the underview.
The underview is an exploration of the shaping of our place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.
The underview is a series of discussions within and about the community of Northwest Arkansas. The underview explores our collective understanding and beliefs about the place we live.
These discussions will include topics that are foundational to the identity of our region, the history of our communities, the truth of conflict with the land and its people, and the current challenges and opportunities for our community.
the underview.
the neighborhood with Solomon Burchfield (ep 2b, 44).
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Solomon Burchfield, Executive Director of New Beginnings NWA, brings both lived experience and professional expertise to one of Northwest Arkansas's most urgent challenges. Growing up in a family that faced the real possibility of homelessness. That formative memory, combined with years working directly with chronically homeless neighbors, has shaped his vision for what he calls "universal dignity," a community where everyone has access to the basic resources needed to survive and thrive.
This conversation moves beyond stereotypes about homelessness to examine the interconnected systems that either support people or allow them to fall through the cracks. Solomon explains how housing functions as infrastructure, why exclusionary zoning and NIMBYism create the homelessness we claim to want to solve, and what it would look like for Northwest Arkansas to grow in a way that doesn't push more people to the margins.
Through New Beginnings' innovative approaches, including micro-shelter communities, medical respite programs, and mixed-background neighborhoods, Solomon demonstrates that homelessness is a solvable problem when communities commit to housing-first solutions and recognize that everyone's well-being is interconnected. With homelessness increasing 23% in the region and housing costs rising 71% over five years, this conversation challenges us to see the gap between those who thrive and those who struggle not as inevitable, but as a choice we're making about what kind of community we want to build.
About the underview:
The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.
Website: theunderview.com
Follow us on Instagram: @underviewthe
Host: @mikerusch
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theunderview/message
It makes our, our life better when everyone has what everyone needs. That is what's the most counter-cultural for us. Our culture atomizes us. You're supposed to be the happiest when you live as a single individual, isolated, often from family, isolated from a lot of community belonging. I'm staring in my phone. I live alone. Everyone has to buy and acquire all the things you need for yourself. And the most countercultural thing you can do is to step out of that and say, actually we need each other. We're at our best when we are in relationship, and we're at our best when we have communities that support us and bring out the best in us. And so there's a almost narrative layer in this of what story do we live in as people, and therefore, what kind of way will we organize life together? What social systems, economics and politics and city planning, et cetera are we excited about? Because if we live in this narrative of every individual for themselves, we end up accepting a whole bunch of suffering.
mike.:Well, you're listening to the underview, an Exploration and the Shaping of Our Place. My name is Mike Rusch and even though we're in between seasons right now, we still have some really important community conversations that need to take place. So while our episode schedule may not be week to week, we are continuing to address the most important conversations about our community here in the Ozarks. Today we're gonna sit down with Solomon Birchfield, the Executive Director of New Beginnings in Fayetteville. Solomon's work puts him at the intersection of some of Northwest Arkansas's most urgent questions around belonging and community and who gets left behind when a region grows as rapidly as ours has. While there are some great economic numbers to celebrate, there are also some statistics that we need to pay attention to. The number of homeless people has increased 23% in our region between 2024 and 2025, and with housing costs rising nearly 71% over the past five years, the gap between those who thrive here and those who are struggling to survive is unfortunately becoming wider. But Solomon brings more than statistics to this conversation. He brings his own lived experience. Growing up in a family of eight that faced the real possibility of homelessness. That memory combined with his years of working directly with some of our most chronically homeless neighbors, has shaped his understanding of what community wholeness can really mean. I'm gonna warn you, this isn't a simple conversation about homelessness. That's too easy to stereotype. It's too easy to dismiss as someone else's problem. This is a conversation about housing as infrastructure, about community care as shared responsibility. About healthcare systems that either catch people or let them fall. It's about creating systems in our region here in our place that don't allow people to drop out of them. Systems that recognize housing as the foundation without which nothing else can work. The path to addressing these interconnected challenges, it's, yeah, it's complex. It's tangled up in zoning battles, not in my backyard politics, in harmful stereotypes about who deserves housing, and the need for entirely new financing models to make affordable housing viable. It's confusing, overwhelming at times, but here's what Solomon knows. That cuts through all of that complexity. This is a problem that can be solved. We have the resources and we have the solutions, but what we need now is the collective will to implement them. In this conversation Solomon challenges us to see homelessness not as an individual failing, but as a community one. One that we have the power to address if we choose to. This is a conversation about dignity and belonging and the uncomfortable truth that the community we're building right now, it's leaving some of our neighbors behind. Alright, we've got a whole lot to work through today. Let's get into it. Well, I have a privilege today of sharing a table with Solomon Burchfield, who's the Executive Director of New Beginnings who is working and has been working, I feel like maybe most of your life around what does it look like to care for some of our most vulnerable neighbors uh, here in northwest Arkansas and I've had the privilege of being able to yeah, watch you and the work that you've done for the past five years in New Beginnings. Solomon, thanks for being a part of the conversation. Thanks for being here.
solomon burchfield.:It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
mike rusch.:It's privilege is mine, but thank you. Maybe before we get started, we've got a whole lot to talk about around we're gonna talk about trails, we're gonna talk about homelessness. We're gonna talk about caring for neighbors. We're gonna talk about housing here in northwest Arkansas, and I would love to know as we start into this bring us up to speed a little bit on your background and. Yeah. How did you come to sit in the chair that you are today and doing the work that you are?
solomon burchfield.:Yeah, I think that there's probably a core memory inside me that's part of my motivation to join this kind of work. I grew up in a family that was rich in love, but poor in money. And we lived on the south side of Fayetteville. And I remember my family standing in line for WIC using food stamps at the store. We had a rental assistance voucher, like a lot of lower income families do in northwest Arkansas. And the day that the landlord raised their rent at the unit where we were renting was a jarring day 'cause the family started talking about where are we gonna move? And honestly, if it wasn't for the friendship of family members in our church that we grew up in, we would've been homeless on the street, a family of eight. I think that memory is somewhere in my motivation system more as an adult. I got started when I actually was taking a break from work to try to find my vocation, trying to get in touch with my purpose, and I ended up completing the camino de Santiago, which is like a six week walk across Spain. And I was thinking, what comes to the surface? What do I want to commit my life energy toward? And I've always been someone that has a passion for being part of work that brings healing and promotes justice in our community. And homelessness seemed like the issue that was just right on the foreground for me. I was lucky enough when I got back to Fayetteville to get hired at Seven Hills Homeless Center. I started as a case manager, supporting people that had been chronically homeless. Was able to step into a leadership role over there over time. And then about four and a half years ago, got the opportunity to help launch New Beginnings. So there's kind of a through line there for me about trying to build community and include everybody in the community that we have.
mike rusch.:This whole conversation, or a lot of these conversations we've been having, is really about what does it mean to belong to a place mm-hmm. and to live within a community of people. And I think
mike.:For most people who live here in northwest Arkansas, this idea of a thriving, growing community with lots of opportunity. The reality is that, that, that's probably most people's frame of reference, and so when I think about my own belonging and my own place in this community the reality is that people that are maybe in the margins, if you want to use that term, or who are without a home is not, I don't think that affects my day to day.
mike rusch.:Mm-hmm.
