My partner and I were discussing this over dinner, our ideas went from buying up land to finance organic farming and distributing it at the lowest price to crashing the financial system to “reset” everybody’s bank account with no possible recovery. Any other ideas?
Buy as much land a possible and build houses for homeless people to rent at an extremely low cost. They would need to either have a job or be actively looking for one (with proof since trying to get one shows they might actually be trying to better their life, in my eyes at least), pay for their own food, and maybe a $10 monthly rent.
The lease would be on a yearly basis and if they find a better place they can afford before the lease is up, they would be allowed to leave without any sort of early lease termination fees. There would probably be a month long period where the person(s) could move back in just in case the new place doesn’t work out and they have to move out. During the grace period, nobody can move in.
I would, with the hypothetical money, pay for their utility bills and try to keep up on repairs/maintenance so long as they don’t abuse it by doing something like constantly keeping the water on 24/7, using as much electricity as they can physically can, or purposefully breaking and wrecking the place.
Also, I would let them know that they would be responsible if they get their internet access cut off because they were too busy pirating. Even though I personally support piracy, I wouldn’t want to be in trouble for piracy that I wasn’t directly involved in.
Wow you would reinvent “means testing” except make sure that it is to your whims speciifcally instead of a government service. So tell me, how would building houses 500 miles from the nearest metropolitian area while requiring “a job” be sustainable? Are you providing them jobs? What if the jobs they found didn’t meet your definition of “bettering their life?” Would you then bus them off to Chicago or New York city? Why not just create company town where you provide them with the job you find useful to your bottom line and then post on lemmy.ml about how benevolent you are?
On the “bettering their life” part, as long as the job is not illegal, going and begging for money all day, or just performing insurance fraud/related scams, I’d say those jobs for the bill of “bettering their life” in my book since it’s legal and they (hopefully) are getting paid enough for them to survive under the conditions at the housing. There probably would be an opportunity for people in the housing area to get jobs for things like lawn care or maintenance to help if they really are struggling to help find a job elsewhere, provided by the small organization I would probably have to create just to make this all happen.
If the job actually involved illegal activity, then I would probably end up calling the police if I found out since I couldn’t in good faith trust that their job might not end up endangering tenant neither accidentally nor on purpose. I’m showing a bit of bias, but I wouldn’t really want to deal with people who feel like they have to stoop so low that crime is their only option to support themselves since there are better resources for helping them than this fictional organization could do (just giving out numbers for other organizations that could help but probably cost way too much for the tenants to afford because capitalism).
As for the 500 miles away from the metropolitan part, with as much money as hypothetically given, I’d probably try and pull a few strings to make sure there is always at least a bus route through the area with a few buses. I don’t know about other cities in America, but the one I live in has a halfway decent public bus system in place. Besides, I don’t know any buses that ship from west to east coast America that you don’t have to rent out for a lot of money. Besides, I wouldn’t wanna act like China and just ship away all the poor people I can out of the big cities and into the rural countryside.
Also, as someone who hates large companies, creating a company town would most likely go completely against my morals and values. If I ever had the thought in the real world of actual doing that, well, let’s just say I would rather hang myself by my internal organs. I’m also not the type who usually does things for social media attention or attention in general since I really don’t care much for what others think of me. I also know I am not a good person and couldn’t claim in good faith that I am benevolent when I know, if Christian He’ll is real, I am already going there and there would be/is little I can do to stop my eternal damnation.