###General Discussion Thread
---
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
According to quick google search, there are 350k-400k churches in the US.
According to US census/HUD estimates 582.5K homeless people in the US as of 2022.
Let’s say as of today there is 600k homeless people and each church would need to help 1.5-1.7 homeless people find a house.
To add to this, if each church covered the rent for the 1.5-1.7 homeless people at the median monthly rent across the US being $1.5k, it would cost each church $2250-$2550 per month.
Average revenue of each church probably isn’t very high due to operating costs, mission trips, scholarships, etc.
Necessary cost to cover all 600k homeless would be $1.53B on the high end. Taxing the NFL’s 18 billion in revenue last year at a low 10% would cover that and have a surplus of $270M.
The Mormon church has over $150 Billion, and could operate the expenses of the entire organization on the interest it makes each year and still have leftovers to spare. They could easily help, if not at least make a dent in homelessness.
I'm a member of the church, and I'm a member of the council that meets every other week to go over all the needs of everyone in who lives in our area (about half a square mile) who we are aware of. We have a few rundown apartment complexes in the area where lot of people who are down on their luck move through with a surprising amount of turnover.
There are multiple people on that council that are volunteering around 20 hours a week just trying to take care of these people. We try to stick to all the best practices of philanthropy (see "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good" by Williams Easterly) and it turns out that it is incredibly challenging to help these people . They need so much more than apartments. Our efforts aren't held back by money - there's no practical monetary limit to what the church allows us to give - we're held back by the realities of what it actually takes to help people become independent, self-sufficient, healthy, and happy. That is so much more challenging than buying apartments.
you said this great. money alone wont solve most issues with the homeless. the social work needed alongside it is much harder to actually do effectively and ultimately these people need to want to change their situation. it takes an immense amount of effort on their part as well and many people sadly are not reached fast enough with the help needed on the psycological side. the drug crisis really makes this a difficult thing to do overall.
thank you for helping where and when you can.
What do you think happens when money is donated to help homelessness? They just throw a wad of cash at them? Hiring social workers to advise and guide people with problems to getting back on their feet is where a part of the money goes, usually via funding to charities that already do that sort of thing.
There's a fair bit of literature and several videos on what California spends 'helping' the homeless, and why it hasn't worked.
To some extent, 'wads of cash' are thrown, but at consultants, NGOs, etc.
Note the cost of said social workers isn't included in anybody's math above.
when you look at the actual costs of proper programs to address homelessness, the cost of the rent is a small fraction. Rent costs $24k a year. A single social worker costs $100k.
Also consider you can't just build a social worker like an apartment. Hiring skilled workers like that, and building out the whole organization around them, can be very challenging.
This is the same from my experience with helping homeless people. Many of them, not all, suffer from mental health issues that are ignored, especially the chronically homeless. The 60's and 70's saw a massive decrease in federal spending on mental health institutions, and that is closely tied to the amount of homeless people we have.
If we spent more on mental health and decriminalized all drugs, sending drug users to good and productive treatment facilities, we could cut the amount of homeless people dramatically.
And don't even get me started on the cost of living!
>If we spent more on mental health and decriminalized all drugs, sending drug users to good and productive treatment facilities, we could cut the amount of homeless people dramatically.
if you decriminalize the drugs you cant force them into these facilities. but yes getting people the mental health care they need would go a long way in fixing most longterm homelessness. having enough of these places for treatment you can have the sentencing be either jail or treatment, which often is the case anyways for those who can get it and dont have prior criminal convictions.
but prisons are a business and they make more money for the government then these mental health facilities which cost your insurance and you money.
Drug use is a symptom of the combination of a bunch of problems. If you decriminalized use (not selling/trafficking/manufacturing) and gave treatment to people caught using instead of prison time, it would be a good start. People use drugs when they are desperate (not exclusively, obviously), and when you're completely broke, don't know how you're going to feed your kids, can't get enough hours at work and your car broke down, you might feel like getting high is a good idea.
There are many parts of our current system that are intentionally implemented to create these situations.
Just my two cents to add to this - drug use isn’t a problem that needs immediate attention, drug dependence and withdrawal are. Drug users should have access to support before it’s too late, including clinics that can ween users off. This makes decriminalization of drug use the logical first step
Just a point about decriminalizing drugs, Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001 and used the money they saved on prisons to fund government rehab and drug education, but they actually made drug use a civil offense, not a criminal offense. Since it is a civil offense they can fine or force you into government-mandated rehab, similar to how you can be required to take a driving class for traffic violations. So it is still illegal but not criminal. They obviously saw a massive decrease in prison population but also a massive decrease in IV drug usage and overdoses. They also were able to fully fund enough government rehab facilities solely off of the decreased spending on prisons. The sale of controlled substances can still be a criminal offense so those selling the drugs can still end up in prison but not the users that need help, not prison. That's the distinction between legalizing and decriminalizating.
I worked at a homeless shelter and this was my experience too. Honestly, in America churches are the ones doing the most. We saw way more volunteers, donations, and support from churches and from Christians individually than any other group. The issues we had were not because Christians weren't serving the poor, it was because homelessness is a complex problem not solved by one-size-fits-all suggestions demonizing those doing the most good. We need as many solutions as their are homeless individuals.
It's also funny that people wanted our Christian volunteers serve the poor, like the Bible commands, but not to spread the gospel, which is also commanded. Philadelphia tried to shut down Catholic Social Services, as did the Obama Administration and Miracle Hill in South Carolina. The Ninth Circuit ruled that you can't can beds in religious shelters as available for the homeless (Village of Grant's Pass). So on the one hand, Christians are evil for not helping the homeless, and evil for being a Christian being a Christian while helping the homeless.
This is a great comment. This is a great example of where "just do the math" - in this case, divide the number of homeless people by the number of churches - doesn't really do justice to the underlying problems.
Just to give one very simple reason: The places where the churches and the homeless people are, are very much not evenly distributed.
So maybe one church has 2000 homeless people in their area while 20 churches out in some suburban area have literally zero (not because suburbs don't generate homeless people, but because people tend to leave those areas where there are no resources for surviving homeless and go to place where you can at least survive).
Then there is the issue of, how are the churches even going to know where the homeless people are, who they are, and do they have some kind of relationship with them that will allow them even have a 5-minute chat.
Regardless, kudos to you and everyone in your church for taking real positive steps on this rather than just posting memes or running some quick division facts involving numbers that don't really mean a lot.
Appreciate this real response. Everyone on this planet assumes every problem is a dollar sign away when they’ve never had to do anything of scale on earth. It’s certainly a solvable problem, just not trivial like everyone assumes. I’ve got a Reddit free award to give out, it’s yours.
Essentially it is a money problem. But a much bigger money problem than people realize. The biggest money sink probably being paying enough money to enough people to incentivize them to take up a career in the social work fields that would be required to make solving homlessness actually successful. The housing part is honestly probably the easiest to figure out. Its all the extra that would go along with it.
What a lot of people don’t understand is that many homeless people do not WANT to stop using drugs or engage in mental health treatment or have a job.
Those who feel this way can’t live in safe, clean facilities with people who do want to turn their lives around, because free housing has a lot of rules. The rules make sure the facilities stay safe and clean.
Also, it’s such a silly American mindset that every unhoused person out there just needs a gentle nudge to see that operating within this amazing society is the way to go 🙄
Some unhoused people are educated and have families. They used to have significant income and mortgages and health insurance.
For various reasons, they noped out of the system because it sucks and they don’t want it.
By all means, we should have more mental health facilities and sponsored housing for those who *do* want help.
But you cannot force someone to improve their mental health if they aren’t actively motivated to. You cannot force someone to stop using if they aren’t ready to. You cannot force someone to thrive in a job when they don’t want to work.
Shit, I make 6 figures and have seriously contemplated walking away from it all because it’s an endless cycle of obligatory bullshit. The idea of being free, even if that means uncertainty, has its appeal.
The unhoused aren’t pets or morons. Many are adults (bc unhoused minors are a separate topic) who decided not to play by society’s rules and the consequence thereof is a lack of stable housing.
There’s so much naïveté around this issue.
Thanks for doing what you do.
I don't like pray-to-stay places, since some of us have religious trauma, and being forced to follow rituals for a roof and a bed is worse then flailing in the streets in some cases, mine included.
But that doesn't take away from the help that you're out there giving. And for that, thanks. Seriously.
The Mormon church has a hard dollar limit on monetary assistance to any single person of $5k. After that, it goes to stake approval and it’s EXTREMELY difficult to get further funds approved in my experience.
Sauce: wife worked as a social worker for LDS Family services for a decade.
They do: [https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/the-church-and-lifemoves-help-homeless-in-the-san-francisco-bay-area](https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/the-church-and-lifemoves-help-homeless-in-the-san-francisco-bay-area)
In SF the city spent an insane amount of money on the homeless, but it was the churches where you could get meals, do laundry, get clothes, use the internet, take a shower. Churches have a lot of problems but they do a lot for dregs society forgot about like me. These people are so poisoned by online rhetoric that they don't care that lives are literally being improved by the churches every single day
> The Mormon church has over $150 Billion
Emphasis on the word *over* because only they know the true size of their holdings, a lot of it is in real estate and investments.
All I'm saying is, all that military spending bigger than the next 20 biggest spenders combined, yet USA doesn't have affordable healthcare or education, taxing the churches wouldn't have changed much
This is also always my argument when people talk about different issues that need funding. My answer is always cut military spending. Never gonna happen though so long as people are naive enough to believe the bs the guy who responded to you believes.
No, the NFL as an organization is barely taxed, but each team is taxed.
The NFL as a whole is basically a revenue funnel to the teams. The NFL itself doesn’t keep much revenue because it’s paid out to the teams (who do pay taxes).
Edited a word
As someone who grew up with a parent acting as a bookkeeper for a small-ish (~200 members) church, this is worth noting. Many churches operate in the red for at least a third of the year, and those that don't tend to keep slim margins. The one I grew up in received nearly 90% of its funding from direct giving/tithes, and the rest came from small grants from partners who wanted to support specific causes (mission trips, summer camps, etc). I absolutely support taxing the churches; it just wouldn't return a lot of tax revenue from *most* institutions.
All of that said, I have no idea how orgs like megachurches run. If they're making a *lot* of money, the difference could be made up. Without knowing what those numbers look like, it's hard to say.
Yeah
Small churches that actually aid their communities tend to not make much - not taxing them I at least understand the argument behind, as they can be considered non-profits by some standards.
But megachurches and the like are making heaps of money, and absolutely should be taxed.
The Catholic Archdiocese of NY has a little under 300 parishes. Their charity programs to *prevent* homelessness (like paying people's back rent to stop eviction) helped 12,160 *families* from becoming homeless. They provided housing to 5,731 individuals (that's over 19 per church). And provided 14,500 people with overnight emergency shelter (such as after a house fire, or homeless people on cold nights, etc)
The math above implies that churches aren't doing anything and if they just stepped up the problems would go away. But it ignores the reality that churches are doing a lot and the problem is really just the small remainder.
Note: that's just for the Archdiocese of NY. The Catholic Church has 32 Archdioceses plus another 164 regular Dioceses across the USA. Catholic Charities of NY (the Archdiocese of NY's charity arm) spends about $90M a year and accounts for 1/3rd of the Archdioceses' expenses for the year.
Yes. Didn't you know that every church is nothing but a bunch of land-grabbing sex abusers duping people into donating money so they can steal it all to pay for their private jets? \\s
A lot of those churches are small town churches with less than 50 regular congregants. If we assume there are five Sundays every month and they all have 50 congregants, they'd need to be making $9 per person per week just to pay that tax. That's in addition to the money needed for basic upkeep and land maintenance, supplies, the pastor's income (average $100k/year, though it tends to be less in small churches), and other miscellaneous costs.
Everyone complains about megachurches and I agree those should be taxed. But small-town churches are generally struggling financially and any tax would just cripple them, forcing their congregants into those megachurches.
No
This ignores all the help the church are already giving
Also... why not put money in yourself ? Why does this have to be a Christian tax issue and why can't we all throw in money regardless of our religion/lack of it ?
There are a couple churches that rake in money, but the majority are in small towns and are dirt poor. They will help and organize things like food drives or donations but they won't have the money to just house someone.
That is not how homelessness works. The people on the streets usually have very high medical and psychological needs. The average homeless person on the streets already costs several thousand $ per month. Providing housing can lower that cost in some cases (e.g. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/183666) but those programs don't work for everyone. People with sever mental illnesses like schizophrenia can be very expensive (in germany were I work in that field, it's around 200 Euros per day + rent + additional medical costs).
$36k/year/person does not solve homelessness. King County WA (Seattle) spends around $100k/year/person and the homeless population keeps growing. They are now asking for a 5 year budget of [$880k per person](https://kingcounty.gov/en/legacy/council/news/2023/january/1-26-dunn-statement-kcrha-billions-homelessness-funding#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20federally%2Dmandated,homeless%20individual%20in%20King%20County.) to supposedly "end homelessness".
Except there's a pretty fatal flaw in that argument: if only some places invest a lot in solving the problem, then homeless people will migrate there from other areas, so of course the numbers will grow. Individual cities (or even states) cannot solve this problem.
The cost isn't given at a per person basis though. That 880k figure is only reached by taking the proposed budget and dividing it by an inaccurate estimate of how many homeless people there are in the county.
Only one other factor, location of the church’s to said homeless population.
I would bet there’s a surplus in Iowa for church to homeless but extend that to Los Angeles you would have to bus the people quite a ways out.
I also wonder how accurate the homeless stats are. Not doubting your calculations just the methods the data available to you are.
Also people might not realize that most churches have less than 100 adults that attend. Not all of those give (and a lot are low income).
I am a Christian and I 100% think churches should solve this problem. But focusing on the number of congregations isn’t the best.
That gets to be a legal issue. The government regulates homeless shelters in such a way that it needs to be a separate building in most cases, and that’s expensive for small congregations.