mike.:But I'm curious like how you would view kind of the work that you've been doing, the people that you've been serving as a part of everyone's sense of belonging within a community.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. The people I meet who have been unhoused for years are some of the most resilient people I've ever met. Funny people that I've ever met friendly people, what we are missing out on is their presence amongst us. We're missing out on people that have a lot to offer because we haven't supported them in a way that allows them to really belong, to really contribute to our shared community life. And then also, part of my motivation bleeds into this because part of my spirituality is even about how we are all connected. In, in my physical body if my finger is gangrene, I can't just say like, ah, that's just my finger. Like here the rest of my body is doing fine. Uh, We're all connected in that way, I think and so when there's somebody hurting in our community and. In some way, we're all hurting, and so to heal that is to bring wholeness to the community.
mike.:I think sometimes it's easy to dismiss that as not a part of maybe some of the problems we need to worry about in our community for the large majority of people. And I, I don't wanna move past this understanding of how does that have an impact on me and my life ? Give us a starting point to think about our community in this way that is Not gonna lead us down this kind of stereotypical definition of how we think about homelessness.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah, we're trying to create a community where everybody matters, and truthfully, that's not been our history in our culture. It has been okay that some people's lives don't matter, and so I think this is just a glaring opportunity for us to try to face that and change that and make a community where every single human life counts and the dignity of each person is recognized. It's also true that in more practical terms, everyone's wellbeing matters to all of us. And so when we leave hundreds of people on the street, what we can expect is to pay really high taxes, building prisons that end up sheltering people with behavior challenges in life. We can expect our health insurance premiums to go up because hospitals are having to provide healthcare over and over again to people whose only way to access care is go in the emergency room. So in a really practical way and in a more kind of spiritual way, we all share an interest in building a community where everyone belongs.
mike rusch.:I will make this one connection. We've been talking about trails and how trails in our community are a leveling factor for people to think about jobs and income and access to healthcare and transportation and all these things. And traditionally, when we talk about this active transportation conversation it's from the perspective of bikes. And while that's been a huge part of our community, I think what you experienced just two weeks ago was really an incredible example of how trails can be used in a different way in our community. As you, I'll let you explain what you did, a 30 mile walk, to really use those trails and those systems as a way of showing and telling a story around a group of people in Northwest Arkansas. Give me a little background on your story and your walk and all, how that all evolved.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah, we just completed about a week and a half ago, a 36 mile pilgrimage along the Razorback Greenway from Bentonville to Fayetteville. And I'm someone that loves our bike trails. I'm on the trail probably every weekend riding to a brewery or a restaurant or just to have fun. And this was a different opportunity. We repurposed a recreational or transportation oriented community resource to to tell a story about our unhoused neighbors who are often camping in the woods and using the trails just to access basic needs services. We had 18 people who hiked all three or one of the days. About half the folks are people that have been homeless themselves. So as we'd walk, they'd point out, here's where you'd want to camp, or here's where you could like, get water. And the other half of the group like my friend Irvin Camacho that
mike rusch.:Oh yeah. That's awesome.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. Hiked with us my friend Alice Guzo Colleen, who's a great community builder in Springdale, pastor Clint Schnekloth here in Fayetteville, people that I think were motivated to participate in this three day experience, to show solidarity, to show, empathy, but more than empathy, like taking action together with people who have been marginalized. Here's why we chose the trail. First off. Our neighbors who don't have housing are using the trails and sidewalks and streets to walk about 10 or 12 miles a day just to survive. And so this was a little taste for us to know a bit of what that is like. It also stands out to me that the Razorback Greenway connects all the cities in northwest Arkansas and sometimes homelessness in our conversations ends up being like, oh, that's something that's happening down in South Fayetteville. And that's not true. People in this economic reality are housing insecure and lose their housing in Bentonville, in Rogers, in Siloam Springs, in Springdale, in Fayetteville. This is a regional problem and I don't believe that people should have to travel to another city to get the help that they need. We should have a regional solution for this regional problem. And the the trail seemed like a cool symbol of how the trail connects all the cities in northwest Arkansas as a shared amenity and to get to repurpose it as a way to highlight how connected the homelessness challenge is in our region too. And so the being on the trail kind of helped highlight how that's true in our community.
mike.:I know one of the things that you were trying to accomplish through this walk is to bring this more front and center into kind of the public spotlight around this issue of what it looks like to be a neighbor here in northwest Arkansas are those that are experiencing homelessness. Help us connect this to some of our regional problems around housing affordability. What does homelessness in northwest Arkansas look like?
solomon burchfield.:Homelessness is growing in northwest Arkansas. The last survey counted over 500 people who were homeless in northwest Arkansas, and more than half were not in shelter. They were unsheltered. So there's not a city in northwest Arkansas that has enough shelter beds for the people who are homeless in their city. And what's true locally is also true nationally. We're setting records in a bad way. Seeing more and more people fall into homelessness faster than we can get people outta homelessness. Locally, we also wanna understand the characteristics. Who is it that's homeless and what are their different needs? So we see a growth in first time homelessness, especially after COVID. We're seeing growth among senior citizens who are homeless, we're seeing growth in people who have disabilities and have been chronically homeless. So we often try to think in the homeless services system about how to help the people that need like a quick hand up and then separately how to help the people that need more long-term intervention. So the people that are going through like a situation of homelessness often are fully capable of independence, but they lost a job or a health event happened, and that's what pushed them over the edge and they lost their home. So now sleeping in my car, I'm sleeping at the shelter. The majority of folks in that circumstance actually resolve their own situation. So they need to have that shelter, they need to have some support but they can rebuild, get into a new house, get into a new job, and that's the folks who are situationally homeless. The folks who end up chronically homeless are typically people that get trapped. Year after year, and there's a reason for that. You or I, if we lost our house, I bet that we would do everything we could to get back into home as fast as possible, right? So what does that say about people who have been stuck for years and years? There's usually some really serious support needs for that person. We find a lot of times it's folks that have serious mental health stuff like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder. There's often a story of trauma behind them in their childhood and into adulthood. There's chronic health problems, if not disabilities. And to help that person recover from homelessness. It can't just be a quick hand up. And so that's really the population that New Beginnings has focused on trying to assist is helping people who have longer term support needs fully recover and stabilize from homelessness. Unfortunately, we are seeing chronic homelessness increase because the intervention that works requires more money and a more long-term commitment to help people stabilize.
mike rusch.:These are problems that we as a society have ideas around how to solve though, right? And I, it's not disconnected from the rest of our healthcare systems or what's happening in the economy or what's happening within housing affordability. Help us place that. For so long, I, it feels like my understanding of homelessness was that someone did something wrong. And if they would just work harder, this would be better. But this population of people that you would use the term chronically homeless, we're dealing with much more complicated issues that really require a different way of thinking about it though. Is that a fair statement?
solomon burchfield.:Yeah, I think that is fair. It's, it is a complex solution, but it's also clear what works. So we know that the housing market has a lot to do with how many people are gonna be homeless. So there's a book called"Homelessness is a Housing Crisis," and basically the premise is that if you know a city's rental market, how healthy is the rental market in our community? What do the rents look like compared to income? What's the vacancy rate? If you can tell me that about my city, I can tell you the homeless count.
mike rusch.:Like almost directly?
