MONEY BETTER SPENT IS ON A HAVEN FOR MORE

INTERESTING reading: “A haven for homeless” (GA 7/7).

Sounds good at first sight!

Then I remembered that the Geelong City Council (ratepayers) gave Samaritan House $450,000 in the last couple of weeks and now the Vic government (taxpayers) gave them $500,000, together nearly $1 million! I question why only seven single-person houses are being built when you reported last week that the numbers of homeless people are rising dramatically.

Seven houses for that huge amount of money has to mean super luxury, certainly not “affordable One-Bedroom Units” as claimed.

When very large sums of money are being handed out to charities, the spending of that money should be with care and wisely done.

The seven lucky occupants of these luxury “affordable houses” will create anger, envy and jealousy among their social homeless community and will create another problem.

This looks to me like a charity’s promo exercise for publication in a glossy magazine like it happened with the “Future Shack” that was published in all the magazines about 10 years ago. It was a supposedly economical unit for crisis accommodation which in fact was a very expensive and elaborate build that never saw the area of a crisis.

The Samaritan House project, a great idea but with a bitter after taste!

C.K.