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.”
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…
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.
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.
Yo
Idea
What if ALL the houses we build are for reducing homelessness?
At least think about it
Just want to remind everyone that we don’t have a housing shortage, we have a cost of living crisis. Everyone deserves a place to live and we have plenty. The will is the only thing. Fight YIMBY traitors. We can do it!
“YIMBY traitor” – isn’t that just a NIMBY?
Two things can be wrong. We can (and should) dispose of landlords and build more housing.
Not sure what you’re talking about, but here in the UK we need over 4m houses to be built to house the current population. That’s quite a lot for a country of 68m.
Ahaha! Wtf is this shit? Bloody think tanks…
Well, can you provide some context to your +4m new houses figure?
Then we can discuss where the difference comes from.
Do you guys have room for that?
There’s loads of space. We just need to mow down terraced houses and get rid of aristocracy, which owns 40% of land in England.
Ah, yea fine makes sense.
Anyone has room for that if it’s not built in the style of American suburbs.
Well tbf Americans have room.
Fight against homelessness shall not be charity driven.
Yes but this is still a good idea in the meantime
How good it is depends on the details, of course.
I have nothing against “home first” strategy, however when some random millionaire decide without impact study or methodology how to fix the problem it might look like home shelters outside of zones where homeless get their social, work or food access, without lights, water or any usefull public infrastructure.
Nice!
Now, it would be good not to rely on good will of some individuals and actually enforce this for all the rich.
But still mad respect for the man.
Someone took 99 families off the streets? Wow fuck that asshole, how dare she have enough money to do that. How dare she not give up her home and make it 100 families off the streets, not good enough!
-Half this website, angry 99 families now have a place to live who didn’t before this event
The anger isn’t (necessarily) for the rich person who housed people. It’s for the system who left people homeless in the first place, the system that will put those people back on the streets if they don’t pay rent/property taxes/whatever other fee people have to pay to exist, the system where the solution is literally just “have rich people pay their share and almost everything will be fixed” but for some reason the people in charge can’t (or don’t want to) figure that out.
You conflating anger with the system with anger for people getting houses is disingenuous.
She?
Bold of you to assume their gender identity!
(I need glasses)
He denied their choice to live like they wanted and God intended! What an asshole. Who is he to decide for them?
This website is full of envy is the simple answer. Hate for people who have more, tons of entitlement and the “I totally wouldn’t want to be a billionaire!” bullcrap flying around.
the bullshit is that the system left 99 people without homes in the first place
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”.
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.
It’s hard not to be jaded. I bounce between both sides constantly.
Either way, this guy did an incredible thing.
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.
Do they pay him rent now?
that sounds an awful lot like communism to me. We can’t have that.
It doesn’t sound like that to me at all, since this was a voluntary action by one individual. It sounds like charity.
Where are they built in relation to necessary services, and what other services are available?
Is there on site support for drugs and mental health issues?
Is anybody’s stuff going to be safe there? Or are they dumped out of sight and mind?
You have to ‘invest’ in preventing the causes of homelessness in the first place, which has proved impossible under capitalism. I doubt corrupt dictatorships of the proletariat such as the Soviet Union did any better.
A lot of people talk about taxing folks like this and then using the money to supply the housing.
The thing is, given the money, few people could pull this off well. The site isn’t just being plopped down; from the sound of the article in the comments it’s being actively developed as a community with other safeguards and support, by someone who sunk a lot of time into finding out what would work to help people rather than just appear to help.
A scheme like this is hard to replicate because, in addition to money, it needs a core team with a clear vision and the time to really make it a focus of their lives. It also needs a community that will embrace it - for example it would likely work in the town I grew up in, but the town I work in (and am sadly forced to live in) now would likely drive such a project to failure.
It’s a good idea that worked against the odds, and should be celebrated for that alone.
A scheme like this is hard to replicate because, in addition to money, it needs a core team with a clear vision and the time to really make it a focus of their lives.
Sounds like an opportunity for the local government, and a way to create local jobs.
Local government’s have had such opportunities for decades, the evidence suggests that this doesn’t work overly well.
Good for him, but this is pretty much an Orphan-Crushing Machine moment.
Haha uhhh gawd.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, we were gonna do that anyway. After covid, I lost faith in humanities ability to be decent.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
