out and it’s a good time for us laypeople to volunteer our skills leading the services one way or another. I went back this week and reread it, and to be honest, I was a little embarrassed about what I had said. I’ll tell you why, but first I’ll tell you what I said. 

I spoke about one of the evergreen themes invited by the architecture and symbolism of the amazing holiday of Sukkot, the theme of housing insecurity and vulnerability, a theme that’s not just implied but specifically articulated by the Torah as part of the holiday’s origins. You can see this in Leviticus 23: 42, in the commandment that we dwell in these temporary booths in memory of the time that God made us booths to dwell in during the exodus from Egypt. 

That story means to evoke our wanderings, our homelessness for those 40 itinerant years in the desert, and then in turn it tells us about God’s benevolence. And the whole thing suggests that when we move out of our homes for a week, we’re trying to channel that original formative feeling of in-betweenness, of liminality.

There are more layers of housing insecurity in the Sukkot story, more metaphors to be drawn on as we celebrate the week. Our Sukkot, according to some traditions, are meant to evoke the temple in Jerusalem. For instance, we say a prayer on Sukkot that God raise up the fallen Sukkah of King David, that God would restore Jewish sovereignty through the Davidic line and rebuild God’s broken house. Our Sukkot, then, are like mini temples and tabernacles, and they implicitly force us to reckon with what must be God’s homelessness since the destruction of the temple. We built God a temple and now, due to our iniquities, it is destroyed. What must that feel like for God? 

Perhaps there’s even a bigger political message of Jewish homelessness that courses throughout Sukkot, which is about the existential Jewish condition of homelessness that has characterized our thousands of years of exile, dispersion, and diaspora. The rabbis in the Talmud cite the Sukkah as the one example of a ritual that symbolized Jewish adherence to the commandments, separating us from other nations, and then thus becomes a marker of our political redemption. Sitting outside in the Sukkah then doesn’t just merely commemorate one-time Jewish homelessness, it’s a means og signifying a kind of permanent state of affairs, a political consciousness rendered into ritual. 

As Torah goes, I think all of this is good stuff. I think they’re good readings of the tradition. I also had some material from the Book of Jonah, which I didn’t mention here, where a sukkah plays an important background role at a key moment in the story. I think these are good ways to understand the symbolism of the holiday. But the piece about all of this, what I found myself kind of cringing about rereading the sermon, is this metaphor and message of housing insecurity and homelessness, and whether the attempt to connect the dots between our rituals and that kind of contemporary social, political, and moral challenge, does it actually help us to become better attuned to the real challenges of homelessness, or does it actually have the corrosive effect of dulling our sensitivities?

The truth is, I can talk about the sukkah as a metaphor for housing insecurity, but my sukkah, when I build one, actually reinforces my own housing security. I own the property on which my sukkah is built. I sit out there for leisure, and I return inside for convenience. I don’t think that my having to eat my brisket outdoors in the brisk and breezy fall in the Northeastern United States constitutes much of an inconvenience at all, much less an approximation by any stretch of the imagination of what it must actually feel like to be housing insecure. 

You see, embedded in the work of trying to take Torah and apply it to our lives and to our politics is a deep risk of banality. We wanna take our traditions and make them relevant to the world around us, and we also want, I think many of us, that a life of Torah awakens us to our moral responsibilities, but sometimes I fear that it actually does the opposite. You think that by offering such readings you’re raising your moral consciousness about something, but it winds up actually reassuring you that you’re a person who cares about those things, but I don’t know that it actually moves you to understand it really or to do something about it. You might conclude that the end game of understanding and relating to housing insecurity is sitting in the sukkah, with your china and fine wines, until it starts raining or until dinner is over, and then moving back inside. You think that you’ve achieved empathy with the vulnerable by pretending to have experienced a little bit of it. 

It makes Torah the equivalent of slacktivism, sitting on the couch, hate reading about Congressional gridlock on Twitter, and thinking that you spent those few hours doing politics. At its best, when Torah is applied to social problems, but doesn’t actually compel us to act upon them, it’s a kind of sophistry at its worst. It’s actual idolatry. We’ve attached our holy language, the language of our holy commitments to our own human failings. 

Anyway, I know all of that sounds kind of bleak, so let me be clear. I do wanna talk today, prompted by Sukkot, about housing insecurity and homelessness as a real set of problems and as a real Jewish priority, because I think that it is related. I think that’s the theme of the holiday. And I do want Torah to be the language, the discourse, the discourse through which we speak about our social and political problems. 

