Good for him, but this is pretty much an Orphan-Crushing Machine moment.
Haha uhhh gawd.
First time reading this?
The government should have done that. At least Trump will build homes for the homeless veterans at least. This guy is doing his charitable work. Good for him. Even if it isn’t his responsibility just because he’s wealthy.
Trump ain’t doing shit
He only just signed an executive order stating as such lol
https://veterans.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=6702
$10k per house per million?
I hope he was a millionaire several times over…
deleted by creator
what kind of math?
Tap for spoiler
It was literally the first sentence of my comment 🤣
deleted by creator
it’s real. the ‘millionaire’ sold a startup for $340m. the homes are in new brunswick and cost $50k ea to build and furnish. the land was $500k. the houses are ~ 240-300 sq ft tiny homes. rent (at the time that source was written) starts at $200.
Almost certainly. Having $1M is unremarkable these days. Technically a millionaire is someone with more than a million and less than a billion, but usually these days it refers to people with hundreds of millions.
A million could buy you like… Two houses. Maybe 3 or 4 at a push if they’re small.
House on my street recently sold for a bit over a million. 3 bed, 2 bath, ok view of the ocean, on a quarter acre. Ludicrous.
With an ocean view and that big a house? Damn cheap
(Crying in a town where lots are in “square feet”, because no one has lots that big)
Where I am in SoCal, it barely buys you one.
Yeah, not up here in the northeast. Maybe two condos if they’re small enough and old enough
Nooo!!! Anyone with money is inherently evil! The only way to help the world is to ensure that none of us ever rise above the level of a wage-slave drone! Anyone who even approaches a position where they might be able to make an actual difference must be attacked mercilessly!
This is a showy display promoted to soften negitive opinion of capitalism. We would need “nice rich people” if we made a ethical wage
Show me a single leftist calling to remove the middle class.
I know of a guy who wanted to remove the middle class, but he also wanted to remove the upper and lower class as well so as to create a classless stateless society.
There is no such thing as evil … But their is antisocial and managing perception
There’s a story about how Bill Gates plans to give away 99% of his wealth in the next 20 years (on causes like eradicating polio, decreasing child mortality, etc) and all the Lemmy comments are “he’ll still have a billion dollars” or “he shouldn’t have that money to begin with”. Can’t we appreciate some good in the world?
So this guy shouldn’t be news, this should be the standard, it’s scary that the one good guy with enough money to do something like this is the exception and not the norm.
We all evolved to live in tribes; we have to work together as people.
The problem is that we allow individuals to amass so much wealth, it inevitably leads to the rest of us being at their mercy like that. If we’re lucky, they’ll be sorta benevolent, like this person. Would be much easier if we took out the randomness and just had the funds to do necessary stuff like this collectively.
That’s why we elected people to help the community with our collected funds. To help govern the distribution of the community effort. Well, that was the idea.
This is a terrible idea. We are not helpless children, it’s our society, we have the right to provide the necessities of life: food, health care, a place to live and a decent job. Capitalism is the sickness: get healthy, go woke.
I think it’s easier to make a million dollars and help a fair number of people out than it would be to over throw capitalism.
While helping people out with your millions of dollars you could also advocate for reform. Work with the systems available to make change. Screaming at the walls of Troy won’t get you inside.
There’s a lot of negativity from armchair experts in this thread but this seems like a genuine case of somebody putting a lot of thought and a lot of effort into actually helping the homeless. It’s not just dropping a bunch of tiny houses and saying “job done”.
Incredible read, thank you for sharing this
I think most likley that is actually the case. Y’all are masters at the sophist uno card. Cha cha real smooth…how low can you go…Charity is a band aid of tyranny and all those in the hierarchy play their part. Some towns out west that have a bunch of rich people don’t have any infrastructure for the poor so the peasants can serve them their cheeseburgers at their local McDonald’s. This means the rich need us. It is not altruism but out of necessity, but you can spin anything the way you would like, especially when it’s hard to tell rich people what to do.
