Back Porch study

So to address what I didn’t last time: our house has a spacious back porch that has hosted a variety of hang-outs, BBQs, dance parties, etc. It’s also been the space in which a couple has slept because they do not have their own home. Lily & Rob have been sleeping on the back porch (over the garage, not visible from the street, by our back door) for years now. They don’t do it every night, but since the weather’s been better, they’ve been doing it more frequently – or had been starting a couple months ago until about a week or so ago. They come around 1am and leave before 7am, so sometimes we don’t see them.

My housemates and I have struggled with how to address it. DY has a policy that would discourage us to allow them to stay – just for safety concerns. For a little while, we operated with a “live and let live” attitude…they weren’t hurting anything, and the porch is better than a gutter so…

But our neighbors next door started talking to us about asking the couple to not sleep there. We, in turn, began asking the couple to not sleep there, to not unscrew our outside lights so they could sleep in darkness, and to please check out some local shelters. This had minimal effect on them, as we continued to find them sleeping outside.

We met with the neighbors next door to discuss options. While Lily & Rob may not be doing anything harmful while they sleep on the porch, they also may be giving a green light to other folks to come up on the porch – and try other things. We’ve had some issues with random people using our driveway as a bathroom. This is immensely annoying/disgusting/intrusive to bleach-out urine and/or feces from our driveway. It appears that the couple who sleeps on the porch and the people who convert the driveway to a latrine are unrelated. Even still, we have been grappling with how to hold 2 realities in tension: if Jesus was sleeping on our back porch, would we pursue a Barring Notice (basically criminalizing the situation), or would we seek alternatives? In the neighborhood, whose voice do we honor more? Those with homes over those without?

Thankfully, some of our conversations seem to be breaking through. I don’t think the couple has slept outside for over a week now. Chalk this up to more urban ambivalence, living in tensions created by class, race, gender, and other power-dynamics. Lord give us wisdom.