David Bloom is a retired Baptist minister who headed the urban ministry of the Church Council of Greater Seattle (1978-1997). He fought bank redlining and the destruction of low-income housing. He was a founder of the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), Common Ground, and the Seattle Displacement Coalition.

I talked with Bloom recently about his life and work related to poverty and homelessness. He said, "Homelessness is simply a symptom of the larger systemic problems. It's the most dramatic manifestation of poverty." He quoted an early director of DESC as saying, "Homelessness in America is a growth industry." Bloom added, "And that was forty years ago, and nothing, nothing has turned that around. ... It's a growth industry because we don't care about poor people." I commented on the sense of despair in his voice. Contrary to common perception, despair is only opposed to one sense of hope, that of hopefulness. Despair is compatible with hoping. (That's from my own reflection and research into despair after our conversation. Cursory, at best, but it seems to be important to parse out for ourselves.) Bloom also said, "In the course of my activism, if there was any success, it was to ameliorate the pain, to mitigate problems. ... You and I both know that the problem of homelessness, lack of affordable housing (it's) now worse than it's ever been."

David Bloom recalled the leaders of Seattle calling for an effort to "house elephants in the zoo--don't we need housing for people?"