Yes this… “What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? 17 Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” Butttttttt… “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6, ESV)
Rich people love peacocking managing perception and you will lap it up like a loyal dog unaware of your position in the hierarchy. I am not even Christian but raised Christian I suppose.
Are you high? It’s incredibly difficult to follow your wondering logic.
Are you high? It’s incredibly difficult to follow your wondering logic.
It’s deadass exhausting seeing people whinge whenever anything that improves the world happens. Always enough time for criticism, never enough to do something anywhere near as positive IRL.
yep, image has been accurate for a long time now.
Agree. Imperfect, enemy, good; you know the spiel. We all know it by now.
Probably stems from powerlessness and endorphin release from online interactions (tbh, guilty) taking place of actual, uh, I guess praxis is the term.
It’s hard not to be jaded. I bounce between both sides constantly.
Either way, this guy did an incredible thing.
Not everyone agrees with this thought but I’m also for allowing unused city parcels to be used for homeless tents and such. My city does everything it can to hide homelessness without addressing any of the underlying issues
i hope it works and contains a forever lease and not just a month to month where the land will be improved by these houses then said millionaire sells the land for a profit and the people living there are screwed yet again.
I hope the opposite: that these are more transitional, with associated services to help people get back on their feet for an eventual move to more standard housing when they are ready
all are good things imho!
A forever lease dude? If that’s in the deal then imma be honest with you and tell you me and my hommies are declaring homelessness and moving to wherever this meme is from. We can rebuild our lives from a point of never paying rent again.
If you have a hatred of hierarchy and a love of nature send me a DM. I’m interviewing people for an intentional community.
The first 5 people that pass the vibe check will get a one dollar, 99 year lease, on .5 acres to call your own. As long as you also partake in fixing/improving central infra.
Oh and one heavy caveat… You gotta be cool with winter. We are in Canada.
I mean that homeownership. i pay prop taxes but own my home. Forgive me. i was pooping and reading and forgot my words. 😂
Millionaire? Nice. Billionaires should follow suit, but 1000x
(With ~800 billionaires in the US, that’s 79,200,000 homes)
That’s my takeaway. The positive effect of the charity of this mere millionaire really does a great job showing just how fucking evil billionaires are. So much potential for positive change in the world siphoned into yachts and propaganda
How many homes do we actually need?
The official homeless number for 2024 in the US was 771,480. That’s probably just reported and not actual.
Analysts think we’re about 4.5 million homes short of what we would need to a well-functioning housing market. I’m not sure exactly how they’re defining that.
I would assume that figure takes into account not just how many homeless there are, but renters and home prices vs wages as well. There isn’t a single county in the US where a worker with the average annual wage can afford to buy a house at the average price range in that area, for example.
I’ve heard elsewhere that we already have enough vacant homes being reverse squatted by property management companies to house every homeless person.
Vacant homes in general, yes. Similar numbers of people have second homes for vacations as are homeless in the US. There are also quite a few abandoned homes in dying rural communities with no jobs.
Property management companies are managing rentals, not squatting. Some investors hold properties empty, but they aren’t in large enough numbers to be THE problem.
Funny story, we actually have enough housing for everyone. It just isn’t always where people want to live, and corporate landlords would rather leave a space vacant to drive up rents than make all of their inventory available, so there is a shit ton of residential (and commercial) property that is basically abandoned.
Some estimates say there are as many as 12 vacant homes per homeless person
this countryin the United States.
Edit: millionaire in OP is from Canada
Yeah, we were gonna do that anyway. After covid, I lost faith in humanities ability to be decent.
Took you that long? Wow. I had lost faith by the late 80s. For context I was only born in the early 80s. Once I went to kindergarten I realized society was awful and this planet sucks.
Unfortunately I haven’t found another planet that hosts life I can move to.
Well, I wasn’t alive in the 80s, so hard to lose faith in humans pre-emptiness. Lol
You weren’t alive in the 80s? Oh man. You missed out. There was cocaine EVERYWHERE!!! Just in the air.
