Shocking news in the LA Times today:
A monthly payment of $750 to $1,000 would allow thousands of the city’s homeless people to find informal housing, living in boarding homes, in shared apartments and with family and friends, according to a policy brief by four prominent Los Angeles academics.
No kidding. In the policy brief itself the authors say:
Put simply, many unhoused people in Los Angeles...have a central problem much more easily addressed than [mental illness or substance abuse]: They are extremely poor.... Los Angeles has created a very complex, bureaucratic, and expensive system that struggles to find even “interim” housing for those who are unhoused. That system ignores the potential of many unhoused people to solve their housing problems if they had a little more money.
The authors are clear: no vouchers, no rules, no bureaucracy. Just give them cash. About two-thirds of homeless people lived in informal housing before becoming homeless—mostly renting rooms from other people—and $1,000 would allow them to return to that. Even in LA that's enough.
If there's a surprise here, it's not that money helps poor people. It's that money doesn't help very much. A USC study looked at the impact of giving homeless people $750 per month:
Although the study is ongoing, initial results show that after 6 months, almost 30% of people who received basic income exited homelessness, which is approximately twice the rate of people who did not receive money.
Only 30% get a home versus 15% if you do nothing? That doesn't seem like a lot.
"...doesn't sound like a lot." Neither does $750 a month.
Yeah, I'm honestly a little surprised that so many are able to self-resolve on just 750/mo. But I guess if the target subpopulation is those who just need a few hundred a month to pay their way on somebody's couch or spare bedroom, or those who just need a shallow subsidy because they've got some other income, then I can see how it works.
A person who would be an unattractive (or just not economically viable) roommate or boarder with $o becomes more attractive with at least some cash to offer.
"...no vouchers, no rules, no bureaucracy. Just give them cash. "
The politics of this, I imagine, are horrible. Here is the conservative media story: we spend X more on homeless and (video of someone shooting up, video of an encampment etc) and got more of the same.
The politics of it aren't any different from the politics of the status quo. Please don't pretend that they wouldn't scream socialism and bootstraps dogma and prosperity gospel (wherein your moral worth is directly tied to how wealthy you are, or aren't) - because they'll do that no matter what. Status quo or policies that actually work better.
Your observation is akin to observing that we don't need stricter gun control because criminals don't obey the law anyway, which is missing the point.
cmayo - my point, political change requires power/winning elections. Advancing policies, that likely are political losers, is a dangerous strategy for broader goals...
You missed the point entirely.
You should never engage middleoftheroad or the other trolls on here. They don’t argue in good faith. They are just huge assholes that produce shit and fling it every which way.
The politics of anything and everything can be horrible. This is not a good argument doing things.
"We cant do anything because Fox News will rail against it!" is also a losing strategy.
"We must do nothing to ensure we win elections and have the ability to do nothing", also a loser.
+1
Having the government give money to people so they can have shelter, so they can eat, all saves employers a lot of money. Look how this has helped Wal-Mart! Push this policy as a major subsidy to business, particularly "small business." Businessmen hate the concept of a "living wage", so let Big Bro pay! With taxes predominantly from the middle class, of course.
Win-win!
I’m strongly in favor of living-wage legislation, and in favor of housing-first programs. They are separate issues. If we had living-wage, economic homelessness would fix itself; the remaining homeless would almost all be those unemployable due to mental illness or substance abuse. Getting them into long-term domiciles means social agencies and medical and mental-health providers know how to find them, and gives them a measure of stability that increases the likelihood of successful outcomes.
Yabbut something something My Hard Earned Tax Dollars something Moochers and Takers something the Lord grants prosperity to those whom He favors and it is not up to us to contravene His will and I am a Very Good Christian -- all my Facebook friends say so!
This is Los Angeles, California, right?
It costs about $36K/yr to operate a houseless pod in a houseless village in PDX, with an additional $16K to purchase a pod. So, more expensive than just giving houseless people money to rent a place.
It's an awful shame we basically wrote SROs out of the building code (by making new SROs impossible to feasibly meet code). As they were demolished, they were never replaced. Thus left without cheap housing alternatives and a dearth of Section 8 housing and vouchers available, people moved out onto the streets.
With the pending Grants Pass decision from SCOTUS, the solution to houseless persons will soon be complete: Let them die faster.
Kevin mentioned boarding homes--I didn't think they were still a thing. In many places renting out a room, your basement/garage/etc., would be illegal. Zoning has to allow this.
One of my offspring has lived in what's basically a boarding house in CA for years. The rent is less unthinkably high than an individual apartment and the housemates come and go.
Renting out a room in your own home is almost never illegal, as the wild success of AirBnb has shown. The original Airbnb was nothing but rooms to rent. They just are priced higher than would benefit the homeless. (I suspect homeowners also would oppose homeless people specifically even if someone gave them exactly what the listing asked for.)