I just want to try to figure out how to do so responsibly so that the Torah makes us look rather than look away, that the Torah helps us act in the world that needs our fixing rather than just by making us feel good about what we ostensibly believe in. So to do this, I’m speaking to a real leader on the forefront of Jewish thinking and writing and speaking and acting about housing insecurity and homelessness, Dr. Hannah Lebovits is an assistant professor of public affairs and planning at University of Texas Arlington. She writes extensively for the Forward as well as on social media. And Hannah, thank you for being with us. Mazel Tov, you recently had a baby. Thanks for being with us this week. And maybe I could start by asking you to kind of, and this is kind of a big question, but can you give us a kind of state of affairs of homelessness and housing insecurity in this country, acknowledging it’s a huge country, there’s wide variations and diversities, but what is the extent of the challenge that we as Americans face around homelessness and housing insecurity, and what are the key factors at work that are creating this problem?

Hannah: Sure, so in one word I would say bleak. It’s really much worse than I think people realize. You mentioned that there’s obviously strong variation across the country. It’s a big country. But the reality is the variation actually is not as strong as I think people believe. The overwhelming media attention to specific locations such as New York and LA give a very strong sense that homelessness exists in certain parts of the country. While in reality, the data reveals that homelessness exists everywhere. You can almost see it as a percentage of a standard population. It’s about below 1% of the standard population. So you’ll find in places that have lower population density, a lower density of homelessness. 

But more importantly than the variation in numbers is the variation in modes of homelessness and housing insecurity. So homelessness and housing insecurity look different in LA than they do in let’s say Dallas or Minneapolis or Cleveland, but it still exists as a major metropolitan issue everywhere. At the core of that issue is the fact that we don’t have enough housing. And when I say we don’t have enough housing, I don’t just mean we don’t have, again, a number of units, but we don’t have that variation in housing that’s necessary to meet the variation in needs. 

For decades in the U.S., we were really focused on producing more housing and producing, again, a variation in housing. So that meant really poor, cheap, low-amenity housing, all the way up to large McMansions and, you know, single-family homes. Today, we’re not building enough of that variation, and it doesn’t match the needs of most vulnerable communities, people who are asset-limited, income-constrained, on the verge of unemployment and employment in certain sectors where things are moving rapidly. 

We also don’t have enough housing that meets the needs of our disabled population. So all of these vulnerable individuals, the second that we cut off that variation in housing, that supply of housing, they end up on the streets. The trajectory from being housed to being unhoused is actually much more quick than I think people realize. Folks might couch surf for a little bit, but they’re heading to the streets pretty shortly after that. So we have this rapid influx of people coming to the streets, not enough housing for folks, a lot of variation in what that looks like, and unfortunately, a huge media storm and politically charged environment seeking to reframe this as inherently tied to personal responsibility or the political leanings of a state or a city. 

So I think it’s incredibly bleak, not just in how many people experience homelessness on a given night, which in the US is about three million, but it’s also incredibly bleak in terms of our lack of understanding of the phenomenon and how it actually exists for people and who actually is represented in the homeless population.

Yehuda: Great, so I want to ask you a couple of, what may feel like basic questions to you, but they’re for the purpose of my own understanding and fleshing out the issue. When you talk about the lack of sufficient housing and especially variation in housing, I would imagine that part of the reason that there’s limited growth in terms of new housing developments that are designed for lower income people is, is it basically just capitalism? 

Like I would imagine that if people want to build, there’s plenty of houses available for people who are wealthy because people can buy the land, build the house, etc. And there’s probably just not enough lower income housing stock because there’s very little financial incentives for developers and therefore it has to be a government responsibility. Is that essentially what we’re talking about?

Hannah: So yeah, I actually would argue that it’s more complex than that. Because in fact, low-income housing can actually be incredibly profitable, particularly predatory low-income housing. And for decades, predatory low-income housing was very common in the US, and still is, of course. But most people who are at lower income levels are in private housing markets. They’re not in a public housing market because we don’t have enough public housing. So there is still a tremendous market for predatory low-income housing.

The complicated factors when it comes to housing supply actually are both private and public. There is public regulatory constraint of housing, which is to say our governmental systems create regulations which make it very difficult to build a lot of housing in most places in the U.S. And when I say most places, I mean if you were to look at all developed areas in terms of acreage across the United States, a larger percentage of that acreage is harder to build on than easier to build on, because of zoning, planning and development regulations that make it very difficult to build period and then to build densely as well. And certainly to build with variation that meets the needs of many individuals. 

So building in a way that meets the needs of people who, for example, have disability means often building with low density, right? Not building several floors up because people can’t get up to those floors. So there are a lot of different needs that folks have that we’re not filling.

I wouldn’t say that it sort of comes down to a capitalism, land use, maximization, profit perspective. I think it really comes down to a lot of factors that meet each other in places that become too complex for individuals to manage. 

Which is to say, there’s developers are part of this story, right? There are real estate agents that are part of this story. There are planning and zoning committees that are part of this story, which by the way are not elected officials, right? Planning and zoning committees are appointed officials. So that’s hard to do those people actually represent the interests of the community. There are a lot of different systems meeting each other. And unfortunately, all of the weight falls on the vulnerable individual to manage those systems and to essentially have to move out to wherever they can possibly afford to find housing or to simply just say, well, I’m going to pitch a tent right here on this sidewalk and that’s it, I’m not going any further than that.

