$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
A study by USC and a San Francisco-based nonprofit has found that a $750 monthly stipend improves the lives of homeless people.
If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?
That question was at the core of a controlled study conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.
Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered.
There's also been a lot of success with providing housing to the homeless. When they have stability, they use it to create a better life for themselves, and that translates to lower costs in terms of enforcement, ER visits, legal aid, and incarceration.
The US doesn't provide for this in federal policy because we like our laws to reflect the cruelty and malice we have in our hearts for perceived undesirables.
Permanently Deleted
One red flag here is that they don't mention how they chose whom to give the stipend to.
That being said I think its a great idea and correlates with other studies that show that money is the best thing you can offer someone who's struggling. Not food, not shelter, money.
I'm not an American but this will be tough to sell as you guys are notorious for porking away public funds (e.g. covid payouts) so this is much more complex than the article implies.
No. Shit.
Seeing as California has one of the worst homelessness problems in the U.S., it seems like a great testing ground for this policy. Maybe if they pass this into law and it helps them reduce their homelessness population, it could potentially be adopted elsewhere.
That being said, California is no stranger to permissive laws with respect to the homeless, and that’s part of the reason their homeless population is so high, so…I’m skeptical, but willing to be proven wrong.
I love the idea of this experiment and my hope is that it leads to some real programs that ultimately lead to UBI, however I hate the article... specifically the headline: "No Questions Asked"... then they go and start asking questions about how the money was spent. How about '$750 a month, no strings attached', or '$750 a month to spend how they want'?
Words have meaning and this should be important to people such as journalists who make a living through using words.