The Eric Metaxas Show - Ben Kay

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Ben Kay on 'Homeland' a New Podcast Highlighting the Rise of Homelessness. https://ourhomeland.us/

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I wop, vanilla. I wopanilla. Here comes Eric Metaxus. Hey, folks. I have the joy right now of speaking to someone named Josiah O'Neill, who has written a book with the awesome title, Defining Truth. Josiah O'Neill, welcome to this program. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me, Eric.

I really appreciate it. Well, you're tough to sum up. The best guests always are. You founded an nonprofit organization called Defining Truth in 2022 after you ran for Congress in California. And you saw the need for an articulable defense of Western civilization and Christian Judaic values in civics. Talk a little bit about what you mean by that because I am tracking with what you say, but it's better if you say it than if I try to say it. Sure, absolutely. And, of course, everyone knows, right, a guy like you, you are tracking that.

So that's awesome to hear. And you've been inspirational, covered your books. They're fantastic. Just want to throw that out there. But I think the issue that drew me into what I'm doing now is that when I ventured into the land of politics and you get a peek behind the curtain, you realize that not everyone out there is engaged. In fact, the opposite. Not engaging in the culture war as they should. And that proliferates into the highest levels of government as well.

dismissed the culture war or relegated it to the left. And we don't engage in it. And that really was the core of the problem that I sort of discovered when I ran for Congress unsuccessfully. Now, before that, I spent 20 years in the government. So I wasn't any stranger to working around government people, mostly on the tactical side. I was in the military. And I was in law enforcement for many years. But the biggest disappointment was the lack of engagement in the culture war from our own people.

and especially the church in America. And that just sort of turned us on to this entirely new focus where we took a step back from politics and said, we got some issues to fix in our own house first. Okay, so Josiah, everything you just said, I mean, we're tracking radically, radically. It has become really sickening to me to see. My new book is called Religinalist Christianity.

And part of it is the nightmare of a church being merely religious, like playing at religion, playing at Christianity, and not doing Christianity. So it's ultimately satanic. You're serving the devil's purposes because you've got all the trappings of the faith, but you don't have the power and the life of Jesus, of the Holy Spirit. Right. And part of what that looks like is a total lack of discipleship. Another you say, oh, well, we just do this privatized, pietistic Christianity.

So it's all about your relationship with Jesus, and it's all about the Bible. of it's not because if you really read the Bible, the Bible leads you beyond the Bible to apply what the Lord commands us to do in the scripture in life. And then how do you do that? Well, you need discipleship. You need pastors and teachers to explain this is what your faith looks like now. This is what we're facing now. We're not living in the Roman Empire. We're living in America. This is how the enemy has stacked the deck against us. And this is how the Lord wants us to live out our faith now. And so something happened where a lot of, I mean, part of what I see is a lot of, you know, it's the standard megachurch seeker model. They were kind of like, we want to put

rear ends in the seats. We want to get everybody, quote, unquote, saved, and all that other stuff will take care of itself. And so they basically have created a church that's, you know, miles wide and a millimeter deep. There is no depth. They don't seem. to understand that if I believe in Jesus, that's going to make me vote against, first of all, it's going to make me vote, and it's going to make me vote against all of this evil stuff. They're not separated. My faith is connected to how I live, including how I live politically, and I do all this different stuff.

So it's a tremendous lack of discipleship. So you hear churches saying, like, well, we just preach the Bible. No, you don't. Because if you preach the Bible, you are discipling your people, you're activating your people. You're sending them out to do God's work out beyond, beyond the building of the church, beyond Sunday morning, and that's not happening. And so you saw that because you ran for Congress in California, where this is just an epidemic. You have tons and tons and tons of Americans, tons of Californians. They say, I'm a Christian, and they don't vote. They don't live their,

I mean, it's unbelievable. So I'm so glad you saw it firsthand, but I'm much more glad. that you're doing something about it. And the book, of course, is defining truth. And I know you deal with it in the book. So keep going. Yeah. So at best, what you're describing, at best, is ignorance. And at worst, it's cowardice.

And that is what we encountered. I mean, you mentioned voter demographics. The area that I ran was enormous. Millions of people that live in that area. And close to or under 3% actually showed up to vote. That's total left and right. So if you break it down by the amount of churches and peoples in pews on Sunday, virtually no one showed up.