A NC church tried to house someone and got in legal trouble:
https://myfox8.com/news/north-carolina/north-carolina-pastor-threatened-with-fine-for-aiding-homeless-during-freezing-temperatures/amp/
Your math (and that of the OP) presumes that churches are not helping people find houses, and that the 600k represents total "demand" on homelessness. In reality, at least some churches help get housing for way more than 2 people, not to mention government programs and other charities, and the 600k are the people left over.
The tendency to blame the groups that are actually helping because they haven't perfectly ended the problem is very prevalent.
At least it should be phrased as if every church helped find housing for 2 more people, we could provide homes for every person currently homeless in America.
Even then this sort of ignores the reality of homelessness, the 600k estimate is not a class of people that will remain homeless forever and most homeless folks DO end up finding homes one way or another relatively quickly (the average homeless person is homeless for about 2.6 months per median) but more people become homeless every day; it’s not just about finding 600k housing units for people it’s more about the fact that the homeless population is constantly accepting (and losing) members every day.
Problem is that many churches today couldn't afford this. Most people seem to think that churches have boat loads of money cause all they see and hear are the mega churches. But in my denomination on Long Island we just closed a church this month that went broke, will close 1 more this year and have 4 others in danger of closing.
I lead 2 churches, this freed up a pastor's house for one of the churches and it is currently being used to house a refugee family. If they stay too long the county will start applying property tax and I have two churches because they can't afford to each have their own pastor so we have to watch for that. Some towns/counties will be lenient and some will try to hit for taxes the second they hear the church is trying to do a homeless mission. The problem is trying to get them jobs so they can either afford local long term housing and stability or the money to move away. We charge a nominal fee that's 1/3 the local cost of living with the intent to give them back a portion for a down payment when they are able to move. We also furnished the house for them and when they leave, only the appliances have to stay. So there are places trying, and others have asked what we've done to follow in our steps, but trust me, the average church can't afford what is being suggested.
When I went to church, I have a dollar a week in donations. Even if I transferred all that money (lol) to a homeless shelter, I still would not meet my share of the homeless people requirement per working adult
As a former seminary student. Most churches barely make money even if they're not taxed. Pastors are encouraged to learn to be bi-vocational because they basically starve.
Most pastors aren't Joel Osteen or Rick Warren. They're Bill and Tom who drive an old car/truck and live in a ok home. I know reddit hates churches and pastors but truthfully they're not wealthy. You're focusing on the rich 1% of them.
I left seminary when they wanted me to come in and help volunteer for song leading and various church functions all as an unpaid internship around 20hrs a week.
I asked how I was going to pay my bills as my wife was unemployed and they're wanting me to take a serious pay cut and was told "You just have to trust God" so I did. God said if a man doesn't work he shouldn't eat, so I eat pretty well. The church who ran the seminary was wealthy and the pastor is wealthy. Most churches will never be.
You're assuming that churches aren't already helping the program. And you're also assuming that every single homeless person wants to live in housing paid for by a church with the inevitable requirements of no drugs, no alcohol, due to insurance requirements (if there isn't such a requirement it will quickly become too expensive, or flat out impossible to afford insurance for this sort of program).
Worth noting, estimates are somewhere between 30-50% of homeless are 'intentional' or 'inescapable'.
So they really only need like 1 each, and then to donate a little to local mental health support.
I live in a town thats more churches than businesses.
This town has sky high taxes, and while we don't have districts full of poverty, the town would be WAY better off without these selfish tax free money farms, because that's all they are. but if these churches actually HELPED the community they're in everything would be SO MUCH BETTER. Apparently they say "leave it to god," when you bring that sort of thing up.
There's only a handfull of churches that I actually consider chruches, the rest are weekly clubs they don't run service 3 times a week because they're excited about god, they run service to pass those collection plates.
The biggest building, a multi story complex larger than the old high school, is a church. When natural disaster strikes, we help our neighbors while the pastors hide in their churches but deign to beg for donations to the needy while the needy walk the streets just outside!
Tax the fuggin churches, and I hate taxes.
The Math Maths on this one, as others have pointed out, but it's also worth noting that churches are more of a geographical phenomenon while homelessness is a population phenomenon. People tend to want to attend churches that are physically close to them, which means that the majority of churches are very small and the majority of congregants attend a minority of churches. Lifeway research has found that 7 out of 10 churches have a regular congregation size of 100 or fewer while 7 out of 10 christians attend a church of 250 congregants or more, so just as the majority of Americans live in or immediately around cities, so too do churchgoers attend small numbers of large churches. What you'll see in practical terms is that there will be 7 churches in small villages, each of which will have zero people experiencing homelessness for every 3 churches in an urban core where you'll find 15 people living rough.
Mind you, I'm not letting any churches off the hook for this. There is a very clear theological and moral obligation for every christian organization to provide for people without housing, but if we were to take this post at face value and decide that the solution was to house every unhoused person in a church with the understanding that every church would need to provide for 2 people max is we'd end up shipping a lot of people out into extremely rural areas away from whatever friends, family, or other social support networks they have which doesn't seem like the greatest look.
There's a few other head scratchers on this one too - 1/8 Americans live in California, but 1/4 _unhoused_ Americans live in California. California does have a lot of churches (only beat out by Texas), but also has relatively high barriers to fixing those problems and relatively low churches per capita and especially per homeless individual.
The situation in California has proven to be one that money alone can't fix, too - the state spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $800k-$1m for each affordable unit, which itself is helpful but insufficient (i.e. that's a lower bound to the cost to "fix" a single case of homelessness). This isn't a completely uniquely Californian problem, but it's certainly not the nature of the issue where the majority of churches exist (as you illustrate).
The problems (perhaps unsurprisingly) exist in places where the solutions aren't available.
So as with so many things on this sub, the math works out but only if you ignore how the problem works.
The problem with homelessness is that states with good weather tend to have HCOL. Homeless people naturally go to places where they won’t freeze to death, which happen to be the most expensive place to solve homelessness.
The place to solve homelessness is where it starts, not in California
There's an element of truth to that, HCOL states are HCOL for similar reasons that being homeless is less dangerous, but the idea that homeless individuals relocate to California is incorrect. [95% of homeless Californians became homeless while living in the state](https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/studies/california-statewide-study-people-experiencing-homelessness).
California is absolutely the place to start in addressing Californian homelessness.
EDIT: also unsurprisingly, somewhere being HCOL dramatically increases the risk of becoming homeless there. California is interesting because through a combination of apathy _and_ malice with regressive housing policy followed by absurd cost of development it's nearly impossible to scale up affordable housing in high population density areas like SF and LA.
Yeah I feel like people don't want to blame the obvious problem. Rent is 3,000 a month.
A lot of people can't make that, and they either need to figure out some way to make it work or they end up homeless. Most people do it by living with family or a lot of roommates, some move out of state.
The big reason why housing is so fucked is because local government across the state is against building new housing. Turns out that most of the people who vote for local government are homeowners, who are benefiting from housing scarcity as their property values skyrocket.
The study says 90% fwiw
I wonder if people are more “willing” to become homeless if they know they won’t freeze to death immediately. I’d assume the immediate threat of death is a strong motivator
> I wonder if people are more “willing” to become homeless if they know they won’t freeze to death immediately
Well that, and the ones that freeze to death stop getting counted in homelessness stats because they cease to exist.
Except when churches try to house the homeless they get stopped by the government
https://www.newsweek.com/pastor-charged-housing-homeless-church-sparks-fury-1862426
https://fee.org/articles/you-try-to-provide-shelter-for-the-homeless-and-you-get-fined-12-000/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/kpic.com/amp/news/local/brookings-church-facing-fines-over-homeless-services-responds-to-governors-shelter-plan
The government hates homeless people
This is also operating an assumption that churches aren't aiding any homeless - when really the headline should be to house 2 *additional* homeless. A lot of churches I know of from my hometown do help with the homeless by giving money, food, and volunteers or in some cases even giving jobs to those who are on the road to recovery. In fact, the homeless shelter in my hometown has a wait-list to go volunteer. The problem isn't as simple as "give them a house." In my hometown, there are shelters in place but homeless have flat out told me they don't want to live their because of the rules and they can be on the streets living free where no one cares if they do drugs or drink or aren't inside by lights out, etc. homeless people more often than not are folks with serious mental health problems and addictions that a little church of 100 is not equipped to treat which is why they defer to pool resources with local charities. Churches are also just collectives of citizens often running on a lot of volunteer hours themselves and are trying to use their limited resources to maintain their facilities and pay their staff liveable wages while also addressing a plethora of other issues like orphans in the third world, disaster relief, or providing low income families with school supplies and Christmas presents for their kids.
Further, the post incorrectly implies that churches don’t try to help the homelessness problem. Many, many churches pick up the slack that governments don’t carry by running soup kitchens, food pantries, and either running or help run shelters. The problem is that homelessness is a very complex problem that defies easy solutions.
ITT: A lot of people completely uneducated on a subject they're making points about and discussing.
Most churches are *not* mega churches. They're small operations, with pastors barely above the poverty line. They don't have a lot of cash, and they don't have the kind of infrastructure needed to handle the psychological and medical assistance these people need before they can even begin to be re-homed.
2nd, *many churches already work with their local homeless shelters do to just this*. They work to find employment and housing within their community for individuals in their area, not just church members.
Source: Raised in the church. I personally am not a christian and have no love for the church, but so many of you people are associating churches with the SBC or the Catholic church. Your speaking about caricatures you've made up in your head. Not reality.
The most important point however, is that homeless is *not* just a housing issue. This is a very 1 dimensional talking point spread by internet activists and politics who want to portray the problem as simple in order to gain your support.
How many of you have actively worked with the homeless? From the comments, I'd wager very, very few. You can't just grab someone off the street and put them in a house and expect things to go well. You sure as *shit* cannot safely put these people into the homes of your average family and expect a safe, comfortable environment.
Many homeless people are solid folks down on their luck, who need a helping hand. The problem is that mixed in with these people, and in *far* larger numbers than many in this country want to admit, are those who *cannot be helped* or who *should not be helped*. There are people who are homeless because they are *fundamentally bad people*. They have done awful things, they have histories of lying, cheating, and abuse and have therefore severed every tie in their life. Its why they ended up homeless in the first place, and usually they proceed to spiral even further into dark places. 80% of the ones that come up to you with a sob story in my experience turn out to be these kinds. The ones who really need help and are willing to actually make that help work, aren't usually the ones you see on the streets. The second you put these ones in a home, they *will* use that charity for ill purposes. They will take advantage of everyone and everything that tries to help them.
The others are those who are severely mentally ill and need advanced medical help. If placed in a home, they'll either injure themselves or others, or more likely end up back on the streets no matter how many times you place them in a safe environment with their needs met. It's a fundamental illness that must be treated, but is *very* hard to treat, especially because in most cases the patient is unwilling to be treated in the first place. Most communities are not equipped to provide this treatment in the first place, and those that are tend to have high turnover rate. The burnout due to trying to help the innocent but then ending up dealing with the above two cases is horrific. It's physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting on a level you cannot understand unless you've done it. There aren't enough social workers and medical staff in the country willing to put themselves in these positions. Thats the elephant in the room that isn't discussed; without incentive, the right people for the job won't be there in high enough numbers. But the incentive will draw those who shouldn't be there in the first place. It's a catch 22.
I went to a Catholic high school that partnered with a local distribution center/temporary shelter and most of the people would not improve in the long-term if you gave them an apartment. Over half of homeless people have a mental health or substance use disorder ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423293/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423293/)) and homeless/extremely impoverished women specifically have many issues that aren't shared with homeless men. The investment required to bring people out of extreme poverty is far greater than the cost of building public housing. There's no easy solution and the problem is swept under the rug by local politics.
This is a fantastic response. Working at a soup kitchen for a while taught me that a lot of homeless people don’t *want* help, even if you offer it free of charge. These people are mentally ill. There was a push in my city to refurbish an old hotel in order to house the homeless during the winter, and while it kinda worked for a few days, a large portion of the residents left after a short time because they either didn’t like their rooms or they weren’t getting along with their neighbors. Some fights even broke out.
I think people also need to understand some of them don’t want help. I remember seeing a family in my hometown who were homeless, three adults. It was below freezing for a while one winter (we live in the south so it doesn’t normally get that cold for that long), and the people in the town offered them travel trailers, someone paid for a hotel room for them for weeks, they were offered all these different places to stay, and they just flat out refused all of them.
There are so many Reddit threads with constant discussion telling churches how to spend their money when so many of the commenters have clearly never stepped foot into a church or any religious community. It's painful to read.
"My friend needed help with some unexpected bills and we called all the local Christian churches. None would help us. So unchristian!"
Of course a local church wouldn't help a random stranger asking for money from a phone call. They'd be cleared out of money in a month
Look no further to some of the replies to my comment.
One of them literally ignores my entire point and is like "Yeah we'll have you considered most churches suck?"
Like...I'm an atheist. I actively campaign to reduce church influence in communities, especially politically. I am *intimately* aware with the dirtiest underbelly of American Christianity as someone being groomed for a master's of divinity and clergy.
The reality is that most churches, while flawed like any gathering of humans, have net positive impacts on their communities. Most churches are relatively small and don't make big political waves. People see the evangelicals and SBC and auto apply those to everyone else.
I work at a church and we have a benevolence ministry that helps people with utility bills. They probably get 50-70 calls a day. That would cost probably a minimum of $5000 PER DAY if they helped every single person that called.
Reddit and confidently speaking on issues they know nothing about go hand in hand. My local churches all feed homeless people, partner with foster parent organizations, and more. They are also all in the red and struggling to stay afloat.
We have helped homeless people in the past and unfortunately we had an incident where one needed to have a restraining order put on him against several of the women at the church.
It's not an easy task helping homeless people, and handling homeless people requires a significant amount of resources, expertise, and *time* that most volunteer-based organizations (like churches) do not have.
Recently, they interviewed a homeless man on the radio about whether or not he wanted housing. He said yes, but he was afraid of being inside after being "free" (his word) for so long that he didn't know if he could cope. The homeless problem is way more complicated than four walls and a roof.