And this isn’t limited to cities. I live in northern Virginia suburbs and the 5-bed home next door is valued by the county at about $950,000 and currently has 5 people each renting a bedroom in it. All 5 are interns or lower-than-average-for-this-region wage workers, so again this isn’t a homeless solution, but rooming houses aren’t unheard of on the east coast.
I did that for about 5 years; four guys leasing a four-bedroom house. Matt, Bobby, and Josh were there when I moved in; Dave, Ed, and Leo replaced them. The landlord decided not to renew the lease, so we found a three bedroom place (poor Ed got the dining room, with large cardboard doors). That eventually fell apart and we all went our separate ways. I leased a bedroom from a colleague for another year and a half, until my job moved and I finally got my own apartment. It wasn't a bad way to live, and it did save us all money.
Loss of the SROs pretty much created the homelessness issue as we know it - back when they were still widespread, homelessness was mostly drifters and itinerant workers.
My man - in what world is doubling the rate of exits to housed destinations "not very much"? Do you have any idea of what the inflow and outflow numbers look like? Do you know that it will take multiple policy interventions to solve the problem? Do you know what a typical housing subsidy costs? Just giving people money as one intervention and having even just 30% of them not return to homelessness (something typically called self-resolved) relieves a ton of stress on the rest of the system.
Homelessness is also a problem that can be solved by just literally throwing money at it. It's just a matter of degrees, and it really is that simple.
Sincerely tired of having to call this out,
Someone who's worked in this field for 15 years
On a national scale, package it as refundable tax credits for everyone. And throw in child care credits too.
That doesn't help those at the low end who make too little to pay taxes, and refunds at the end of the year don't pay rent monthly.
People are homeless mostly for three reasons;
- bad luck - direct cash payments will really help these people who just some help break the loop of bad luck they are in.
- mental health issues - direct cash payments will help a decent chunk of these people who are unwell enough they can’t hold down a job but well enough that they can maintain housing with financial support
- drug addiction - direct cash payments are likely to go on supporting their addiction and they present the biggest problem politically. Their problems also make it hard for them to maintain traditional forms of supported accommodation for homeless people - especially when combined with mental health issues. So at the very least direct cash payments will make their lives less precarious and take some pressure off to engage in behaviours that normies find so troubling.
While there is plenty of political problems with giving people money getting an additional political problems. An additional 15% of lower risk people off the street helps relive pressure on other programs and prevents these poleople from getting caught in a much more problematic cycle of drug abuse and poor mental health. So it seems like.a good idea socially and a difficult but not impossible idea politically.
One thing that is very bad for your mental health is being homeless. So you can bet a good chunk of the homeless who suffer from mental health issues would see this issues get a lot better if they were given enough money to find a place to live.
And wrt the drug addicted--some portion of them, if given a reasonable amount of money, would be able to find places to live as well. And I'd rather have them shooting up in an apartment somewhere than out in public. And my guess is some percentage of the drug addicted would be able to address their addictions if given enough money to find a place to live.
Oh 100%. And drug addiction is often concurrent with mental health issues. So getting people out of homelessness as soon as possible is important to prevent them coming unwell. That said people with significant mental health and addiction issues are, as a cohort, the hardest to get off the street and also from a political aspect the hardest to support. I 1000% support giving people money.but also they should still receive support as well.
Your statement is only correct if you also mention the vast majority of homeless were neither in mental or drug crisis when they became homeless. Most just aren't in these two groups.
Will any of this matter if Trump is “President” this time next year? As I understand it he will be setting up special camps for the homeless to live in on the outskirts of cities. They will be given special care there by the government. I doubt Kristi Noem will be vice president but being the person in charge of these camps seems like the perfect job for her. She has demonstrated an ability to make the hard but “necessary” choices. I’m sure Stephen Miller has already written up her job responsibilities.
The Telephone Game at work. From almost 30% to outright 30%.
The policy brief doesn’t include actual numbers behind almost or approximately.
Because they are unemployable… it seems like the thing to do. But it’s a tough sell. People have a natural response to those unable or unwilling to help themselves. It’s hard enough when you know them personally to muster compassion. So when we’re asked to help total strangers who have been abandoned by their own families and former friends, it’s a tough sell. There are so many. Giving them a crappy apartment is not enough.
Most homeless people are employed.
You have a natural response to say ignorant things.
There are 180,000 homeless people in California. 15% of that is 27,000 people. 30% is 54,000 for a difference of 27,000.
Seems like a lot to me.
What is almost always missing from any discussion about the cost of treating homelessness is the cost we are currently paying of doing nothing.
Homelessness and all its spinoff problems cause property values to decline, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for even a single property of any significant size.
Every initiative to provide assistance is inevitably greeted with OMG sticker shock, but no one ever talks about the vast ocean of wealth that is being pissed away by doing nothing.
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