“There’s no time for us
There’s no place for us
What is this thing that builds our dreams
Yet tips ’em ‘way from us…” Queen

 1 And Jesus passing by, saw a man, who was blind from his birth:  2 And his disciples asked him: Rabbi, who hath sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?  3 Jesus answered: Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. – John 9: 1-3

We can fix the homeless problem in America. We created it after all. That gives us the power to solve it. How did we create this problem?

I cannot go back to the roots of the problem, but I can illustrate how we continue creating new homeless people every day.

1. We see and use housing as an investment. We have decided that housing itself is a way to make money.
2. We won’t allow shared housing. We create zoning laws that limit various forms of housing in order to dissuade poor people from living in certain areas. We limit rentals to single families. We have entire neighborhoods rise up in protest of any changes to zoning to allow low-income housing or multifamily dwellings, like apartments, in their area.
3. We refuse to rent housing to various groups of people. Even when they come to us with money we still deem them unworthy. They might have bad credit. They might have a criminal record. They might not have enough money for all the deposits we’d like to have. They might be from a social group we personally dislike. They might be the wrong race. They might be the wrong gender. They might be the wrong religion. They might even make their money in a way in which we don’t approve.
4. Confusing and conflating the housing issue with the separate issues that can lead to homelessness. If the problem is homelessness, then we need to solve housing, we’re not going to do that by addressing mental health. We could very likely, by following that path, end up with mentally stable people that still live on the streets and need more care due to their continued living on the streets.
5. When the homeless do find steady shelter we remove it, sending them back to the beginning of their struggle to get housed. An example of this is, recently in the city where I live, motels where the homeless are living because they cannot find a rental are being closed because they are a public nuisance with criminal activity. We tear down their tents. We throw away their food. We throw away their papers and personal items. We consistently keep them moving and unable to improve their lives.

What does this have to do with abundance?

Our housing, our neighborhoods, and our wealth are all abundance. We have created a problem with hoarding our abundance. At the same time, we complain about the problem and create criminals out of the poor who have done nothing but exist. We will spend money to put them in jail. We will spend money to make benches that won’t allow rest. We will spend money to make laws that they’re not to be fed. We will spend money to make laws that they’re not allowed to sleep next to a street. But we will not spend a dime to solve homelessness by changing the rules that created the problem in the first place. We have abundance to share but our generosity is missing. If we withhold our abundance from people who need it, what good is our abundance?

We have made our problems. We can change things and fix them. The current way is as if we expect a blind person to make themselves see. Even Jesus didn’t expect that. Jesus understood that it was his job, and now our job, to do right by our neighbor.