One Ride, One Choice
How Anchor, a community-powered app and shelter network, could replace guilt with real change at the intersection.
At the corner of Hanes Mall Boulevard and Stratford Road, a young woman named Kayla stands beside the turn lane, holding a cardboard sign in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. The message on her sign is written in large block letters with a fading black Sharpie:
“Hungry. Anything Helps. God Bless.”
She’s not panhandling aggressively. She doesn’t walk up to windows or knock on windshields. She simply stands, half-shaded by a utility pole, and waits—quiet, patient, and exposed. It’s a tableau so familiar in American cities that we’ve learned to look past it, or through it, or—if we’re honest—away from it entirely.
Three cars ahead, a man in a Toyota Camry glances up from his phone at the light. He sees Kayla, registers her presence, and instinctively reaches toward the center console where he keeps spare cash. A five-dollar bill is there. He hesitates. He’s done this before, and he’s never been sure whether it helped. Still, to give something feels better than nothing. He picks up the bill. Then he puts it back.
The light turns green. The traffic flows forward. Kayla stays behind.
The Limits of Spontaneous Kindness
Scenes like this unfold every day in American life. They are moral speedbumps—moments when a stranger’s need collides with our impulse to help, and our uncertainty about how to do so well. We want to believe that a few dollars can change something. We want to respond. But deep down, we also fear the truth: that our well-meaning gestures, given at 30 seconds and 35 miles per hour, may not help at all.
The United States spends billions on homelessness prevention, housing subsidies, and mental health programs. Nonprofits, churches, and municipal governments run parallel systems of outreach and emergency shelter. And yet on any given night, more than 600,000 Americans are unsheltered. In many cities, the tent encampment has replaced the soup kitchen as the public face of poverty. Homelessness has become chronic, visible, and, for many, immovable.
The corner—the stoplight—is where it all converges. It’s where we encounter homelessness not as a policy problem but as a human face. And it is where our civic structures often leave us with only two options: give money to someone we don’t know, or do nothing and feel the guilt of inaction.
That is the question we face daily. That is what I call the Streetlight Test.
What If There Were a Third Option?
Now imagine this: the man in the Camry doesn’t reach for his wallet. He reaches for his phone.
Instead of cash, he opens an app called Anchor—a new kind of tool being developed in North Carolina and other cities that combines technology, local generosity, and structured support. The app lets him do something that no coin or bill ever could: it creates a one-way transportation voucher—a digital bus pass or Uber ride—to a nearby homeless hub.
This isn’t a referral. It’s not a hotline. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a direct, trackable invitation to something real: a shelter space with food, showers, safety—and, crucially, rules.
At the heart of the hub is a covenant. Guests are asked to commit to basic expectations: sobriety, participation, mutual respect. In return, the community offers not just a bed, but a pathway—medical care, addiction treatment, mental health counseling, case management, and job training. Local churches cook meals. Volunteer nurses offer checkups. A pastor, or a therapist, or a GED tutor might sit with you over coffee.
This is not a warehouse. It’s not a flophouse. It’s a human-scale, locally governed place of reentry. A front porch back into community.
And because the system is built on a digital backbone, the same man who gave the voucher can opt to get updates: “Kayla arrived safely.” “Kayla checked in for her second night.” “Kayla enrolled in job training.” His compassion is no longer a dead-end transaction—it becomes a story he shares in.
Subsidiarity in Action
What makes this system different is not the technology—it’s the architecture of responsibility. Instead of a top-down federal solution with layers of compliance and detachment, this system is rooted in a principle called subsidiarity: the idea that the smallest, most local competent unit of society should take the lead in solving problems.
In practical terms, this means every city, even every neighborhood, can form its own “hub.” Some are run by churches. Others by nonprofits. But each one is accountable to its community. Each one knows its people by name. And each one sets its own tone—tough love, radical grace, structured recovery, or all of the above.
The Anchor app doesn’t control the system—it coordinates it. It lets those who want to help—grocers, donors, teenagers, business owners—plug into real-time needs. A customer at a checkout line might round up 47 cents to fund someone’s next ride to the hub. A retired nurse might sign up for Tuesday shifts. A church might sponsor 30 nights of beds. This is compassion with infrastructure.
Why It Works
To be clear, the Anchor system described here has not yet been implemented. Anchor is not a program—it's a platform. Unlike traditional models, it doesn’t deliver services directly; it enables communities to organize their own decentralized, hub-based responses. While community-based interventions are being piloted in cities like Spokane, Austin, and Oklahoma City, none currently offer a framework like Anchor: one that combines one-click transportation, conditional shelter, and digital coordination into a replicable, grassroots network. While Anchor emerges from a deeply local, relational vision of care, it also stands as a quiet rebuke to the failures of large-scale, bureaucratic approaches to homelessness. In San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, Michael Shellenberger offers a blistering critique of policies that, under the guise of compassion, have enabled addiction, eroded accountability, and turned public spaces into unmanaged zones of despair. His central claim—that progressive governance often confuses permissiveness with mercy—sharpens the case for a peer-to-peer alternative like Anchor. Rather than defaulting to impersonal systems or punitive enforcement, Anchor invites communities to take responsibility for their own neighbors—creating spaces of support, structure, and shared dignity. In this way, Shellenberger’s warnings don’t just challenge the status quo; they help illuminate what’s possible when compassion is anchored in relationship.
Unlike traditional homelessness programs, Anchor is not a centralized service or institution—it’s a peer-to-peer framework that empowers communities to design their own response networks. Lightweight and replicable by design, Anchor enables churches, shelters, neighbors, or even extended families to organize "hubs" of care where individuals can be welcomed, supported, and connected to next steps. Each hub operates independently but links to a shared digital platform that fosters coordination, transparency, and personal giving. Rather than reinforce the spectacle of homelessness at the stoplight, Anchor reimagines that moment as an invitation—a tangible, trackable step into dignity, relationship, and belonging. What they have in common is a refusal to let homelessness become either a spectacle or a sentence. They bring help back into relationship, and they transform that brief, ambiguous moment at the stoplight into something sacred: a beginning.
They don’t criminalize homelessness. But they don’t romanticize it either. They offer dignity in exchange for commitment. And they build community not through pity, but through shared responsibility.
The Light Turns Green
Back on the corner, the light changes again. The traffic resumes. Kayla lowers her sign slightly. She hasn’t moved.
But this time, something different happens. A car pulls into the gas station beside the intersection. A man steps out, walks over, and gently hands her a small laminated card. It's a voucher. It has a QR code and a message on the back:
“There’s a place for you. One ride. One choice. One new beginning.”
She looks at him, confused but curious. He smiles. No pressure. Just a possibility.
In that moment, the moral math of the intersection changes. It’s no longer a question of guilt or generosity. It’s a question of direction.
A Better System
We don’t need more cash at the corner. We need doorways.
We don’t need more services in silos. We need hubs—places of trust, recovery, and rebirth.
We don’t need to give more. We need to give differently—with intention, structure, and hope.
Because the real test at the streetlight isn’t whether we look away.
It’s whether we have anything to offer beyond loose change.
Let the light change.
Let us be the ones who help others do the same.