Your post about homeless shelters calls their issues "uniquely liberal". Can I ask what you mean by that? /Gen
To me, there's nothing more liberal than a finely tuned system of bureaucracy that is hand-crafted to seem politically neutral despite still negatively impacting our most vulnerable populations en-masse.
When you enter the shelter system, you lose status as a person and instead become a measurable outcome. The nonprofit complex (which most shelters fall under) is a massive industry with billions of dollars flowing in and out. Their continued existence & expansion- which could include hundreds of people's jobs- live and die on 2 things: 1) they must constantly prove that they are socially necessary, or that there is a high/growing need for them to exist, but also simultaneously 2) proving "positive outcomes" and making it look like they are helping people transition out of homelessness with a program that works.
Whether it DOES work doesn't really matter, and in fact, if it worked that might actually be worse for their business. I mean, if there's no homeless people, what happens to the shelter? Our jobs? Our funding? But it especially does not matter to the people at the top of these orgs; a board of directors who likely will never interact directly with the staff, clientele, or even site locations at any time. All they interact with are numbers, and every decision is based on what those numbers say. It doesn't need to work, it just needs to look like it works.
I'll give you a personal anecdote to highlight what I mean.
I recently briefly worked for a very large system that runs several HUGE shelters in one of the most homeless metropolitan areas in the country. It's a very liberal company that mostly employs people of color and trans folk (which I now recognize as a massive red flag lol they want our labor for cheap). They are focused on things like *equity* and *accountability* blah blah
Success in these shelters is measured in a very prototypical way; how many beds are we filling daily, and how many people are "leaving shelter of their own accord" (i.e. not being kicked out for violating rules, and presumably leaving because they have found housing)? Essentially: how many beds are we turning over each day? And the higher that number = positive outcomes.
But here's the thing. If someone "forfeits" their bed, they can be counted as a tally under that "left shelter of their own accord" category, even if they immediately just get back on the waitlist (and oh yes, there are wait lists) to return to the shelter. So what these shelters do is they maintain a VERY strict, convoluted set of rules around what it means to forfeit your bed.
Back 5 minutes past curfew because you're visibly transgender and had 3 Uber drivers decline your ride when they saw you? Forfeit. Late for curfew because the bus' wheelchair lift didn't work and you use a power chair? Forfeit. You ARE back on time, but your partner is seemingly AWOL (because, as we discovered later, he was picked up by immigration and disappeared for several days)? Forfeit for the both of you, because this is a couples-only shelter. Sorry. You can jump back in the list as a single, and return to shelter after sleeping outside for a few days, though.
(all of these are real situations I really encountered, and you can very clearly see the type of people impacted)
Any bending of these rules requires documentation (like for clients that work late, for example, giving proof of schedule) but that documentation needed to be renewed WEEKLY. Beyond being impossible for clients to keep track of, it was impossible for US to keep track of. We were so understaffed and on top of everything, we have to keep track of 200 people's work schedules? No. Of course stuff slips through the cracks- and that's a function of the bureaucracy too- making it such a fucking chore to maintain legitimately, that people are encouraged to fudge shit and lie.
And as a result of all these policies, you get a constantly turning conveyor belt of people "exiting" shelter and then re-entering it, both of which count positively for outcome numbers. Why WOULDN'T they make that cycle part of the routine? And they did- almost every client I worked with had accidentally forfeit their bed at least once. Some clients had done it dozens of times.
When it comes to nonprofits I always keep this saying in the back of my head; if you're not paying for a product, you are the product. Assume that bureaucracy will always bend in favor of the industrial complex, because you're just the product. You're just a number. You're just an outcome. And if that outcome doesn't look pretty for their bottom line, they'll force it to. All while smiling and preaching equity. Really, what's more liberal than that?
