Today when the morning sunlight hit our community just right, I went to the top of a hill across the arroyo to get a photograph for our condominium association’s WEB site; and I came away thinking about the great variety of places in the world that people call home. I thought of the rows of Georgian townhouses in Dublin with their painted doors and distinctive door knockers, and how different those houses are from the small, plain, rustic cottages scattered across the green hills and dales of The Republic of Ireland. I thought of the clear dividing line between the Catholic and Protestant sections of Londonderry in Northern Ireland. I remember the Kampong houses in Malaysia and Indonesia and the delicate frame houses on stilts in Thailand... and I thought of the cardboard /clear plastic makeshift shelter on the hillside on the other side of Mission Valley from where I live in the United States of America.

Later in the day I reread one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, “The Death of the Hired Man.” I thought about the line in it that says, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” (http://bartleby.net/118/3.html) When I turned to come up the hill from Friars Road in the middle of the day, two panhandlers with their “homeless” signs stood at the intersection begging for money. Yesterday on the way home from church, Margaret and I saw a hugely pregnant woman begging at another intersection. She sat on a stump and the man with her carried his sign declaring their homelessness. These homeless people seem to be everywhere. What’s going on here? This is America. How can it be that so many don’t have a place to go where someone has to take them in?

The statistics are shocking. On any given night, an estimated 672,000 people in the United States experience homelessness. This means 22 out of every 10,000 people are homeless in America. 42% of those 672,000 are unsheltered (meaning they live on the streets or in other forms of shelter not meant for human habitation), while 58% are living in shelters or transitional housing. When we hear talk about homeless people, we usually think of single, ragged men loitering. But the fact is that the most common makeup of a homeless family is a mother with one or two children.

I am privileged to live in a comfortable home on a hill above the valley near the sea. I don’t know what to do about the people in the world who are homeless. Giving money to people who beg at street corners is not the solution. The very least I can do is to vote in elections for candidates who are committed to solving the problem of homelessness.