So, yeah, the answer is I wouldn’t say that it comes down to simple, wealthy people can get housing, poor people can’t. I think that we’re really meeting an intersection of several different factors. And among those also is gentrification and the ability of developers to buy massive amounts of debt and essentially recreate neighborhoods for a more expensive clientele. That’s a big part of it too.

There are a lot of different financial, banking, public, private systems happening here, and I would say that they all are working against vulnerable individuals.

Yehuda: Great. So can you help us understand when you talk about three million people every night across this country, can you help us map out who those three million people are? You said, you know, there’s a there’s a faster trajectory from being housed to being unhoused. I kind of want to understand what the what are the subpopulations, assuming that there’s some, I would say a vast majority of that population that basically just want to be housed and have, for a whole variety of reasons, fallen through the safety net or never had one, and then perhaps some small percentage of the population that is willingly living between places. But maybe help us map out what are the circumstances that move people through the system from being housed to being unhoused.

Hannah: Yeah, so that three million number, just to be clear, is an estimation that, that most of us advocates use between two and a half and three million, because the official counts of the homeless population are significant undercounts. 

Yehuda: Wait, why?

Hannah: And so instead we often, oh, so this is a great one. Okay, most people don’t know this, but the way that we get a quote number of people who are experiencing homelessness is by sending out volunteers. So HUD is the Department of Housing and Urban Development is the federal agency that oversees all homelessness initiatives. HUD has what we call local subsidiaries. So in every major county, region, and then what we call the balance of the state, so that’s the rest of the rural state, there are these subsidiaries of HUD called Continuum of Care Agencies, COCs. The COCs are tasked by HUD with doing a count every year of their homeless populations. 

And what that involves is getting volunteers, so they have to somehow recruit volunteers, creating a grid of the area, and sending out volunteers to essentially count whatever they see as they drive around or walk around on one of the coldest nights in January. So it’s a very poor way to count a population that is inherently transitory and inherently a population that many people don’t feel comfortable interacting with. So you can get these volunteers, I mean, they self-report oftentimes that they haven’t done a full count, or that they saw a tent and just assumed there was only one person in there, or that they went to a shelter and asked how many beds do you have instead of how many people are there. So things like that. It’s a significant undercount every year. 

Certainly over the last couple of years because of COVID, it’s been even worse, the gap between what the actual count is and what the undercount is. Advocates like to use something different. We use what’s called the HMIS system, which is the homeless management system. So the COCs, whenever they have an intake, they put that individual into the HMIS system, and that’s any individual that has sought out homelessness services. They might not be currently living in a shelter, you might not see them in a tent, they might be living in a friend’s house, they might be living in their car. So the HMIS system gives us a better understanding of how many people are actually in need of these services, and that’s closer to that two and a half to three million number. 

And who is in that population is a great question because it’s, like I said, huge variation. You do certainly have individuals that look like what we might imagine a homeless individual looks like, older, males, often with disabilities, often appearing to have some sort of drug or alcohol use issue, which I’ll get into in a minute, and typically have a varied work history, which is to say, they maybe finished high school, didn’t really go to college. Most of their work has been menial labor, one-off jobs, don’t really have social security benefits. Many of them have ties to family, but not strong ties to communal wealth or resources. So these kind of typical lone folks that we might see on the street, panhandlers, we might assume that about many of them. There is that population in the homeless population. 

However, that’s actually a significant subpopulation. Most folks who are experiencing homelessness have actually had more stability in their life previously. They typically end up experiencing homelessness because of a significant loss. So a significant interpersonal loss, a parent passed away, a loved one passed away, a child passed away, they fell into a depression, they stopped going to their job, they stopped having money to pay rent, etc., etc., etc., a significant eviction that’s made it difficult for them to find housing again. So that might be an eviction where there was also a damage to the property or something like that. 

A significant job loss. So they’ve lost their job and it’s very difficult for them to get retraining for a new industry or to seek out the additional services. So a significant loss occurs and then that significant loss triggers other things like depression or anxiety or drug use or alcohol use or general instability, and the lack of a network, and I don’t just mean like a social group but I mean the ability to access resources through a network, prevents these individuals from getting back to where they were. 

Sometimes that’s personal pride. I’ve had interviews with many people who experience homelessness who have told me my family doesn’t even know what I’m going through. I haven’t told anyone. So some of it is their own desire not to tell people what’s going, some of it is kind of actually the opposite, where they sort of run through all of their support services and support systems and they feel they don’t have any more. Some of it is what we call administrative burdens. So people do reach out and ask for help but can’t access that help. It becomes too burdensome to get through all the systems. So that’s the most common thing that we see. 