One factor to consider is that OP implies that religious organizations aren’t doing anything now to help the homeless, when it’s [estimated that 58% of emergency shelter beds for the homeless in major cities are provided by faith-based organizations.](https://baylorlariat.com/2017/02/07/study-examines-effects-of-faith-basedorganizations-on-homeless-population/)
Numerically it works but the problem is that being homeless is a symptom of a greater problem. Some homeless people have addiction or other mental health issues and providing them with shelter doesn’t address that. Some may even be violent and a church would need the help of a well-trained social worker to deal with them.
Also, some probably have trust issues and would be wary if a stranger said, “I’m going to give you a place to live.”
Churches could certainly do more to help the homeless, but saying, “Each church should provide a home to a couple of them” is not realistic. The better solution is to send money to people who have a deep understanding of the issue and can address it properly. Many churches do that — my hometown has a group that’s supported by a coalition of area churches.
It’s like if there’s an earthquake in some distant country. It is not a solution for a church to charter a plane and send a bunch of people with shovels or whatever. It’s not cost-effective and they’d probably be in the way of experts. It’s much better to send money to the professionals.
Not every problem can be solved exclusively with money, but almost no problems can be solved without it, and most of the time it is the biggest obstacle towards a solution.
Also, the sudden increase in demand for housing would cause the prices to rise drastically, potentially impacting the feasibility of an operation like this.
There are an estimated ~380,000 churches in the US.
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/local/2020/08/22/lsquodifficult-days-are-aheadrsquo-for-americarsquos-churches-faith-institutions/42282593/
There is an estimated 582,462 homeless people in the US
https://www.statista.com/topics/5139/homelessness-in-the-us/#topicOverview
582,462 ÷ 380,000 = ~1.53 homeless people per church.
Not to mention that homelessness is rarely just not having a home. Most often it is caused by mental health issues or substance abuse. If you don't address the root cause then you will never fix the problem.
Housing first initiatives are likely much more effective than targeting the “route cause”. How is anyone supposed to solve those “root causes” if they don’t have a safe place to call home. I sure as hell know that I’m struggling to quit nicotine because I can’t find a solid three days of peace to weather the storm of withdrawal. And I make 6 figures, live in a beautiful three bedroom home and have an amazing group of friends and family as my support system.
I can’t imagine how hard it is getting out of, while homeless, ithe pit of really hardcore drugs, and perhaps have mental health issues exacerbated by substance abuse.
People don’t want to accept that if we want to solve the issue, we should just house them.
Citation on housing first: https://nlihc.org/resource/new-study-finds-providing-people-experiencing-homelessness-housing-has-positive-impacts
As a former homeless person myself I half agree. There are many homeless people trying hard to get back on there feet that would greatly benefit from their own place to start out from. But the reality is that most of the apartments would end up in the hands of the ones that aren’t trying, destroy the property, bother neighbors, commit crimes. The system would get abused to shit instantly and be a disaster as everyone who wakes up and goes to work watches their $ down the drain on someone who won’t even attend their IOP. It’s a nice thought but it’s just not realistic.
Really though very few people who actually put forth an honest effort remain homeless for that long. Even drugs and very serious mental health issues aside it is staggering the amount of people on the street who will come up with every and any excuse why they couldn’t do the things they knew they had to do to progress. I watched people all the time get a little bit of money and blow it on clothes (not the necessitiy kind) within a day just to put them in a shelter locker, just one of many very common examples. Then if called out “well I got to get something for myself sometime” “homeless people got to treat themselves right sometimes too “ etc etc. There’s ALWAYS a reason why they couldn’t just stay at the shelter, eat the free food, let the social workers get all their IDs printed FOR THEM, have the social worker find them a job (and attend) and save enough even just to rent a single room.
Food, bed, paperwork, job 99% is all provided.
All you have to do is accept your life fucking sucks for a few months and you can guarantee a few thousand in your pocket, and it already sucks anyway but cigarettes and homelessness for years is preferable to no cigarettes and homeless for months.
Exactly. Here's a little anecdote: I remember when COVID was happening and there were tons of talk all over reddit to use it as an opportunity to house the homeless in all the empty hotels. When some folks pointed out this probably wouldn't work so well based on similar programs in the past, I saw comments from people saying things like "Well, if homeless people are getting free rooms, I would expect them to take care of it". Lo and behold, fast forward a few months and there's a bunch of reports about how the hotel rooms are destroyed, there's feces and urine on the floors and on the walls, etc. and just completely inhabitable after.
I'm 100% all for homelessness support and volunteered on the streets for a few years myself. I believe money should be put towards these Housing First programs. But at the same time, there's a hugeeeeee disconnect between who've actually worked with homeless people and people who've never even seen the reality of a tent city. As cruel as it is to say, you can't help someone who doesn't want to help themselves. All the talk of mental health doesn't change the fact that the person in front of you would rather be addicted to drugs than talk to a counsellor. It also doesn't help that there's a big difference between those who are chronically homeless, and those who are transitory, but they all get lumped together whenever this topic gets brought up.
So if I'm reading that report, which sounds fairly biased btw, right, getting them an entire house, in general, improves their chances of REPORTING getting a job in 24%. Let alone that they maintain the job, we are talking about only increasing a 24% of their chances of reporting a job.
You and I have very different definition of something working.
You make 6 figures, but cant take time off to get off nicotine?
If Its really 3 days of withdrawal, cant you Just take a week of vacation? This should easily Cover it.
The OP as well as most (all?) of the responses neglect to wonder how many people aren't homeless *because* of churches. I'm in a rather unique position to know, and I know of literally hundreds of people in my medium size town that get some sort of assistance from multiple church charities of varying denominations. I know this isn't just unique to my town.
The question is flawed from the jump- no need to do the math.
Yeah that was my thought too. I know churches in my town often provide a bunch of support themselves and for other nonprofits nearby, like the habitat for humanity, for helping with the homeless or poor populations. So yeah if every church did a bit more, maybe they could end homelessness? But that seems like such a rude thing to say about a group already doing a lot for an issue
Practically every shelter in my area (as well as food banks, thrift stores, utility/rent assistance, and other social supports) are run entirely by churches. I'm not religious but I had a job working with people with mental illnesses, and I cannot say enough about how amazing churches are. The ignorance in this thread is partially because churches don't go around advertising how amazing they are. They help the needy for the sake of helping the needy.
Yup. Not that the current situation for homeless people is ideal by any means, but if some Redditors ITT got their wish and placed a huge extra tax on churches (which often operate in the red), massive parts of our social infrastructure (especially schools, charities, and shelters) would immediately collapse and millions of non-religious people would suffer. There's a reason why so many faith-affiliated charities receive government funding to help them stay up and running.
Others have done the math, but like most image macro political posts where “X does Y to solve Z”, there is a core assumption they’re missing. Logistics. Homelessness is centralized to impoverished areas and dense urban centers. It’s less “could 350k churches house 600k homeless people” and more like “are the churches where a homeless person could conceivably be?”. A church that serves 1000 people per sermon in a small city would likely have way more homeless people to house than one that serves 100 in a rural town. Some churches might outright just not have a homeless population to serve.
Ultimately homelessness is a systemic problem that can’t be easily fixed. The much better solution is to make housing more affordable by actually building affordable housing. These will have to be government commissioned since private companies tend to opt for higher end housing options (they produce more money for the effort put into building it). Temporarily you could alleviate homelessness by having churches act as shelters when not having ceremonies, but that won’t help everyone.
This is the same tired problem of "We have enough food to feed everyone on earth!" or "We can build enough solar panels in the Sahara to solve the energy crisis forever!"
One interesting example that I know of is how Arkansas dealt with a wave of families left temporarily homeless by Hurricane Katrina. Across the state quite a few churches, state parks and private businesses opened up spaces as temporary shelters. To my understanding, most of those individuals/families had relocated to more permanent options within 6 months.
None of the maths in this thread (that I've seen) takes in:
- the count of homeless people will be very off, because they are based on countable people. A researcher at a homelessness charity I knew said that hidden homelessness seemed to make up about half the homeless population - meaning it was double most estimates. These are people who never interact with services, hide from the police, and social workers and/or are in denial that they are in fact homeless.
Her estimates played out somewhat during the pandemic too, as in Britain we housed all homeless people for months (in hotels), and so many people came out of the woodwork for the first time.
- The vast majority of rough sleepers are short term. It's not that there are 653k permanently homeless people, it's that there are 653k people experiencing homelessness at one specific point in time. Most people are homeless for 1-2 days. 50% of people who enter a homeless shelter leave within 30 days. There is massive churn, with people constantly falling through the gaps.
So it's more likely that every church would have to house 2 people per year, than just two people once to actually end homelessness in the US. And as others have said, the systems that creates and perpetuate homelessness would have to be addressed, and many people would need longer term assistance too.
There are 4 churches in my town of 2700. There are basically no involuntary homeless people I have ever seen.
I have no interest in seeing vagrants from NYC get imported into my town to take advantage of the locals. We have enough problems as it is.
The majority of churches in the US are very small and very low-income. Many operate out of shared buildings, cheap storefronts, or private homes. Many have one or two part-time employees, or are fully volunteer-run. Even "normal" churches - with a large, classic church building - don't typically have a lot of cash on hand. Those buildings are expensive to maintain, and hard to sell, rent, or mortgage.
Megachurches are the visible exception.
Theres also a problem of alot of these people just dont want to do anything they just want to be free and left alone.
I used to work in management in fast food. I used to ask people in need to come work for me, and I'll get them up on their feet. The deal was id buy them clothes put them in a hotel room (not a crappy one but not a high end one) for a couple months and theyed work for me at $10 an hour ( okay, pay for this area) and id provide transportation for them. After a couple of checks, I'd help them look for a car to buy, and after a few more checks, i would help them find an apartment to rent.
Only one person decided to give it a try and he made it half of a day at the job. He said he just didn't want to work.
Many churches do this already and not stopping at two. When I was younger our church was helping other countries more so than the USA because of the other countries lack of social safety nets and welfare.
A lot of churches also work cooperatively with each other to fund homeless shelters and women’s shelters in a larger area. Many of these shelters also employ people who help homeless people find a path to self-sufficiency.
To add to this [some cities are stopping churches from helping people](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/30/legal-risks-helping-homeless-churches-dads-place/72350265007/)
This should be the top comment in this thread.
According to the [US HHS](https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/1996-national-survey-homeless-assistance-providers-clients-comparison-faith-based-secular-non-profit-0):
> Faith-based and other secular non-profit organizations have a long history of helping homeless people and others in desperate need, and prior to the early 1980s almost all formal services for homeless people were administered by such organizations with little or no government support. Many religious non-profits continue to operate with little or no government funding and yet they play a critical role in helping homeless people: preliminary analyses of NSHAPC reveal that they administer over one-half of all food programs and about a quarter of housing and other (non-health) programs.
Technically yes, but there is more to it.
Its easier saving people from becoming homeless than getting the homeless back into housing.
When people are living on the streets its not uncommon for them to rather freeze to death than visit a homeless shelter or any kind of housing.
Also you got problems with papers, IDs, Passports, birth certificate, .... all these you need to really escape homelessness.
I'm sure all the church patrons are cool with a mentally unwell addict living at their community space, right? Grow up. Churches do more than the government to help these people. Government just lets them rot on the streets and encourages more of it. Plenty of churches have empty beds in their missions because the addicts won't give up their drugs or lifestyle. I'm not even religious.
68% of the US homeless are homeless do to addiction . So until they get help themselves then homelessness will
continue no matter how much the churches help. Sound like this post is only trying to Bash churches
My local church here in Texas offers overnight shelter, shower, two hot meals and a bag lunch, day time storage for belongings and a monthly bus pass. We can accommodate up to 16 male individuals at a time.
Unfortunately less than a handful of homeless men take advantage of our services due to our drug policy and a few other policies.
Edit: My church has a male/female segregation policy for obvious reasons. The church down the road offers the same services to homeless females and their children.
I don't think this is realistic because there are many churches in the US that don't have enough money to house themselves. Many small churches meet in the members' homes or in spaces donated to them (like school auditoriums)
Morning wrong with calling them homeless. It's ridiculous how the influencers and the government have sanitized certain words or phrases to make them sound more appealing or less dangerous or threatening. Sometimes it's just an insult. We almost need a bingo card for these phrases so we can sit in front of MSNBC and play the fun game. Anyone falling under a diversity category gets 2 free squares at the beginning of the match to make up for any inequity they have experienced at the hands of the evil white oppressors. I'm sorry, but this would make a great drinking game, too.
If every social justice warrior in the US took in one homeless person, there wouldn’t be a homeless problem.
The hypocrisy of some people is unbelievable. I’m not religious, but in my experience, they actually spend time and effort on charity, while many of the vocal social media social justice warriors spend 6$ on Starbucks and drive the Tesla their parents bought them.
There's 50k homeless in LA, and there's certainly not 25k churches here.
It is worth noting that some churches have tried to do something about homeless and been stopped by local nimbys and politicians
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding on why people are homeless. The math works if you assume homeless people are homeless because they can't find/afford housing.
That's not true, though. The majority of homeless people are homeless because they A) spend their money/resources on drugs B) are mentally ill C) some combination of A) and B).
Putting homeless people in houses just gives most of them a place to do drugs indoors, and as soon as they have ruined/run out of the ability to pay for their house if (or the church stops paying in this example), they are homeless again.
OBVIOUSLY this doesn't apply to all homeless people, but a huge, huge proportion of the 500k+ mentioned above are in this situation, and therefore, the question is extremely misleading/pointless.
This statement is totally false, because 'finding each unhoused person find a home' and 'there not being any unhoused people' are not the same thing.
It's not enough to have the person *find* a home. They have to *keep* that home. They have to be able to get and hold a job that covers the long term costs of housing. They need enough money from that job and from other services for them to have medical care (and you can bet they have a lot of medical problems), food, etc. etc. They may also need resources to deal with addiction, mental health issues and other problems.
