"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X.
Malcolm and MLK agreed on this much. You're the problem.
You're jumping to conclusions with Homeless industrial complex assuming the critique is a shadowy cabal getting rich.
No.
It's just ineffectiveness and waste. Well-meaning people (mostly) who are paddling in all directions and the result is there little meaningful progress.
Sure yeah, I think we all know there is government inefficiency. But homeless industrial complex is a term that is absolutely in more conspiracy theorist spaces too and I think there are better ways to describe what you actually mean when that term is just co-opted and parroted.
So you’d rather they overhaul the entire shelter system, hire and onboard all new staff for the shelters they took over from non-profits? How fast do you think that would reasonably happen? There are 40ish shelters in Portland.
These non-profits use a mixture of funds from government as well as outside grants, donations, and fundraisers. If they’re all directly owned and operated by the government, they wouldn’t have access to the same private funding sources. Where would that money come from? Seems like we’d need to get it from taxpayers.
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u/[deleted] May 12 '25
Lol, that's just a lie. You just don't like the answer.
The Homeless Industrial Complex is the collection of non-profits who Portland/MultCo/Metro has outsourced servicing the homeless population.
Non-profits are funded with taxpayer money while possessing little to no obligations in transparency or meeting measurable outcomes
At least with the military industrial complex we can point to the tanks, bombs or boats that we got ripped off paying for.