If you think this is some gotcha (you can't help with Afghan refugees during a crisis until you've solved homelessness?) then you never cared about the homeless in the first place, and are using them as a pawn when it's useful to dunk on the middle east.
>then you never cared about the homeless in the first place
That's a bit presumptuous, don't you think? There's nothing inherently contradictory about "we need to look after americans before look after refugees" and "we need to do something about homelessness". The only contradiction is that the former is a policy of one political party, and the latter is a policy of the other political party.
>As part of President Joe Biden's new infrastructure plan, he unveiled nearly $5 billion in new grants to state and local governments for rental assistance and the development of affordable housing. In doing so, he aims to get 130,000 homeless people into homes.
The covid crisis is affecting marginalized groups like the homeless or people with psychological problems among the hardest, because numbers of beds in clinics and shelters have been reduced, hospitals are busy and access is in cases restricted, everyone is dealing with ever-changing mandates, and many people simply have their own lives to worry about so no one cares for them.
At the same time many hotels and airbnbs are under capacity because travel is restricted. It is a fair question why the homeless aren't hosted there. We don't have to expect Airbnb to pay for it but the government could if they actually cared about people, instead of terrorizing school kids and bankrupting the state with neverending lockdowns and restrictions.
I don’t think that’s fair. I drive past hundreds of homeless people who are already here in the US every day. I applaud Airbnb for this move, but I also can’t ignore the fact that it’s a moment in the news cycle that determines these people are getting help and these ones aren’t.
Why does Airbnb offer free stays to refugees in Afghanistan, but not homeless in the US?
First, Airbnb is very host-centered. The host can pick their guests, make changes to their reservations, etc. I think if they said “your house will host homeless, but don’t worry we will pay you anyway”, they’d lose 70% of US hosts regardless. The shelter is only part of the problem with homelessness, going hand in hand with at least mental health care.
Second, it may have to do with prices. I imagine a night in Kabul cost $15–25 for an apartment (prior to the withdrawal, at which point they probably lowered further); now compare to prices in say Washington or SF area. Imagine Airbnb declares a plan for fighting homelessness, and has to pay actual market rates to its hosts in major US cities.
All in all it looks like it could be an interesting idea for a non-profit, but it doesn’t seem to make sense as a long-term tactic for a business like Airbnb.
This could be a good question to ask companies like Booking.com though, where hosts are generally not expected to be able to choose whether to accommodate the name on the booking.
The CEO is quoted saying "The displacement and resettlement of Afghan refugees in the US and elsewhere is one of the biggest humanitarian crises of our time."
These refugees aren't in Kabul any more; airbnb is probably paying market rates, or close to them, though perhaps not in DC or SF.
Ah. Much of my argument doesn’t apply then, except that still locations in the US with high homeless population are probably significantly more expensive (large cities) relative to where refugees are resettling, and that mental health care would have to accompany shelter more so with the homeless than with refugees.
The Middle East 'grew' in the early 00s, for the reasons you probably expect. The Bush administration needed a euphemism for Muslim nations.
> The Greater Middle East, is a geo-political term, introduced in March 2004 in a paper by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as part of the U.S. administration's preparatory work for the G8 summit of June 2004, denoting a vaguely defined region that includes the Arab world plus Afghanistan, Cyprus, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Turkey.[1] The paper presented a proposal for sweeping change in the way the West deals with the Middle East and North Africa.[2][3] Previously, by Adam Garfinkle of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Greater Middle East had been defined as the MENA region together with Central Asia and the Caucasus.[4]
> The future of this Greater Middle East has sometimes been referred to as the "new Middle East", first so by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who in Dubai in June 2006 presented the second-term Bush administration's vision for the region's future. Rice said would be achieved through 'constructive chaos', a phrase she repeated a few weeks later during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when the 2006 Lebanon War had broken out; the meaning of this phrase and the Bush administration's vision have been much debated since.[5][6][7] The efforts to achieve this new Middle East are sometimes called "The Great Middle East Project".[8][9]
I had an argument the other day with a guy refering to Morocco as part of the Middle East. It seemed mind-boggling to me you'd put a country West of Portugal in that category. I then discovered it had become common parlance in the US for anything that spoke Arabic or Persian.
In a world of unlimited resources we should do both. However the refugees are in imminent danger of death (or at least goes conventional national security thinking), whereas most homeless Americans are at least able to scrape by.
>However the refugees are in imminent danger of death (or at least goes conventional national security thinking), whereas most homeless Americans are at least able to scrape by.