Particularly in the U.S. today and also particularly in red states, we see a growing youth LGBTQ homelessness crisis. So certainly in blue states as well, but there have been more resources accessible for those folks. In red states there are fewer resources. We see a lot more people quasi-voluntarily leaving their homes, which is to say no one’s physically kicked them out, but the home environment is too hostile for them. We see a lot of folks who are being told that they’re forced to go to access a service that doesn’t align with their gender identity, or people who are told to access services through religious groups that won’t their sexuality or their gender identity. So that’s a growing issue. 

We also have obviously racial and ethnic minorities overrepresented in the homeless population because they also experience an over-representation of job loss and eviction, as well as actual health disparities too, and certainly an over-representation of people with disabilities who cannot access housing, cannot access resources, and included with that is obviously physical and what we call mental disabilities too.

There is a lot of talk about a subpopulation of people who experience homelessness also being drug addicts or people who, I like to say, people who struggle and suffer with substance abuse. And that’s actually a really interesting question because we don’t really have enough data to say that there’s a line between drug use and homelessness. Particularly today, for whatever reasons, the attempts to get people not to access drugs have been widely unsuccessful. And we have many, many people who are highly successful individuals who are regular drug users, right? So the drug usage across the board, it’s not clear that because of drug usage across the board, it’s not clear that that’s actually a pipeline or a direct cause. However, the conditions in which people who experience homelessness often live really does create a need for self-soothing and self-medicating, which many people do through alcohol and substance use.

So that’s something I always like to talk about because I think people know that very well. You know a lot of homeless people are drug addicts. I hear that a lot. Or I don’t want to give anyone a dollar because they’re going to go use it for drugs which, just as an aside, your dollar is not getting anyone any drugs. Feel free to give someone a dollar. It’s okay.

Yehuda: But also, it’s also a direct violation of the rules of tzedakah, but that’s for another time.

Hannah: Yes, oh, absolutely. And we can get into that. But I mean, like your dollar is not going far on the drug market, ma’am. But yeah, I mean, I think that it’s important to just put that out there. But mostly it’s folks who were already in more vulnerable situations and then a big loss comes and they just cannot get back to where they were.

Yehuda: Great, so I want to talk a little bit about the world of interventions, responses, reactions, in other words, how does policy engage these questions? And I guess I want to get at it through two questions. One is about the particular strategies that are being talked about and deployed by folks who are studying these problems and trying to work on that. And then second, I want to get into motivations. 

And let me start with the actual proposed solutions. It would seem to a novice like me encountering what you’ve said over the last 20 minutes in terms of understanding this issue that I would imagine that the kinds of responses that are available might fall into three buckets. One is providing support and services tailored towards individuals that help them deal with whatever they’re dealing with, medical bill, a problem, family reality, challenges with respect to their place in society, et cetera, which would feel like a kind of in the realm of personal responsibility. 

A second set of solutions would be build more volume in terms of housing supply, right? Focus less on individuals and more on housing as a system. And the third are in much larger, unwieldier, how do we change the culture of how we talk about homelessness? How do we change the larger questions about structural racism, for instance? 

You alluded to this, but I think one of the statistics you’ve cited in one of your written pieces is that where you live in Dallas, Fort Worth, 43% of the homeless population is Black, even though only 19% of all residents are Black, which suggests that it’s an intersectional issue overlaps with structural racism. So is that a fair map of the kinds of responses, focusing on individuals, focusing on housing, or focusing on structural systemic change? And does that map itself out according to political lines?

Hannah: Yeah, I think that we typically say micro, meso, and macro, right? That’s what you’re discussing. That’s what you’re describing here. We need micro solutions at the individual level. We need organization and institution level issues, so, you know, taking these different systems of housing and getting them to speak to each other and to support that supply issue. And then we certainly need that macro level shift in narrative, in structural systems, in better understanding who these people are, what their needs are, and combating them straight, you know, from the onset. 

I would say that there’s also another access here, which is preventative versus responsive. And unfortunately, we don’t have enough preventative systems where we aren’t helping folks while they’re in those early stages of struggle. We’re trying to capture them much later on. And one of the subpopulations within the homeless population certainly is survivors of domestic violence. And when you mention people who might be homeless by choice or people who might be sort of choosing to keep themselves from being stably housed, that is actually one group that does not feel safe being stably housed very often because abusers can come and find them. 

And there are systems around housing that could be more preventative, such as making sure that these folks are off the streets, that violent individuals are kept away from people who they’ve preyed on, that survivors are protected. And so to me, that’s preventative before allowing someone to get to the streets saying, we’re going to help keep you protected.

