What: Home everyone.
How: The interest income from investment through a non-profit.
Why: Because it is the right thing to do. It is a human right to have a home.2
Level of Difficulty: “The US government has a technology called a printing press, that allows it to produce as many dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.” - Ben Bernanke, remarks before the National Economists Club in Washington, D.C., www.federalreserve.gov. November 21, 2002.
Premise: “Four percent of some amount of money homes some number of people in perpetuity.” - Casey OBrien, July 2021.
Purpose: End homelessness and end the financial burden from the same. The cost to NOT home somebody in the United States this year, 2023, will be approximately $60,000 per chronically homeless person. That definition is addressed later as it is not viewed properly, as in from the top down perspective, which is more adroit in this case than endless bottom up exercises. I use a more conservative range, ~42K - ~52K, for reasons explained in THE MATH section.5, 6
Projection: Homelessness will be resolved within the United States in 20 years. The cost of ending it will be over in 10 (aspirational, but doable) to 12 years. More likely 15 as the collective drags (a little less) ass while picking up the pace! I am unwilling to predict against other locales as I am not nearly as culturally aware of any other countries, but why would it take any longer if the target is fully and correctly embraced?
Leverage: Pain. Yours. Mine. Theirs. Ours. 'nuff to go all the way around.
Why: Because a home, a safe place of your own, is the single most important human right after air and water. It is ahead of food because I can get you to give me a cheeseburger, but I cannot get you to let me sleep on your couch. Without a physically stable location under their own control, humans are adrift and cannot function in a healthy fashion for themselves beyond mere survival, and in no way can they assist society as much as almost all of them would like to until they can resolve the ground shaking beneath them continuously. Home First is an established social fact.7, 8
Plus Result: An expectation, beyond resolving homelessness, and ancillary benefits of improved sanitation and public health, improved public safety, a revitalization of urban business centers, a huge increase in national self-esteem, reestablishment of global leadership, this time much more earned than previously, and the return to non-crisis mode for municipal governments so that they can begin to resolve other issues more effectively, of the generation of a virtuous cycle influencing the inception of other solution based projects.
My credentials: Human
The retirement model’s credentials: Since when hasn't America believed in the damn stock market? Do you get it yet? This investment model for solving problems can be looked at as a community savings account. Americans haven't been saving enough money for a long time. Everybody has wanted to extend their lifestyle in the moment. It's easy to demonstrate that this community savings account will save you money everyday, removing a societal cancer, easing your mind and giving the country a boost of self-esteem.
The point: You will be changing the world in real time. We will bend a transactional device to deliver love. It will finally become much more of a shared apparatus of success, perhaps even a blessing, as has been its potential since inception.
This is a retirement play. Let’s retire homelessness.