And this is repeated across the entire country. And you really hit the nail on the head with discipleship. Because I run into this all the time. People are going to church. They get a feel good message. And they come out and they don't know how to apply that practically in their lives. They're given the milk of the gospel and not the meat. The meat being how to go out and be salt and light.

How to apply this in circumstances outside of your, you know, Christian coffee shop environment. Like I mentioned, I spent years in austere environments in the military and in law enforcement. And it's like, okay, who's disciplining these young men and women to go out and live their faith in the public sector? That could be news media. That could be government service. That could be, you know, wherever it is that the Lord has placed you in life, you have to be able to take a bold stance. And I think what bothered me the most was that the church has now begun to validate the left's narrative. And this is where I said, at best, it's ignorant, at worst, it's cowardice, because we've had this roadmap called the 20th century for a long time.

We've seen the evils and the death and the violence that the 20th century has brought. In my research, I studied the Soviets and what they were doing culturally. One particular person, Alexander Colentai, was the first people's commissar for welfare in the Soviet Union. her entire work was focused on separating children from their parents, right? Sound familiar? I mean, this is nothing new, and they did it with a purpose. So what I try to get people to do when they read the book or when I talk with them, I try to get them to ask themselves, look, the world is hyper-focused on the culture war.

The church is not. And I would like people to ask themselves, why? Why does the left focus so much on getting your children away from you? Why are they obsessed with the transgender movement? There is ultimately a political purpose. It's about power. It's not because Hillary Clinton cares about 14-year-old transgender kids. I doubt it.

There's a political motivation, and so we're trying to get the church to wake up, as you said, and say, how do we practically apply the word of God and live it out in a way that actually is loving people? Because here's the big lie. The church thinks that being passive and weak is the best way to love people. fact it's the exact opposite. That's what Satan wants people to believe. If the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself, there is no better way possibly to do that than to be invested in the lives of your neighbors and in your community in civics. If you don't care about them, by all means, don't show up and vote. You're handing your nation over to the enemy, and we all know what happens with that. Well, there's no doubt about it.

I mean, again, I've become so disgusted with so much of the church. Now, of course, there are heroic pastors. Most of them I know personally at this point. It's unbelievable. But there are so many that are looking the other way. And I want to be real clear, folks, if you're going to a church that is looking the other way, you are guilty. You are guilty. Just as the Germans who went to churches, they were just doing church while the Nazis were taking power,

they could have done something to avert the nightmare of satanic. activity that resulted as the Nazis got power and then used it, they could have averted it, they chose not to. And there are innumerable American Christians right now going to churches that are looking the other way. And they'll even say, oh, my pastor preaches the Bible. No, your pastor does not preach the Bible because if he preached the Bible, he might be a good man, he might think he's preaching the Bible. But if he actually preached the Bible, he would be talking about these things because the Bible talks about talking about these things. It doesn't say just believe it in your head and then go on. You've got to live it out. Josiah O'Neill, just great

to meet you here. Congratulations on the book, Defining Truth. Folks, you can find Josiah at defining truth.org. Definingtruth.org. Josiah, thank you. I like knowing exactly where my meat comes from. And with Moink, that place is from small family farms all across the country. and you can help save the family farm and get access to the highest quality meat when you join the Moink movement today. Moink farmers farm like our grandparents did, and that means meat tastes like it should. Moink delivers grass-fed beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken, a sustainable wild-caught, Alaskan salmon delivered straight to your door.

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With the silver IRA, you can surf this incredible wave of growth. It doesn't matter who sits in the White House or what Wall Street does. solar power is unstoppable and silver is its secret weapon. As the world goes green, your retirement could be going sterling silver. Don't let this opportunity slip through your fingers in 2024. Visit noblegoldinvestments.com. You may get up to 10 free brand new one ounce silver trump coins or a 10 ounce silver American flag bar with every qualifying IRA. That's noblegoldinvestments.com. Welcome back. I'm talking to Josiah O'Neill. That's this real name. Josiah O'Neill, who's written a book called Defining Truth. He has a nonprofit.

