The Great Big Homelessness/Capitalism/Socialism Thread

westernpromise

Herzlos wrote: »

That isn't the problem of Shelter.

How an organisation is perceived is absolutely its problem. If a tobacco company were perceived as selling health food I'm quite sure it would be blamed for misleading its customers. Charities that aren't - same thing.

This seems to be very much a thing with the housing racket. As well as Shelter, which doesn't, there are also gems like "Empty Homes", which is at least honest in that it makes no attempt to fill them. You could barely make these people up:
"The charity's founder, Antony Fletcher...had a long career in housing associations and worked in public policy."
So he'd be a Labour Party shill, then. What are this august body's aims?
"We believe priority should be given to bringing long-term empty homes back into use to meet housing needs, alongside building more homes."
Great! So does this charidee have a list of empty homes?
"Empty Homes does not have a list of empty properties or have access to any empty homes themselves."
Oh dear! So it's other people who'll have to find them and do them up. How can Empty Homes help with this?
"We do not have access to any specific properties, their owners or have specific lists of abandoned properties over the country. As such, the Empty Homes charity does not refurbish or renovate empty homes."

So they bleat, basically, for Other People's Money, but they actually do, well, nothing. So, so typical.

No I didn't, and I'm still baffled you claim it hasn't housed anyone, but this could be an interpretation thing.

I said
They are fake charities who do exactly nothing and who fritter donations on lobbying for even more of other people's money.
which you called "outlandish" and have now had to concede is entirely true.

Apart from pointing you to the people who can help, tell you what to say and provide you support throughout the whole process. He doesn't take money to just tell people to sod off to the job centre.

Talk doesn't keep the rain off. For that you need a roof, provided never by Shelter and always by somebody else. Shelter's contribution is to try to prevent that someone else from getting paid and to fiddle smart ways for people to live somewhere for nothing, while blagging as many benefits as possible.

The fact it never claimed to do so? That it's completely irrelevant to it's aims?

Of course a charidee called "Shelter" could not possibly be expected by anyone to provide anyone with shelter, or have as one of its aims to make more of it available. Of course not. How absurd! It calls itself the housing and homelessness charity but it's none of its mission to provide housing or reduce homelessness - other people can do that. The website gives the whole game away:
Popular topics

Homelessness
Private renting
Tenancy deposits
Repossession
Eviction
Repairs
Housing benefit
Council housing

All of those are in effect about how to avoid paying for the roof over your head.

Herzlos

westernpromise wrote: »

How an organisation is perceived is absolutely its problem. If a tobacco company were perceived as selling health food I'm quite sure it would be blamed for misleading its customers. Charities that aren't - same thing.

Only if it's been misleading people into thinking that's what it does. My only interaction with Shelter has been buying furniture from one of their stores and at no point did I get the impression they provided bricks & mortar.

So they bleat, basically, for Other People's Money, but they actually do, well, nothing. So, so typical.

I'm not going to convince you that tenant advocacy is useful so I'm not going to bother.

I said
They are fake charities who do exactly nothing and who fritter donations on lobbying for even more of other people's money.
which you called "outlandish" and have now had to concede is entirely true.

I did no such thing. That statement is still 100% verifiably false. Your adjusted statement of (and I paraphrase) "Shelter don't actually provide the accommodation themselves" is true, but is completely irrelevant. They don't claim to.

Shelter's contribution is to try to prevent that someone else from getting paid and to fiddle smart ways for people to live somewhere for nothing, while blagging as many benefits as possible.

That's a very cynical view, and completely wrong. Shelter give people the advice and legal help they need to deal with disputes, sort out payment plans, talk to the correct people, fill out forms and so on.The focus is on helping people avoid homelessness, not on shafting the innocent hard working landlords.

Of course a charidee called "Shelter" could not possibly be expected by anyone to provide anyone with shelter

It does provide people with shelter, just not directly by putting them in a house. I'm pretty sure you're deliberately missing the point now so I'm giving up.

Jack_Johnson_the_acorn

westernpromise wrote: »

How an organisation is perceived is absolutely its problem. If a tobacco company were perceived as selling health food I'm quite sure it would be blamed for misleading its customers. Charities that aren't - same thing. You


I said
They are fake charities who do exactly nothing and who fritter donations on lobbying for even more of other people's money.
which you called "outlandish" and have now had to concede is entirely true.


Of course a charidee called "Shelter" could not possibly be expected by anyone to provide anyone with shelter, or have as one of its aims to make more of it available. Of course not. How absurd! It calls itself the housing and homelessness charity but it's none of its mission to provide housing or reduce homelessness - other people can do that. The website gives the whole game away:
Popular topics

Homelessness
Private renting
Tenancy deposits
Repossession
Eviction
Repairs
Housing benefit
Council housing

All of those are in effect about how to avoid paying for the roof over your head.

What's wrong with giving vulnerable people free legal advice and support?
Why do you think this is so wrong? Why shouldn't people know what there rights are? Do vulnerable people not deserve assistance when facing the prospect of homelessness? Do homeless people not deserve to be told how to find shelter?

