Because the goal is not to make people rich but to provide housing.
I’d question that.
the OBJECTIVE is to end poverty for them…
provide housing … might be a tool towards that objective.
whats wrong with them selling the social housing flat after a few years and move up to something bigger/better, living the american dream?
In cities with rent control, a family might remain in a rent-controlled apartment for decades, never acquiring equity. And yet the low rent still allows them to acquire wealth, if they’re careful enough to save and invest.
One thing that’s wrong is that it prevents others from benefitting. If I just want the first group of people to gain wealth, I might as well just give them the money as if it was a lottery - with all the disadvantages that has. Because if my son could sell his apartment for $1 million a year after he bought it ( which is approximately market rate in that neighborhood) no one would benefit after him. Just like if the first person who occupied it had sold it at market rate, it would have always been market rate afterward and the whole complex would be very different today.
@Dewey_Finn is correct - I know more than one person who lived in a rent controlled apartment for many years ( for anyone from NYC I do mean controlled, as their families were there since the 70s) and bought vacation homes in other areas which they only could afford because of the low rent. One person had a house in the Poconos and another in Florida.
I’d focus on a single community - say, the homeless and those in poverty living in a single town of 50k (or whatever I could afford). I’d employ several different areas of expertise and try multiple strategies, collecting data on each one for the long term, to see what was most effective that could be used elsewhere.
Unless your business plan involved providing donations in perpetuity, you would still need to figure out a way for your grocery store to generate enough revenue to cover their operating costs.
^ This.
In a good year a successful grocery store runs at 3-4% profit. Most people are unaware of how small the margins are in food. A non profit is not going to be able to sell things that much more cheaply than the average chain.
Do things like soup kitchens or homeless shelters cover their operating costs out of revenues? I think not and it’s possible that a grocery store operated for the benefit of those in a food desert needs to be subsidized.
That’s actually happening to an extent. Here in Minneapolis a major food chain was told by the city government (which had come under political pressure to do something about the food desert problem) that it HAD to operate a store in the middle of an economically depressed neighborhood, or else they would be denied business licenses for anywhere else in the city. So that store remains open at a perpetual loss.
Not to derail the thread, but is that legal? Sounds coercive enough that it could be a lawsuit, especially if the city doesn’t mandate that any other business of any other form be forced to open a store in that region as well.
I don’t know about this case specifically but usually it’s a little more nuanced - more like you won’t get that zoning variance to open the giant store in the other neighborhood. Or you’ll get tax abatements if you open a store in a food desert. It’s usually not business licenses.
That sounds especially shitty to think that it’s ok to steal from a big company/rich person, poverty culture or not.
I think that’s a really good idea, actually. A twist might be that since you have the resources to do something along the lines of the Framingham Heart Study, except in multiple towns, you could try multiple variations in multiple (geographically distant) places simultaneously in hopes of eliminating as many variables as possible.
If it’s a store, then pretty much by definition has to cover costs. Otherwise it’s just some kind of food pantry that charges people.
I’m not saying that a subsidized grocery store is the best or only way to improve the availability of food to low-income food deserts, but it’s an idea. Here is a Dallas Morning News article about Jubilee Market in Waco. Most of the startup costs were raised by selling “shares” to local residents. The store negotiates with distributors for discounts. And yet it still needs a subsidy from a local non-profit, Mission Waco.
NM. @bump beat me to it
Well, yes, that is a non-profit grocery store. Isn’t the whole thread about how to donate money to the poor?
Yeah, I just think it’s a waste of money just tossing it at poor people unless you are doing it in a way that provides some sort of longer term solution.
Like it’s fine if you want to help a bunch of people out with some sort term issues like getting out of debt or paying for training and education or whatever. But to me, “food deserts” implies a much more long-term systematic issue that isn’t solved by propping up a grocery store until you run out of money or get bored and move on to something else.
Really the problem I would be trying to solve is “where should I put my billion dollars to fix whatever issue makes this neighborhood so economically unviable it can’t even support a grocery store or bodega?”
The example I provided of the Jubilee Market in Waco is intended as a long-term solution, though it’s going to take time to get to the point of being self-sustaining. The same thing may be true of a for-profit business, where years of investment may be needed before the company is profitable.
A for profit business often needs time to get to a point of being self-sustaining because it needs to develop a product, build infrastructure, and/or acquire customers. If you open an unprofitable grocery story, what is going to be different in 1, 5, or x years that will make it become self sustaining?
You got me; providing for the poor might never be a profitable venture. Who knew?