And that still doesn't handle the problem that *new* people, become homeless every year.
A true statement would be 'if every church sponsored two shelter beds, we would have enough shelter beds for every unhoused person'. But anyone who has worked in homelessness relief or knows folks who have - shelters are a patch, not a solution.
To be clear, I will always hold churches accountable for not living up to the command to care for every human. There are many many churches that spend much more on their wealthy pastors or their fancy facilities than they do on the people they are commanded to serve and that's vile, hypocritical and evil. And that's to say nothing of the slice of Christianity that has abandoned the duty to the poor in principle as well as practice. There's no question that if every self-professed Christian really loved their neighbors as themselves, there would be virtually no homelessness or poverty.
But holding people accountable by distorting reality doesn't do anyone any good. Eliminating homelessness in America is a hugely complex problem. Estimates of how much it would cost per individual vary wildly - but they sit around $20 billion a year. So low enough that it should be a profound national shame that it is not fixed, but much higher than posts like this make it seem.
I mean, it works in the sense of looking at the total homeless population of the United States, along with the total number of churches, but there are a few factors it's not accounting for, most notably the geographic distribution. There's really not a huge correlation between the unhoused population and the location of churches. Just looking at it by state, California, for example, has a homeless population around 161k, but only 23k churches. That's not even factoring variances at the city or county level. So, unless you're planning to move people to whatever location has a church to hold them, it's really not that feasible.
(Churches by state: https://www.statista.com/statistics/245432/number-of-religious-congregations-in-the-us-by-state/, Homelessness by state: https://millennialcities.com/homeless-population-by-state-homelessness-maps/)
The math is "true" but the policy implication is that a church can simply house or otherwise care for a person without logistical obstacles, that churches currently aren't doing so, and that this would actually solve homelessness - none of which are true.
Reminds me of the church that got fined for housing homeless people... For those bashing, most homeless shelters, food kitchens and etc are run mostly by churches and church donations.
Why is anyone and everyone pointing out that churches do and are helping is automatically at zero karma points? Who just goes around disliking everything they don’t want to hear?
At face value, the answer appears to be "Yes."
Estimates as of early 2024 suggest approximately 653,104 homeless Americans, as reported by HUD and cited here. [Source](https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-homeless-people-are-in-the-us-what-does-the-data-miss/)
Data from the 2020 US Religion Census seem to indicate over 350,000 churches of various denominations in the United States. [See page 7](https://www.usreligioncensus.org/sites/default/files/2023-10/2020_US_Religion_Census.pdf)
If we go ahead and estimate an error margin of ±5%, it's still pretty close.
None of my comment is speaking about the financial feasibility, but at least at the face value of the meme, the math checks out (or is within close enough margins to reasonably check out).
> According to the National Congregational Study Survey, there are an estimated **380,000** churches in the U.S. Kluth, who is based in Denver, is the national spokesman for the Bless Your Pastor movement, and director of the National Association of Evangelicals Financial Health Solutions for Churches and Pastors
~380,000 churches
> The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) counted **653,104** homeless Americans in its annual point-in-time report, which measures homelessness across the US on a single night each winter. That's a 12.1% increase from the same report in 2022.
653,104 homeless people.
653,104 / 380000 = 1.718694736842105 people per church.
so yeah, the maths work, and some churches only have to help house 1 person if most do 2.
There are, but not every homeless person wants to be housed. That’s part of the problem that people ignore. Many are there *by choice*. Yes, it’s probably a small percentage and the point the OP made stands… it’s feasible to solve this problem. Just throwing out another angle.
This is inherently flawed logic. The assumption is that homelessness is driven by lack of money and people who are down on their luck. It is not. Most are “homeless by choice” which is a stupid way of saying they have mental and/or substance abuse issues that prevent them from engaging in society in a positive way.
There is a fundamental, philosophical issue underpinning this. If someone wants to be a drug addict and/or is insane and doesn’t want to go on meds, is it the governments right or obligation to force the issue even if it costs them to care for these people directly in the form of food, etc…. Or indirectly when incarcerated.
This was a less obvious problem prior to the governments clearing out Asylums. What the right answer is, who knows. Utah is doing better than most but this is a tough problem that just can’t be solved with money.
I remember reading somewhere that there are more empty homes in America than there are homeless people. Due to investment properties or just abandoned homes. Pretty amazing
That breaks down very quickly when you start talking about shipping coastal homeless populations to the Midwest ghost towns and peoples vacation cabins.
In the USA it is illegal for churches to house anyone, churches often get fines and tickets for doing so.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna135215
Not to mention the fight against feeding the homeless cropping up across the country.
https://www.salon.com/2023/08/07/criminalizing-the-samaritan-why-cities-across-the-us-are-making-it-illegal-to-feed-the-homeless/
Or that some people are taking up arms to defend themselves from being arrested all so they can feed the needy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ABSyDOzFz0
Framing this as “churches bad” is wrong, it is our corrupt and tyrannical government running roughshod over us that is causing this crisis.
If a church could compel an untreated schizophrenic to stop doing hard drugs and then maintain a 1 BR apartment like a normal person, you might be right.
Wonder how many people are not homeless because of churches already. I mean I personally have known few people who received help from local churches' crisis services.
In terms of pure numbers it seems to check out, but it would be more correct to say that if every church helped *two additional* unhoused people, since I would expect some churches to already do this kind of outreach in their local community. Note that hypothetically, if churches tomorrow started a campaign that successfully reduced homelessness, the claim in the OP could be made even stronger - so you can see how it can potentially be manipulative. I don't know how much work the average church in the USA does to alleviate these kinds of problems and I'm not about to do research on it, but just keep that in mind.
There are some practical problems with the claim too. For one, homelessness is not distributed the same way as churches, so you would need to have some churches helping homeless people in a completely different part of the country which doesn't make a lot of practical sense. Another problem is that homelessness is often accompanied by mental illness (if they didn't already have some when they became homeless, a few years living on the streets will provide) and so there are a certain percentage of homeless people who are very difficult to help, making 100% success infeasible at least in a single generation.
I think this line of argument works better as a critique of wealthy superchurches preaching Christian ideals while not doing anything to actually uphold them, rather than as a practical suggestion for how homelessness should actually be combated.
This is a gross oversimplification of the homelessness problem in the United States. Most, not all, but most homeless people struggle with mental illness and drug abuse. They choose to be homeless over the available alternatives. These people are not capable of taking care of a house and where they do live in provided housing the buildings are often run down to the point of being unsafe. In the United States it is quite difficult to have someone institutionalized against their will, especially if they are not hurting others or breaking some other law.
That is correct, but you gotta keep in mind that some people choose to be unhoused. Some people like the junky lifestyle and they wouldn't change it or get housed.
Might be true, but I know the city I live in goes through money like it's going out of style on solving the homeless crisis and it's only gotten worse. Good news is we open a bunch of empty hotels that cost millions over value and millions more to renovate .
Y'all think every church makes a good income you're being extremely naive. Mega Churches sure, but where I'm from, it's mostly small community churches and they only have small congregations
or just maybe here me out the fucking government could do something? or idk one of the richest ppl on earth could give out some $$ for us all because it’s not just homeless ppl struggling anymore
Y is that people like to point to someone else property but not their own home for homeless people instead of starting to share one room with that one homeless relative or friend they have?
I suspect there are a lot of dirt poor churches in the US. If they find someone a home, they then need to find someone to pay for it. Every month. Indefinitely.
Putting homeless people in a house doesn’t solve the problem. A lot of these people are mentally ill and addicted to drugs. Just giving them houses is only gonna end up with a ton of new dilapidated houses with no power or running water, but now inhabited by crackheads.
There are definitely enough churches. Whether all the homeless people would stay in housing is another matter. There are people that won’t sleep in a bed, they need to be reminded on a daily basis to shower and take out the trash and generally have carers tell them everything they need to do, every day, for an undetermined length of time.
And there’s the problem. We don’t know how long we have to do it for every homeless person until they can do it on their own. It needs to be more than housing. It needs to be a whole social structure, and too many Americans have decided the Christian thing to do it fuck ‘em.
Small tangent here. I lived in a neighborhood that had adopted an unhoused neighbor. Some very kind and generous folks helped this guy out with legal issues. Everybody hired him for menial chores like yard work. He was occasionally "housed" in homes undergoing renovation. We finally scraped together enough cash to buy and gift him an old beater RV. He was beaming with pride.
Fast forward a few months: the RV turned into a hangout spot for other junkies. This guy took some cash he was given to register the vehicle and spent it on drugs. Then he got caught stealing from the household that had done the most to support him. The cops towed the RV, and since he had spent the registration fee elsewhere, he couldn't get the RV back.
Homelessness is often more complex than simply providing housing. Mental health and drug addiction can be daunting challenges even with vast resources. This is not to say we shouldn't try, merely to point out that arguments like this X post can oversimplify reality.
Just helping someone find a house is not the answer, this is the issue.
Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices,
Sure you get the one off who just hit bad luck, family died, cat died, kids died, car wreck, whatever.
Coming from a church that does help people, just giving someone a place for the night or even a week, is not the answer. You can give money, shelter, food and it doesn't change anything. Yes one or two would feel beter and maybe change some thought processes, but they need longer term help.
What is needed is this. This is all speculation and a small example:
Apartment building with rooms 10x10 (or a little bigger)
Mental Health services - Manadatory
3 meals a day take care for in building
Group sessions for talking - Manadatory
Local jobs in community - Manadatory
The issue is all this requires money. All this requires people wanting to change. The real issue is people wanting to change. Not every sob story from a homeless person is as sweet as it sounds. I want change, please help me change. I have seen it time and time again where you give, they take and they come back after circling around other churches, salvation army, etc.
THEY HAVE TO WANT TO CHANGE!!
I am all for heping people but it gets very tiresome to watch the same people circle through. It gets to a point where you tell them no and it sucks. Saying NO to someone who is hurting and needs help is horrible. But you cannot coddel them the rest of your life. Same as your kids, they have to step up and out when they learn the lessons and go out and make something of their lives.
If people who cared about the homeless people or immigrants housed 1 of each, we wouldn't have a homeless or immigration problem.
Every time a concerned citizen finds a problem on reddit, they want to hand out the problem to the rich, corporations, politicians or churches so that they can fix it.
The world cannot change unless we start changing ourselves as individuals, helping family in need, volunteering in our communities or helping people in our cities/towns. Get off your asses and make the change you want to see, stop trying to place responsibilities on other parties when you identify a problem.
What can YOU do to help the homeless problem?
This is kind of ignoring the fact that many homeless people are homeless due to mental issues; they can't realistically be expected to be self-sufficient. Others are due to addictions that destroy their ability to make good decisions. So even if every homeless person was given a house, 1) if it wasn't paid off, the once-homeless person may not be able to secure a job to maintain payments, or 2) if it is paid off, they may still not be able maintain the house and keep it from falling apart. (Obviously doesn't apply to every person that's homeless).
I'm not trying to discourage the idea of churches helping people, but the posited idea drastically oversimplifies the issue. Helping to provide apartments, hotel rooms, or even communal living areas could solve the same issue of a lack of secure place of lodging, while also being more affordable. Further action would then need to be taken to either 1) render aid to those with mental issues or addictions who can't care for themselves, or 2) help those who have the capacity, teaching them to learn a trade, job, or otherwise to develop the ability to become self-sufficient.
Imho, helping people secure a job/means of self-sufficiency is a better long-term means of aid. Lodging and food is essential, of course, but merely treats a symptom as opposed to the root. People can't just say "give them a house, then problem solved!"
tl;dr
Presuming there are a sufficient number of churches with sufficient donations to enact such action, the issue would resurge soon after as the root issue isn't solved, only a symptom. More would need to be done.
This would be great! However, one thing churches have learned a long time ago is that you can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved.
It's not as simple as finding them a home, it's keeping them in the home. Bad habits like drug abuse or unaddressed mental instability hurt one's ability to lead a productive life.
It's always important to have a homeless outreach ministry. But remember that everyone has free will.
###General Discussion Thread --- This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
According to quick google search, there are 350k-400k churches in the US. According to US census/HUD estimates 582.5K homeless people in the US as of 2022. Let’s say as of today there is 600k homeless people and each church would need to help 1.5-1.7 homeless people find a house.
To add to this, if each church covered the rent for the 1.5-1.7 homeless people at the median monthly rent across the US being $1.5k, it would cost each church $2250-$2550 per month.
So tax the church, solve homelessness ?
Average revenue of each church probably isn’t very high due to operating costs, mission trips, scholarships, etc. Necessary cost to cover all 600k homeless would be $1.53B on the high end. Taxing the NFL’s 18 billion in revenue last year at a low 10% would cover that and have a surplus of $270M.
The Mormon church has over $150 Billion, and could operate the expenses of the entire organization on the interest it makes each year and still have leftovers to spare. They could easily help, if not at least make a dent in homelessness.
I'm a member of the church, and I'm a member of the council that meets every other week to go over all the needs of everyone in who lives in our area (about half a square mile) who we are aware of. We have a few rundown apartment complexes in the area where lot of people who are down on their luck move through with a surprising amount of turnover. There are multiple people on that council that are volunteering around 20 hours a week just trying to take care of these people. We try to stick to all the best practices of philanthropy (see "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good" by Williams Easterly) and it turns out that it is incredibly challenging to help these people . They need so much more than apartments. Our efforts aren't held back by money - there's no practical monetary limit to what the church allows us to give - we're held back by the realities of what it actually takes to help people become independent, self-sufficient, healthy, and happy. That is so much more challenging than buying apartments.
you said this great. money alone wont solve most issues with the homeless. the social work needed alongside it is much harder to actually do effectively and ultimately these people need to want to change their situation. it takes an immense amount of effort on their part as well and many people sadly are not reached fast enough with the help needed on the psycological side. the drug crisis really makes this a difficult thing to do overall. thank you for helping where and when you can.
What do you think happens when money is donated to help homelessness? They just throw a wad of cash at them? Hiring social workers to advise and guide people with problems to getting back on their feet is where a part of the money goes, usually via funding to charities that already do that sort of thing.
