Shack-a-Thon took place on the Brickyard last week, and raised about $25,000 out of a goal of $30,000 for the Wake County chapter of Habitat for Humanity. According to the N.C. State Habitat for Humanity chapter, the annual Shack-a-Thon fundraiser takes place to help eliminate poverty housing through raising awareness, support and funding.

Students representing various clubs and organizations built shacks out of plywood and other material. At least two people manned each shack for 24 hours from Monday to Friday. According to the N.C. State Habitat for Humanity chapter, donations acquired via “panhandling passersby” will be used for providing houses to low-income families. 

Now, most people take part in this event for fun. It’s an opportunity to promote one’s organization, and because of the collaboration between organizations, it also builds community on the Brickyard. 

Fun and camaraderie are all well and good, but the slightest smugness about participation in Shack-a-Thon from a belief that one is doing good is ill-founded. 

“There is an element of self-gratification that comes out of the premise that this is for a good cause,” Regan Hale, the co-head organizer of the Park Scholarships shack, said.

We can’t solve the problems of food scarcity by giving a family a lifetime’s worth of food. We won’t even solve it if we give every single family without enough food a lifetime’s supply of food.―The number of families without enough food isn’t a constant, and so, the problem isn’t as simple as getting meals to mouths. Solving the problem would require looking at the sustainability of our food systems, the politics that govern them and the varied stakes in them. 

Similarly, Habitat for Humanity, or, for that matter, humanity, isn’t going to achieve a goal of eliminating poverty housing by giving people houses. Rather than haphazardly treating the symptom rather than the disease, we should be looking at the issue at a fundamental level. Even if some families get houses, lasting change will never happen until the system that generates shelter-scarcity is cured or toppled. 

Change of this sort is best achieved by letting people find their own way up, by simply giving them a fair playing field. Underprivileged people around the world can build or buy their own houses if we―privileged people―let them – or are forced to let them. 

Aid of any kind, and especially foreign aid from the U.S., which is one of Habitat for Humanity’s undertakings, can be toxic. Anything,―be it a house or a system,―designed and built by those whom it is meant to serve, will be much more resilient and colorful than a solution handed to that community. 

No country bombed us to establish civil rights here,―and whatever improved racial relations we have here are because we solved our problems ourselves. But that would have never happened if the rest of the world hadn’t given us space to work. 

Finally, in this country at least, there are already enough houses. According to Amnesty International USA, there are more than five times as many vacant houses in the U.S. than there are homeless people. If the participants of Shack-a-Thon want to make a substantial difference and provide houses to underprivileged people at all costs, they should try to engage with the problem systemically, not through short-sighted displays of “service.” After all, as such figures show, the problem is primarily political, and systemic political transformation is possible. 

Band-Aid solutions―such as giving houses to families one at a time (as more and more families perhaps require houses)―should only be adopted as a last resort. They are the right choice if the best thing that can be done is salvage some good from a sinking ship. But that’s not the case for Shack-a-Thon. The opportunity cost of such endeavors to rid the world of shelter-scarcity indicates that they are the wrong course of action, the only net gain emerging from them being a boost in self-righteousness.

The people on the Brickyard last week might have had good fun, and they may have had good intentions. But as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And Shack-a-Thon is where the travelers lodge.