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. There's a strong correlation and all the other things that we tend to think about the cities where the poverty's deeper is where you're gonna see more homelessness. It turns out it's not true. The cities that have higher mental illness rates is where you'd see higher homeless rates. It's not true. Maybe it's the climate or the political climate. All of those data points end up not correlating. And the one that does, the most explanatory work is knowing what, how healthy is your rental market in your community? So that does, it's one of those primary drivers that combines with other factors to end up producing the homelessness that we see. But that's a key one because it's one that decision makers can influence. How do we generate more affordable housing? How are our cities using our land? Do we want it to be used for developing multifamily housing and more affordable housing and public transit that makes life more affordable for lower income folks? Those are decisions that come from our city and county decision makers. So affecting the rental housing market is a really important part of addressing homelessness. It's not the only thing that needs addressed. So even if we have a really healthy rental housing market in a society where we continue to see that the cost of living goes up even while the wages that people receive stay flat, that's a big pressure on family stability and housing. When we see a healthcare system where millions and millions of people still don't have health insurance. Or the people that do have health insurance end up facing a system that doesn't have enough for mental health services. That's another pressure point that's going to, put a target on certain people's back. We have some really significant social drivers that are creating the homelessness we see in our society. And it comes back to an economy that is making life more unaffordable. A healthcare system that has huge gaps in it and people fall through the cracks. And a failure to repair the damage of systemic racism in our society. Therefore, in a society with all of that, we are guaranteeing there's gonna be homeless people. It's just a matter of which people, and that's why we see people with, intergenerational poverty backgrounds, that's how much higher likelihood you'll be one of the people that's homeless or people with mental health concerns or people that have experienced discrimination. If you are a black or a Native American person, if you are a LGTBQ person, that's where those risk factors for an individual are there. Because our society has those social systems around our economy and our healthcare systems that end up putting pressure on families' wellbeing.
mike rusch.:Solomon, one of the things that, we've had no surprise to anybody is this housing affordability crisis, where even though wages are going up in northwest Arkansas, the cost of housing is just far outpacing that. And, I see a lot of effort that's being done around zoning and housing, thinking differently about housing thinking differently about transportation. All of these things that are being worked on are still like, we are still not getting ahead of it. Do you see that, it sounds like this is a direct impact back to some of our most vulnerable people is this something that's front and center in mind when we think about how our region is growing, how our region is being planned? Is this something we need to spend more attention on or do you feel like we're doing a pretty good job trying to get our head around it so that we can address it or try to get ahead of it?
solomon burchfield.:I think there's more and more people waking up to how important those decisions cascade down and affect everybody. But there are also decisions that will take time to produce results. That's true. So the land in northwest Arkansas is almost exclusively zoned to build a single home on a plot of land. We know that pattern of development is both bankrupting cities 'cause it's really expensive to build the roads and deliver the public services if you're spreading, 20,000 people out over a huge area. Whereas if we can develop in more dense patterns, then it can be more affordable per square foot in the homes and we can service public transportation when people live in that pattern. So the things that have to change like rezoning land to allow us to build multifamily in places that currently can only have businesses or single homes, that's a fundamental shift that is occurring, I think. But it is gonna take some time before it really unfolds and you start to see the impact. I think another piece is direct investment in housing. So cities around the country have issued bonds where a city takes on helping finance projects if a percentage of the units will be affordable for their citizens. And that's one of the ways to reach below market rate rents. If we want below market rents, we have to have non-market financing. There's really no other way to square that circle. Market financing will create market rate rents, and so whether it's philanthropy that devotes money to help close the gap in financing affordable housing projects, or at cities or counties or the state that provides some of that financing, that's the tool that allows new construction to actually offer affordable units for people in the city.
mike rusch.:I spent a lot of time listening to conversations about zoning and land use and I just can't really remember many times when some of those people in those positions were really seeking out the advice of the people that are dealing with when it doesn't work the way that it's supposed to. I'm curious, what do you see within Northwest Arkansas, around are we spending enough time really trying to understand this or enact this? Do you see initiatives that are like making progress? Or do we have some, some real areas we need to be focusing on if we're gonna try to solve this?'Cause this is not a city by city problem.
solomon burchfield.:Right.
mike rusch.:This is something we're gonna have to tackle as a region. Is that a fair statement?
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. We gotta tackle it as a region and there can't be a race to the bottom of, I'm a developer that wants to develop with the least regulations and the least attention to affordability. I'll go to the city that has the loosest regulation around that. It does need to be addressed regionally. My gut take is that we still have too much thinking that is, the housing that's getting built is affordable to the off people who are moving here for corporate jobs. So what's the problem? I think there's a lot of people that's just not their life circumstance. Maybe they grew up here, maybe they work as a nurse or a teacher or a firefighter. Maybe their family got hit so hard by the economy that they did lose their housing and have gone through homelessness. That's the group of people that I don't think planners and decision makers are really putting front of mind. So it varies city by city because there's a whole toolbox that cities and counties need to use to address this challenge. City like Rogers has done an incredible amount of work, rezoning their land. Hopefully that is gonna result in a lot more multifamily, denser development within the city and make it more affordable for the city and make it more affordable for their renters in the city. Fayetteville has also been trying to up zone a lot of the land so that it's legal to develop a more, in a more dense pattern throughout the city.
mike rusch.:I think traditionally, I've been in northwest Arkansas for a long time now, and have, I feel like been trying to pay attention to this issue and it feels like for most services where probably the city that has to deal with this the most is the city of Fayetteville.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah.
mike rusch.:Is that true? It feels that way, but it feels like in many ways I don't know, by the lack of services in other cities, sometimes that puts a , it feels like it puts an undue burden or a greater burden on the city of Fayetteville. Can you help us maybe understand what your thoughts are there or how that works?
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. I would need two hands to count all the nonprofits and churches that are supporting people without housing in Fayetteville, it has become a challenge. And I don't think it's because more people become homeless in Fayetteville. I think people are having to travel to another city to get the help that they need. And so it's important for every city to take a look in the mirror and say, this is our problem. We can't offload this on some other community to take care of our neighbors struggling to maintain housing. And we need to cooperate, fund solutions together, collaborate, share data. Really coordinate the services that would help people stay in their housing or recover housing after they've lost it.
mike rusch.:I hear that. I, I just wanna be practical, and I'm not trying to put you on the spot all, but that's not happening, right? I mean it, or is it, and we're just not seeing it? Or is this is there a practical kind of process by which, as a region, we're working through some of these, I guess regional problems in a way that's gonna actually make a difference?
solomon burchfield.:The infrastructure is there for the collaboration and coordination and I do think almost all the nonprofits I'm aware of do lean in, do participate in the same shared software platform, participate in the collaboration meetings. I think that heart is there. I think the sense of a shared agenda to produce more affordable housing and help people get out of homelessness is not there yet. And the resources are available. I think it's a matter of our city and county, and I have to say philanthropic leaders saying this is a top priority. Change the policies that will help promote production of affordable housing in that big picture, and then fund the programs that are needed to actually give someone the direct assistance they need to get back into a home.