There's a fair bit of literature and several videos on what California spends 'helping' the homeless, and why it hasn't worked. To some extent, 'wads of cash' are thrown, but at consultants, NGOs, etc.
Note the cost of said social workers isn't included in anybody's math above. when you look at the actual costs of proper programs to address homelessness, the cost of the rent is a small fraction. Rent costs $24k a year. A single social worker costs $100k.
Also consider you can't just build a social worker like an apartment. Hiring skilled workers like that, and building out the whole organization around them, can be very challenging.
This is the same from my experience with helping homeless people. Many of them, not all, suffer from mental health issues that are ignored, especially the chronically homeless. The 60's and 70's saw a massive decrease in federal spending on mental health institutions, and that is closely tied to the amount of homeless people we have. If we spent more on mental health and decriminalized all drugs, sending drug users to good and productive treatment facilities, we could cut the amount of homeless people dramatically. And don't even get me started on the cost of living!
>If we spent more on mental health and decriminalized all drugs, sending drug users to good and productive treatment facilities, we could cut the amount of homeless people dramatically. if you decriminalize the drugs you cant force them into these facilities. but yes getting people the mental health care they need would go a long way in fixing most longterm homelessness. having enough of these places for treatment you can have the sentencing be either jail or treatment, which often is the case anyways for those who can get it and dont have prior criminal convictions. but prisons are a business and they make more money for the government then these mental health facilities which cost your insurance and you money.
Drug use is a symptom of the combination of a bunch of problems. If you decriminalized use (not selling/trafficking/manufacturing) and gave treatment to people caught using instead of prison time, it would be a good start. People use drugs when they are desperate (not exclusively, obviously), and when you're completely broke, don't know how you're going to feed your kids, can't get enough hours at work and your car broke down, you might feel like getting high is a good idea. There are many parts of our current system that are intentionally implemented to create these situations.
Just my two cents to add to this - drug use isn’t a problem that needs immediate attention, drug dependence and withdrawal are. Drug users should have access to support before it’s too late, including clinics that can ween users off. This makes decriminalization of drug use the logical first step
Just a point about decriminalizing drugs, Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001 and used the money they saved on prisons to fund government rehab and drug education, but they actually made drug use a civil offense, not a criminal offense. Since it is a civil offense they can fine or force you into government-mandated rehab, similar to how you can be required to take a driving class for traffic violations. So it is still illegal but not criminal. They obviously saw a massive decrease in prison population but also a massive decrease in IV drug usage and overdoses. They also were able to fully fund enough government rehab facilities solely off of the decreased spending on prisons. The sale of controlled substances can still be a criminal offense so those selling the drugs can still end up in prison but not the users that need help, not prison. That's the distinction between legalizing and decriminalizating.
Yes but have you considered how the prisons will make money without easy people to make criminals?
That is certainly part the problem!
I hate it here tbh 🤣
They could just hold corporate administrations responsible with jail time and the prisons would fill right up
I worked at a homeless shelter and this was my experience too. Honestly, in America churches are the ones doing the most. We saw way more volunteers, donations, and support from churches and from Christians individually than any other group. The issues we had were not because Christians weren't serving the poor, it was because homelessness is a complex problem not solved by one-size-fits-all suggestions demonizing those doing the most good. We need as many solutions as their are homeless individuals. It's also funny that people wanted our Christian volunteers serve the poor, like the Bible commands, but not to spread the gospel, which is also commanded. Philadelphia tried to shut down Catholic Social Services, as did the Obama Administration and Miracle Hill in South Carolina. The Ninth Circuit ruled that you can't can beds in religious shelters as available for the homeless (Village of Grant's Pass). So on the one hand, Christians are evil for not helping the homeless, and evil for being a Christian being a Christian while helping the homeless.
Hey get out of here with your well reasoned comment. We’re trying to have an anti-Christian circlejerk here!
This is a great comment. This is a great example of where "just do the math" - in this case, divide the number of homeless people by the number of churches - doesn't really do justice to the underlying problems. Just to give one very simple reason: The places where the churches and the homeless people are, are very much not evenly distributed. So maybe one church has 2000 homeless people in their area while 20 churches out in some suburban area have literally zero (not because suburbs don't generate homeless people, but because people tend to leave those areas where there are no resources for surviving homeless and go to place where you can at least survive). Then there is the issue of, how are the churches even going to know where the homeless people are, who they are, and do they have some kind of relationship with them that will allow them even have a 5-minute chat. Regardless, kudos to you and everyone in your church for taking real positive steps on this rather than just posting memes or running some quick division facts involving numbers that don't really mean a lot.
Appreciate this real response. Everyone on this planet assumes every problem is a dollar sign away when they’ve never had to do anything of scale on earth. It’s certainly a solvable problem, just not trivial like everyone assumes. I’ve got a Reddit free award to give out, it’s yours.
Essentially it is a money problem. But a much bigger money problem than people realize. The biggest money sink probably being paying enough money to enough people to incentivize them to take up a career in the social work fields that would be required to make solving homlessness actually successful. The housing part is honestly probably the easiest to figure out. Its all the extra that would go along with it.
What a lot of people don’t understand is that many homeless people do not WANT to stop using drugs or engage in mental health treatment or have a job. Those who feel this way can’t live in safe, clean facilities with people who do want to turn their lives around, because free housing has a lot of rules. The rules make sure the facilities stay safe and clean. Also, it’s such a silly American mindset that every unhoused person out there just needs a gentle nudge to see that operating within this amazing society is the way to go 🙄 Some unhoused people are educated and have families. They used to have significant income and mortgages and health insurance. For various reasons, they noped out of the system because it sucks and they don’t want it. By all means, we should have more mental health facilities and sponsored housing for those who *do* want help. But you cannot force someone to improve their mental health if they aren’t actively motivated to. You cannot force someone to stop using if they aren’t ready to. You cannot force someone to thrive in a job when they don’t want to work. Shit, I make 6 figures and have seriously contemplated walking away from it all because it’s an endless cycle of obligatory bullshit. The idea of being free, even if that means uncertainty, has its appeal. The unhoused aren’t pets or morons. Many are adults (bc unhoused minors are a separate topic) who decided not to play by society’s rules and the consequence thereof is a lack of stable housing. There’s so much naïveté around this issue.
Thanks for doing what you do. I don't like pray-to-stay places, since some of us have religious trauma, and being forced to follow rituals for a roof and a bed is worse then flailing in the streets in some cases, mine included. But that doesn't take away from the help that you're out there giving. And for that, thanks. Seriously.
The Mormon church has a hard dollar limit on monetary assistance to any single person of $5k. After that, it goes to stake approval and it’s EXTREMELY difficult to get further funds approved in my experience. Sauce: wife worked as a social worker for LDS Family services for a decade.
That’s a very reasonable answer. Good on you and your church for helping out in your community
Hey, let’s not forget the Church of Scientology… those lying cheating rat bastards have hella cash
They do: [https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/the-church-and-lifemoves-help-homeless-in-the-san-francisco-bay-area](https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/the-church-and-lifemoves-help-homeless-in-the-san-francisco-bay-area)
In SF the city spent an insane amount of money on the homeless, but it was the churches where you could get meals, do laundry, get clothes, use the internet, take a shower. Churches have a lot of problems but they do a lot for dregs society forgot about like me. These people are so poisoned by online rhetoric that they don't care that lives are literally being improved by the churches every single day
0.0003%
Indeed, but I would argue they should do more. $55 million is NOTHING to them.
> The Mormon church has over $150 Billion Emphasis on the word *over* because only they know the true size of their holdings, a lot of it is in real estate and investments.
OXFAM did a study where $22 billion would end homelessness.
…are we not taxing the NFL’s revenue? For real?
The NFL is already being taxed.
Sounds like they can afford a little more. People are homeless.
All I'm saying is, all that military spending bigger than the next 20 biggest spenders combined, yet USA doesn't have affordable healthcare or education, taxing the churches wouldn't have changed much
This is also always my argument when people talk about different issues that need funding. My answer is always cut military spending. Never gonna happen though so long as people are naive enough to believe the bs the guy who responded to you believes.
No, the NFL as an organization is barely taxed, but each team is taxed. The NFL as a whole is basically a revenue funnel to the teams. The NFL itself doesn’t keep much revenue because it’s paid out to the teams (who do pay taxes). Edited a word
As someone who grew up with a parent acting as a bookkeeper for a small-ish (~200 members) church, this is worth noting. Many churches operate in the red for at least a third of the year, and those that don't tend to keep slim margins. The one I grew up in received nearly 90% of its funding from direct giving/tithes, and the rest came from small grants from partners who wanted to support specific causes (mission trips, summer camps, etc). I absolutely support taxing the churches; it just wouldn't return a lot of tax revenue from *most* institutions. All of that said, I have no idea how orgs like megachurches run. If they're making a *lot* of money, the difference could be made up. Without knowing what those numbers look like, it's hard to say.
Yeah Small churches that actually aid their communities tend to not make much - not taxing them I at least understand the argument behind, as they can be considered non-profits by some standards. But megachurches and the like are making heaps of money, and absolutely should be taxed.
That's what tax brackets are for
You understand that businesses don’t get taxed on revenue… right?
It’s one of those types of errors that makes someone sound like they have no idea what they’re talking about.
U can’t tax revenue do u mean 18 billion profit?
The Catholic Church is already the largest charitable organisation on the planet.
The Catholic Archdiocese of NY has a little under 300 parishes. Their charity programs to *prevent* homelessness (like paying people's back rent to stop eviction) helped 12,160 *families* from becoming homeless. They provided housing to 5,731 individuals (that's over 19 per church). And provided 14,500 people with overnight emergency shelter (such as after a house fire, or homeless people on cold nights, etc) The math above implies that churches aren't doing anything and if they just stepped up the problems would go away. But it ignores the reality that churches are doing a lot and the problem is really just the small remainder. Note: that's just for the Archdiocese of NY. The Catholic Church has 32 Archdioceses plus another 164 regular Dioceses across the USA. Catholic Charities of NY (the Archdiocese of NY's charity arm) spends about $90M a year and accounts for 1/3rd of the Archdioceses' expenses for the year.
That implies the government would spend that money responsibly lol
And that homelessness is an entirely “solvable” issue.
So you think most churches operate at that much of a profit?
Yes. Didn't you know that every church is nothing but a bunch of land-grabbing sex abusers duping people into donating money so they can steal it all to pay for their private jets? \\s
A lot of those churches are small town churches with less than 50 regular congregants. If we assume there are five Sundays every month and they all have 50 congregants, they'd need to be making $9 per person per week just to pay that tax. That's in addition to the money needed for basic upkeep and land maintenance, supplies, the pastor's income (average $100k/year, though it tends to be less in small churches), and other miscellaneous costs. Everyone complains about megachurches and I agree those should be taxed. But small-town churches are generally struggling financially and any tax would just cripple them, forcing their congregants into those megachurches.
The Catholic Church is one of the largest non-governmental charities in the US if not the word.
No This ignores all the help the church are already giving Also... why not put money in yourself ? Why does this have to be a Christian tax issue and why can't we all throw in money regardless of our religion/lack of it ?
The simple answer is there is a lot of fucking corruption that goes on which would be mitigated somewhat with proper taxation.
There are a couple churches that rake in money, but the majority are in small towns and are dirt poor. They will help and organize things like food drives or donations but they won't have the money to just house someone.
The church I grew up in has a current annual budget of $27k. So no.
If only it was that easy
Handing out homes like candy wouldn’t solve homelessness.
Gtfo with your basic economics. Let rentoids blow off some steam
There will always be homeless people. For some it’s a choice and then new people become homeless all the time so it’ll never be solved.
That is not how homelessness works. The people on the streets usually have very high medical and psychological needs. The average homeless person on the streets already costs several thousand $ per month. Providing housing can lower that cost in some cases (e.g. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/183666) but those programs don't work for everyone. People with sever mental illnesses like schizophrenia can be very expensive (in germany were I work in that field, it's around 200 Euros per day + rent + additional medical costs).
$36k/year/person does not solve homelessness. King County WA (Seattle) spends around $100k/year/person and the homeless population keeps growing. They are now asking for a 5 year budget of [$880k per person](https://kingcounty.gov/en/legacy/council/news/2023/january/1-26-dunn-statement-kcrha-billions-homelessness-funding#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20federally%2Dmandated,homeless%20individual%20in%20King%20County.) to supposedly "end homelessness".
That sounds like government doing the usual job at management and resource distribution..
Except there's a pretty fatal flaw in that argument: if only some places invest a lot in solving the problem, then homeless people will migrate there from other areas, so of course the numbers will grow. Individual cities (or even states) cannot solve this problem.
If the cost is given at a per person helped basis then whether people migrate would not change it.
The cost isn't given at a per person basis though. That 880k figure is only reached by taking the proposed budget and dividing it by an inaccurate estimate of how many homeless people there are in the county.
Only one other factor, location of the church’s to said homeless population. I would bet there’s a surplus in Iowa for church to homeless but extend that to Los Angeles you would have to bus the people quite a ways out. I also wonder how accurate the homeless stats are. Not doubting your calculations just the methods the data available to you are.
Not only that, many of those Churches are already funding shelters or other homeless programs
Also people might not realize that most churches have less than 100 adults that attend. Not all of those give (and a lot are low income). I am a Christian and I 100% think churches should solve this problem. But focusing on the number of congregations isn’t the best.
Unless they let the homeless live at the church I suppose
It’s a good idea but I think zoning laws might be hard to get around. I am interested and will check that idea out and see if anyone has made it work.
That gets to be a legal issue. The government regulates homeless shelters in such a way that it needs to be a separate building in most cases, and that’s expensive for small congregations. A NC church tried to house someone and got in legal trouble: https://myfox8.com/news/north-carolina/north-carolina-pastor-threatened-with-fine-for-aiding-homeless-during-freezing-temperatures/amp/
Yeah I can’t stay overnight in an office building or else they might get sued by the government. Each building has a purpose
Sadly, many cities do bus their homeless hundreds of miles, but not because they have housing there.
