this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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Yes.
Yes, they might use it for drugs or alcohol, that's fine, it's as important as food sometimes.
Non profits and charities are great in theory, but most redirect less than 10% of what they receive towards the homeless look at LA's projects as the most glaring example, it "takes" 10 million+ per single housing unit for temporary housing. Not due to cost, but simply corruption at every level. From the non profits involved to the government itself.
Giving directly to the homeless skips all that.
Or to put it another way, you can't fix the problem or treat symptoms by continuing to give money to the cause of the problem. Giving directly at least treats the symptom.
this is a very very bad way to think about charitable giving. if your aim is to get as much money to solving homelessness as possible, you want advertising and marketing campaigns, you want efficiency (but people working on a problem is “overhead” whilst their solutions to make things cheaper mean less money that “makes it to” solving the problem at hand)
this video does an excellent job at describing the problem
https://youtu.be/bfAzi6D5FpM
That's nice, but there is no excuse for higher overhead than the amount of money actually spent on the problem, when the problem objectively can be solved by direct expenditure.
We know how to eliminate homelessness and the causes behind it even in a capitalist society. It doesn't cost a billion per 100 transitional housing units.
and that all requires organisation, and organisation isn’t free - in fact the structures required to organise things like that are more expensive than the cost actually spent on the problem … you don’t just up and build houses - that’s not how any of this works… ask anyone that’s built a house, and they’re not even doing it on a large scale where complexity goes up significantly, or dealing with distributing money in a manner that they have to makes sure their expenditures are justified rather than just being able to make decisions for themselves
The government should take care of it's people