Sanctuary?

Photo by Ev on Unsplash

It's been cold over the last few nights in Baltimore. So cold that the city has invoked code blue and opened several warming shelters. But those shelters have limited capacity. And the population of the unhoused are notoriously wary of shelters, often with good reason. So, on a night like this, it is highly likely that at least one life was needlessly lost to the cold.

Within a mile of where I sit, there are at least a dozen churches - three or four of them vacant and unoccupied, but all of them with their doors locked tight. In each of these buildings there is a space called a sanctuary, which the Oxford dictionary defines as “a place of refuge or safety.” In a small church, a sanctuary would seat around 50 people, but several of the ones near me seat six to eight hundred. In very rough terms, that’s thirty thousand square feet of space. But these buildings also have meeting rooms and other spaces, so it’s not unrealistic to think that these 12 buildings contain at least seventy-five thousand square feet of open space.

The American Red Cross suggests that emergency shelters should allow sixty square feet per person. Being extremely generous and allowing 100 square feet would suggest that these twelve buildings could offer sanctuary from the cold for seven hundred fifty souls.

There is an amazing database called Open Baltimore that catalogues all sorts of interesting data – one thing they have identified is that there are 549 religious buildings within the boundaries of the city. Using the same metrics I set out above, that would suggest that there is capacity for over thirty-four thousand people to be housed in these spaces.

The Baltimore Mayor’s Office of Homeless Services estimates that there are roughly 1600 individuals experiencing homelessness on any given day. So, if five percent of these 549 buildings would open their doors, then perhaps no one would freeze to death tonight.

So, why is this not the present reality? Having spent a lot of time around congregations, the reasons you hear most often have to do with an inability to properly staff the facility, or concerns about security or liability. And if you boil all of that down, it comes down to money.

Ten years ago, I did some rough math to determine that there was (at that time) about $300M in passive assets (read invested dollars) held in trust in various churches and judicatories in Greater Baltimore. With inflation, that’s probably around $350M now. The Department of Housing and Urban Development suggests that it costs about $100 per day to house someone experiencing homelessness, so the cost for those 1600 souls would be about $160,000. The daily interest on those funds would be over $45,000, so within a week, the interest on that money would cover the cost. Clearly, money is not the problem.

It's possible that the root cause is fear of some sort – fear of the other, or fear of getting involved in the life of another person (which is always messy and complicated). Or perhaps it’s one of the other venal sins that organized religion is prone to manifest. No matter the cause, the effect is quite clear – unnecessary pain and suffering inflicted on a vulnerable population.

My point here is not to place blame, but to show in clear terms that the solution is literally right in front of us.

Sanctuary!