You can find him at definingtruth.org. If people do go to defining truth.org, Josiah, what will they find there? Right now, we definitely want to push the book. The book, Defining Truth, self-titled, subtitle is Articulating America's Worldview. And it's meant to be a tool. We want to put this tool into people's hands so that they can engage in civic apologetic of Western. civilization. Of course, it's from a biblical perspective, as is Western civilization. But it's real simple. It's not a huge book. It's 10 chapters. Each chapter is a culture war topic where we give a defense for it from a faith perspective, and then we show the practical applications of obeying God's word and how it played out in American history. So super easy tool. Anyone from, I would say, junior high on up, it's a great gift. Christmas is coming up, but really our goal is to get it

out there and give people something to ping back on if maybe, as we were discussing previously, maybe they're not getting it from their churches. Maybe they're not being disciples appropriately. So this is just another tool for your toolkit to say, hey, if I'm engaged in a conversation, say, about gender, maybe with my neighbors, or maybe about the defense of marriage, you can flip through the chapter, you can get a good historical perspective on what happened during the 20th century when we abandoned those values and what happens when America followed them.

That's the point of the book, defining truth. It's interesting because I was reading in the scriptures this morning in Leviticus, I guess it was 17 and 18. And it talks about, you know, God's commands about all kinds of stuff, like, you know, eating why we shouldn't eat the blood of animals. And all this stuff that your average person, myself included, it's sort of obscure. Why does it say this? Why does God say this? And then when you look at the context, you realize that at the time that God is really telling his people how to live, they are surrounded. And this is what it's hard for us to understand, because we live in the West.

We live in the Christian West, where we've been Christianized for centuries. So even pagans live pretty Christian in many ways. We care for the poor. On and on and on and on. But imagine God in Leviticus, I mean, he's writing to people who, who have been surrounded by people or who have themselves been part of a people that do the most abominable things. I mean, sex between parents and children, drinking blood, child sacrifice, the kind of stuff that you look at and you go, that's demonic. That's really, really demonic.

The reason I bring this up is that God wanted to protect the people of Israel from this demonic stuff, not just because it's like, oh, don't do that. But when you do that, you invite in the demonic. And I realize that in America, we have been over the decades inviting in the demonic. And we have seen more and more transgression. Transgression has been celebrated. Let's be clear. And if you live this way, God will bless you.

If you live this way, he can't bless you. In other words, it's not like he chooses not to. He's created a system where if you open the door to the demon, He gives you over to that. And that's a big part of where we are in America, the sexual transgression, but the transgression on every level, the mockery of God. And I just say this, because when you understand that, you realize the only way forward is to go back to what we used to be as a people, to the moral foundations, the truth that you articulate in part in your book defining truth. We have to understand what those things are. And we have to go back to

that. Otherwise, there really is no going forward. So it's, it's, it's very, very clear that we've opened ourselves up over the decades to this demonic stuff, to the point where it's infiltrated the churches. I mean, you have, you know and I know, there are plenty churches that are looking the other way. Then there are plenty churches that are opening the door a little bit to some of this dark stuff. And then there are churches that are opening the door big time to some of this dark stuff. And that's where we are. Yeah. You really, again, you're on point, which is kind of we drew our namesake when we founded defining truth as a nonprofit was we just saw this great lack of truth, of truth in general in society, because we had allowed our enemies to define

who we were, and that bothered me. The church has allowed that. A large part of Western civilization in Europe and the West out here has allowed that, and it's akin to letting the Nazis tell us about American soldiers during World War II. It's like, why are we even listening to that? And it trickles all the way back to Aristotle and the concept of first principles. as he wrote in the organon. I mean, the idea is that if at the very beginning, your first principle or assertion is off or wrong, then everything that follows is fruit of the poisonous tree.

We understand this in legal terms when I would write indictments or bring cases against organized crime groups in law enforcement, that if a piece of evidence was wrong or ill gotten in the first place, everything else is through to the poisonous tree, meaning it's a waste of time. And so we have a culture where the church

is validating the first principles of the enemy. And it's, it's just, it's insane. I get it from the world, but I don't understand churches. Look, I recently listened to a guest speaker who came and spoke on, uh, sexuality or something. I don't know. It was a very woke discussion. I knew it was going to be weird. So I listened to it anyways. I just wanted, what is this guy going to say? And during the discussion, he kept validating worldly terms for the church. He even alluded to the fact that we might be homophobic for not being more accepting of, you know, just nonsense. And what I really took from that was, why are you validating the definitions that the world, really, let's be clear, it's Satan.

Why are you validating the definitions of life that Satan has given you as the church? If we're not the bastions of truth, then there is no hope. So we go with defining truth because the world needs a lot of clarity. And like you said, going back to discipleship, there are so many people, especially young men, who are just lost in the quandary of this relativist culture. They need discipleship. They need solid grounding in the Word of God. And through that lens, everything else will make sense.

