Friday, April 8, 2011

Spot of Dirt

I find it really hard to be impressed by a religion that builds commercial centers for wealthy people and invests little to no money in homeless shelters or soup kitchens.  Many times my old ward would set up service opportunities wherin we would volunteer to work with another denomination's soup kitchen.  All time and money came out of our own pockets.  No LDS church funds were ever used to assist.
"City Creek Center, by contrast, was/is being built at ~$3,000 per square foot, or nearly 5x more expensive than the next nearest comparable property, and that’s assuming that the City Creek Center utilizes every square foot of the approximately 20-acre development site."
Source: Truth Hurts: Church Finance – Part IV

Imagine the possibilities of what this kind of money could do if it were spent in ways that really helped people. People who, from no fault of their own, truly needed it?

Source: MormonGags.com

6 comments :

  1. "City Creek Center, by contrast, was/is being built at ~$3,000 per square foot, or nearly 5x more expensive than the next nearest comparable property..."

    ...so I don't think I would employ the Morg to build my home. 5x over budget doesn't sound appealing to me! How have they stuffed up that bad?? It's one thing for them to build it in the first place, when as you say, they could at least build a few homeless shelters as well to 'even things out'... but then to so poorly mismanaged that they completely blow their expenditures...

    Or, are they inflating their cost reportings in order to hide expenditure in other areas, e.g. funding for their efforts w/Prop8?

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  2. Absolutely, its about Profit, not Prophet.

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  3. But if we help the poor, then we're robbing them of the agency to help themselves. That would be so dehumanizing and, you know, Satan's plan. There's no agency without winners and losers, so we gotta make sure there's some losers in there.

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  4. While I'm not religious myself, I respect religious institutions that help people in need. This, on the other hand ...

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  5. organized religion is big business... tax exemption not withstanding....

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  6. It looks like it helps a large number of construction workers who would otherwise be up a creek with this housing bust. That kind of infrastructure investment is exactly what one would hope a big institution in the community would do. And if injecting cash into the economy is a goal, paying extra makes perfectly good sense.

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