One of the things that I do is I do oral histories with individuals who’ve experienced homelessness and we go all the way back to the beginning of their lives. And you can see throughout their early childhood there were signs that they were struggling. There were clear and obvious indicators that these were going to be individuals who would later on struggle with their economic condition, their housing condition, their social condition. And identifying those early on, you know, not just seeing a child who needs to get through school, but a child who needs to be successful throughout their life. 

So I certainly think we are putting a lot of weight at the micro, meso, and macro level on these responsive systems and not putting nearly enough weight on the preventative side. 

Certainly when it comes to healthcare, that’s another one too. People who end up with disabilities later in life because of, because the healthcare systems were not accessible, there’s a preventative need too. But I also think that there is a need to think of housing not as a market, which is how we often talk about it, but as a public good. And you know something like vaccines, right? We’ve put a lot of work into getting vaccines out there, into educating people about the use of vaccines. Certainly this was why COVID was such a difficult conversation when it came to vaccines, because it actually didn’t necessarily follow the same protocol of many of our other public good perspectives on vaccines. And I think we can do that with housing, we can see housing as a public good, not necessarily in the sense that the government has to provide it, right? Vaccines are often provided by private providers, but in the sense that we need to see these as significant to our public health and to our communal health. 

Any one individual who’s experiencing homelessness in your neighborhood should be seen as someone who is your actual neighbor and needs actual help and that you and your neighborbood as a whole are better off helping that person get housed. The same way you and your neighborhood are better off as a whole helping someone to get a vaccine or making sure that people are taken care of and not hacking away on everyone they see on the bus, right? So seeing everyone as a part of our collective is significant. That’s where I would say perhaps the capitalistic mindset of, well, I got mine and I have whatever I need, so I’m fine, is problematic. And certainly, like we mentioned, not in line with Torah and Halakha at all.

Yehuda: So let me get to now flip to, you’ve moved us a little bit to kind of motivations and then I do want to talk a little bit about the particular questions as relates to the Jewish community, but It seems to me that there are then four or so drivers or motivators for why this is a critical issue to tackle and to address. 

One which you’ve talked about is a kind of utilitarian argument. It’s in the public interest. It’s a public good. A second that emerges in your writings is about fairness. And it shows up especially when you’ve sued the city, I believe, of Dallas, together with this Texas Civil Rights Project about the rights that belong to people who are experiencing homelessness, which is a fairness argument. It’s less of a public good argument, it’s a fairness that the Bill of Rights applies to them as well, which includes the right to take up public space and to not be driven even off the street. 

There’s a third kind of motivator, which is around empathy, which feels different than a fairness argument and a utilitarian argument of just, we are human beings in relationship to other human beings. And there’s a fourth that shows up a little bit in some of your writings about particular responsibilities that we as Jews bear. So is that right? I mean, is that like the map of concerns and considerations?

Hannah: So have you, did you just like secretly take my ethics in public service class? Because.

Yehuda: I didn’t, but I think I discerned it from your first half an hour here. Thank you.

Hannah: Yeah, you did, you’ve done well. I do think that housing and homelessness from a perspective, again, from a collectivist perspective, do fall into these kind of four categories that we typically use when we talk about ethical obligations. And like you said, the first is a utilitarian, right? We have an ethical obligation towards utilitarianism. We have an ethical obligation towards justice. That’s the second one. We have an ethical obligation towards caring and taking care of individuals who are not otherwise serviced by the market. And we also have an ethical obligation to cultural competency. We have an ethical obligation to understand that different groups have to see different issues differently and that it is our job to tap into what those groups see in order to advocate better for them and service their needs. 

So I would say that last one when it comes to the Jewish community, I typically frame it as what I call cultural competency because I think that in the Jewish community we do have a unique perspective on shelter. We have a unique perspective on wellness and what it means, you know, what it means for the individual to be well by being a giver, right? I don’t give tzedakah because I’m helping someone else. I give tzedakah because I need it for myself. I am not a well person if I don’t give tzedakah. 

We have a unique perspective on what it means to communally provide needs and where that line is between, you know, sarhe tzibor and making money off of it, right? And I think that that’s one of the biggest ones that I am often concerned about. If the men’s mikvah started to charge $40 every single time someone used it, people would be taken aback and they would say, you know, this is crazy, we can’t charge $40, who’s making money off of the men’s mikvah? This is a communal need, we need a mikvah. 

Women’s mikvahs are different, they have to be maintained at a certain level so that amount of money would vary. But if suddenly everyone had to pay $40, $50, every man, to go to the mikvah, everyone would be up in arms saying, where’s this money going? But when it’s housing, when it’s food, when it’s these other things, and people make a lot of money off of this, we don’t see that as wild or crazy or healthcare. We just say, oh well, of course people should be able to make money off of providing health care. Of course people should be able to make money off of providing housing. You know, they took out a mortgage on the home that they are now landlords for, so of course they should be able to charge whatever they want in rent and make a profit off of that. 

