Bob Bass

I think a harm of online activism is the "THIS IS ACTUALLY EASY" argument. I've seen lots of folks indicate that a single billionaire could solve homelessness, or that there are 30x more houses than homeless people so we could just give them all houses. These words are fantastic for activating people, but they are also lies. The US government currently spends around 50B per year keeping people housed. States, of course, have their own budgets. If Bill Gates spent the same amount of money the US does just to keep people housed, he would be out of money in 3 years. I think that would be a great use of his money, but it would not be a permanent solution. The statistics about there being more houses than homeless are just...fake. They rely on looking at extremely low estimates of homelessness (which are never used in any other context) and include normal vacancy rates (an apartment is counted as vacant even if it's only vacant for a month while the landlord is finding a new tenant.) In a country with 150,000,000 housing units, a 2% vacancy rate is three million units, which, yes, is greater than the homeless population. But a 2% vacancy rate is extremely low (and bad, because it means there's fewer available units than there are people looking to move, which drives the price of rent higher.) Housing should not be an option in this country. It should be something we spend tons of money on. It should be a priority for every leader and every citizen. it should also be interfaced with in real, complex ways. And it should be remembered that the main way we solve the problem is BUILDING MORE HOUSING, which I find a whole lot of my peers in seemingly progressive spaces ARE ACTUALLY OPPOSED TO. Sometimes they are opposed to it because they've heard stats that the problem is simple and could be solved very easily if only we would just decide to solve it, which is DOING REAL DAMAGE. By telling the simplest version of the story, you can get people riled up, but what do you do with that once they're riled up if they were riled up by lies? There are only two paths: 1. Tell them the truth...that everything they've been told is actually a lie and that the problem is actually hard. And, because the problem is both big and hard, tons of people are working very hard on it, and they should be grateful for (or even become) one of those people. 2. Keep lying until they are convinced that the problem does not exist because it is hard, it exists because people are evil. Or, I guess, #3, people could just be angry and sad all the time, which is also not great for affecting real change. I dunno...I'm aware that people aren't doing this because they want to create a problem, and often they believe the fake stats they are quoting, but I do not think it is doing more good than harm, and I would like to see folks doing less of it. One thing that definitely does more good than harm is actually connecting to the complexity of an issue that is important to you. Do that...and see that there are many people working hard. We do not have any big, easy problems. If we did, they'd be solved. I'm sorry, it's a bummer, but here we are.