mike rusch.:We've been talking about this as a regional problem for a long time. But the region isn't solving the problem together. And I hear you that the infrastructure's in place to be able to do some of this, but maybe it's a question of funding. I live in the city of Bentonville. You would be hard pressed to think there is anyone that is homeless in the City of Bentonville. And I know that's just not true. But for some reason it's just not a topic of conversation where I live. We're talking about affordable housing. Obviously there's great work that's being done to think about the infrastructure to support more affordable housing but how that impacts some of the most vulnerable people in our community. It's just, it, this is not the frame of reference we're really talking and that, and there's a whole lot of reasons for that. And it's one of those things that no one person's responsible yet. Everybody is. I'm just curious is that, I don't know, is my feeling typical or not typical or do you feel like that's the reality of what we see within Northwest Arkansas or within other cities?
solomon burchfield.:Yeah, I don't think it has to be an intentional plan to produce outcomes where there's too many homeless folks. I think that it's more about just who is front and center in the mind of those, doing the planning and making those top level decisions. So the way we have developed currently is really amenable for people who work corporate jobs, who love to go to concerts and museums who love to ride the bike trail. Those regional planning decisions and funding decisions have come to fruition and. I think my question is how do we put at the front of our mind the people who are working at cash registers or the people who are teachers or the people struggling so bad, they're sleeping in their car and need a really affordable unit. Is there an equal amount of regional thinking of regional planning and regional financing for the kind of programs and projects that will make housing available to everyone in our community? That hasn't happened yet, and so those regional meetings and funding things that, that talk about an airport or the interstate or the tourism industry, those things are being done successfully. If we applied the same amount of energy and focus and money into making sure that our community had abundant, affordable homes, we could do it.
mike rusch.:I think this is one of the reasons why I wanted to sit and talk with you about New Beginnings is because and I'm biased. I've been involved there for a long time now. But this is, I guess this is the question is, can homelessness be solved?
solomon burchfield.:Yeah, it is a solvable problem. It does require us to do some new things, and I think that we focus on kind of the hardest to help people. The folks trapped for years and years in homelessness that have ongoing support needs and have become alienated from a lot of their healthy community. This is the part that's the hardest to change. And so it's a good place to begin if we can help end homelessness for chronically homeless folks, we can make sure everyone is taken care of. So the approach we take at New Beginnings is thinking about how you've gotta have the three magical ingredients. First you've gotta have shelter or housing that is affordable, even if someone's living on disability income or social security, fixed income. We have to solve for that. To end the homelessness, we also need to have available personalized support services. You mentioned how mental health and other chronic health issues are part of the story. It's not just housing. When people are in a neighborhood with support, they have someone giving them a home visit once a week and they're working together on managing money or learning how to cook in a healthier way, or making sure that they're connected to their psychiatric appointment. Taking care of legal issues that may still be haunting them from years before. They have a trusted person that is in their life. If they go through an episode of mental distress, they have somebody they trust to reach out to instead of just blowing up their life and ending up back on the street. So those ongoing support services that are tailored to what the person needs is a key part. You have to combine that with the affordable housing. And then the third magical ingredient is that nobody wants to just have an affordable roof over my head and a weekly home visit from somebody doing their job. To really thrive, we have to belong to a community. And so we really take that seriously at New Beginnings all through our programs, is putting a priority on community, connecting with each other in healthy interdependent ways, with appropriate boundaries with all the stuff that comes with relationships. And so the New Beginnings model for ending. Chronic homelessness involves developing neighborhoods with support, where we have affordable homes, we have support services, and we add neighbors who are intentional about helping build community with people as they recover from chronic homelessness. The point in time survey identified about 170 odd people who are chronically homeless in northwest Arkansas. So the solution is pretty clear. Let's develop neighborhoods with support and community and make sure that people can transition off the street and into homes and communities where they belong.
mike rusch.:Solomon, talk a little bit more about this, I mean, we've got a lot of history in northwest Arkansas around what zoning looks like. What you're describing doesn't fit into an easy zoning pattern, and we talked with Ali Quinlan a few episodes ago to talk about like our history of zoning and what's that's based in, which is a lot of historical issues of segregation that has kept people apart, that cities have used to keep people apart from each other who are different races, different economic conditions, like. What I hear from you is trying to break down some of those really long established understandings of how we even think about making or building a community. I don't know. Give gimme some more insight into how you're thinking about this.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. The history of zoning is based on history of trying to exclude, first people of color, also people of lower economic status to create neighborhoods that are really homogeneous. It's all people of the same background, same ethnicity, same economic strata. Is that okay? Do we want our communities splintered off from each other in that way? When I talk about developing neighborhoods with support, where people that have been homeless and have disabilities of some kind can live, my question is, could I build that in your neighborhood? Okay. Or would people show up at city council and say, oh no, no, no. We love that. They want to do that, but not here, not where I raise my family. So we really have to go to the heart and heal some of that. How do we have neighborhoods where everyone can belong, where we accept people in all of their differences. That's a precondition to be able to develop the kind of neighborhoods that I think are the solution to chronic homelessness.
mike rusch.:Yeah. I mean, Because you're pushing the boundaries of what we think that means in our own community. Could people, could you build that in my neighborhood today? No.'cause of the zoning laws have been created in a way that doesn't allow that. But that at the end of the day, I'm a neighbor that lives there, so I'm gonna have to start thinking differently about who can be my neighbor, as Mr. Rogers would say. Not to steal from that, but how does this work? What does this mean with supported neighborhoods? You're having people who have been in chronic homelessness going through a process to try to get them to a place where they can be housed and they need some extra support. How should we think about this differently as a, as a region?
solomon burchfield.:A little in the concrete terms. Like we need homes that people can pay like 250 or $300 a month to rent. And that's why it should prompt us to go as a bank gonna finance Solomon building homes at that rent rate. The answer is no.' cause you couldn't pay the debt that you borrowed to build with that kind of rent revenue. So we'll have to find ways to finance the construction of homes that are affordable. We'll have to be in someone's neighborhood. And I think that our cities belong to our neighbors without housing as much as they belong to you and me. And so my neighborhood and the library I go to and the grocery store that I ride my bike to we need to make sure that those quality of life services are just as available to the people that we end up helping regain housing in these really affordable homes. So we have to have kind of a, as a, at the social level, like we have to get reconciled to this idea of our community belongs to everybody. And so we need the land to be, we need to be legal to develop the solutions to homelessness in every neighborhood. We need neighbors that wanna welcome people. So the first neighborhood with support that we're developing now currently has eight people who live here. We have weekly home visits from our support team. We do social night where people can get to know each other and grill together and garden together. We're gonna add an outdoor movie screen and do some movies in the summer. The goal is to build some belonging amongst the, our people that we support, but also connected to the neighbors that have already lived in this neighborhood for years. And so it will take a commitment on all of our parts to make space for new people in our neighborhood to get educated about mental health and be able to be good neighbors that don't just call the police on folks that may need some support from time to time. And it'll take some intentional effort because part of our history is that we are naturally segregated from each other. And you think economically we live in different neighborhoods. We worship in different communities, we eat at different restaurants, we vacation to different spots. We are economically stratified already. And so much of our social systems pre segregate all of us. And it takes a really intentional effort to be the fish swimming against the stream. If we're gonna heal some of that, we actually have to reach out and say, it's gonna be okay. Even if it concerns me, I'm gonna be okay with an affordable housing development going up near me and my family, or I'm going to do some work to learn about what are the support needs for folks recovering from homelessness and, and that way I don't freak out as much if someone's having a mental health episode. I instead be the kind of neighbor that would reach out for help or be a, be an assistance to that person. So anyway, I ran some directions on that, but
mike rusch.:So walk me through kind of the lifecycle, for lack of better words, of someone who is experiencing chronic homelessness today to what this supported housing, new situation looks like. What does that look like and what's in? I think it would help me anyway, understand a little bit.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah.