And I’m not so certain that’s true. I’m not certain that that’s aligned with Torah values, and certainly not when those margins become so wide that you’re talking about people who are, you know, for lack of a better word, slumlords, making millions of dollars, not taking care of the homes that they’re responsible for not providing adequate living conditions just so that they can make their money, send their children to prestigious mice dice, and have the tzedakah that they give in the community. I’m not really sure that’s aligned with Jewish values and Torah.

Yehuda: Yeah. So, can I just riff on that for a second? 

Hannah: Yeah, go ahead.

Yehuda: Just to play a little bit about what might be happening around Jewish and larger cultural expectations about charity and philanthropy, about issues like this, I kind of wonder whether what’s happened in our community and beyond is that Jewish expectations about responsibility to the public good and to the social good are getting altered by income inequality, which is doing a bunch of things, one of which is it is placing a much greater burden on the major philanthropic stuff that is necessary for the public good on the ultra-wealthy. 

And what that does is it divests a sense of responsibility of all of the collective stakeholders from kind of doing our part for the public good. Because if I perceive that like, sure, I could help, but I know that one or two donors down the street are the people holding up the key institutions in my community. Well, that’s their responsibility to do it. Like in the sum total of dollars that may be going towards communal needs and communal issues maybe hasn’t changed all that much, but income inequality has skewed also philanthropic inequality and that winds up shifting a kind of culture of empathy by the rest of the stakeholders in that community. Do you think that’s out of left field and weird?

Hannah: So I would add, no, I don’t think that that’s incorrect, but I would add another layer to that, which is not just major philanthropists, but nonprofits. And this idea of institutional giving as opposed to individual giving. Which, I mean, I’ve certainly, I have a history of working for some of these nonprofits, so I’ve seen them from the inside as well. This shift in a mindset from it’s meaningful for you to give money directly from your hand to someone else’s hand. You need to see somebody and say this is for you. And that’s important to look at someone and to say this is for you, that that actually is not the ideal way to give, but rather to give to an institution or to give or to, like you said, rely on a major philanthropist, that’s shifted things significantly because not only are we now obviously paying for a massive amount of overhead for these nonprofits, but we also have lost that individual, personal connection to people who are in need. 

I used to live in Cleveland, and in Cleveland there was a major philanthropist there who passed away several years ago, who really did support a lot of the community and every time there was a new initiative everyone would say, go talk to him or a new idea of an initiative, and I actually was very vocally against that. I was vocally against many of the things that he did as well because of exactly what you’re saying. That lack of diversity and funding means that more people do not feel that they’re a part of that at all and they lack that empathy and they lack that ability to know there is actually a person on the other side who needs help. 

And instead it becomes, well, this big veer, this major philanthropist is going to take care of everything and it wouldn’t even be efficient for us to give our $18. It’s silly. That’s what people start to see and that’s how people start to think. I will say though that the world of crowdfunding has tried to kind of actually push up against this. I’ve seen more and more in the Jewish crowdfunding initiatives, there is an emphasis on how many donors, not just how much money. And this idea that, you know, we’re doing this as a community because 1,000 people donated to this, as opposed to two people who each, you know, donated tens of thousands of dollars. 

So I think that and that’s why I think the world of crowd-sourcing, crowdfunding has been so embraced in a lot of institutions. It’s also become a way to get individuals to commit to certain amounts of money, and to raise those and to reach out to their families and all of that. So I think that crowdfunding has shifted some of that and looking to groups to help support initiatives has changed that. But then you still have the influencers who are still that medium, right, to get folks involved in the crowdfunding.

Yehuda: Well, it seems to be even more, from a crowdfunding, crowdsourcing piece, financially it may wind up being more work for less money, but what it gets at, what you were talking about earlier, is almost like the virtue ethics of giving and caring, which is whether or not your $18 makes a difference, something has transformed in you. You become a different person by virtue of the fact that you are on the side of giving, which I would suspect has a long tail also then into a person’s recognition of social problems, who they vote for, their attitudes towards the world are quite different once your giving connects you to the problems that you see and you see yourself as, as capable of being part of solutions as opposed to outsourcing it to someone else’s problem.

Hannah: So I would say that one is, it doesn’t shake out consistently all the time. And this is actually some of the research that I’ve done on kind of what we what we might call narrative gatekeepers. So there are a lot of people who try to own narratives of vulnerability and try to talk about what it means to be food insecure, housing insecure, all of that. And some of those narrative gatekeepers are people who say, look, I’m close to this issue. You don’t understand how major the issue is and how significant it is and how much we need to give and understand and be empathetic. 

And some people provide the opposite perspective. I was there, I was homeless. I had to pull myself up by my own bootstraps. No one helped me. Why are we helping these people in this way? 