Last estimates I saw before the pandemic had the rate above 30:1. I haven’t looked since then, but I’m certain it’s only gotten worse.
What we need is tax on vacant property. Make it a ladder system so its worse based on number of vacant units and value.
And eliminate corporate ownership of residential property. Tax the shit out of anyone owning more than three residences, and bring property values back down to earth. Bail out homeowners who owe mortgages for more than the value of the properties, and let the market self-correct.
I’d go so far as to attack the idea of a corporation. Letting a business own property or act as a liability shield for human choices is clearly bad for society.
It goes both ways though. I have a corporation for my contracting business to shield possible frivolous lawsuits from unscrupulous people. I do my best to screen clients and not work for wackos, but that’s not necessarily enough to protect myself and family.
Same. Different entities for different concerns keeps each siloed WRT finance and liability. But that should have no bearing on what I believe is true.
TLDR: Thomas Jefferson asked us to “crush” them. Better late than never.
Corporate entities in the USA are out of control and absolutely must be reigned in at every level of government. Their overreach is not a new problem. Thomas Jefferson said it had already begun in a letter from 1816:
I hope we shall take warning from the example [of the lawless English aristocracy] and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations (emphasis mine) which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.
Spoiler, we didn’t. We just let them bribe legislators to change the laws so they no longer even had to defy them. And of course a few of the largest corporations recently purchased the republic outright for a relatively paltry sum, as if it were a startup acquisition.
It’s obvious to anyone who owns corporations that they make nearly everything easier. So much about the economy and government has been hugely optimized for them, while the real flesh-and-blood citizenry experience greater friction year over year.
Edit: TLDR because no one reads walls of text
It would have to take into account how long it’s been vacant though.
I don’t want to punish property owners the literal second someone moves out, and it’s technically vacant. I also don’t want to punish them if they need to make repairs or updates to the property in between tenants.
So lets call it a tax forgiveness period of 1 year. I figure thats enough time to get the property renovated, and advertised as being available for rent.
And yes, I’m sure theres going to be someone who abuses the rule by just keeping it vacant for 11 months, and trying to rent it that last month. But here’s the thing. Those minded people will get burned. Because it takes time to rent properties. They’ll find it may take 2 or 3 months to find a tenant. Or maybe on the 11th month, they’ll realize they can’t rent it because in the time the property sat abandoned, uninspected, rats infested the property. Now it needs extermination services and renovations which will take 5 months. Oh well. There’s always SOME delay if you wait until the last minute. Which is why I gave it a generous year. Honest landlords won’t get burned with that grace period. Scammers will.
I’d say 3-6 months vacant is considered empty. Especially in high COL areas.
This forces property owners to lower rent to get the property filled if they can’t get a tenant. Thus bringing down rates.
The problem with that is, sometimes renovations take longer than 6 months. I don’t want to punish honest landlords, because then that incentivizes honest landlords to seek out ways to cheat the system, because the system cheated them.
It’s the same reason piracy is so popular in times when the official sources are either too convoluted or expensive to follow the official way.
Most customers would be happy to follow the rules, but if you want to watch 1 single NFL team through all 17 regular season games, my local team would require you to have access to an OTA broadcast tv source, and 5 different paid subscription services. Most of which are only broadcasting 1 game.
And now the NFL is seeing a MASSIVE rise in piracy. Yeah. No shit.
Same concept here. If you punish the honest landlords for undertaking a major renovation, then you push them to seek out other ways to cheat the system. And once they start, theres nothing saying they’ll stop.
There’s also the fact that many of those houses have sat vacant and have been left to rot for many years, meaning that plenty of them need to be demolished and rebuilt before they can be lived in. Small towns have been dying for decades as suburban sprawl consumes ever-increasing amounts of land and bleeds our cities dry of tax revenue, forcing them to continue making more suburbs to pay off the previous ones.
Drive through a small town, and all of your questions will be answered.
This is not a housing problem, it’s not a mental health problem, it’s a fucking unadulterated greed problem.
