> how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally
Simplistic version: San Francisco spends roughly $100,000/year on each homeless person. In services, salaries for people working on it, rent for office buildings etc. I am willing to bet many of these people would not be homeless if we just gave them $100,000/year without all the middle bureaucracy layers.
The biggest obstacle to that is the electorate. People (voters!) would go wild. Anything the NGOs do, however shady, won't compare to that.
We had a successful campaign to recall a progressive prosecutor over less.
But the idea that that is intentionally done is the leap, right? In my model of the world, it's very easy to believe how overlapping & duplicate programmes, middleman corruption, and ineffective programs can cause this without meaning to, rather than some deliberate attempt to engineer the morass of beuracracy.
I didn't say it was intentional, it's the result of millions of little decisions that all make total sense in isolation.
How many of the homeless people in SF are from other parts of the US and are given one-way bus tickets to SF by their own hometowns? Because just giving them money could only possibly make that problem worse.
(Yes, this is a real thing that happens, though I'm not sure the extent. See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/... )