California allocated 7 billion in 2022 to homelessness. There are 172,000 homeless in California. So that is $40,000 per homeless person, per year, in just state funds. Lot's of people keep a roof over their heads while making less money than that a year. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dude. There were 172,000 homeless people counted in one night.
Among those people, some were chronically homeless, which basically means mentally ill, disabled and/or addicted to something. Nobody is paying for housing and health care for these people for less than $40k per year.
The majority of those people, however, are not in that group. They also didn’t stay homeless all year - over the course of one year, many times that number were nearly homeless and got help from those funds to avoid it (pay back rent to avoid eviction, pay a deposit on a new place, etc), or used these funds for services while homeless - shelter, job training, medical care, assistance applying for disability payments, etc. Besides directly funding these services, the money was also spent in paying people to manage job training programs, run the shelters, be social workers who know how disability applications work, be social workers who have to find their homeless clients to tell them about work opportunities, track available spaces in rehab programs, ……………
Your attempted equivalency there is missing so much information that it is uselessly wrong.
I’m sure that the frontline workers for those organizations are earnest and genuine in their effort to help, but it’s also undoubtedly true that there’s a lot of money to be made (and it’s not really in the interest of those making the money to see the problem solved). If you search the term “homeless industrial complex”, you’ll see lots of hot takes on this. I’m not really endorsing any specific perspective, but I suspect that, as always, the truth is mixed and complex.
I said the truth is mixed and complex, not that it is "in the middle". The last few years provide examples of that which are as good as any other time.
"there's money to be made" is one of the weakest arguments there is. Capitalism makes it all about money! There's little doing without it.
This opinion can lead to some really ignorant statements (which I've heard before) :
- Full time jobs at charities? Money laundering for sure, they should reject their salary and starve.
- Investing in clean energy? A conspiracy, some people make money there.
- Recycling? People are paid to do it, it's a sham.
- Politician not forfeiting his salary? Corruption, they shouldn't make a living (or just take brides under the table).
"There's money to be made" isn't an argument. The world is not a binary, just because I am implying that some part of an industry is cronyism and grift, doesn't mean that I am asserting that it is 100% the case. It would be equally dumb to assert that it is 0%.