Please arm yourselves. The opposition will.
Except it would be unethical for a billionaire to throw that much power around. They should relinquish the value back to the communities from where they took it.
They didn’t become billionaires by being charitable.
Quite the contrary. You CAN’T accumulate that much money except by exploiting others, creating issues like homelessness.
And why were they homeless?
Why were they homeless???
I dont want to take away the feel good juice but the lack of housing isnt what causes homelessness…
The wealthy do not deserve praise for spending the money they leeched from society to solve problems that could have been paid for by taxes they avoided paying. The wealthy are NOT going to solve society’s problems long term, just drag them out so society relies on them instead of solving it themselves.
removed by mod
No, we want taxes to help the homeless and other members of society in need dumbass.
Yeah, ok. Look at our governments since the dawn of time and tell me when that’s happening moron.
Look at the wealthy since the dawn of time and tell me that they are a net benefit to society.
Such a problem that has yet to be solved by any government.
And you expect those same governments to just magically spend that money wisely.
Hilarious.
He’s a millionaire, not a billionaire. Calm down. A millionaire most likely worked hard and earned their wealth. It’s billionaires who cheat.
Millionaire covers everyone from having a million or two due to home equity all the way to 999 million because they just haven’t hit a billion yet. Someone who can drop a million dollars or more and still be a millionaire has multiple millions.
Equating the two is “not all millionaires”.
From my little bit of research, he created and sold a software startup for around $320mil. He seems to consider it something he “won” through luck instead of earned through merit
Reading up on him, it seems he researched successful programs for helping people out of homelessness with the intent to make sure nobody in his hometown would be unhoused. He appears to be pretty involved in the community too
Inbe4 the starter-home priced housing is bought up, demolished, rebuilt, and sold as luxury housing on the market, as airbnbs, or rentals with no rent control.
You might be interested in the story of Tengelo Park.
Harris Rosen went from a childhood in a rough New York City neighborhood to becoming a millionaire whose company owns seven hotels in Orlando, but his self-made success is not his proudest achievement.
Twenty years ago, the Orlando, Fla. neighborhood of Tangelo Park was a crime-infested place where people were afraid to walk down the street. The graduation rate at the local high school was 25 percent. Having amassed a fortune from his success in the hotel business, Rosen decided Tangelo Park needed some hospitality of its own.
“Hospitality really is appreciating a fellow human being,” Rosen told Gabe Gutierrez in a segment that aired on TODAY Wednesday. “I came to the realization that I really had to now say, ‘Thank you.’’’
Rosen, 73, began his philanthropic efforts by paying for day care for parents in Tangelo Park, a community of about 3,000 people. When those children reached high school, he created a scholarship program in which he offered to pay free tuition to Florida state colleges for any students in the neighborhood.
In the two decades since starting the programs, Rosen has donated nearly $10 million, and the results have been remarkable. The high school graduation rate is now nearly 100 percent, and some property values have quadrupled. The crime rate has been cut in half, according to a study by the University of Central Florida.
“We’ve given them hope,’’ Rosen said. “We’ve given these kids hope, and given the families hope. And hope is an amazing thing.”
Who would have thought that the way to reduce crime was to reduce people’s need to commit crimes by giving them homes and a future.
Bruce Wayne but sane
10M over 20 years to help a community of 3000 or $166 per person per year. USA is planning to increase the military budget by 150B this year or over $400 per US citIzen…
You’re saying that as if investment into military was unnecessary these days
It is if you don’t use it when you’re part of a contract that got broken from another Partie of the contract.
So breaking contracts now justifies military intervention?
Alternatively you could eliminate oil company tax breaks and direct subsidies and that alone would fund it.
Yeah I was shocked by the math on that one too. It is ridiculously cheap to lower crime and poverty, while increasing graduation rates and college enrollment. It’s almost like keeping people poor and stupid and criminal is intentional.
I like this because it is both a good story about an individual helping their community and it is proof individual action alone is not enough to rely on to solve social problems.
