St. Vincent de Paul | Louisville

Some things, it seems, don’t change. Or they don’t get adequately addressed.

More than two decades ago, the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission called attention to the “serious” housing problem that exists for countless numbers of people. “The cry of despair of so many men and women, children and elderly people who do not have a roof over their head or who have, as their only shelter, something that could hardly be called even ‘a dwelling’ resounds across the world.”

The commission said, “A fundamental human right is, in reality, being violated.”

Closer to home, the U.S. Catholic bishops — more than three decades ago — mentioned that “a severe housing crisis” existed in the United States. This crisis “touches millions of poor families who live in inhuman conditions, but it also involves many middle-income families whose ability to provide themselves with decent housing is being painfully tested,” the bishops said in a 1975 pastoral statement, “The Right to a Decent Home.”

More recently, the U.S. bishops have underscored that this crisis hasn’t changed. They have reiterated the lack of safe, affordable housing and have called for “a renewed commitment to increase the supply” of affordable housing.

Such a commitment is obviously needed as underscored in the “2010 State of Metropolitan Housing Report” released last week by the Metropolitan Housing Coalition in Louisville. Some of the figures in this report indicate the extent of the housing crisis in the Louisville Metro area.

For example, the report said:

In addition to foreclosures, the Metropolitan Housing Coalition report cited the increasing numbers of “severely cost-burdened households” in the United States. The report noted that the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University found that the number of these households spending more than half of their income on housing increased to 16 percent in 2008.

The housing coalition report offers a number of recommendations to address the problem, including an increase in affordable housing units and more funding for affordable housing developments.

This recommendation demonstrates the importance of affordable housing projects for seniors that Archdiocese of Louisville Catholic Charities, in partnership with other groups, has been involved in developing in Louisville in recent years. In fact, the seventh such project was announced in August with the development of 24 one-bedroom apartments for seniors in the former St. Bartholomew School building on Buechel Bank Road.

On another front, on Nov. 11 the Society of St. Vincent de Paul will officially break ground on a $10.6-million project encompassing an entire city block in the Shelby Park and Smoketown neighborhoods of Louisville that will include the construction of new housing units. Regarding this development, Ed Wnorowski, the society’s executive director, said in a recent article in The Record: “We need not only to provide safe shelter for people, we need to help the people of this community aspire to more. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re starting — with this project — to try to provide a few.”

Such an effort to provide some of the answers is the kind of commitment that’s needed in addressing the basic human right to a safe and decent shelter. As the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission said in its 1988 document on housing: “An adequate response to such a large-scale problem calls for the shaping of a consistent political will, as well as an increased awareness of the collective responsibility of all, and particularly of Christians, for the future of society.”

Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, papal nuncio to the United Nations, put it another way recently in challenging the international community to unite against global poverty: “We have the means to bring an end to poverty. Do we have the will? That is the question.”

The same question can be asked of the long-standing housing problem.