Without it, they don't know how to approach these issues of how do I lovingly, you know, if I go to a church that's telling me that I need to be loving, so don't talk about abortion, don't talk about homosexuality. It's like, dude, you're just, you're out there. You're totally lost. So we have to come back to what does God say about this and clear the playing field from the beginning and say, look, we're not going to. going to validate the terminology or definitions of the world, we're going to use the lens of

the word of God and through that lens derive our worldview and deal with these issues. And that's a huge problem today. And at the heart of this, one of the main things is you just mentioned it, male and female, how's a young man supposed to behave? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean for women to be a woman? Those ideas have been viciously attacked by satanic forces in our culture. so that every woman is given this model to basically to be a man,

to be a warrior, to be empowered, whatever that is. It's a complete perversion of God's idea of womanhood. And men are told that really to be masculine. Oh, that's toxic. And obviously, that's not God's view. And I think one thing I think that it's very interesting to me how these things can happen over time. but the Protestants and the evangelicals decision, I don't know if it's actually a decision, but to move away from Mary, to stop talking about Mary, Mary was the model of womanhood.

Just as Jesus is the model for a man, Mary was the model. And you always see Mary as the mother, the mother with the child. There's something very powerful and holy about that. But obviously, motherhood is repudiated in the culture in which we live. You know, you can't be empowered if you're saddled down with an infant or whatever it is. And so the church itself has bought in to a lot of these lies. And so we're in a process by the grace of God of finding our way back. We're in a war to find our way back.

And that's why I'm grateful for folks like you and for a handful of pastors that I know out there who are warriors on this stuff. but things, it seems like things had to get this bad for many people to wake up. At least that's how I see it. Yeah, I mean, clearly, even from my perspective of public service, I did multiple deployments to the Middle East. And I would look back at America and think, man, there's so many people that are just enjoying and taking for granted the freedom and existence they have. Well, you could apply the physical attributes of that to the spiritual, as you're saying. We have taken for granted the blessings and the richness of our founding. fathers that dedicated a form of government and this constitutional republic to God. That is explicitly

undeniable. And of course, the left has worked overtime to convince people that the opposite is true. And the end goal is the same for everyone. We should expect no different. And I know, Eric, you understand this more than anyone. America should expect no different result than Nazi Germany did or any other nation who suffered under leftism throughout the 20th century. All secular humanist nations that abandon God's way in favor of elevating man as deity end in the same way, death and destruction. And we have all of history to show us that. So you have the church who holds this knowledge, and they're sort of just standing idly by as America flames to the ground. And it's, it's frustrating. It's very frustrating. Well, I mean, it's why I know the Lord called me to write

letter to the American church. I should remind people, it's also a documentary film. Go to letter to the American church.com. Because if the church doesn't wake up, like, immediately, it's over. In Germany, the church had a moment to wake up. They did not wake up in time. And what happened in Germany, none of them dreamt it could have happened. But it happened, and it happened. It's happening here.

It will happen here unless the church wakes up. And folks, if you're listening, you're the church. It's on you. But God wants us to rejoice that he gives us the privilege of being a part of what he's doing. Josiah O'Neill, just great to meet you here. Congratulations on the book, Defining Truth. Folks, you can find Josiah at definingtruth.org, Definingtruth.org. Josiah, thank you.

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and featuring stellar performances by Julian Anderson and Academy Award winner Helen Mirren, Whitebird promises to be a cinematic experience you won't forget. Catch it in theaters now. For tickets and more details, visit whitebird.movey. That's whitebird.movey. Welcome back. Folks, I have with me in the studio one of the two men behind a brand new podcast about the homeless crisis. If you live in America, you know it's a real crisis. The podcast is called Homeland. And Ben Kay is my guest. Ben, welcome.

Thank you so much, Eric, for having me. Now, we wanted to get you and Andrew Didway in here. I've known Andrew for a while. He's done some projects with us. We filmed the Duck Dynasty guys in Monroe, Louisiana. That's incredible. And the patriarch of the clan, Phil Robertson, dubbed Andrew Redbeard. Was this when he had a big Red Beard?