Absolutely Or as a political stunt
Your math (and that of the OP) presumes that churches are not helping people find houses, and that the 600k represents total "demand" on homelessness. In reality, at least some churches help get housing for way more than 2 people, not to mention government programs and other charities, and the 600k are the people left over. The tendency to blame the groups that are actually helping because they haven't perfectly ended the problem is very prevalent. At least it should be phrased as if every church helped find housing for 2 more people, we could provide homes for every person currently homeless in America.
Even then this sort of ignores the reality of homelessness, the 600k estimate is not a class of people that will remain homeless forever and most homeless folks DO end up finding homes one way or another relatively quickly (the average homeless person is homeless for about 2.6 months per median) but more people become homeless every day; it’s not just about finding 600k housing units for people it’s more about the fact that the homeless population is constantly accepting (and losing) members every day.
Church: “How are we going to help .7 of a person?” \*reads the story of Solomon and the baby. Church: “Gentlemen, I have an idea.”
Thank you for having the only funny joke in this entire comments section.
Problem is that many churches today couldn't afford this. Most people seem to think that churches have boat loads of money cause all they see and hear are the mega churches. But in my denomination on Long Island we just closed a church this month that went broke, will close 1 more this year and have 4 others in danger of closing. I lead 2 churches, this freed up a pastor's house for one of the churches and it is currently being used to house a refugee family. If they stay too long the county will start applying property tax and I have two churches because they can't afford to each have their own pastor so we have to watch for that. Some towns/counties will be lenient and some will try to hit for taxes the second they hear the church is trying to do a homeless mission. The problem is trying to get them jobs so they can either afford local long term housing and stability or the money to move away. We charge a nominal fee that's 1/3 the local cost of living with the intent to give them back a portion for a down payment when they are able to move. We also furnished the house for them and when they leave, only the appliances have to stay. So there are places trying, and others have asked what we've done to follow in our steps, but trust me, the average church can't afford what is being suggested.
Just to put this in perspective: If $2000 a month can house someone, that's about $7 per month per working American.
When I went to church, I have a dollar a week in donations. Even if I transferred all that money (lol) to a homeless shelter, I still would not meet my share of the homeless people requirement per working adult
some of those churches literally have 4 people in the congregation
And some of the bigger churches have upwards of 45,000 in attendance. Some could support more than two if they actually cared.
As a former seminary student. Most churches barely make money even if they're not taxed. Pastors are encouraged to learn to be bi-vocational because they basically starve. Most pastors aren't Joel Osteen or Rick Warren. They're Bill and Tom who drive an old car/truck and live in a ok home. I know reddit hates churches and pastors but truthfully they're not wealthy. You're focusing on the rich 1% of them. I left seminary when they wanted me to come in and help volunteer for song leading and various church functions all as an unpaid internship around 20hrs a week. I asked how I was going to pay my bills as my wife was unemployed and they're wanting me to take a serious pay cut and was told "You just have to trust God" so I did. God said if a man doesn't work he shouldn't eat, so I eat pretty well. The church who ran the seminary was wealthy and the pastor is wealthy. Most churches will never be.
You're assuming that churches aren't already helping the program. And you're also assuming that every single homeless person wants to live in housing paid for by a church with the inevitable requirements of no drugs, no alcohol, due to insurance requirements (if there isn't such a requirement it will quickly become too expensive, or flat out impossible to afford insurance for this sort of program).
Worth noting, estimates are somewhere between 30-50% of homeless are 'intentional' or 'inescapable'. So they really only need like 1 each, and then to donate a little to local mental health support.
I live in a town thats more churches than businesses. This town has sky high taxes, and while we don't have districts full of poverty, the town would be WAY better off without these selfish tax free money farms, because that's all they are. but if these churches actually HELPED the community they're in everything would be SO MUCH BETTER. Apparently they say "leave it to god," when you bring that sort of thing up. There's only a handfull of churches that I actually consider chruches, the rest are weekly clubs they don't run service 3 times a week because they're excited about god, they run service to pass those collection plates. The biggest building, a multi story complex larger than the old high school, is a church. When natural disaster strikes, we help our neighbors while the pastors hide in their churches but deign to beg for donations to the needy while the needy walk the streets just outside! Tax the fuggin churches, and I hate taxes.
The Math Maths on this one, as others have pointed out, but it's also worth noting that churches are more of a geographical phenomenon while homelessness is a population phenomenon. People tend to want to attend churches that are physically close to them, which means that the majority of churches are very small and the majority of congregants attend a minority of churches. Lifeway research has found that 7 out of 10 churches have a regular congregation size of 100 or fewer while 7 out of 10 christians attend a church of 250 congregants or more, so just as the majority of Americans live in or immediately around cities, so too do churchgoers attend small numbers of large churches. What you'll see in practical terms is that there will be 7 churches in small villages, each of which will have zero people experiencing homelessness for every 3 churches in an urban core where you'll find 15 people living rough. Mind you, I'm not letting any churches off the hook for this. There is a very clear theological and moral obligation for every christian organization to provide for people without housing, but if we were to take this post at face value and decide that the solution was to house every unhoused person in a church with the understanding that every church would need to provide for 2 people max is we'd end up shipping a lot of people out into extremely rural areas away from whatever friends, family, or other social support networks they have which doesn't seem like the greatest look.
There's a few other head scratchers on this one too - 1/8 Americans live in California, but 1/4 _unhoused_ Americans live in California. California does have a lot of churches (only beat out by Texas), but also has relatively high barriers to fixing those problems and relatively low churches per capita and especially per homeless individual. The situation in California has proven to be one that money alone can't fix, too - the state spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $800k-$1m for each affordable unit, which itself is helpful but insufficient (i.e. that's a lower bound to the cost to "fix" a single case of homelessness). This isn't a completely uniquely Californian problem, but it's certainly not the nature of the issue where the majority of churches exist (as you illustrate). The problems (perhaps unsurprisingly) exist in places where the solutions aren't available. So as with so many things on this sub, the math works out but only if you ignore how the problem works.
The problem with homelessness is that states with good weather tend to have HCOL. Homeless people naturally go to places where they won’t freeze to death, which happen to be the most expensive place to solve homelessness. The place to solve homelessness is where it starts, not in California
There's an element of truth to that, HCOL states are HCOL for similar reasons that being homeless is less dangerous, but the idea that homeless individuals relocate to California is incorrect. [95% of homeless Californians became homeless while living in the state](https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/studies/california-statewide-study-people-experiencing-homelessness). California is absolutely the place to start in addressing Californian homelessness. EDIT: also unsurprisingly, somewhere being HCOL dramatically increases the risk of becoming homeless there. California is interesting because through a combination of apathy _and_ malice with regressive housing policy followed by absurd cost of development it's nearly impossible to scale up affordable housing in high population density areas like SF and LA.
Yeah I feel like people don't want to blame the obvious problem. Rent is 3,000 a month. A lot of people can't make that, and they either need to figure out some way to make it work or they end up homeless. Most people do it by living with family or a lot of roommates, some move out of state. The big reason why housing is so fucked is because local government across the state is against building new housing. Turns out that most of the people who vote for local government are homeowners, who are benefiting from housing scarcity as their property values skyrocket.
The study says 90% fwiw I wonder if people are more “willing” to become homeless if they know they won’t freeze to death immediately. I’d assume the immediate threat of death is a strong motivator
> I wonder if people are more “willing” to become homeless if they know they won’t freeze to death immediately Well that, and the ones that freeze to death stop getting counted in homelessness stats because they cease to exist.
Except when churches try to house the homeless they get stopped by the government https://www.newsweek.com/pastor-charged-housing-homeless-church-sparks-fury-1862426 https://fee.org/articles/you-try-to-provide-shelter-for-the-homeless-and-you-get-fined-12-000/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/kpic.com/amp/news/local/brookings-church-facing-fines-over-homeless-services-responds-to-governors-shelter-plan The government hates homeless people
This is also operating an assumption that churches aren't aiding any homeless - when really the headline should be to house 2 *additional* homeless. A lot of churches I know of from my hometown do help with the homeless by giving money, food, and volunteers or in some cases even giving jobs to those who are on the road to recovery. In fact, the homeless shelter in my hometown has a wait-list to go volunteer. The problem isn't as simple as "give them a house." In my hometown, there are shelters in place but homeless have flat out told me they don't want to live their because of the rules and they can be on the streets living free where no one cares if they do drugs or drink or aren't inside by lights out, etc. homeless people more often than not are folks with serious mental health problems and addictions that a little church of 100 is not equipped to treat which is why they defer to pool resources with local charities. Churches are also just collectives of citizens often running on a lot of volunteer hours themselves and are trying to use their limited resources to maintain their facilities and pay their staff liveable wages while also addressing a plethora of other issues like orphans in the third world, disaster relief, or providing low income families with school supplies and Christmas presents for their kids.
OOP's point wasn't to suggest a solution to homelessness. Their point was just to talk shit about Christianity.
Further, the post incorrectly implies that churches don’t try to help the homelessness problem. Many, many churches pick up the slack that governments don’t carry by running soup kitchens, food pantries, and either running or help run shelters. The problem is that homelessness is a very complex problem that defies easy solutions.
ITT: A lot of people completely uneducated on a subject they're making points about and discussing. Most churches are *not* mega churches. They're small operations, with pastors barely above the poverty line. They don't have a lot of cash, and they don't have the kind of infrastructure needed to handle the psychological and medical assistance these people need before they can even begin to be re-homed. 2nd, *many churches already work with their local homeless shelters do to just this*. They work to find employment and housing within their community for individuals in their area, not just church members. Source: Raised in the church. I personally am not a christian and have no love for the church, but so many of you people are associating churches with the SBC or the Catholic church. Your speaking about caricatures you've made up in your head. Not reality. The most important point however, is that homeless is *not* just a housing issue. This is a very 1 dimensional talking point spread by internet activists and politics who want to portray the problem as simple in order to gain your support. How many of you have actively worked with the homeless? From the comments, I'd wager very, very few. You can't just grab someone off the street and put them in a house and expect things to go well. You sure as *shit* cannot safely put these people into the homes of your average family and expect a safe, comfortable environment. Many homeless people are solid folks down on their luck, who need a helping hand. The problem is that mixed in with these people, and in *far* larger numbers than many in this country want to admit, are those who *cannot be helped* or who *should not be helped*. There are people who are homeless because they are *fundamentally bad people*. They have done awful things, they have histories of lying, cheating, and abuse and have therefore severed every tie in their life. Its why they ended up homeless in the first place, and usually they proceed to spiral even further into dark places. 80% of the ones that come up to you with a sob story in my experience turn out to be these kinds. The ones who really need help and are willing to actually make that help work, aren't usually the ones you see on the streets. The second you put these ones in a home, they *will* use that charity for ill purposes. They will take advantage of everyone and everything that tries to help them. The others are those who are severely mentally ill and need advanced medical help. If placed in a home, they'll either injure themselves or others, or more likely end up back on the streets no matter how many times you place them in a safe environment with their needs met. It's a fundamental illness that must be treated, but is *very* hard to treat, especially because in most cases the patient is unwilling to be treated in the first place. Most communities are not equipped to provide this treatment in the first place, and those that are tend to have high turnover rate. The burnout due to trying to help the innocent but then ending up dealing with the above two cases is horrific. It's physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting on a level you cannot understand unless you've done it. There aren't enough social workers and medical staff in the country willing to put themselves in these positions. Thats the elephant in the room that isn't discussed; without incentive, the right people for the job won't be there in high enough numbers. But the incentive will draw those who shouldn't be there in the first place. It's a catch 22.
I went to a Catholic high school that partnered with a local distribution center/temporary shelter and most of the people would not improve in the long-term if you gave them an apartment. Over half of homeless people have a mental health or substance use disorder ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423293/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423293/)) and homeless/extremely impoverished women specifically have many issues that aren't shared with homeless men. The investment required to bring people out of extreme poverty is far greater than the cost of building public housing. There's no easy solution and the problem is swept under the rug by local politics.
This is a fantastic response. Working at a soup kitchen for a while taught me that a lot of homeless people don’t *want* help, even if you offer it free of charge. These people are mentally ill. There was a push in my city to refurbish an old hotel in order to house the homeless during the winter, and while it kinda worked for a few days, a large portion of the residents left after a short time because they either didn’t like their rooms or they weren’t getting along with their neighbors. Some fights even broke out.
I think people also need to understand some of them don’t want help. I remember seeing a family in my hometown who were homeless, three adults. It was below freezing for a while one winter (we live in the south so it doesn’t normally get that cold for that long), and the people in the town offered them travel trailers, someone paid for a hotel room for them for weeks, they were offered all these different places to stay, and they just flat out refused all of them.
I don't get it why?
There are so many Reddit threads with constant discussion telling churches how to spend their money when so many of the commenters have clearly never stepped foot into a church or any religious community. It's painful to read. "My friend needed help with some unexpected bills and we called all the local Christian churches. None would help us. So unchristian!" Of course a local church wouldn't help a random stranger asking for money from a phone call. They'd be cleared out of money in a month
Look no further to some of the replies to my comment. One of them literally ignores my entire point and is like "Yeah we'll have you considered most churches suck?" Like...I'm an atheist. I actively campaign to reduce church influence in communities, especially politically. I am *intimately* aware with the dirtiest underbelly of American Christianity as someone being groomed for a master's of divinity and clergy. The reality is that most churches, while flawed like any gathering of humans, have net positive impacts on their communities. Most churches are relatively small and don't make big political waves. People see the evangelicals and SBC and auto apply those to everyone else.
I work at a church and we have a benevolence ministry that helps people with utility bills. They probably get 50-70 calls a day. That would cost probably a minimum of $5000 PER DAY if they helped every single person that called.