mike rusch.:And maybe lower, I, I don't know, anxiety or worry or just, which is probably based in just my own ignorance or un not knowing. What that process looks like. Walk us through what New Beginnings does from I guess from beginning to end.
solomon burchfield.:Okay. This may take just a minute, but
mike rusch.:it's okay. Go for it.
solomon burchfield.:So we'll call this guy Greg, and Greg, when you and I meet him, has been chronically homeless in northwest Arkansas. But rewind his story a little bit, probably Greg grew up in a family that was poor, that was economically struggling, didn't have the best opportunities through life. There may have been some childhood trauma in Greg's life, and that's part of how he ended up developing the coping skills that he developed through his teenage years. Got in trouble in school. Ended up, going to juvenile detention for acting out at school. This person may have ended up leaning on drugs as a way to cope with stresses in life. And over time got alienated from his family. They gave him a second chance. They gave him a third chance. Finally they had to ride him off. And so he's gotten alienated from his family over the years and he's working a job and he gets divorced and that sends him on a downward spiral. And he's relapses, he's back on his old habits of using drugs to deal with stress. So he loses the job and he is lost the wife, and he's given up on life. And so he walks out from his home that he can't afford. The apartment he was renting. For somebody with mental health needs or substance use addiction, sometimes they're the hardest people to help if they walk into a food pantry or a shelter and they get called that the difficult to serve. And so sometimes they get banned or they, or the programs that are on offer just don't fit what their needs are. So they end up, they stop going, they isolate themselves. They end up finding other long-term homeless people and camping together. And so they kinda take care of things with each other. They, one person guards the camp overnight. One person goes in and picks up meals at the soup kitchen and brings 'em back. And they really become acclimated to life without housing isolated from the rest of the community. They deal with crime differently. They deal with health issues differently, and they really often don't think that housing is in their future. Where New Beginnings tries to step in is first developing real relationships with people in those circumstances, to build enough trust, to have someone allow you to help them. We actually did a lot of meetings with long-term unsheltered folks before we built New Beginnings, and they helped us come up with the ideas that they said would work. They want a community, but they don't want to be controlled. So I wanna be able to come and go when I need to, but I wanna have a fence around it so the wrong people don't come in and make live hell for us who are staying inside. We want to have more privacy. They told us they, we want to have, be empowered to, to take care of ourselves instead of it always being someone hands you food or hands you a, does your laundry for you or what have you. So we really designed some of those features into new beginnings. We have a neighborhood of cabins where there's 20 individual cabins. Each person has their own private space. We have a community building that has the kitchen and the bathrooms, showers, the laundromat so they can get all the things taken care of that they need to, the people that stay there actually run the place. So people are very capable of running their own lives. We always say we aren't gonna do anything for someone. We want to do things with someone. So the individual staying there elect a leadership council. We got three people on the leadership council. Each leader is in charge of a team. One team's over kitchen, one team's over the bathrooms, one team's over recycling and trash. And in the course of running the place, people are working on the life skills that they need to get readjusted to living in a real home. I've been camping for 10 years, dealing with things my own way. Now I'm practicing being a neighbor. I'm getting along with that guy that's really hard to deal with. Next door, I'm following the quiet hours rule about things. Gotta be quiet at 10 o'clock. I'm showing up at my appointment. I said I'd, volunteer at the front desk and talk to people as they come in. So I'm managing my time differently. So there's a skill building effect for staying at the New Beginnings neighborhood. And then our support team meets with each person each week. And so the person when they first come in, often they're struggling with everything, right? They don't, I don't have an id, I don't have health insurance. I haven't seen a doctor in 15 years. I used to have this medication I was on, but I stopped taking it 12 years ago. I've got four charges with the court for trespassing and littering. And so they meet with our support team each week to start identifying the barriers that they need to overcome to regain housing. And maybe that's getting income through work. Maybe that's getting income through disability. It's definitely becoming consistent at following some basic rules, just like you would need to do in a lease if you're renting. It definitely involves getting along with my neighbors ' cause that's gonna be needed as I move out into a home. In mainstream society. So it's a transitional period where I'm practicing becoming a neighbor again instead of the life I've adapted to on the streets for many years. And then what we found at New Beginnings was, here's a bunch of people who are ready. They've got some income, they can be a good neighbor, they're ready to move out into homes of their own. And where do they go? Especially if you earn 900 bucks a month on disability check, where are you gonna rent? In Northwest Arkansas. And so that's what motivated our organization to say, how can we follow people into permanent housing and increase the capacity. There are some opportunities out there, there's just not enough. And so we set our minds to how do we offer permanent housing to people who are ready to move on. Part of it is options that are scattered throughout the community. Some people want to live in a neighborhood where no one else knows I've been homeless. But a lot of people really thrive on living next to people that have some shared background that may also have support needs that we've gotten to know each other, staying at New beginnings, and now we'd really like to continue that and live in a neighborhood with people that I know and trust. So that motivated us to look for opportunities to pioneer this kind of neighborhood with support. That can be a long-term living situation. It's not a transitional thing that someone has to get rehabilitated and move out from. Anyone can choose to leave when they want to, but it's a place that someone can actually live and belong and rebuild their life. They're paying rent, they're following their lease, they're getting along with their neighbors, and they're receiving support to figure out how are they gonna contribute back? How are they gonna live a life with purpose? And that's what we have seen in this kind of proof of concept that we're developing now, is we've seen people thrive as long as they have affordable homes and support and community. And our vision is to complete developing that neighborhood so that we can add in the cottages where intentional neighbors live. We'd like to double how many folks with homeless backgrounds can live here in this neighborhood on Spruce Street. And then we'd like to invite in churches and community groups that want to be part of building community with our neighbors, recovering from homelessness, and show that it takes all of us, the ingredients are here, but we've gotta organize together and wrap around these people and build a life together. Once we can show everyone it works, like people are healthy and happy and thriving, they're not falling back into homelessness, then we really want to pour gasoline on this model. We want to plant a neighborhood in every city in northwest Arkansas and keep growing this type of intervention until we can go from 177 chronically homeless people in that survey down to zero.
mike rusch.:I, as I listened to you, this falls outside of what many would define as the community that they're familiar with. This is a different way of thinking about what community looks like. It's a different way of really trying to understand who my neighbor is and what does it mean to belong to a place and to be intentional with those that are around me live around me or are a part of my community. Where do we start to reimagine or to reset how we think about what community can look like?
