As one of the people who have offered a room in our house, I disagree with you OP. I've given a description of our family and the house, mentioning that we have a playhouse with a slide in the back garden. Within 24 hours I was contacted by 3 women, 2 with kids, asking for more information. 1 of the women in the text said she picked our advert because of the information we had included in there. I've now spoken with the first woman who contacted me and she said she picked my advert to reply to because we sounded like a normal family, living in a decent area and that is what she wants for her and her 9 year old son. She likes the fact that our youngest child is a very similar age.
I included this sort of information (no photos in my advert) because some of them are so basic "Double room available in family home in London. Want to help" and I thought if I had to flee my home town with my children, some more information in the advert would help me in my search.
I'm not doing this for the likes and the humble brags on social media. My husband and I have discussed doing this with our children but otherwise haven't told a soul that we are going to host someone if we can. I don't intend to post on social media about it if I can avoid it. I guess technically MN is social media but I don't count it as such as none of you know who I am and I'm certainly not doing this for the likes and praise from a bunch of internet strangers (and especially not on this particular post when it seems like most of you will have a very negative view of what I'm doing).
A lot of people have asked on this forum and on news sites generally why people haven't opened up their homes to refugees before and I think that's a legitimate question although I also think we should be wary of a standard of perfection i.e. you haven't done that before for other refugees so therefore you shouldn't do it now. In the same way, it shouldn't (and in my view wouldn't) invalidate someone's efforts to help a refugee from say Afghan, if they then decided they'd do their bit and wouldn't be hosting any more refugees in the future. FWIW, I don't at all think opening your house to a homeless person equates given their likely addiction and mental health issues.
From my own perspective, I have thought about housing refugees in the past but I have never followed through for a number of reasons, not all of them brilliant. Those reasons include being anxious about cultural differences specifically in the way women were treated, having a strange man in my house and the danger potential - I never actually looked into it and had I done so would have realised that I could be quite specific about who I say we're happy to house (women and children only). The government involvement in the current scheme, woeful though the information available to us at the moment is, gives me some reassurance that this won't be indefinite and there will be some support, particularly as they're saying Ukrainians will be able to work and claim benefits immediately. The £350 payment is a factor for us as my husband has just become self-employed so we've gone to a 1 income household. I am a high earner so we are lucky to be able to still cope relatively comfortably but not to the extent that we could afford all the costs of 2 extra people in our home. However, we don't plan to make a profit from the payment, we intend to use it to try and cover any costs in gas, electric and water (we're on a meter so there definitely will be increased costs there) and their food bill. We've decided if there's any money left over after that, we will save it and give it to our guests. Another factor is that I genuinely never thought it was something my husband would contemplate and I was very pleasantly surprised when I finally asked him about it, that he said he was up for doing it. Finally, we live in a 3 bedroom house and have 2 children so we don't actually have a spare bedroom but we talked to our kids and they said they thought we should do it and that they would be happy to share a room so we can help. We're willing to do this on the basis that it will be 6-9 months, if our house was bigger maybe we'd be willing to do it for longer. Finally, the fact that as a family we've all been open to doing this has led to us having conversations about hosting a refugee from another country once my husband's business picks up, if we don't end up hosting someone from Ukraine and we've agreed that we will do this or at least try to.
We're not blind to the difficulties of this hosting situation for those hosting us and the impact it will have on us. I'm sure we don't understand just how difficult it will be but who does, when trying something new. I come back to the idea that a desire for perfection should not stop me from offering anything at all. If I was in their situation, I would rather someone take us in and offer us a safe, warm home in a room that might be a bit too small with no en-suite, than leave me living in the basement of a public building with my children, afraid at any minute what the air raid sirens might bring.