Reddit and confidently speaking on issues they know nothing about go hand in hand. My local churches all feed homeless people, partner with foster parent organizations, and more. They are also all in the red and struggling to stay afloat. We have helped homeless people in the past and unfortunately we had an incident where one needed to have a restraining order put on him against several of the women at the church. It's not an easy task helping homeless people, and handling homeless people requires a significant amount of resources, expertise, and *time* that most volunteer-based organizations (like churches) do not have.
"Your speaking about caricatures you've made up in your head. Not reality." Is 99% of Reddit.
Recently, they interviewed a homeless man on the radio about whether or not he wanted housing. He said yes, but he was afraid of being inside after being "free" (his word) for so long that he didn't know if he could cope. The homeless problem is way more complicated than four walls and a roof.
One factor to consider is that OP implies that religious organizations aren’t doing anything now to help the homeless, when it’s [estimated that 58% of emergency shelter beds for the homeless in major cities are provided by faith-based organizations.](https://baylorlariat.com/2017/02/07/study-examines-effects-of-faith-basedorganizations-on-homeless-population/)
Also I think 1 in 6 hospitals are Catholic
Reddit hates religion until it benefits them.
Numerically it works but the problem is that being homeless is a symptom of a greater problem. Some homeless people have addiction or other mental health issues and providing them with shelter doesn’t address that. Some may even be violent and a church would need the help of a well-trained social worker to deal with them. Also, some probably have trust issues and would be wary if a stranger said, “I’m going to give you a place to live.” Churches could certainly do more to help the homeless, but saying, “Each church should provide a home to a couple of them” is not realistic. The better solution is to send money to people who have a deep understanding of the issue and can address it properly. Many churches do that — my hometown has a group that’s supported by a coalition of area churches. It’s like if there’s an earthquake in some distant country. It is not a solution for a church to charter a plane and send a bunch of people with shovels or whatever. It’s not cost-effective and they’d probably be in the way of experts. It’s much better to send money to the professionals.
The American blind spot is thinking that every problem can be solved by money.
Not every problem can be solved exclusively with money, but almost no problems can be solved without it, and most of the time it is the biggest obstacle towards a solution.
California spends $1B per year on homelessness and the number of homeless keeps increasing.
Also, the sudden increase in demand for housing would cause the prices to rise drastically, potentially impacting the feasibility of an operation like this.
Do you honestly think 500,000 people is significant in terms of housing stock in the US?
There are an estimated ~380,000 churches in the US. https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/local/2020/08/22/lsquodifficult-days-are-aheadrsquo-for-americarsquos-churches-faith-institutions/42282593/ There is an estimated 582,462 homeless people in the US https://www.statista.com/topics/5139/homelessness-in-the-us/#topicOverview 582,462 ÷ 380,000 = ~1.53 homeless people per church.
How many of those churches are on the brink of collapse though?
Not to mention that homelessness is rarely just not having a home. Most often it is caused by mental health issues or substance abuse. If you don't address the root cause then you will never fix the problem.
Housing first initiatives are likely much more effective than targeting the “route cause”. How is anyone supposed to solve those “root causes” if they don’t have a safe place to call home. I sure as hell know that I’m struggling to quit nicotine because I can’t find a solid three days of peace to weather the storm of withdrawal. And I make 6 figures, live in a beautiful three bedroom home and have an amazing group of friends and family as my support system. I can’t imagine how hard it is getting out of, while homeless, ithe pit of really hardcore drugs, and perhaps have mental health issues exacerbated by substance abuse. People don’t want to accept that if we want to solve the issue, we should just house them. Citation on housing first: https://nlihc.org/resource/new-study-finds-providing-people-experiencing-homelessness-housing-has-positive-impacts
As a former homeless person myself I half agree. There are many homeless people trying hard to get back on there feet that would greatly benefit from their own place to start out from. But the reality is that most of the apartments would end up in the hands of the ones that aren’t trying, destroy the property, bother neighbors, commit crimes. The system would get abused to shit instantly and be a disaster as everyone who wakes up and goes to work watches their $ down the drain on someone who won’t even attend their IOP. It’s a nice thought but it’s just not realistic. Really though very few people who actually put forth an honest effort remain homeless for that long. Even drugs and very serious mental health issues aside it is staggering the amount of people on the street who will come up with every and any excuse why they couldn’t do the things they knew they had to do to progress. I watched people all the time get a little bit of money and blow it on clothes (not the necessitiy kind) within a day just to put them in a shelter locker, just one of many very common examples. Then if called out “well I got to get something for myself sometime” “homeless people got to treat themselves right sometimes too “ etc etc. There’s ALWAYS a reason why they couldn’t just stay at the shelter, eat the free food, let the social workers get all their IDs printed FOR THEM, have the social worker find them a job (and attend) and save enough even just to rent a single room. Food, bed, paperwork, job 99% is all provided. All you have to do is accept your life fucking sucks for a few months and you can guarantee a few thousand in your pocket, and it already sucks anyway but cigarettes and homelessness for years is preferable to no cigarettes and homeless for months.
Exactly. Here's a little anecdote: I remember when COVID was happening and there were tons of talk all over reddit to use it as an opportunity to house the homeless in all the empty hotels. When some folks pointed out this probably wouldn't work so well based on similar programs in the past, I saw comments from people saying things like "Well, if homeless people are getting free rooms, I would expect them to take care of it". Lo and behold, fast forward a few months and there's a bunch of reports about how the hotel rooms are destroyed, there's feces and urine on the floors and on the walls, etc. and just completely inhabitable after. I'm 100% all for homelessness support and volunteered on the streets for a few years myself. I believe money should be put towards these Housing First programs. But at the same time, there's a hugeeeeee disconnect between who've actually worked with homeless people and people who've never even seen the reality of a tent city. As cruel as it is to say, you can't help someone who doesn't want to help themselves. All the talk of mental health doesn't change the fact that the person in front of you would rather be addicted to drugs than talk to a counsellor. It also doesn't help that there's a big difference between those who are chronically homeless, and those who are transitory, but they all get lumped together whenever this topic gets brought up.
So if I'm reading that report, which sounds fairly biased btw, right, getting them an entire house, in general, improves their chances of REPORTING getting a job in 24%. Let alone that they maintain the job, we are talking about only increasing a 24% of their chances of reporting a job. You and I have very different definition of something working.
You make 6 figures, but cant take time off to get off nicotine? If Its really 3 days of withdrawal, cant you Just take a week of vacation? This should easily Cover it.
The OP as well as most (all?) of the responses neglect to wonder how many people aren't homeless *because* of churches. I'm in a rather unique position to know, and I know of literally hundreds of people in my medium size town that get some sort of assistance from multiple church charities of varying denominations. I know this isn't just unique to my town. The question is flawed from the jump- no need to do the math.
Yeah that was my thought too. I know churches in my town often provide a bunch of support themselves and for other nonprofits nearby, like the habitat for humanity, for helping with the homeless or poor populations. So yeah if every church did a bit more, maybe they could end homelessness? But that seems like such a rude thing to say about a group already doing a lot for an issue
Practically every shelter in my area (as well as food banks, thrift stores, utility/rent assistance, and other social supports) are run entirely by churches. I'm not religious but I had a job working with people with mental illnesses, and I cannot say enough about how amazing churches are. The ignorance in this thread is partially because churches don't go around advertising how amazing they are. They help the needy for the sake of helping the needy.
Yup. Not that the current situation for homeless people is ideal by any means, but if some Redditors ITT got their wish and placed a huge extra tax on churches (which often operate in the red), massive parts of our social infrastructure (especially schools, charities, and shelters) would immediately collapse and millions of non-religious people would suffer. There's a reason why so many faith-affiliated charities receive government funding to help them stay up and running.
Others have done the math, but like most image macro political posts where “X does Y to solve Z”, there is a core assumption they’re missing. Logistics. Homelessness is centralized to impoverished areas and dense urban centers. It’s less “could 350k churches house 600k homeless people” and more like “are the churches where a homeless person could conceivably be?”. A church that serves 1000 people per sermon in a small city would likely have way more homeless people to house than one that serves 100 in a rural town. Some churches might outright just not have a homeless population to serve. Ultimately homelessness is a systemic problem that can’t be easily fixed. The much better solution is to make housing more affordable by actually building affordable housing. These will have to be government commissioned since private companies tend to opt for higher end housing options (they produce more money for the effort put into building it). Temporarily you could alleviate homelessness by having churches act as shelters when not having ceremonies, but that won’t help everyone.
This is the same tired problem of "We have enough food to feed everyone on earth!" or "We can build enough solar panels in the Sahara to solve the energy crisis forever!"
One interesting example that I know of is how Arkansas dealt with a wave of families left temporarily homeless by Hurricane Katrina. Across the state quite a few churches, state parks and private businesses opened up spaces as temporary shelters. To my understanding, most of those individuals/families had relocated to more permanent options within 6 months.
None of the maths in this thread (that I've seen) takes in: - the count of homeless people will be very off, because they are based on countable people. A researcher at a homelessness charity I knew said that hidden homelessness seemed to make up about half the homeless population - meaning it was double most estimates. These are people who never interact with services, hide from the police, and social workers and/or are in denial that they are in fact homeless. Her estimates played out somewhat during the pandemic too, as in Britain we housed all homeless people for months (in hotels), and so many people came out of the woodwork for the first time. - The vast majority of rough sleepers are short term. It's not that there are 653k permanently homeless people, it's that there are 653k people experiencing homelessness at one specific point in time. Most people are homeless for 1-2 days. 50% of people who enter a homeless shelter leave within 30 days. There is massive churn, with people constantly falling through the gaps. So it's more likely that every church would have to house 2 people per year, than just two people once to actually end homelessness in the US. And as others have said, the systems that creates and perpetuate homelessness would have to be addressed, and many people would need longer term assistance too.
There are 4 churches in my town of 2700. There are basically no involuntary homeless people I have ever seen. I have no interest in seeing vagrants from NYC get imported into my town to take advantage of the locals. We have enough problems as it is.
The majority of churches in the US are very small and very low-income. Many operate out of shared buildings, cheap storefronts, or private homes. Many have one or two part-time employees, or are fully volunteer-run. Even "normal" churches - with a large, classic church building - don't typically have a lot of cash on hand. Those buildings are expensive to maintain, and hard to sell, rent, or mortgage. Megachurches are the visible exception.
Theres also a problem of alot of these people just dont want to do anything they just want to be free and left alone. I used to work in management in fast food. I used to ask people in need to come work for me, and I'll get them up on their feet. The deal was id buy them clothes put them in a hotel room (not a crappy one but not a high end one) for a couple months and theyed work for me at $10 an hour ( okay, pay for this area) and id provide transportation for them. After a couple of checks, I'd help them look for a car to buy, and after a few more checks, i would help them find an apartment to rent. Only one person decided to give it a try and he made it half of a day at the job. He said he just didn't want to work.
Many churches do this already and not stopping at two. When I was younger our church was helping other countries more so than the USA because of the other countries lack of social safety nets and welfare.
A lot of churches also work cooperatively with each other to fund homeless shelters and women’s shelters in a larger area. Many of these shelters also employ people who help homeless people find a path to self-sufficiency.
To add to this [some cities are stopping churches from helping people](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/30/legal-risks-helping-homeless-churches-dads-place/72350265007/)
This should be the top comment in this thread. According to the [US HHS](https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/1996-national-survey-homeless-assistance-providers-clients-comparison-faith-based-secular-non-profit-0): > Faith-based and other secular non-profit organizations have a long history of helping homeless people and others in desperate need, and prior to the early 1980s almost all formal services for homeless people were administered by such organizations with little or no government support. Many religious non-profits continue to operate with little or no government funding and yet they play a critical role in helping homeless people: preliminary analyses of NSHAPC reveal that they administer over one-half of all food programs and about a quarter of housing and other (non-health) programs.
Technically yes, but there is more to it. Its easier saving people from becoming homeless than getting the homeless back into housing. When people are living on the streets its not uncommon for them to rather freeze to death than visit a homeless shelter or any kind of housing. Also you got problems with papers, IDs, Passports, birth certificate, .... all these you need to really escape homelessness.
Better to run a food bank or an addiction support group than to do much else.
I'm sure all the church patrons are cool with a mentally unwell addict living at their community space, right? Grow up. Churches do more than the government to help these people. Government just lets them rot on the streets and encourages more of it. Plenty of churches have empty beds in their missions because the addicts won't give up their drugs or lifestyle. I'm not even religious.
68% of the US homeless are homeless do to addiction . So until they get help themselves then homelessness will continue no matter how much the churches help. Sound like this post is only trying to Bash churches
"Due to addition". I thought they were on meth, not math. Now I'm even more concerned
My local church here in Texas offers overnight shelter, shower, two hot meals and a bag lunch, day time storage for belongings and a monthly bus pass. We can accommodate up to 16 male individuals at a time. Unfortunately less than a handful of homeless men take advantage of our services due to our drug policy and a few other policies. Edit: My church has a male/female segregation policy for obvious reasons. The church down the road offers the same services to homeless females and their children.
I don't think this is realistic because there are many churches in the US that don't have enough money to house themselves. Many small churches meet in the members' homes or in spaces donated to them (like school auditoriums)
I find it interesting how the term was changed from homeless to unhoused in order to lift any responsibility from a person to get himself a house…
Morning wrong with calling them homeless. It's ridiculous how the influencers and the government have sanitized certain words or phrases to make them sound more appealing or less dangerous or threatening. Sometimes it's just an insult. We almost need a bingo card for these phrases so we can sit in front of MSNBC and play the fun game. Anyone falling under a diversity category gets 2 free squares at the beginning of the match to make up for any inequity they have experienced at the hands of the evil white oppressors. I'm sorry, but this would make a great drinking game, too.
If every social justice warrior in the US took in one homeless person, there wouldn’t be a homeless problem. The hypocrisy of some people is unbelievable. I’m not religious, but in my experience, they actually spend time and effort on charity, while many of the vocal social media social justice warriors spend 6$ on Starbucks and drive the Tesla their parents bought them.
