Mildly Infuriating

It's people downvoting because "Religion = bad".

When in reality it should be "Religion = institutions and institutions can be either good or bad or mix of both."

Edit: Spelling

Knee jerk emotional voting. People don’t like seeing information that contradicts their deeply rooted beliefs, and downvoting is emotionally less costly than performing self-investigation.

Don’t get me wrong I would love if every problem in America could be patched by taxing some sussy non profits. But there’s no evidence for that.

At best it’s a comfy position that lets you “not my problem” your way through life, at worst it’s propganda to divert attention from the system of capital that is actually keeping the lower class unhoused and constantly struggling.

Not trying to be a smartass here, it’s genuinely just human nature to choose an emotionally efficient worldview. One-on-one conversations and counter propoganda are one solution to getting folks to see truth. It just takes energy.

Well I don't think you should go trying to disband someone's religion. In my area Churches usually donate people and money to organizations that help the homeless. I've worked in the soup kitchens serving hundreds

There are more empty homes in the US than homeless.

While churches taking extreme advantage of tax exemption is a concern, a concern that should be addressed, this situation pales in comparison to the hoarding, lobbying and zoning that goes into keeping the illusion that housing is a scarce resource up, and prices intentionally high.

Yeah the moral bit is we know people who hold housing for profit are douches. Churches are worse because they think they're doing the Lord's work and love talking about caring for people, but very few actually do any good.

If all churches were to be taxed, the estimated new income would be a paltry $2.4 billion yearly. source

While there is no consensus on the cost to end homelessness, estimates suggest the cost to be more than $300 billion.

So yeah. A bit silly, or at least not an “obvious solution.”

Edit: Meanwhile, taxing the rich and mega corporations is quite effective at retrieving this kind of cash, into the trillions. My personal position, if asked (though I want to be clear taxes were not the original topic at hand), is that taxing owners of multiple residential properties into unafordability is an important step toward ending homelessness.

tldr, The users downvoting this comment are letting their anti-religious sentiment cloud the noxious nature of late stage capitalism. In a world where human lives are less important than profit, for fucks sake the nonprofits are not the primary blame.

Correct. The “whatever reasons” you cite include chronic illness, mental illness, addiction, and abusive relationships. These are not unique to homelessness but are disproportionately prevalent in the population and therefore a key obstacle to overcome.

Addressing this takes labor and money to handle, a process that is often undertaken by nonprofits with funding from government, but also from charities and churches.

I don’t disagree with you per se? I simply haven’t seen empirical evidence to support this statement:

Christians in the US demonstrably [don’t] care about the poor that much these days.

Meanwhile the evidence that the ultra wealthy are actively screwing over the lower class piles up daily. If you have a citation for that thesis above I’d love to talk.

It's a red state blue state thing.

Red states (rural areas) deal with homelessness by buying the homeless bus tickets and sending them to metropolitan areas within blue states. Basically, red states create issues with homelessness because of their social policies, then externalize the consequences of those policies. This has been the case for decades. Before 2010 this was almost exclusively a red state issue. They would buy a homeless person a bus ticket to CA or NY and that was that. However, more recently some blue cities like Portland are trying the same strategy.

I thought this was common knowledge around homelessness in the US, that it was a blue state problem caused by red states.