Yes. And for years, I couldn't remember Andrew's name because I just thought it's Redbeard. It's Redbeard. But anyway, I'm sorry Redbeard couldn't be here. I am too. How did the two of you guys meet? So we both went to Regent University in Virginia Beach. Small at the time, Christian school, there was maybe a couple hundred undergrad students. But we met on day one, and we have been best of friends ever since. It was 2008 we met. And how did you come to a place where you're doing a podcast on homelessness? What led to that?

So about five or six years ago, we had this idea, because I've worked in nonprofit, faith-based orgs and homeless service organizations for about 12 years. And about halfway through, about six years ago, Andy and I started talking and we were like, we should create a documentary on homelessness. We should try to create something new from a different perspective. And so back in about 2022, when everything was shut down, Andy didn't really have a whole lot of work. And so he was like, let's just film a pilot. So him, some other crew came to LA.

We spent four days over a long weekend, and we filmed what we thought would be a pilot to a documentary series. The writer's strikes happened shortly thereafter. And so the goal of this project was to actually be a documentary. But the writer strikes shut that down. And one of our producers, I'll never forget, Shannon Rig, she said, Ben, you need to turn this into a podcast. You're not going to get this made as a documentary right now. Turn it into a podcast. that's the direction to go.

And since that's happened, it's just been fire. It's just what unreal. Now, so is there a film or any film related to this? No, not yet. Our goal would still be to create something that is a documentary, something that is a film. We filmed everything. You know, most things are all filmed. So you have it filmed.

Oh, we've got everything filmed. It's probably like 100, 200 hours of filmed stuff, yeah. Well, and so let me ask you again, what led you to this subject? In other words, where do you get the idea that we need to have a problem? podcast about this because it's it's a huge problem. To me, it's a symptom of the larger problem. In other words, you can sort of see something's wrong in America just by the homeless. Like you just say, this doesn't make sense. What's going on? I mean, even in Danbury, Connecticut, where I grew up, I can see homeless people. I'm thinking, what are there

homeless people doing here? I wouldn't expect there to be homeless people here begging for money by the side of the highway or whatever. It's chronic. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I once heard it said that homelessness is the most visible manifestation of extreme poverty. And there are so many people in this country who are living literally on the knife sedge, a paycheck away. One thing goes sideways, whether they have an unexpected medical expense, they lose their employment.

And just like that, they can't make their rent anymore. In L.A., there's over half a million people who are spent. Upwards of 90% on their rent, they have no margin for anything to go sideways. And so for me, I've worked in this field since I left college. And so one of the things that led us to do this was I was starting to see all these documentaries come out on homelessness, because it is something that is capturing kind of the American imagination and not in a great way. But it was created by people who didn't understand it clearly. It was folks who were really well-intentioned, and some are very good.

but it was created by folks who are producers or directors from Hollywood. And I looked at Andy. I was like, Andy, we can do this. I've worked in this. I understand this from kind of a practitioner perspective. I have all the relationships with folks who are closest to the work in L.A. and beyond. And I was like, we can actually do something that is different. So that's what sparked it, was this idea of, wait a second, we're not getting clarity because people who are creating these documentaries aren't close enough to it. And so we wanted to create something that was from those who are doing the work.

And so what do you see as the ultimate problem here? To me, it's the breakdown of American society that we would have this in the middle of things. So it's it is a much bigger problem. How are you talking about dealing with it? First of all, is it just to make people aware of it? Yeah. So Greg Colburn, he is a professor in Seattle. He also wrote a book called Homelessness is a House.

problem. Something he said that was fascinating. He said there are these kind of core root issues, but there's also individual vulnerabilities. And he said those two things when they combine, they actually create homelessness. So I'll give this example, and he uses this in the book. There is a city like Los Angeles that is really well to do. New York's the same. Both have the highest amount of homeless in the entire country. What he says is homelessness actually, it thrives amidst affluence, not amidst poverty. And he uses the example of a city like Cleveland. I'm from Cleveland.

I grew up with, you know, the bombed out warehouses and poverty, and you just thought it was normal. Cleveland doesn't have a problem with housing insecurity or homelessness. And what Greg says is, listen, there's larger systems, but keenly housing or the availability of affordable housing, that is what's driving homelessness. And so being poor in Cleveland has different. consequences than being poor in New York or Los Angeles.

Because being poor in Cleveland, at least you can afford rent still. So what he says is when you combine these larger problems of affordable housing with individual vulnerabilities, let's say you have a substance abuse challenge, you have a mental health diagnoses, those things when they combine result in homelessness. Going to a break. The website is our homeland. us, our homeland.us. Be right back. There's a revolution happening right above our heads.

