Give Homeless People Card Terminals

You walk past a homeless person on the street.

Twenty years ago, you might have had a few coins in your pocket. You might have dropped one in the cup. The transaction was simple. They had something they didn't have before. You felt slightly less complicit in walking past suffering. Nobody had to verify anything.

Now your wallet has no cash in it. Your transit pass is on your phone. Your coffee is paid by tapping your watch. Your groceries are scanned at a self-checkout. There are no coins, because there's no need for coins. The entire infrastructure of small generosity that used to operate between strangers, a quarter here, a dollar there, has quietly disappeared.

The homeless person is still on the street. The cup is still there. But the transaction that used to fill the cup doesn't work anymore.

This isn't an abstract problem. In the past decade, donations to street-level homeless individuals have collapsed in cashless societies. Sweden, the leader in digital payments, saw informal charity drop dramatically in the 2010s as cash use fell below 10% of transactions. The same trend is visible everywhere cash has retreated: South Korea, the Netherlands, increasingly Canada and the UK.

Some homeless people have tried to adapt. A small number have set up GoFundMe accounts, posted Venmo handles on cardboard signs, accepted bank transfers. This works for a few who are tech-savvy and visible enough to get attention. It does not work at scale. Most people walking past will not stop to take out their phone, scan a stranger's QR code, sign into their banking app, and complete a transfer for one dollar.

The friction killed the donation. Cash had no friction. Digital giving has too much.

Where cash retreated, the small change that filled cups went with it. The technology that replaced cash never built a path for street-level giving.

What if every homeless person, in cooperation with their municipality, was given a small contactless payment terminal? The kind Square or Stripe ships for free to small businesses.

Same authentication standards as any merchant terminal on the Visa/Mastercard network. Tap and walk.

The terminal sits in their cup or on their sign. A passerby who wants to donate taps their card or phone to the terminal. A pre-set amount, say 10 cents, is transferred to a verified account. People used to drop a penny in the cup without thinking; this is the digital version of that. The whole transaction takes about a second. There's no QR code to scan, no app to open, no contact information exchanged. You tap and walk.

The crucial mechanism is that the terminals are issued and authenticated by the municipality. Each terminal is registered to a specific individual through a city program. The account it transfers to is opened with help from the city's social services. This solves the two biggest objections people raise.

First, security. Without municipal authentication, the obvious worry is hacking, a malicious terminal that captures card details. With city-issued, regularly audited terminals on the standard Visa/Mastercard contactless network, this risk is no higher than tapping your card at any other small business. The infrastructure exists. It's the same as any street vendor or food truck.

Second, fraud. People worry about scams, someone with a terminal who isn't actually homeless, or someone using the money for things the donor wouldn't want to fund. The municipal authentication addresses the first; the terminal is only issued through a process that confirms the individual is in the city's housing assistance system. The second concern is real but is also true of cash; a dollar given is a dollar that recipient spends however they want, and most reasonable models of charity accept that.

The terminal model has been tried, with various levels of success, in Amsterdam, Stockholm, parts of London, and a few US cities. The technology works. The deployment has been small and underfunded. It deserves to be the default.

But here's the part I want to say plainly, because the terminal solution is fundamentally a workaround.

In a country with the per-capita wealth of any developed economy in 2026, there should not be homeless people in significant numbers. The fact that there are, in every major Western city, is not a result of insufficient resources. It is a result of how those resources have been allocated.

Most developed countries spend somewhere between 30% and 50% of their GDP on government. A large fraction of that is on social programs. Housing, in particular, is the most obvious lever, building it, subsidizing it, ensuring it's available to people who can't access market housing.

Yet in San Francisco, in Vancouver, in Sydney, in Paris, in Berlin, in Toronto, homelessness has been growing for two decades. Not because resources are scarce. Because the political will to build housing at the scale needed has been absent, and because the systems that should catch people before they end up on the street, mental health care, addiction treatment, transitional housing, employment assistance, are underfunded, fragmented, and often hostile to the people they're supposed to serve.

A homeless person with a payment terminal is a better outcome than a homeless person with an empty cup. But the existence of the homeless person is the actual scandal. The terminal is a small humane patch on a much larger civilizational failure.

Two layers.

The terminal program should be implemented as a default municipal service in any city with a homeless population. The technology costs are trivial. The administrative overhead is small. The benefit to people living on the street is meaningful. Cities that haven't done this should.

But the actual fix is upstream. Build housing, public, social, transitional. Fund mental health care that people can actually access, not just have a phone number for. Treat addiction as a health condition and not a criminal one. Make the transition from temporary crisis to permanent stability easier, not harder. None of this is mysterious. Finland did most of it and reduced rough sleeping by over 80% with a "Housing First" policy that has been studied, copied, and successfully implemented elsewhere.

There is no developed country in 2026 where the existence of widespread street homelessness is a financial problem. It's a political problem. It's a choice. And the terminal is a humane response to a situation that shouldn't exist in the first place.

We've spent twenty years building the most efficient payment infrastructure in human history. Trillions of dollars move through it every day, at near-zero cost, faster than the previous generation could have imagined.

We have not figured out how to include in this system the most visible, most vulnerable members of our communities. They've been left behind by the same modernization the rest of us have benefited from. The cup is empty because the system that used to fill it doesn't work in this economy.

Give them terminals. It's a small thing, and it costs almost nothing.

And then build the housing. Fund the care. Solve the actual problem.

The terminal is a patch. The empty cup is a scandal. We can do both.