From Beyoncé funding housing in Houston to Gary Neville hosting the homeless in Manchester, celebrities are trying to do good in their home towns. But is this really a new model for making our cities better?

With Madonna, it’s youth programmes in Detroit. Beyoncé has funded housing in Houston. This year alone, basketball star LeBron James announced a vast scholarship programme at the University of Akron;

Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville agreed to lend the former Manchester stock exchange building, which they own, to a group of homeless people; Dr Dre promised that the proceeds from his new album will go straight back into Compton (to build an arts centre).

Some people are cynical about celebrities’ charity work, and sometimes they are right to be, but it takes a hard heart to doubt the motives of someone “giving back” some wealth to their home town.

“I just wanted to do something special for Compton,” Dre explained.

Motives can be mixed, of course. In April, the comedian Kevin Hart was filmed surprising four high-achieving black students in Philadelphia, where he grew up, with a $50,000 scholarship each – partly from himself, partly from the United Negro College Fund.

As he presented those cheques and declared himself “the Hart of the city”, it was hard not to feel that the occasion was stage-managed for publicity.

Maybe a better question to ask is whether favouring one’s home town is actually a good idea. Actually, it might be. The great thing about rich people – believe it or not – is that they don’t have to justify to anyone how they spend their money.

By contrast, government ministers are quite rightly accountable for every pound of public money that they put into good works on our behalf.

It’s scarcely any easier for big charities, who have the opinion of thousands of donors to think about when they make decisions. Institutions, in short, tend to be conservative. Good at raising a pile of money, not so good at figuring out where the pile should be.

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