A thousand dollars may as well be a million dollars. In my personal experience, gifting a thousand dollars to someone in housing distress will not lead to the purchase of a solar panel.

I'm talking about "working homeless" here. There are many people living out of their cars because they can't afford a proper home but still have money they can spend, and many of them in fact are living some kind of "stealth camper" setup with accompanying gear.

But that gear would have been infeasible even ten years ago - the status quo outside of luxury campers for six figures was absorber refrigeration [1] that needs a heat source - either powered by natural gas, which has challenges relating to safety as well as high consumption, or by electricity, which was lead-acid batteries back then.

The power density of lithium cells today is what makes that possible in the first place.

Poverty-homeless people however are a different thing, agreed on that. If you don't have a lockable place to store stuff you might as well have nothing at all...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator