What radicalized me was Conservative philanthropy.
I've said before that my parents were property managers, which is to say, the people real estate investors who owned apartment buildings hired to act as landlords for them. And they and a lot of my other relatives were really big into investing in real estate as a means of creating generational wealth. (This has not worked out for us, by and large. Some have given up, but others are still hustling today.)
This means that when a local government wants to create a Taskforce on How We're Totally Addressing the Housing Crisis, You Guys, and among all the shelters and charities desperate for funding, they look to appoint someone who can represent the landlords who control most of the housing here... they appoint the kind of people I end up sitting next to at Thanksgiving dinner.
So this story I just shared about landlords and government and housing benefit payment dates?
Yeah. That got shared with me by a conservative. Someone who knows I'm a fruity socialist leech now, and wanted me to know that this was proof that the private sector CARES!
Actually, it was part of an argument about how government or nonprofit housing wasn't a good solution to the housing crisis, because the private sector "can do it more efficiently". The landlords saw something was really wrong and they were having to evict a lot more people than usual! So they called up their buddies in office and got it FIXED! Let us join hands and sing!
I, meanwhile, knew that benefits recipients had been screaming about this problem to national newsmedia for months before the landlords stepped in, so I was less than impressed. Imagine a type of noblesse oblige that only takes notice when they realize they're making people homeless when they might have made a profit off them instead.
Every time conservatives pat themselves on the back for how good they are to the poor, I can't stop seeing just how good to the poor they aren't, most of the time.
(And also: I know how the economics work, and how most of the time the landlords couldn't afford to just let people stay for less money. Mortgages need paying. But that doesn't inspire me to let the landlords off easy; it says to me that we really do need radically different funding models for housing.)