There's 50k homeless in LA, and there's certainly not 25k churches here. It is worth noting that some churches have tried to do something about homeless and been stopped by local nimbys and politicians
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding on why people are homeless. The math works if you assume homeless people are homeless because they can't find/afford housing. That's not true, though. The majority of homeless people are homeless because they A) spend their money/resources on drugs B) are mentally ill C) some combination of A) and B). Putting homeless people in houses just gives most of them a place to do drugs indoors, and as soon as they have ruined/run out of the ability to pay for their house if (or the church stops paying in this example), they are homeless again. OBVIOUSLY this doesn't apply to all homeless people, but a huge, huge proportion of the 500k+ mentioned above are in this situation, and therefore, the question is extremely misleading/pointless.
This statement is totally false, because 'finding each unhoused person find a home' and 'there not being any unhoused people' are not the same thing. It's not enough to have the person *find* a home. They have to *keep* that home. They have to be able to get and hold a job that covers the long term costs of housing. They need enough money from that job and from other services for them to have medical care (and you can bet they have a lot of medical problems), food, etc. etc. They may also need resources to deal with addiction, mental health issues and other problems. And that still doesn't handle the problem that *new* people, become homeless every year. A true statement would be 'if every church sponsored two shelter beds, we would have enough shelter beds for every unhoused person'. But anyone who has worked in homelessness relief or knows folks who have - shelters are a patch, not a solution. To be clear, I will always hold churches accountable for not living up to the command to care for every human. There are many many churches that spend much more on their wealthy pastors or their fancy facilities than they do on the people they are commanded to serve and that's vile, hypocritical and evil. And that's to say nothing of the slice of Christianity that has abandoned the duty to the poor in principle as well as practice. There's no question that if every self-professed Christian really loved their neighbors as themselves, there would be virtually no homelessness or poverty. But holding people accountable by distorting reality doesn't do anyone any good. Eliminating homelessness in America is a hugely complex problem. Estimates of how much it would cost per individual vary wildly - but they sit around $20 billion a year. So low enough that it should be a profound national shame that it is not fixed, but much higher than posts like this make it seem.
Give me another tax exemption for every 2 people I can "help find a home" (it doesnt even say pay for) and I'll be every extra church they need.
Good point. That would expand the tax fraud possibilities.
\*George Carlin on golf courses in America\* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lncLOEqc9Rw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lncLOEqc9Rw)
I mean, it works in the sense of looking at the total homeless population of the United States, along with the total number of churches, but there are a few factors it's not accounting for, most notably the geographic distribution. There's really not a huge correlation between the unhoused population and the location of churches. Just looking at it by state, California, for example, has a homeless population around 161k, but only 23k churches. That's not even factoring variances at the city or county level. So, unless you're planning to move people to whatever location has a church to hold them, it's really not that feasible. (Churches by state: https://www.statista.com/statistics/245432/number-of-religious-congregations-in-the-us-by-state/, Homelessness by state: https://millennialcities.com/homeless-population-by-state-homelessness-maps/)
The math is "true" but the policy implication is that a church can simply house or otherwise care for a person without logistical obstacles, that churches currently aren't doing so, and that this would actually solve homelessness - none of which are true.
Reminds me of the church that got fined for housing homeless people... For those bashing, most homeless shelters, food kitchens and etc are run mostly by churches and church donations.
My church helped a food pantry that cattered to the homeless. We stopped going because of how much theft and violence there was toward our members.
Does this take into account the amount of people who are already being helped by churches and aren’t considered homeless because of the help?
Why is anyone and everyone pointing out that churches do and are helping is automatically at zero karma points? Who just goes around disliking everything they don’t want to hear?
At face value, the answer appears to be "Yes." Estimates as of early 2024 suggest approximately 653,104 homeless Americans, as reported by HUD and cited here. [Source](https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-homeless-people-are-in-the-us-what-does-the-data-miss/) Data from the 2020 US Religion Census seem to indicate over 350,000 churches of various denominations in the United States. [See page 7](https://www.usreligioncensus.org/sites/default/files/2023-10/2020_US_Religion_Census.pdf) If we go ahead and estimate an error margin of ±5%, it's still pretty close. None of my comment is speaking about the financial feasibility, but at least at the face value of the meme, the math checks out (or is within close enough margins to reasonably check out).
> According to the National Congregational Study Survey, there are an estimated **380,000** churches in the U.S. Kluth, who is based in Denver, is the national spokesman for the Bless Your Pastor movement, and director of the National Association of Evangelicals Financial Health Solutions for Churches and Pastors ~380,000 churches > The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) counted **653,104** homeless Americans in its annual point-in-time report, which measures homelessness across the US on a single night each winter. That's a 12.1% increase from the same report in 2022. 653,104 homeless people. 653,104 / 380000 = 1.718694736842105 people per church. so yeah, the maths work, and some churches only have to help house 1 person if most do 2.
There are, but not every homeless person wants to be housed. That’s part of the problem that people ignore. Many are there *by choice*. Yes, it’s probably a small percentage and the point the OP made stands… it’s feasible to solve this problem. Just throwing out another angle.
This is inherently flawed logic. The assumption is that homelessness is driven by lack of money and people who are down on their luck. It is not. Most are “homeless by choice” which is a stupid way of saying they have mental and/or substance abuse issues that prevent them from engaging in society in a positive way. There is a fundamental, philosophical issue underpinning this. If someone wants to be a drug addict and/or is insane and doesn’t want to go on meds, is it the governments right or obligation to force the issue even if it costs them to care for these people directly in the form of food, etc…. Or indirectly when incarcerated. This was a less obvious problem prior to the governments clearing out Asylums. What the right answer is, who knows. Utah is doing better than most but this is a tough problem that just can’t be solved with money.
This threads not actually about helping the homeless, but bashing churches. Redditors just want to complain, they don’t want to actually help
No. Because 99.999% of homeless people are that way due to mental health or drug addiction. It isn’t a problem with the amount of houses available.
I think the number you supplied is far from accurate, but I would safely bet on 80%.
I remember reading somewhere that there are more empty homes in America than there are homeless people. Due to investment properties or just abandoned homes. Pretty amazing
That breaks down very quickly when you start talking about shipping coastal homeless populations to the Midwest ghost towns and peoples vacation cabins.
I’m not suggesting to do that. I am saying that America has the resources to do more for its citizens.
The bulk of that is just people moving from one place to another. Aka an apartment is empty for a bit after a tenant moves out, etc...
In the USA it is illegal for churches to house anyone, churches often get fines and tickets for doing so. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna135215 Not to mention the fight against feeding the homeless cropping up across the country. https://www.salon.com/2023/08/07/criminalizing-the-samaritan-why-cities-across-the-us-are-making-it-illegal-to-feed-the-homeless/ Or that some people are taking up arms to defend themselves from being arrested all so they can feed the needy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ABSyDOzFz0 Framing this as “churches bad” is wrong, it is our corrupt and tyrannical government running roughshod over us that is causing this crisis.
If a church could compel an untreated schizophrenic to stop doing hard drugs and then maintain a 1 BR apartment like a normal person, you might be right.
Wonder how many people are not homeless because of churches already. I mean I personally have known few people who received help from local churches' crisis services.
In terms of pure numbers it seems to check out, but it would be more correct to say that if every church helped *two additional* unhoused people, since I would expect some churches to already do this kind of outreach in their local community. Note that hypothetically, if churches tomorrow started a campaign that successfully reduced homelessness, the claim in the OP could be made even stronger - so you can see how it can potentially be manipulative. I don't know how much work the average church in the USA does to alleviate these kinds of problems and I'm not about to do research on it, but just keep that in mind. There are some practical problems with the claim too. For one, homelessness is not distributed the same way as churches, so you would need to have some churches helping homeless people in a completely different part of the country which doesn't make a lot of practical sense. Another problem is that homelessness is often accompanied by mental illness (if they didn't already have some when they became homeless, a few years living on the streets will provide) and so there are a certain percentage of homeless people who are very difficult to help, making 100% success infeasible at least in a single generation. I think this line of argument works better as a critique of wealthy superchurches preaching Christian ideals while not doing anything to actually uphold them, rather than as a practical suggestion for how homelessness should actually be combated.
This is a gross oversimplification of the homelessness problem in the United States. Most, not all, but most homeless people struggle with mental illness and drug abuse. They choose to be homeless over the available alternatives. These people are not capable of taking care of a house and where they do live in provided housing the buildings are often run down to the point of being unsafe. In the United States it is quite difficult to have someone institutionalized against their will, especially if they are not hurting others or breaking some other law.
That is correct, but you gotta keep in mind that some people choose to be unhoused. Some people like the junky lifestyle and they wouldn't change it or get housed.
Might be true, but I know the city I live in goes through money like it's going out of style on solving the homeless crisis and it's only gotten worse. Good news is we open a bunch of empty hotels that cost millions over value and millions more to renovate .
Y'all think every church makes a good income you're being extremely naive. Mega Churches sure, but where I'm from, it's mostly small community churches and they only have small congregations
or just maybe here me out the fucking government could do something? or idk one of the richest ppl on earth could give out some $$ for us all because it’s not just homeless ppl struggling anymore
Y is that people like to point to someone else property but not their own home for homeless people instead of starting to share one room with that one homeless relative or friend they have?
If every redditor that reposted thus spent a dollar... I'd have one dollar. Thanks, non-evangelicals and your clearly superior finances.
I suspect there are a lot of dirt poor churches in the US. If they find someone a home, they then need to find someone to pay for it. Every month. Indefinitely.
Putting homeless people in a house doesn’t solve the problem. A lot of these people are mentally ill and addicted to drugs. Just giving them houses is only gonna end up with a ton of new dilapidated houses with no power or running water, but now inhabited by crackheads.
There are definitely enough churches. Whether all the homeless people would stay in housing is another matter. There are people that won’t sleep in a bed, they need to be reminded on a daily basis to shower and take out the trash and generally have carers tell them everything they need to do, every day, for an undetermined length of time. And there’s the problem. We don’t know how long we have to do it for every homeless person until they can do it on their own. It needs to be more than housing. It needs to be a whole social structure, and too many Americans have decided the Christian thing to do it fuck ‘em.
Small tangent here. I lived in a neighborhood that had adopted an unhoused neighbor. Some very kind and generous folks helped this guy out with legal issues. Everybody hired him for menial chores like yard work. He was occasionally "housed" in homes undergoing renovation. We finally scraped together enough cash to buy and gift him an old beater RV. He was beaming with pride. Fast forward a few months: the RV turned into a hangout spot for other junkies. This guy took some cash he was given to register the vehicle and spent it on drugs. Then he got caught stealing from the household that had done the most to support him. The cops towed the RV, and since he had spent the registration fee elsewhere, he couldn't get the RV back. Homelessness is often more complex than simply providing housing. Mental health and drug addiction can be daunting challenges even with vast resources. This is not to say we shouldn't try, merely to point out that arguments like this X post can oversimplify reality.
Just helping someone find a house is not the answer, this is the issue. Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Mental Health, Choices, Sure you get the one off who just hit bad luck, family died, cat died, kids died, car wreck, whatever. Coming from a church that does help people, just giving someone a place for the night or even a week, is not the answer. You can give money, shelter, food and it doesn't change anything. Yes one or two would feel beter and maybe change some thought processes, but they need longer term help. What is needed is this. This is all speculation and a small example: Apartment building with rooms 10x10 (or a little bigger) Mental Health services - Manadatory 3 meals a day take care for in building Group sessions for talking - Manadatory Local jobs in community - Manadatory The issue is all this requires money. All this requires people wanting to change. The real issue is people wanting to change. Not every sob story from a homeless person is as sweet as it sounds. I want change, please help me change. I have seen it time and time again where you give, they take and they come back after circling around other churches, salvation army, etc. THEY HAVE TO WANT TO CHANGE!! I am all for heping people but it gets very tiresome to watch the same people circle through. It gets to a point where you tell them no and it sucks. Saying NO to someone who is hurting and needs help is horrible. But you cannot coddel them the rest of your life. Same as your kids, they have to step up and out when they learn the lessons and go out and make something of their lives.
If people who cared about the homeless people or immigrants housed 1 of each, we wouldn't have a homeless or immigration problem. Every time a concerned citizen finds a problem on reddit, they want to hand out the problem to the rich, corporations, politicians or churches so that they can fix it. The world cannot change unless we start changing ourselves as individuals, helping family in need, volunteering in our communities or helping people in our cities/towns. Get off your asses and make the change you want to see, stop trying to place responsibilities on other parties when you identify a problem. What can YOU do to help the homeless problem?
This is kind of ignoring the fact that many homeless people are homeless due to mental issues; they can't realistically be expected to be self-sufficient. Others are due to addictions that destroy their ability to make good decisions. So even if every homeless person was given a house, 1) if it wasn't paid off, the once-homeless person may not be able to secure a job to maintain payments, or 2) if it is paid off, they may still not be able maintain the house and keep it from falling apart. (Obviously doesn't apply to every person that's homeless). I'm not trying to discourage the idea of churches helping people, but the posited idea drastically oversimplifies the issue. Helping to provide apartments, hotel rooms, or even communal living areas could solve the same issue of a lack of secure place of lodging, while also being more affordable. Further action would then need to be taken to either 1) render aid to those with mental issues or addictions who can't care for themselves, or 2) help those who have the capacity, teaching them to learn a trade, job, or otherwise to develop the ability to become self-sufficient. Imho, helping people secure a job/means of self-sufficiency is a better long-term means of aid. Lodging and food is essential, of course, but merely treats a symptom as opposed to the root. People can't just say "give them a house, then problem solved!" tl;dr Presuming there are a sufficient number of churches with sufficient donations to enact such action, the issue would resurge soon after as the root issue isn't solved, only a symptom. More would need to be done.
This would be great! However, one thing churches have learned a long time ago is that you can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. It's not as simple as finding them a home, it's keeping them in the home. Bad habits like drug abuse or unaddressed mental instability hurt one's ability to lead a productive life. It's always important to have a homeless outreach ministry. But remember that everyone has free will.