This site is mainly a companion for my music. Over the years, it's also become my only public profile, where I share articles, podcasts, and websites that I find interesting.
This page used to link to a piece I wrote about nonprofits, specifically how and why they won't solve homelessness. It was verbose, so I got rid of it. Fortunately, a Jacobin article by Meagan Day expressed my current views on nonprofits much better. “Woke” or Not, Philanthropy Is a Great Deal for Big Tech describes how the rich use charities and similar organisations to maintain economic inequality. My favourite point is that activists' livelihoods and the sources of funding they depend on are often contradictory. Nonprofits compromise their views, however progressive such organizations claim they are, in order to secure funding for themselves.
How many politicians are involved with nonprofits? How many of them are landlords? Would the board members from your local charity oppose a labour union? How many of these people would argue against redistributive policies, such as taxing extreme wealth and returning that to society and the working class?
Generations of homelessness across "developed" societies have been deliberately met with ineffective solutions. Unpopular euphemisms like "houselessness" or "the unhoused" do nothing to change the fact that people are still homeless. Performative busywork like this draws attention away from the root causes of homelessness: the privatization of housing and construction, a lack of rent controls, and the lack of good jobs.
In the end, the elites and the professional-managerial class maintain the status quo, the one which has made and continues to make them wealthy. Whatever "progress" happens is moral vanity at best. At worst, it's money laundering and tax evasion. And of course, the problems that make these organizations possible are always conveniently too big or too complicated to solve.
Well, they're not. We can start by thinking of housing as an economic issue within an economic system. And economic systems can be "[...] discerned, understood and, if necessary, altered or changed". That quote was from Economics as politics, an article by Luke Savage, also a Jacobin contributor.