So there’s a lot of gatekeeping that happens when people get really close to an issue and it can shake out in both ways. Certainly we’ve seen in the homelessness space, many individuals who have close ties to homeless folks using their close ties as a way to pathologize homelessness and as a way to say, my uncle was this and that and he was never able to work a day in his life and blah blah. So it doesn’t necessarily create that empathy. I definitely agree that it does create that virtue and that sense of like we need to do things for ourselves. We need to be kind for ourselves, not just for what we’re giving to other folks.

I think that we’re living today in a time of such immense vulnerability for most people. Most people realize that there’s no safety net. Most people realize that many of the things that past generations took for granted, for example, being able to just have a high school diploma and one working parent for a family of five and still be able to have a home and a retirement is not the way we’re going to live. It’s not the way we live today and it’s certainly not the way we’re going to live in 30, 40, 50 years.

And I think that that vulnerability creates a, you know, again, this is perhaps where capitalism comes in, it creates sort of a dog eat dog mentality. Either I’m going to be eaten or I’m going to eat someone else. So it’s not, we’re not living in ideal conditions for empathy. We’re not living in ideal conditions for a sense of understanding. And it would be nice if Torah provided that. And if people looked to the Torah and said, regardless of how we’re living today, these are still our ideals. But unfortunately, I just don’t think that that’s happening. And I don’t think that that’s specific to any part of the Jewish community, Jewish, you know, in terms of even, you know, how religious people are. I think we’re seeing it across the board.

Yehuda: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it seems to me that there are like, there’s like two obvious drivers for Jews for particular interest in this issue. And by analogy, you know, the organization, HIAS, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, originated, essentially, to take care of Jewish immigrants to America, to accelerate the processes of immigration and absorption. And then in more recent years, basically has shifted their mission statement. And the way they’ll put it is, we once existed to take care of Jews, and now we exist to take care of immigrants because we are Jews. 

And sometimes when I see in your writings when you write about what’s going on in Dallas that as a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, your gratitude for the Bill of Rights, that that’s the HIAS argument because I’m a Jew, I should care about this issue. 

I’m wondering, the other side of it is, we should care about this because there are members of our own community who are housing insecure. So can you give us just a little bit of window into housing insecurity and homelessness in Jewish communities? Does it correlate to the general population? Are there similar trends and patterns in Jewish communities? And I suspect that in many places it’s not as visible because of cultures of shame around housing insecurity.

Hannah: So I would say that it certainly tracks in terms of aging population, people with disabilities. Again, those kind of vulnerable individuals who had previously struggled with economic, social, and housing loss and eviction. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the reason why it’s hidden is because of a culture of shame. That is a component. We do have a very, because we all feel we’re family, there is that strong sense that comes with family, of not wanting family to know when you’re struggling and putting on a brave face. I think that the Jewish community is uniquely set up with many social resources that other communities don’t have. 

So you know most major metro areas have a Jewish Family Service Agency, they have a Jewish Federation which provides funding for various different projects, they have Jewish educational institutions that while providing a private education can often be very kind when it comes to how much they charge for tuition for families that might be in need. 

There are many conditions across the US in metro regions for Jewish populations that make accessing those support networks easier and more preventative, which is to say you will very often find, because these resources exist within a fairly closed network, that if there is a child in school who clearly seems to be struggling or having some sort of disability, the school will recommend reach out to Jewish Family Services, see what you can help them with, and setting kids on a trajectory that will hopefully provide them with the early resources necessary to be more stable in economic housing and social conditions. 

But we also have a culture of providing care in ways that are not standard and are not already in existence through regulatory systems. So for example, again, our crowdsourcing network, of, does anyone happen to have diapers? Does anyone happen to have this? Oh, you know, if you’re giving away things like formula, which is very costly, and under various government programs, sometimes there’s only a certain amount of formula that someone can get a month, and they would otherwise have to pay for, whereas in the crowdsourcing networks of the Jewish community, someone’s giving away formula, someone’s taking formula, right? So clothing, and these are other things that create stress on housing conditions. 

The other thing is housing itself being provided in many ways through informal resources and informal connections. People who take in other folks for various periods of time. I mean, for a period of time I had a girl from a Satmar family in Monroe living at my home because she just needed to get out of her house and she would have been homeless in Monroe if she hadn’t been here in Dallas. So, you know, we do create those strong networks.

I would say that the bigger concern is that there are a lot of people who are struggling and who actually need the resources outside of the Jewish community. And unfortunately, they’re cycled through the Jewish resources over and over and over again and remain vulnerable and remain in unstable conditions for longer periods of time than they would if they were accessing resources outside. So it’s sort of like the other side of the coin, right?

And you’ll see, unfortunately, many conditions ripe for abuse and for manipulation because of the support systems that we have. And I think that that’s the bigger issue, is not just how many people end up vulnerable, and we do have a significant, I mean, it’s similar to the broad population, about 1% of people who remain housing insecure. But unfortunately, sometimes they remain insecure and unstable for longer periods of time, because they’re not accessing the actual resources they need.