If we're using the utilitarian argument, shouldn't we be pouring money into effective altruism (eg. bill gates funding malaria prevention programs), which do a even better job at preventing death?
Isn’t it kind of a gotcha to accuse someone of not caring about the homeless on the grounds that they… brought up homelessness? I did not see the word solved appear in the comment you’re responding to.
I personally read it as a general comment about housing supply.
Edit: To clarify, I’m happy about what AirBNB is doing here and support it fully. I think it’s possible to be concerned about housing from multiple angles at the same time though.
I genuinely think it’s a stretch to assume that a person advocating for an additional large group of units literally translates to someone that wants more people on the street. Furthermore I find that reason to be far more convoluted than what would constitute an easy “gotcha.”
“You said you want to help a problem and therefore you don’t want that problem helped. My proof is that you brought up the problem in the first place.” is something I have difficulty digesting.
I disagree. Most homeless are sheltered, and the unsheltered homeless are largely in their situation due to mental health and drug issues which tend to persist. By comparison, these Afghan refugees are likely going to try and connect with the Afghan diaspora and get jobs and eventually become independent of this support system. Not to mention, the risk of lodgings being trashed by the inhabitants is likely much less - that is what happened when Seattle metro hotels were converted to homeless shelters during lockdown.
The Airbnb is a solution to a temporary problem, which is that there is a lot of Afghan coming to America and need temporary shelter while they find something else.
The homelessness problem needs a more long-term solution than 25k shelters for a limited time. You can read about Toronto leasing hotels for the homeless if you want to read more about some solutions that are being worked on, for example.
Airbnb will probably house these refugees for a few weeks or months until they have more permanent housing from a non-profit or the government or they're simply on their feet. While refugees may have more needs than the average person, as a group they don't have the widespread problems with mental health and substance abuse that the unsheltered homeless population does.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't help the homeless, but it does mean that's a much heavier ask, one more suited to either the government, or non-profits specifically targeted at the issue.
This is how the civil reserve air fleet works. If an airline wants to receive military contracts it has to make a portion of it’s fleet available for emergency use.
I’m personally not a big fan of these sorts of neoliberal public private partnerships. But at least with conventional thinking it’s not that bad of an idea. Not sure why you’re getting all these downvotes.
Or we could just, y'know, produce enough homeless shelters or crisis housing ourselves, through the government + taxes.
Trying to twist the private sector's arm into doing this themselves is stupid, it's not their wheelhouse, just tax their profits and have the government do it.
doesn't really make sense, this is a temporary spike of people that need some kind of transitional housing. Really the governments problem, but fine if AirBnB see some value in helping out.
I see this argument in relation to refugees pretty often. It seems to insinuate that we are spending more on refugees than we are on homeless shelters.
SF is prepared to spend 1.1 billion to address homelessness, which I think is just shy of the federal refugee program budget.
The fights to combat exclusionary / single family zoning are in part to create more affordable housing.
It seems we, as a society, are doing a lot to fight homelessness, but relatively little to help resettle refugees.
They don’t care about Afghans just scoring brand points. Businesses exist to make money and the fact they thought this might help there branding in effort to make more money says more about society really than it does about this company in particular.
Many of the visible homeless you see in cities aren't in trouble because they lack housing, they're in trouble because they have untreated mental health and drug addiction problems(which leads to their lack of housing).
Giving them temporary accomodation isn't going to make their lives better in the long term. Giving these 20k Afghans temporary accommodation may actually make their lives better while they transition to permanent housing, because homelessness is actually their biggest problem, not drugs or mental health.
Can you imagine if America spent 2 trillion (cost it spent trying to help Afghan people) on its homeless and poor. Could barely get them a fucking $1200 check after shutting down the economy for a year.
“Between 80 and 90 percent of outlays actually returned to the US economy.”
Your tax dollars went to pay defense contractors, construction firms, anyone who pounced on an opportunity.
While I disagree with the parent on helping US citizens first, I don't think it's generally wrong to put your own people first if you have to choose. That doesn't mean that other people are worth less, it simply means that, if you can choose one or the other, it's not generally reprehensible to choose people close to you, at least in my opinion.
Imagine, for example, a natural disaster strikes and you're forced to either save the live of your own child or a complete stranger. Anyone would choose his own child (assuming exactly similar circumstances). That does not mean the other childs live is worth less. It's exactly the same thing if it's about people in your country or a foreign one - of course, your relation is less intense, but it still holds.
Other comments explain why you'd choose contrary to this in this case, but I don't think we should assume bad faith in the parent.