The likes of crisis, help the homeless, centre point and the salvation army all specifically help the homeless. Now if they weren't doing that, you'd have a valid point.

But so far you've basically stated that you dislike Shelter because they don't house the homeless which is not something there ever claimed to do.

Beggars belief.

Herzlos

I'm assuming he's been upset by Shelter (or similar) helping out one of his tenants who was presumably having difficulties paying rent. It's about the only thing that sort of makes sense.

Malthusian

Herzlos wrote: »

Do you think it's fair that the councils have something called a "nil income form", which allows their housing benefits to be reinstated when their benefits are cut/sanctioned unfairly, but the only way to get this form is to ask for it by name, and the council will only acknowledge it exists if explicitly asked?

Do you think it would be fairer if there was no nil income form and people were unable to get their housing benefit reinstated at all?

Because we don't have enough money to pay full housing costs for everyone who has no income, hence why we only do it for an arbitarily selected minority who ask about the form. Same with continuing healthcare benefit and other benefits only available to those in the know.

We could make the benefit available to everyone and advertise its availability on high street shop windows and local radio and ensure that absolutely everyone knew it existed - but to do so we would have to slash the benefit dramatically. If we have a benefit that, let's say, only half those eligible know about, and we want everyone to claim it, then to afford it we have to slash it in half. As night follows day and as two plus two equals four.

The middle-class progressives won't wear it. They prefer benefits to be paid at a higher level but only to those who know how to work the system, because it suits them. They don't care about those who miss out because they're in the know and they always get these benefits when they need them, and more importantly, it creates a market for organisations they run like Shelter to make money in.

Abolishing all benefits and replacing them with universal basic income would solve the problem of the "nil income form" in a much fairer way, but as it would mean tens of thousands of redundancies in the public sector and significant cuts to many people's benefits, that's a pipe dream.

westernpromise

Jack_Johnson_the_acorn wrote: »

What's wrong with giving vulnerable people free legal advice and support?

Who says they're vulnerable? What's wrong with it is that money directed to Shelter is not spent on shelter. The fund of money directed to charities is finite and therefore anyone who leeches it to spend on political lobbying, cobbling up fake statistics, and Shelter's other nefarious activities is diverting it away from where it could do actual good.

Otherwise you might just as well argue that all charidees are automatically good. So if I were to set up a charidee that focused on, say, assisting drivers to avoid speed points; or taught violent criminals what to say in the dock or in front of the parole board to get their sentence shortened; or taught gambling addicts tips on how to cheat the machines; those would presumably be great too.

I could call them the Road Safety Alliance, the Rehabilitation of Offenders Mission, and GambleAware. They'd all have chuggers out on the pavement soliciting donations to help road accident victims, families of criminals and gamblers. Every penny they collected would be spent on salaries or misspent. But they're charidees so that's all good.

westernpromise

Malthusian wrote: »

Do you think it would be fairer if there was no nil income form and people were unable to get their housing benefit reinstated at all?

What would be good is if Shelter paid their benefits out of all the funds it's rolling in.

Then it could proudly say that after 50 years it had finally done something tangible to help the homeless, rather than telling them to find another landlord and here's a smart way to bilk the taxpayer of a few quid.

GreatApe

Shelter should use its donated money to advertise and promote for council tenants to buy their own homes. Maybe even paying for the £1k solicitors costs and helping people with the formalities and paperwork of applying for a mortgage. I would return to donating to them of they did that.

I have thought a few times how could a group get together collect some money and do a mass mailout to council properties the forms to apply for RTB and also maybe a website or youtube channel explaining the process

4 million council homes maybe £1 per home cost to print and post the materials and maybe £10k worth to put up you tube videos explains the process. Total cost in the region of £4 million could lead to maybe 5% uptake = 200,000 homes bought would thus increase homeownership by 0.7% points.

Maybe repeat the process 3 years could get 500k homes switched from social to owned for a cost of not much more than £12 million

Malthusian

GreatApe wrote: »

Shelter should use its donated money to advertise and promote for council tenants to buy their own homes.

Ok, now it's getting a bit silly. It's a charity for helping homeless people, a council tenant is not homeless. It's fun to throw rocks at sacred cows but let's not drop them on our own feet.

Cakeguts

Shelter runs a brilliant help line for advice. If it just did that it would have my total support but it doesn't. It makes up statistics. It will take a statistic for a poor area of a town and then suggest that this applies to a whole area like the north west of England without any research on the area that it is applying the statistic to. Apart from the fact that this doesn't help anyone it only raises funds it is also not just misleading but bordering on fraud.

I object very strongly to their Christmas adverts. Using child actors to try to con people out of money by implying that they will find homes for them is misleading. How these adverts get past the advertising complaints commission is beyond me. I also don't know how much they pay for the adverts.

If Shelter would stick to its advice line and sack all the people who are living off the charitable donations by making up statistics and paying for adverts it would do something useful and I would support that. At the moment it will not be getting my money. I prefer to give time to my favourite charity.