Yehuda: So I guess there are two places in particular then where it seems to me that the Jewish community has, I’ll put it nicely, opportunity to change its attitudes with respect to housing and security. One you’ve written about very extensively, which is around rent control debates. You wrote about the ways in which it seems as though because Jews shifted to the landlord class, there’s attitudes in certain segments of the Jewish community that rent control is actually a bad thing, that it drives down income as opposed to the ways that it actually supports the social safety net. 

So one argument that you’ve made is that it’s important for our communities to revisit its orientation towards that kind of policy. The other that I’d love for you to poke in on a little bit is NIMBYism. And I could give you an example just from my, literally my own backyard. This emerged, I live in Riverdale, which is, by the way, the whole Jewish community is there because of white flight. And in Riverdale, there has been, for a number of years now, talk of the building of a homeless shelter basically adjacent to Riverdale and tremendous backlash from the community against it. 

How do you propose the Jewish community in particular, which constitutes a big percentage of Riverdale, take a leadership role in this issue, and what do people have to understand about the presence of a homeless shelter that might counter-balance the kind of fear mongering that’s very common in the NIMBYism conversation.

Hannah: Yeah, so, NIMBYism, it’s a difficult issue to grapple with, because you have to be honest and you have to be vulnerable in order to be able to grapple with NIMBYism. And that honesty is very hard for a lot of people on both sides of this conversation. There are real reasons for a personal, on a personal level for an individual to feel uncomfortable with something they’re not used to coming into a space that they feel is their own. That is valid. It’s valid in any way, right? I mean, when there’s construction that happens on my street. I’m annoyed. I’m bothered. Why are you here? Why are there workers of all on all at all hours of the day blah blah, right? 

So anytime something new comes into your space that’s a very real and legitimate frustration to have and I think that telling people immediately that they’re you know bigots for not wanting something in their space doesn’t it’s not helpful at all and we need to validate that any change does feel significant and difficult. 

However, I think it’s important to go into those conversations again on both sides with an understanding of what these conditions actually look like. For example, homeless shelters, various kinds of institutions to support individuals with disabilities, various kinds of institutions to support individuals with criminal histories, these typically are places that have more security measures than your average neighbor’s home, right? Right like, your neighbor could have child with a disability and there will be more services and more security at this facility than there will with your neighbor, right? 

So understanding that first and foremost these places are built with standards of safety and security. They’re not built with everyone running in and out and around and you know a mess. They’re physically built with standards of safety and security. They’re operationally run with standards of safety and security. So there really isn’t a rational need to fear them being built.

The concern about economic shifts to your property values or things like that when new things come into neighborhoods also don’t play out. We see in the research and the data over and over again that properties are not negatively impacted by increased density, they’re not negatively impacted by increased amenities. And this is certainly true, I mean, all you need to do is look at any inner, what we call inner city neighborhood that 20 years ago, no one went into, and now the rents are, you know, $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom. So we know that that’s certainly not true and that property values are not tied to whether there is, you know, some sort of problem institution in the area. 

But more than that, I think, is seeing individuals who live in your neighborhood as your neighbors, period. In whatever they live in, they are your neighbors, and interacting with them in a neighborly way is important for your own wellness, for your neighborhood’s wellness, for your civic wellness, and recognizing that regardless of who is in your neighborhood, they are your neighbors.That changes, I think, our perspective. When I lived in Cleveland, my backyard, literally my backyard, was up against what’s called the Belfair Jewish Children’s Bureau, Belfair JCB, which is a massive inpatient and outpatient facility for children with a vari

ety of disabilities and other needs. And there were times when we in the neighbhrood needed to be alerted of something that was happening at Belfair. There were times when we needed to alert Belfair about something that was happening in our neighborhood.

But seeing them as a part of our neighborhood was a significant shift away from NIMBYism. And I think that when it comes to this issue in its entirety, housing insecurity, we tend to see only some people as being our neighbors and other people as being the local delinquents. And that’s where I think a lot of the problem starts.

Yehuda: That’s a powerful place to stop. So thank you very much to our guest this week, Hannah Lebovits, and thanks to all of you for listening to our show.

Identity Crisis is produced by M Louis Gordon with our executive producer, Maital Friedman, and assistance from Miri Miller, Sarina Shohet, and Talia Harris. This episode was edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC, and our music is provided by Socalled.

Transcripts of our show are now available on our website, typically a week after an episode airs. To find them and to learn more about the Shalom Hartman Institute and give it a visit us online at shalomhartman.org. 

We’re always looking for ideas of what to cover in future episodes. If you have a topic you’d like to hear about or comments about this episode, you can write to us at [email protected]. You can rate and review our show on iTunes to have more people find it, You can subscribe to our show everywhere podcasts are available. We’ll see you next week, chag sameach, and thanks for listening.