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Whether you order online or call them direct, you must use the promo code Eric to get 35% off plus free shipping and their money back guarantee. Call them at 800-2468-751 and use discount code Eric or order online at balance of nature.com. Use discount code Eric to get 35% off plus free shipping. cow how do they do it welcome back homeland is a 10 episode podcast series that brings clarity to the homelessness crisis by highlighting the work of those leading efforts to end homelessness in their communities um i'm talking to one of the co-creators ben k about this so you were just saying that yeah it makes sense in other words if i'm living in a place that's really not expensive there's going to be less homelessness. But in a place like New York or L.A., clearly there's going to be more

homelessness. Well, what about that? I mean, how is that salient? I mean, it's interesting, but what do you do with that? Yeah, so one of the things that, you know, because we interviewed over 75 folks as part of the project, and one of the things so many of them said is there are folks across the country who are struggling with a mental health diagnosis. There are folks across the country who are struggling with a substance abuse problem, but they're still housed. And you look at communities that may have a higher rate per capita of both of those things, but they have far less homelessness than a New York, then a Los Angeles, then a Seattle, than a San Francisco. And so the one X factor for those other cities is experiencing those individual challenges or, you know, vulnerabilities,

it has a different price tag based on where you live. And so if you, if you're, you live in a place that's really expensive, the price tag for a lot of people ultimately is the streets. It's unbelievable. The website is our homeland.us, and so we can, people can access the podcast, but also some of these filmed interviews are there. People can watch them online. Yeah, so we filmed and recorded all of the interviews. We have 10, you know, highly produced episodes, but we wanted to release all of our filmed interviews, and those will be on the website after the podcast releases, yeah. And what's the day to the podcast, like right now?

Yeah, so October 14th is when the first episode drops, and then it'll be dropping every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for three weeks straight. And this is you and Andy talking on the podcast? So I'm the host. So Andy's our director. You'll hear his voice, the red-bearded man from time to time asking great questions, but I act as the host for the show. So where do you see this going?

In other words, this is to me, again, part of a, it's the picture of where we are in America right now. Something is wrong. There's a lot that's wrong. Why is looking at homelessness itself part of the solution for you? What is it about that? So one of my incredible friends and colleagues, Rudy Salinas, he said something that I've never forgotten. He said, this is important because it's a lot closer to us now. housing and security is a lot closer to us now. And he gave some examples. So I'll use personal ones for myself. I live in Los Angeles. I have a good paying job. I have multiple jobs because I've got kids and they eat all my money. But I can't afford a home. So the housing crisis, the broader housing crisis, that's how it impacts me. I have colleagues who are impacted by the broader housing crisis, even though they have jobs, where they have to commute one way over two and a half hours to work. They can't live where they work.

So the housing crisis impacts them in that way. In South Los Angeles, where I work at a homeless service and housing agency, there are families in South Los Angeles, three or four families who are sharing a single apartment. So for those families, this broader housing crisis, this affordability crisis, impacts them in a very different way. And then on the final rung, for folks who have maybe lost all relational credit, they've used it up, Maybe there were family or friends who cared about them who could help them out when they hit a hard time. Those relationships are gone for one reason or another. For them, the last rung is the streets.

And so the reason this is important is because most Americans are impacted by the affordable housing crisis. It looks different for each of us. But for some folks, it looks like. Now, when you say the affordable housing crisis, that's a term. What do we mean by that? In other words, where's the failure? Who's responsible for this, what you're calling a crisis? So back in the 80s, we cut HUD's budget.

The government cut HUD's budget. And we at that time had a surplus of what we'd call affordable housing units. So we cut how much we were spending to build affordable housing. And now we have a deficit. In L.A. County alone, we are in the deficit of affordable housing units upwards of half, a million units, upwards to a million units. So when I say affordable housing crisis, what I mean is that there isn't enough affordable housing to go around. There's not enough affordable homes to buy. But you're making it sound like it's a government issue. It's not just a government issue. It's a

community issue as well. So it's, there is a part the national government plays. There's also part that local governments play. I'll give an example. In L.A., there was faith communities that wanted to build affordable housing on land they owned, but the local community shut them down for years because they didn't want to have affordable housing in their community. Now, California has changed their laws that allows faith communities to build on land they own, regardless of local zoning.

