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your /other/ neighbors
how knowing your houseless neighbors' names can improve your mental health! plus, the intersections of intentional communities and unhoused populations, from halfway houses to resource sharing.
Jasper Lydon
April 15, 2025
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hi friends! hope you’re enjoying spring break season, if you have a break, and staying safe from all the colds going around if not!
i’d love to hear your feedback on how the newsletter is going — if you have any thoughts on what you’d like to hear more or less of, please leave a comment or shoot me a quick email; it helps me a ton!!
today’s topic: did you know that knowing the names of your houseless neighbors can improve your mental health? that some intentional communities are built around supporting unhoused neighbors?
the rental RV i was living in while conducting this research & touring intentional communities
service-focused intentional communities
some intentional communities do mutual aid, including with unhoused people. this is especially common among catholic worker communities, where service is an integral part of their mission.
Even through college, I was so sheltered from homeless people. I would walk down the street and not make eye contact and then feel guilty and try to forget about it. I think a lot of people are that way. But after living at The Farm, you can’t look away. These are your neighbors, they’re knocking at your door. And no one else is looking away; they’re really talking to people and engaging with them.
It’s completely shifted my family in terms of how they treat people on the street. My mom always says, “You never know.” But actually, I think I do know. I know my neighbors, even the ones on the street.
Working with any marginalized group — people coming out of prison, struggling with addiction, struggling with homelessness — if you talk to anyone who works with those populations, there are way more joyful or boring stories than ones that would scare you off or make you not want to interact with those communities. The people who are scared haven’t had any interactions with those groups to learn that.
photo from my same ‘camping’ spot as above, in arizona
ask their names!
last week i tried out a mutual aid group near me that dumpster dives for good quality discarded food from grocery stores, cooks them into dozens of meals, and distributes them to their neighbors on the street.
what stood out to me most wasn’t the cooking or sharing meals — it was being surrounded by a group of peers just like me who were chatting with people living on the street, who knew their names and friends, and treated them like neighbors, instead of looking away.
my biggest takeaway/recommendation from this experience, and from my interviews with catholic worker houses, might be this:
next time someone on the streets asks you for change, ask their name. you’re welcome to still politely decline requests for money! but sharing names is a simple, non-committal way to humanize the interaction, to start treating each other as people.
why know your neighbors?
community and mutual aid and all that sounds great. but i think the biggest motivator to get to know your neighbors, including the ones on the street, is: it feels good. there’s a real comfort and release of tension when you get to know people, even just a little, who are near your home and community.
it can help you
feel safer
feel more relaxed
feel more connected
i’ve been looking for good, readable, recent psychological studies on this, but found almost nothing done in the 21st century. if anyone knows good studies on this, please send them my way! for now, though, we’ll have to rely on anecdotal evidence. it’s something i, and many of my interviewees, have felt in our bodies. if you try it, maybe you’ll be able to feel the same.
cacti fields, photo taken by me the same day, in ariona
for communitarians: where would you draw the line?
just yesterday, someone asked me,
“are halfway houses a type of community housing?”
could they be a type of intentional community? the most obvious argument against them being considered an intentional community is that people might not be opting in to a shared set of values or vision. but in a way, isn’t that exactly what they’re doing? they’re groups of people agreeing to fit into a shared type of lifestyle. living together, sharing space, sharing resources, and working to better themselves and their neighborhoods. what’s more IC than that?
how would the intentional communities movement be impacted if we expanded our definition of IC to include these kinds of places?
food for thought 🙂 i’d love to hear your thoughts!
much love,
jasper
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