We can’t just keep throwing money at help groups in hopes that will magically solve homelessness, we need to address the economic factors pushing people there, the high and ever increasing costs of living. From a ponzi scheme housing market to ever increasing groccery costs, people are being priced out of their apartments and homes.
We need to invest in affordable housing and transit, we need to break up the groccery cartels that keep getting away with price fixing, we need to slow immigration to ease the pressure on rental units, we need to rework the temporary foreign worker programs to be less exploitative which would open up more low skill jobs available to homeless populations.
But our governments don’t want to do any of that because it hurts their sweet sweet profits and the oligarch shareholders. Best they can offer is some cash for local outreach groups that often don’t have the resources to make meaningful change (at least compared to the reaources available to governments).
Solving a problem at its root cause is usually better than trying to fix the consequences of those causes. Just helping the homeless without addressing what pushes people to homelessness would be a never ending cycle of providing aid to new people pushed into homelessness
The truth is, this isn’t an accident. This is both a necessary consequence of, and a necessary precondition for, the vast wealth disparity that has been engineered into our society. We don’t change things not because we can’t, but because we don’t want to.
Regardless of whether or not we are addressing the root causes (which is not simply flipping a switch and might likely still not be successful) we still need to address the consequences, and we need more funding to do that. You have to live below the poverty line just to work in a career where you get to help people. I know many people with master’s degrees who are themselves struggling with food and housing insecurity because they have chosen to spend their lives trying to help people. And it’s not as though it’s due to an over abundance of other people competing with them in that space… Like teachers buying their own teaching supplies, social workers have to pick up a lot of slack out of their own pockets. People who want to help and are trained to help simply cannot afford to help. It’s a very bad situation.
I would really like to see the government taking on the responsibilities they shed to NGOs over the last three decades. How has this improved anything??
We can’t just keep throwing money at help groups in hopes that will magically solve homelessness, we need to address the economic factors pushing people there, the high and ever increasing costs of living. From a ponzi scheme housing market to ever increasing groccery costs, people are being priced out of their apartments and homes.
We need to invest in affordable housing and transit, we need to break up the groccery cartels that keep getting away with price fixing, we need to slow immigration to ease the pressure on rental units, we need to rework the temporary foreign worker programs to be less exploitative which would open up more low skill jobs available to homeless populations.
But our governments don’t want to do any of that because it hurts their sweet sweet profits and the oligarch shareholders. Best they can offer is some cash for local outreach groups that often don’t have the resources to make meaningful change (at least compared to the reaources available to governments).
I mean, we could try. We certainly aren’t providing adequate funding.
Solving a problem at its root cause is usually better than trying to fix the consequences of those causes. Just helping the homeless without addressing what pushes people to homelessness would be a never ending cycle of providing aid to new people pushed into homelessness
The truth is, this isn’t an accident. This is both a necessary consequence of, and a necessary precondition for, the vast wealth disparity that has been engineered into our society. We don’t change things not because we can’t, but because we don’t want to.
Regardless of whether or not we are addressing the root causes (which is not simply flipping a switch and might likely still not be successful) we still need to address the consequences, and we need more funding to do that. You have to live below the poverty line just to work in a career where you get to help people. I know many people with master’s degrees who are themselves struggling with food and housing insecurity because they have chosen to spend their lives trying to help people. And it’s not as though it’s due to an over abundance of other people competing with them in that space… Like teachers buying their own teaching supplies, social workers have to pick up a lot of slack out of their own pockets. People who want to help and are trained to help simply cannot afford to help. It’s a very bad situation.
I would really like to see the government taking on the responsibilities they shed to NGOs over the last three decades. How has this improved anything??