> Fight for just housing/zoning policies and against NIMBYism
With you on that one. But this is a problem of successful, growing cities and it sounds like OP is in a city in the opposite situation that is lacking in economic opportunities.
> Join orgs supporting the homeless and fighting against the criminalization of homelessness.
When most people complain about homelessness, they're talking about the homeless on the streets, and particularly the ones on drugs who accost the people walking by. Criminalization of homelessness might be bad for moral reasons, but letting an unlimited number of homeless people live on streets indefinitely is exactly the opposite of what almost everybody wants. We need to focus on getting them off the streets into shelters and housing, and then everybody wins because they are also not being arrested anymore. Just focusing on the "criminalization" aspect and ignoring everything else is just making the problem worse in other ways.
> Buy from locally-owned businesses that treat their employees well. Not the gentrifying upscale cafes and restaurants and boutiques
This one is where you've really lost me.... who do you think provides good paying jobs and can afford to treat their employees well? Businesses that are making money, such as upscale cafes and restaurants and boutiques. These are also often locally-owned.
Where I live these upscale cafes and restaurants are owned by extremely wealthy restaurant ownership groups. Their attempts to seem local are little more than virtue signaling, and the money backing them has crushed whole city blocks of small local businesses in favor of their sterilized Instagram-aesthetic places where the food is 2x the price for half the flavor.
Gentrification kicks out the people who lived there and the local business there by jacking up rents. And this is not just a pure market dynamic - cities subsidize the developers that do these projects.
You won't care how "great" the new neighborhood is with its SoulCycle classes if you cannot afford to live there anymore.
I appreciate your prospective. I have to respectfully disagree though.
Building an apartment of affordable housing in an affluent community or building a condo of upscale units in a poor community clearly evokes feelings of NIMBY from some of the entrenched interests in both communities.
Some feel that helping 10 poor families find affordable housing in the affluent community does the greatest good. It certainly does for those families who can get the assistance to support their new lives. It does absolutely nothing though for the vast majority of the residents in their former underserved communities.
I personally feel that a greater good can result from 10 affluent families providing a cornerstone for the gentrification/improvement of an entire underserved community.
I believe we are both advocating for better services, increased safety, and affluence for historically under served communities. We just have a different perspective on how that might be done.
With you on that one. But this is a problem of successful, growing cities and it sounds like OP is in a city in the opposite situation that is lacking in economic opportunities.
> Join orgs supporting the homeless and fighting against the criminalization of homelessness.
When most people complain about homelessness, they're talking about the homeless on the streets, and particularly the ones on drugs who accost the people walking by. Criminalization of homelessness might be bad for moral reasons, but letting an unlimited number of homeless people live on streets indefinitely is exactly the opposite of what almost everybody wants. We need to focus on getting them off the streets into shelters and housing, and then everybody wins because they are also not being arrested anymore. Just focusing on the "criminalization" aspect and ignoring everything else is just making the problem worse in other ways.
> Buy from locally-owned businesses that treat their employees well. Not the gentrifying upscale cafes and restaurants and boutiques
This one is where you've really lost me.... who do you think provides good paying jobs and can afford to treat their employees well? Businesses that are making money, such as upscale cafes and restaurants and boutiques. These are also often locally-owned.