There exists a particular breed of well-moisturized predator stalking the ruins of the American dream. Dressed in tailored linen, adorned with foundation-sponsored lanyards and sincerity-shaped lapel pins, they glide from keynote to keynote, murmuring words like “equity,” “impact,” and “community stakeholder engagement” with the precision of a Silicon Valley chatbot trained exclusively on TED Talks and NPR. These are the CEOs of compassion, the millionaires of misery—modern clergy of the nonprofit industrial complex, who have transformed human suffering into a sustainable business model.
Their sanctuaries are not soup kitchens, but glass-walled conference rooms high above the people they allegedly serve. There, they gather to fart out strategic plans, grunt over PowerPoint charts on racial equity, and bellow through grant applications so bloated with buzzwords they sound like rejected Marvel scripts. They speak of “interventions” and “disruptions,” but their only real disruption is making sure nothing ever truly changes—because change would kill the goose that lays the foundation-funded golden egg.
Like their counterparts in the political and corporate spheres, these figures do not dwell among the unhoused, the traumatized, or the dispossessed. They study them. They categorize them. They dataficate their pain. They do not ask what people need; they conduct community needs assessments with six-figure contracts attached. Their lips are encrusted with verbal diarrhea as they announce their new $20 million initiative to study the feasibility of piloting a task force to evaluate the potential of a low-barrier entry model to a trauma-informed shelter referral system—over five years, of course. For “research.”
And when the people ask for homes? They are handed pamphlets. When they ask for safety? They are given rules. When they cry for autonomy? They are told to “follow the program.”
To be homeless is to be processed, monitored, and judged by a rotating cast of social workers who are overworked and underpaid, serving under administrators who are overpaid and under-accountable. The case manager drives a used Toyota. The Executive Director drives a leased Tesla. The client sleeps under an overpass. The math checks out—if you’re not the one freezing to death in it.
Behind every “permanent supportive housing unit” that never gets built, behind every “wraparound services hub” launched with great fanfare and quietly defunded months later, lies a class of professional do-gooders who would rather bury a real solution than lose access to their career pipeline of conferences, consulting gigs, and six-figure base salaries. They thrive on misery—not because they are cruel, but because they are well-insulated from the consequences of their incompetence. They call it complexity. We call it complicity.
Meanwhile, the actual homeless—those not sanitized into graphs and KPIs—continue to die in alleyways and behind dumpsters while the CEOs of America’s largest housing nonprofits get cost-of-living raises and plan their next “vision retreat” in Aspen. If the bodies pile up, the grants increase. If they go away, the funding does too. What incentive is there to solve what pays so well to maintain?
But the real insult isn’t the hypocrisy. It’s the patronizing paternalism. The belief that poor people must be administered, not trusted. That their housing must be earned, not guaranteed. That dignity must be behaviorally contingent. That programs know better than people. The machinery of “help” is designed to ensure compliance—not liberation. People are not clients to be managed. They are human beings. Full stop.
In contrast, those who work in grassroots efforts—volunteers, community organizers, and those with lived experience—do not seek praise, nor profit. They calmly state that housing is a right, not a service. They speak with quiet clarity about community-led solutions. They cook food without grant funding. They build shelters without permits. They care without paperwork. And for that, they are harassed, fined, and arrested.
They threaten the ecosystem of spectacle. They represent the dangerous possibility that real solutions are simple, direct, and incompatible with professionalized charity. Their model is not scalable, not brandable, and not fundable by Chevron or BlackRock—so it must be ignored, discredited, or destroyed.
When Compassion Is a Job Title, Not a Calling
There is no reforming this rot. No amount of task forces or training modules will redeem a system that views suffering as a growth sector. What we face is not an inefficiency—it is a perfectly designed machine, engineered to appear benevolent while guaranteeing the conditions that make it necessary.
To truly transform this, we must abandon the notion that the answer to institutional failure is better institutions. We must stop looking to empire to fix what empire profits from. What is needed is not more credentialed professionals with anti-racism certificates, but a fundamental shift in consciousness.
That shift will not come from power. It will come from you—the neighbor, the stranger, the one who stops and listens instead of passing by. It will arise in silence, outside the spotlight, without applause. It will grow slowly, as truth does, in the spaces where systems fail and people remember what it means to simply care.