But for a while, it was also the local community that would put a stop to some of these affordable housing units being built. That's interesting, because, I mean, that is the question, right? I mean, you have to think, what does it mean? I mean, it's like if when you say affordable housing, part of what that means is potentially people with mental health issues, people at the lowest rung of the ladder in your neighborhood. So in other words, isn't there some oversight that needs to happen? Because it's one thing to house people. Of course.

Then what happens? Yeah. So housing alone isn't the only answer. So in L.A., what we do is we have housing along with support. So there's what we'd call permanent supportive housing. So folks are housed permanently. And these are usually folks who we would call high acuity. It would mean that maybe they have a mental health diagnoses,

maybe they're elderly, maybe they have a chronic health condition. They can't go work. So we would house them, but support, and it comes down to just community. That's what's important. Yeah. So if you can provide support, community, and housing, those things have been found to work. And there's organizations like mine that I work for, like others, that see a 95% retention rate when you combine housing with other supports. Yeah, no, there's no doubt that if you don't have that kind of community support, it's just a government handout, which will fail.

It's not just, you know, that it's big government bad. It is, but it's bad because it doesn't work. You need more. You need – these people need care. They don't just need a free place to live. And so community, and this is where the faith-based thing comes in. We're going to go to a break. We'll get back to this.

The website is OurHomeland.us, our homeland.us. All kinds of stuff there. We'll be right back talking to Ben K. Welcome back talking to Ben K, the host of a brand new podcast called Homeland about homelessness. And I like, people can't see this if they're listening to radio or whatever. But the logo. Homeland, the L.A. and land is highlighted. So it's about L.A.

Because you live in L.A. So Homeland and L.A. And we were going to talk about the issue of, you know, you talk about community support because you see people. I mean, again, I was saying like in Danbury, Connecticut, where I'm spending a lot of time, you see these people kind of begging for money. And I'm thinking, who the heck are these people?

Where did they come from? How did they get here? And what are they doing? Is there nobody to help? them to say to them, hey, you know, you can't beg here. And by the way, what do you need? How can we help you? That's the real issue. And it seems like I would just get the impression that a lot of these folks maybe don't want help or maybe they're afraid of, I don't know what it is. In other words, I think there's probably many different kinds of stories.

Yeah, I mean, one thing I'll say, Margot Cushel at University of California, San Francisco, did the largest study on California's experiencing homelessness. And one thing she found is that homelessness is a homegrown problem. 90% of all people that were surveyed in this study were from California. So other states as well, people are actually from the communities they're experiencing homelessness in. And so one of the things we found is that often homelessness is the result of a relational or community breakdown. When someone loses connect with family or friends, that's usually the last kind of rung of support. And so community is vital to supporting people.

This isn't just a government fix. Communities have a responsibility, and that's really important to ending homelessness. And it's interesting because that was part of the warp and the woof of American life in decades past, that there was a sense of community throughout the country. And I think as people become more scattered or you're not really from any place, you don't have that sense of responsibility. Like, this is my town and what's going on here, and we need to care for these people or whatever. And it sort of becomes the government's problem.

And the government is not really equipped to deal with some of these problems. Not alone. So I'm a follower of Jesus. I'm a Christian. One thing that I have held to is this idea that you have to seek the welfare of the city that you're in. And in its welfare, you find yours. And the context for that verse in Jeremiah is actually the welfare of the city that took your home from you, that took everything from you. And Jeremiah is telling these people, these people who are your enemies who have stolen everything and made you homeless seek their welfare.

So I think for me, when I think about where I'm from, what city I'm living in, I hold on to that. And if I seek its welfare, I find my own. Yeah, I mean, I really do see the faith community at the heart of the solution. because people who love God know that somehow they have responsibility here. They also know, but there, but for the grace of God, go I. They're not deluded into thinking, like, that could never happen to me. It's only by God's grace that it hasn't happened to me. And so you just said that some churches had wanted to build affordable housing,

and the community said no. Yeah, yeah. So this was a problem in California for a while. There was something called local zoning, and local zoning and communities could decide on what was built. And so that was a problem that kept a lot of faith communities from building housing and being part of the solution. California as a state passed something called SB4, which allows those communities to build now. And so it's fixing a problem that was felt at the local community.

We're out of time, but the website is Our Homeland.us. The host of the podcast is Ben K. Ben Kay, congratulations on this and everything you're doing. Thanks for being with us today. Thanks, Eric.