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. I think it helps to become face to face with people. If I've found that my life is a little isolated from all these problems that I'm sharing about we need to make some intentional choices to go and meet people. Whether you're volunteering at Salvation Army, at Seven Hills, at New Beginnings, whether you're showing up at our Laundry love event and helping do laundry, once a month you will meet people. And if you bring in openness and a friendliness, you'll end up finding a friend. You'll find people that make you laugh and you'll start to empathize with what they're struggling with. And hopefully that will help you activate that. That shift towards how do I get, how do I in my personal life, but then also in my public roles, like my political life, how do I make sure that our community is making planning decisions and investing the money that is needed to be invested, that make a community where everyone can belong.
mike rusch.:I think you're going there, but maybe I'll ask you to keep going because it is how we think about who our neighbors are, how we build our communities, but this is gonna require some structural change within how we think about zoning laws. Yeah. And how we think about housing types and like, how do we start to think about that in a new way and in a way that people can embrace and not be afraid of.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah, I think there's like the two hands connected there of one. Is that the personal piece for me, if I'm seeing, I like my community to be different, I'm seeing some a pain point in the community. It does start, I think, with me finding some way to have more personal exposure and learn from the people who are struggling and marginalized in our community. And then that can't be enough. So to keep this through line of neighborliness, like I want to love my neighbor in a personal way, but also in a political way. I want to see my community get assertive about getting more housing built. And I want to see my leaders ask us if we would like to use tax money to fund public transportation. And I want to see how do I love my neighbor through my city council, through our tax dollars. Like we need to hit both of those sides where I'm personally connected and living in a way that has space for people who are different than me or recovering from stuff that I don't understand. And there's an energy in our cities and counties and in leadership roles throughout the community to become the solution and to shift things and to not accidentally even become part of resistance to that, to hear that there's a new apartment complex coming up and immediately rushing to how it affects me personally and the property values that I'm worried about for my home. Like maybe that's not the top priority. Maybe to be a neighbor. I should be excited to see that there's more places for people to live and that's what's gonna allow our community to be diverse. And it's gonna allow people in our community that are struggling to get real opportunities, like what we've had. So I think there's that personal and that political line that we need to keep together.
mike rusch.:Part of the hard part of this is we live in an economic model where so much of someone's household wealth is built into their home. And so that becomes, in many ways, like an investment strategy of that that we count on or that many people count on growing to provide some sort of value, right? And we could go into all the history of how that emerged and the problems with that and how not everybody gets to share within that hope but I think when we start thinking about different models for neighborhoods, you're gonna run smack into this resistance maybe for all the wrong reasons and I don't know how we solve that problem, if I'm honest.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. Probably what's part of, at the root of this not in my backyard movement is people that even if they want to be loving, kind people and understand themselves that way, they nevertheless, at a root level, understand their self-interest. And if you're telling me you're gonna build an apartment complex in my neighborhood that jeopardizes how my home value's gonna appreciate in the coming years, and that appreciation is what I'm counting on for retirement. I'm planning to sell this house and make a mint to get ready for my, being an older person. If I'm self interested enough, which we all are. I'm gonna have this visceral reaction to building homes for people with lower incomes next door. And we need to name that I think that's a healthy thing to face and struggle with and go, what are really my values? What kind of community am I really committed to? A lot in our economic system is gonna teach me to prioritize that economic self-interest. And if that's so then okay, I'll be on the other side of the fence organizing against you.
mike rusch.:Yeah. But that becomes a barrier whether sometimes we're even aware of it or not though.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah.
mike rusch.:I, and I don't we're, so to solve homelessness and to create more affordable housing, like there's not a solution for what we think about an economic model. This is the economic model that we're in. Just point blank and like it's really hard to be in it and not participate in it or need it to be able to, hopefully provide stability for yourself. So I think, I don't know if you've got an idea about how solve that I'd be great, but I do recognize, 'cause I've seen this happen in my own neighborhood where I live in, single family homes and people want to consolidate lots and put up town homes and and there's just an automatic resistance to it because of the fear of what that's gonna do to the economic model or viability of the neighborhood. And so we start arguing about zoning conversations. And we're just anti any change whatsoever without really engaging in a thoughtful dialogue about what does it mean to be a neighbor? What does it mean to be a community? And is my sense of net worth or my future plans, is it dependent upon a community and the way they care for me, or what they can produce for me? I think these are the things that I start to,
solomon burchfield.:yeah.
mike rusch.:I could wait I start to ruminate about.
solomon burchfield.:Right? Yeah. No, I think you're ruminating on the right things. What if it's not in my financial self-interest to create a community where everyone belongs? What if?
mike rusch.:Yeah.
solomon burchfield.:Now what, in a sense we. Have to defect from some of the values of the dominant culture in order to make space for everyone. I think the same rule applies for how we think about our 401Ks. The policies that would help create more equality and universal wellbeing in our country may hit certain 401ks and if. I prioritize the values of that dominant system that says human beings have value based on how much they produce or how much they consume. If you're really productive or if you have a big consumer in a market system, then you're really valuable. And if you're someone that has been homeless for 15 years and eats at food pantries and qualifies for disability, and you're not gonna be. Producing the next factory and you're not gonna be buying the next boat. What's your value? And that comes back to having to defect from some of the values in this dominant culture. If we're really gonna have a society that includes everyone, there's something better than the limitations capitalism imposes on us. Are we still thinking through? What are, how do you describe that Better system? Yeah, I think there's a lot of good conversation to be had there to transcend the limitations that capitalism imposes on us. But I hope at the values level that is something that we are reckoning with. We can't get trapped in the anthropology that capitalism offers us and make a world where everyone can belong. We won't.
mike rusch.:I think back, for those that have been listening for a while, they know they. We listen to Alyssa Horner at the beginning of season two, and it's one of, one of the things was this idea that within our society, we just, one of the things that we're constrained by is this idea of a limited way of being. And that we have this idea that this, it, like we, we don't use our imagination to think about how this could be done differently. So we become these willing or unwilling, if you will, participants in that system. And I think about it, as I think close to home, there's so much focus on how do we create workforce housing. And which, not a fan of the label. I think people are, work more, are worth more than just a workforce. But it's in need of the labor market, unfortunately, I think we live in a world sometimes where someone who's homeless there's probably a stereotype that they're not gonna be part of that labor market and or they can't be, or whatever the limitations may be. And so therefore they're not gonna serve in that production that you're talking about. And I guess we could probably go through this a lot, but. I think this is going to be, and is something that I've seen actively work itself out in our community and I wish I had solutions for it, but I think maybe it begins with just a conversation. And to your point, acknowledging. We're naming it as a problem. So we can get some, yeah, broader thinking around it,
solomon burchfield.:I guess. Yeah. So we can struggle with ourselves on, that's a good word. And in that same vein, one of the reasons that seldom talked about for why there's a affordable housing and homelessness crisis is that the housing in America is very financialized. It is an investment vehicle. And so I can choose to invest my money in a business or in building homes, but in both cases, I'm trying to maximize the return on my investment. And if that's the system behind generating housing in the society you're gonna see certain outcomes. If you take a different approach. And there's a couple countries around the world that do. That think about housing more in line with how we think about public schools or libraries or nonprofit hospitals or community colleges where we take a collective interest in making sure that we are providing the basic needs for people universally. Then it would result in investments in housing that may not be the most profitable vehicle for investors for the permanent capital class. It instead would be produced through the same revenue strategies that we create community colleges , hospitals and public schools with, and what we would see is we are making sure that human needs are met universally because having housing determines so much of how healthy your future is physically, mentally, socially. Having housing is a primary social driver of health, we need to find a way to realize that in our life together, not just talk about it like how it's a social pro, social determinant of health. It has to work its way into our budgets and our policies and how we look at the system that's making housing, and how do we introduce new strategies that will produce housing, not based on are you a valuable member of the workforce? Are you a consumer that is willing to pay a price for this home I built that returns me a great profit on my investment but rather thinks about how does housing meet basic human needs and contribute to health?
