However, the quakes also rattled the lives of thousands of people in the vicinity of Assisi who were left homeless. These children of God have spent their third winter in trailer camps, in the wet cold of the central Italian mountains. Somehow, money was found for the church but not for investment in the needed homes. This seems counter to the spirit of St. Francis.

The story reminded me of a quote from Dorothy Day in On Pilgrimage: "A priest we know who does not like our emphasis on distributism, decentralism, or whatever one wishes to call it, said one time, ‘It’s too late for anything but love.’ That sounded good to many people. But that same priest was going about his business having his church repaired $20,000 worth."

We sometimes miss God in our search for God. Today, not only in central Italy, but also throughout the United States, parishes in comfortable neighborhoods are building and renovating church buildings and schools for the greater glory of God, while the number of homeless people in our streets increases daily. The government of our nation, meanwhile, does more and more to build its military might and subsidize the housing of those with means than to assure that its most vulnerable people are properly sheltered.

The sacred right of every person to the warmth and shelter of an affordable home-which was the pledge of the US Housing Act of 1949-is further from fulfillment today than it was 20 years ago. It would seem that the basilicas God wants us to build and renovate are the apartments and houses of the poor, the immigrants, the disabled and others who are marginalized. These buildings are the sacred spaces that need our investment.

Everywhere across our land-city, suburb and countryside-the number of affordable housing units is declining, as a strong economy drives up rents. From 1991 to 1997, the number of affordable units shrunk by almost 400,000. The role of "Holy Mother State" from the late 1930s has been to subsidize rents, through a variety of programs like Section 8 and locally-administered federal housing projects. However, in the last two decades, Washington has shifted its thinking and drastically reduced the number of subsidized units.

This means that many poor renters pay 50 percent or more of their income for shelter. The average American family spends about 27 percent of its income on housing. The government standard for affordability is 30 percent. At today’s rent levels, minimum-wage workers must work more than 100 hours a week to afford market-rate rents. The National Low Income Housing Coalition says, "Nowhere in the United States is the minimum wage sufficient to allow for the rental of a two-bedroom apartment at fair-market rent."

Sadly, in our materially rich nation, 5.3 million worst-case households wait for rent subsidies for too few units. Yet, in the midst of this crisis, federal subsidies have dropped by 65,000 since 1995. One reason for this decline is the policy that permits annual extensions of subsidy contracts with landlords, instead of long-term arrangements. This permits landlords to opt out as soon as market rates exceed what they receive in subsidies. This can also leave the renter in a lurch, unable to make long-term living arrangements. The possibility of a forced move, as soon as the owner sees a chance to make more money in the unsubsidized market, is ever present.

Instead of addressing the rent subsidy issue in a bold way, federal officials seem to have unreasonably shifted priority to home ownership to solve the crisis. It is absurd to expect that our worst housing problems will be solved by home ownership alone. Owning a home requires thousands of dollars for a down payment, mortgage insurance, tax payments and money for maintenance. If poor people had the opportunity and skills to earn and manage money well enough to meet these requirements, they wouldn’t be as poor.

This structural injustice in our national housing policy deserves a structural response. Mortgage interests and property tax deductions should be capped at the cost of one median-priced home per household. Currently, two-thirds of this welfare program goes to families with incomes above $75,000 a year. Recent tax reforms add to the subsidy for homeowners by giving a capital gains tax break on the sale of their homes.

The wealthy do not need to be subsidized to live in mansions and second and third vacation homes. The additional tax revenue from such a cap could be shifted to increase the number of subsidized rental units. Some could also be devoted to increasing the amount of subsidies to current landlords, so they can keep their property in good state of repair and not jump to the market rate arena.

The federal policy should also foster subsidized units in middle and upper-class neighborhoods. This means having local housing authorities, who administer federal rent subsidy programs, spice wealthier areas with more Section 8 units. Also, while the Community Reinvestment Act of 1978 was passed by Congress to stimulate investments by banks in low-income areas, federal housing policies often discourage such investments. This drains the wealth from older, poorer sections, leaving rotting urban cores. The resulting class segregation in all major American cities fosters intractable poverty.

Besides these structural reforms in our country’s housing policy, the cry of the poor for a living wage must also be heeded. Poverty wages help assure financial security for business owners and stockholders, but they foster hopelessness in workers. Living wages, with health care benefits, should be minimal expectations of all employers in our capitalist system. These boosts, in turn, would enable more workers to afford rents that are not subsidized.

But, regardless of what happens in the legislative chambers or in corporate boardrooms, the personalist response to the housing crisis must continue to be the ideal by which we live. Homeless people in our streets increase in number daily. Peter Maurin’s call for Houses of Hospitality in every parish is more relevant today than it was in the 1930s. Every family who can afford it needs a Christ Room in its home, to welcome the stranger and the poor.

These personalist ideals are also lived every day by those of us who join hands to raise homes for individual poor families. These homes are often built under the aegis of Habitat for Humanity or other nonprofit housing organizations, for individual families who participate in the construction.

But, I am afraid the current housing crisis is so severe that it requires more than our personalist stance. Holy Mother State, because of the severity of the problem and because she helped create the crisis, must intervene in a major way. The good will of those who build homes for the poor through non-profit groups has resulted in the miracle of over 450,000 units created since 1986. However, at this rate, it would take over 100 years to provide homes for just 5 million of our 15 million poorest families. The need cannot wait.

As we live through another winter, we must pray and work for a revolution in our hearts and in the hearts of policy makers to address this crisis. A 1988 Vatican statement on housing reinforces our prayers and good works: "The Church appeals to governments and to those with social responsibilities to make the necessary decisions and set up economic programs that will adequately meet the need for housing, particularly for the poorest and the most marginalized. "This should be our appeal to each other and to Holy Mother State. If our nation-during these corporate boom times, with a federal surplus and a bloated defense budget-cannot solve this crisis now, then when? The Christ we see in the eyes of the poor deserves a sacred sanctuary called a home.