mike rusch.:Yeah. Okay., I think these are conversations that are needed and necessary because , and my hope would be that it broadens our way of thinking, or at least it lets us understand sometimes the constraints that we have placed ourselves in and that we don't have a limited way of being and that there are other ways to think about this. But unfortunately part of, it's not usually part of our community dialogue or we don't feel empowered to change the institutions that we've created to serve us. Which I think we have the ability to do that. But it's gonna create a, a situation where we have to have a better imagination.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The imagination is always the leader. I love the quote from uh, Shelling that said uh, artists are the unacknowledged legislators of our time because artists can imagine a alternative reality. And then it's up to us to live into what version of the future do we want. And I look back at, the public housing that we have in northwest Arkansas was all built back in the 1970s and looks like it hasn't been maintained well.'cause it. Hasn't been funded to be maintained well, but what if we had actually built new. s ocial housing, public housing, every four years. If a Hillcrest Towers, that's by the library in Fayetteville. What if we had built one of those every five years for the last 40 years? Would that be different today of how many people were struggling with affordable housing or homelessness over time policy investments like that are what, and no one's making a million dollars off of the people living in public housing, but it's people that are able to be healthy and contribute to our community. They're not camping out in front of businesses and holding signs at the stoplights. And so is housing the kind of thing that we want to guarantee across the board? And if so. What kind of shift in our values does that require?
mike rusch.:I'm gonna refrain from answering that.'Cause I'm gonna have to do some soul work there to really think through the layers of that. And which is true of probably all of us, but yeah. And I'm just curious, I know you're still early but you're doing very practical things at this point. Like where are you seeing some successes here? Are there certain municipalities that are like interested or leaning in or do you feel like, do you feel like we've got that political will to start to see some of these things really come alive?
solomon burchfield.:On some things. I think the land use piece has gotten a lot of attention, the rezoning, and I think that's a big one. So I hope that we continue that push and we see every city get serious about rezoning so that we can get more housing and that will take time. But those are primary driver decisions. So I see some movement on that. I don't yet see a lot of energy around the programmatic as opposed to the policy wise. So we need to actually fund the programs that help people regain housing. Fayetteville is the only city in northwest Arkansas that is holding grants from HUD that allows for there to be supportive housing in the city. Fayetteville has been assertive about dedicating general fund money to help nonprofits who are assisting neighbors to get back into housing. And there have been. Smaller efforts in other cities, like in Springdale and Rogers and Bentonville, but to see it as a priority, no, I don't think that I have seen leadership really get energetic about what is a whole of government response, policies that need to change, development staff that need to be hired, and programs that need to be funded, that are targeted at where the pain is the worst, and implementing those best practice solutions that help people regain housing.
mike rusch.:I'm curious, Solomon, as I think about this I guess my question is, what am I missing out on by not seeing these kinds of programs in my community or promoting them, or at least asking the questions about how they may become real.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. What am I missing out on? I'm missing out on meeting people like Mark who walked the pilgrimage with us. Yeah. And said that he has never felt more alive. Getting to lead the pilgrimage each day. Getting to know him would make your life better. And I've known Mark for many years when he slept behind dumpsters and in his car and was not his best self. Today I know Mark as someone that lives in a home. He has a roommate he is making a chess set. He's got a really artistic mind. He collects coins and would love to show you his coin collection. We're missing out on living with Mark. Instead of seeing Mark holding a sign at a stoplight and judging him for, I bet he didn't make good decisions or whatnot. We're getting to experience the best of Mark when he's healthy and happy and fulfilled, and it actually makes our life better too to have space for all kinds of diverse backgrounds in our friends circle and in our neighborhood. It makes our life better when everyone has what everyone needs. That is what's the most counter-cultural for us? Our culture atomizes us. You're supposed to be the happiest when you live as a single individual, isolated, often from family, isolated from a lot of community belonging. I'm staring in my phone. I live alone. Everyone has to buy and acquire all the things you need for yourself. And the most countercultural thing you can do is to step out of that and say, actually we need each other. I need you and you need me. We're at our best when we are in relationship and we're at our best when we have communities that support us and bring out the best in us. That is a really countercultural move. And so there's a almost narrative layer in this of what story do we live in as people, and therefore, what kind of way will we organize life together? What social systems, economics and politics and city planning, et cetera, are we excited about? Because if we live in this narrative of every individual for themselves, we end up accepting a whole bunch of suffering. We go those who can get it. If you can afford a home, you get a home. If you can afford a nicer home, you get a nicer home. And if you can't, that's just tough. You are on your own. So we really have to heal something like that in our core that our society has really socialized us into. If we want to have a better story about how we belong to each other and how we can get through the hard things in life, if we, if we build a community together.
mike rusch.:One thing that I just keeps coming back in my mind here we are in 2025, 2050, were estimated approximately to have a million people here, which is about almost 400,000 more than we have today. The need for housing within the current models is not going away. Without change, my assumption is that the rates of homelessness that we see are only going to increase and probably become more complex. I'm curious, as you look towards the future, what do we need to start to do now, or how do we start to get our head around this in a way that we don't end up in 2050 having the same conversation?
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. Are they saying that our region will double in population by 2050? if we don't change things, I think we can expect to see homelessness, growing more people in tents, on sidewalks, more people at stoplights and sitting in front of businesses struggling, hurting. We're gonna see more of that and we're gonna see what happens in other communities where ultimately people throw up their hands and give up. This is too big. There's thousands of people and some of 'em have really intense support needs. Look at the drug addiction, look at the mental health stuff, and they end up turning folks into pariahs instead of neighbors. They say, start blaming them like they're trying to ruin our parks. They're trying to ruin our trails. We see this in the national discourse of talking about this camp out in Utah. The, they're looking at building some camp outside of the city, some separate place to send all the homeless folks. It's an internment camp. That's the opposite of how do we make space for everyone in our community. If we do change things, if we start to say, Hey, we need to see by 2050, we need to start seeing a lot more multifamily, smaller homes that can be more affordable for people built in our communities. And we're gonna see buses able to provide transportation for the people that live in more dense areas. And we're gonna address the problems in the mental health care system so that when people have serious mental illness, it, their insurance pays for the support they need to be stable. If we make those kinds of choices and we see apartments that get built where 25% of the units are offered at lower rates, or 10% of the units are offered for people recovering from homelessness. If we start making those decisions and funding those solutions by 2050, we can see a place where it's a lower cost of living. It's a place where life is more affordable. My home and my transportation costs are doable. I don't have to see people sleeping in the dugouts at the park or groups of tents along the bike trail. Like we can have a community that is affordable for everyone. We can have a community abundant with affordable homes, and we can have neighborhoods where we're actually connected to each other in healthy ways. But it is gonna take a really intentional shift, both at the personal and at the social level to make that reality.
mike rusch.:For those that, this may be new information or a new way of thinking about it, like what practically could a next step look like? If someone cares about this, where do we start? What's a way that can make a difference in our own community? Even if we are not surrounded by maybe visible homelessness, but we know that we're working on the future problem of what zoning reform looks like, or policy, or just even starting to think differently about this I don't know, give us a place to start.
solomon burchfield.:It always helps to get personally familiar. So I say either volunteer somewhere or donate somewhere. Start to get involved in your own personal way, and then ask yourself, what does my community need to do about this problem that I'm closer to now? So if I'm giving five bucks to a guy at the stoplight, and I wonder is he just gonna go spend that on drugs? Now I need to ask myself, how easy is it in my community to access residential treatment? Is it free? Does it depend on insurance? Do you have to wait six weeks before you can get a bed in a treatment center? What needs to change at the community level to address the problem that I've encountered at a more personal level? So get involved personally and then ask those questions. I need to sit down with my city council member and tell 'em how my priorities have changed. I need to talk to my neighbors and say, we need to not speak out against development. We need to welcome that more homes are getting built so that everyone has housing in our community. And if you've done that, you're also welcome to donate to nonprofits who are currently supporting people living in the world that we do have. And if you really want to get more educated. I say, reach out to us and we will bring some people that have recovered from homelessness to come and visit with you and your community group. We'd love to be in churches Sunday morning. We'd love to be speaking at a business's monthly staff meeting. Like we'd like to come and share what it is like for someone to recover from chronic homelessness and let that be the place that you start.
mike rusch.:What you've laid out is is really practical way of getting really proximate to the needs that are here in a way that allows us to understand them, which is sometimes the hardest thing to do. Whether it be volunteering at New Beginnings or laundry love, or what that looks like. There are some real practical ways to start to interact in our community in a ways that, that allows you to learn a story and learn a name. And I think back to the, gosh, 20 years ago when we started doing Laundry Love in Fayetteville, that's still going on today. How much that shaped my understanding of what it means to see other people beyond a quote unquote label or condition. But to be able to see people for really the beauty that they hold intrinsically in who they are. And I would encourage everybody to find a real practical way to make sure that we are engaging personally in these issues. And obviously we can go to New Beginnings website to get more information about that. But I would like to know what keeps you awake at night in this space? What are the fears that you carry from your perspective about about this work or about the situation that we're dealing with here in northwest Arkansas around this? What are your fears for this?
solomon burchfield.:Yeah, I guess I would blend northwest Arkansas and our nation. My fear is that our unreasonable economic system further and further divides us. Between a very few people having more and more resources and power over the decisions made in our communities, and therefore more people struggling, keeping their head above water just to pay bills. And some people actually becoming destitute, living on the street with practically nothing. And then what happens from that? If we tolerate such an unreasonable economic system, we end up having to justify why that is. Okay. And that's when we begin to dehumanize the people who are struggling and we try to blame them more. They're immoral. They made bad choices. They need fixed, send them away. That's the scary thing to me. When we start dehumanizing the people that we. Share the image of God with. Yeah.
mike rusch.:Uh, the other side of that is this idea of community wholeness. We've been trying to carry that theme through every conversation that we've had. And so when I use that term wholeness, I'm curious what comes to mind and how you would think about wholeness in this space.
solomon burchfield.:Yeah. I've used the phrase a community where everyone belongs a couple times today. I think that is what wholeness means to me instead of community being where some people live in pockets over here and others are completely isolated from what it feels like to live in that pocket where we're separate along lines of economic, race, religion, where we don't see that we have a stake in each other's future, or we don't have space for people who are different than us in our lives. Having wholeness would mean that we've healed from some of those scar, some of those scars, and we've taken intentional efforts in our personal and political life to create a community where everyone has what they basically need. Not the best way to say that, but everyone has dignity and everyone has their human rights respected. Everyone has the chance to have housing and food and friends and I think I said it somewhere in there
mike rusch.:Solomon, I'm deeply grateful just to be able to sit down and hear a little bit more about the story of the work that you've been doing, your own story, the work in New beginnings. I love hearing the story of the walk. You're gonna do that next year is that?
solomon burchfield.:Definitely gonna do that next year. This was just like the small version Okay. To work out the kinks. So next year we will want a lot more people walking.
mike rusch.:Oh, okay. All right.
solomon burchfield.:We'll want more congregations to let us sleep in their gymnasium. Okay. We'll want to raise a lot more money to help build neighborhoods with support and community. So if you are a person or a business owner or a church leader and would like to be involved, we'd love to welcome you to the planning meetings in early 2026.
mike rusch.:I love that. Put me on the list. I would love to take this, and I think what I love so much about this is it's not just a bunch of people who have never experienced homelessness that are walking. Do. That is good. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing. You're doing this with people who have real life lessons to be able to teach you. And I think that's that sounds whole as you would talk and share that definition. So Solomon, thank you for the work you're doing. Thank you for the work of New Beginnings. It's really beautiful to see that in this world there are solutions to these problems that we can find. And I think the work that you guys have done has really pioneered and shown that what is possible in a way maybe that I've not seen before. And Soloman, thanks for sitting down. Thanks for the work you're doing. Really appreciate it.
solomon burchfield.:It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Mike.
mike rusch.:You bet.
solomon burchfield.:Well, a big thank you to Solomon for reminding us that homelessness, it's not really about homelessness at all. It's about housing as infrastructure, about community care as shared responsibility, about healthcare systems that either catch people or let them fall. It's about whether we're willing to create systems in northwest Arkansas that refuse to let people fall through the cracks. I truly appreciate Solomon's sharing of his own story, that memory combined with years of walking alongside some of our most chronically homeless neighbors, it has shaped his understanding that the people at the margins of our community, they aren't lacking in resilience or worth. They're just lacking access to the basic resources that allow all of us to belong. Through new beginnings, Solomon and the team, they're creating solutions that center dignity, that recognize housing as the foundation without which nothing else works. From micro shelter communities to medical respite programs to the mixed background neighborhood at Spruce Street, he's showing us what's possible when we choose to see homelessness as a solvable problem rather than an inevitable condition. But this conversation also confronts us with some uncomfortable truths that our current economic system is dividing us further between those who have resources and those who are struggling to survive. The "not in my backyard" perspective and exclusionary zoning while they're creating the very homelessness that we say we wanna solve. The fact that housing costs in our region have risen 71% while wages haven't kept pace. It's pushing more and more people to the edge of that circle that Solomon described further and further from access to what they need to survive. The question he leaves us with isn't whether we have the resources or the solutions. We do. The question is whether we have the collective will to implement them. Whether we're ready to build a northwest Arkansas where everyone belongs, let our communities reflect all people who live here, and uphold the belief that dignity isn't just a word, but a reality that we've chosen to create together. The work of building a more whole community, a more just community. A community where everyone has what they need to survive and to thrive. That work continues and it's work that requires all of us. So I wanna say thank you for listening and thank you for being the most important part of what our community is becoming. This is the underview, an exploration in the shaping of our place.
