Monthly payments of $750 to $1,000 would allow thousands of homeless people in the city to find informal housing, living in boarding homes, shared apartments and with family and friends, according to a policy brief By four leading Los Angeles academics.
Citing positive preliminary results of pilot studies in several cities, including Los Angeles, they argue that the income can provide access to housing for a portion of the population that has become homeless primarily as a result of economic shocks. He argued that this could ultimately save millions of dollars in public services, and leave vastly expanded and far more expensive subsidized and service-enriched housing for those whose social needs are more complex.
Lead author Gary Blasi said, “If the idea is to reduce the number of people on the road, then surely the fastest way to do that is money, not this incredibly complex system that we have built primarily for people with severe disabilities.” Made to help.” An emeritus professor at UCLA School of Law.
The paper provides no prescription for how payments should be made or who should receive the money. Instead, the authors, coming from four different disciplines, contrast the simplicity and documented effectiveness of basic income with the high costs and inadequate results of programs to provide standard housing for every homeless person.
He wrote, “The truth is that we cannot do a better job than the present system, which spends vast sums of money to house a small portion of the needy.”
That system, relying on Housing Navigator to “find the very rare subsidized housing subject to strict criteria” is a “lengthy and expensive process”, leaving thousands of rental subsidy vouchers unused and thousands unable to find housing. Let’s go.
“Providing interim housing during this process may be too costly, as it is increasing the housing supply,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, a source of readily available affordable housing goes unused.
They wrote, “Informal housing, once a subject of study only in developing countries, refers to housing that does not conform to the standards of the formal housing market.” “This includes shared housing arrangements, housing that does not meet all code requirements, rooms rented in single-family homes.”
“There is already a huge informal rental market operating throughout California,” Co-authored by Sam Tsemberis, A a clinical community psychologist at the UCLA School of Psychiatry said in an interview. “People are renting out single-family homes. They have two or three beds in each bedroom and they’re charging people $400, $500 a month to sleep there.’
Tsemberis is the founder of Pathways to Housing, a New York program that has now adopted the Housing First approach across the country as a model for housing chronically homeless people with complex issues of mental illness and substance abuse. Have adopted.
Basic assistance is not a substitute for housing first, Tsemberis said.
“This is for the group that internally has more resources, work history, that is not struggling strongly with mental illness or addiction,” he said.
To indicate Research By the Benioff Homeless and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco, the authors suggest that more than half of people living on the streets fall into that category.
The study found that in a large sample of homeless people in California, less than a third were tenants in “ordinary” housing before becoming homeless. “Most were last housed in a unit rented by someone else – that is, the informal housing market. If they had to pay rent, their average monthly rent would be $450.19,” he wrote.
The authors cited a 2022 survey by the Urban Institute of guaranteed income programs in Austin, Chicago and Arlington County, Virginia, which found that cash subsidies provided more flexible housing support at lower costs, allowed recipients greater dignity, Vouchers avoided discrimination by landlords and served people who were ineligible for government subsidies.
While those programs, and Similar ones are currently below Trails in Los Angeles County are for the general population, a preliminary study One of the authors found that homeless people also benefit.
Ben Henwood, director of the Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research at the USC Suzanne Dvorak-Peck School of Social Work, designed a controlled study. cash stipend pilot Founded by Miracle Messages, a San Francisco-based nonprofit.
Initial results were so promising that Henwood released a preliminary six-month analysis, breaking down recipients’ spending as 36.6% food, 19.5% housing, 12.7% transportation, 11.5% clothing, and 6.2% health care, leaving only 13.6% remained unclassified.
“The idea that giving money to poor people is controversial is absolutely bizarre to me,” Henwood said. “Of course that will help.”
Blasi, an attorney who has engaged in litigation involving housing, welfare, homelessness and redevelopment for decades and started the Legal Aid Foundation of the Los Angeles Eviction Defense Center in 1983, said Henwood’s study succinctly captured this idea. inspired.
Along with Henwood and Tsemberis, Blasi brought Dan Fleming, chairman of the Economic Roundtable.
Fleming has led the research documented high costs Public services for chronically homeless people. They recently conducted a study used predictive tools Identifying individuals at risk of persistent homelessness and providing them with housing, mental health therapy, and apprenticeship training for union jobs.
at its conclusionTwice as many participants were housed and 40% more were employed than at its beginning.
“The bigger perspective is that homelessness is a result of economic inequality and income, at least as much as it is the lack of affordable housing,” Fleming said. “I don’t see any way that we can find a way out of homelessness. “It’s another tool, a tool to provide basic income to people, that we need to make better use of.”
While not proposing a specific administrative plan, the authors point to a possible mechanism for implementing basic income: increasing general relief, with county programs mandated to provide minimum assistance to those who are “destitute, unemployed, and other are ineligible for such assistance.”
“Liberal L.A. County hasn’t increased GR grants in 40 years,” Blasi said.
The rate has been $221 per month since the 1970s. If it had increased with inflation, it would have been $1,008.
“Astonishingly, the county’s Department of Public Social Services reports that approximately 75% of the more than 100,000 general relief recipients are homeless and have no stable address.” He has written.
The paper anticipates and counters the potential objection that their plan will push people into substandard housing.
It says, “There is no reason to think that the housing will be worse than the last stable housing they had before becoming homeless.”
“I have no illusions that people will live in places that will be acceptable to middle-class people,” Blasi said.
Informal housing is not a substitute for the thousands of units of supportive housing needed.
But “somewhere around half of the people living on the street and in those camps do not need supportive housing,” he said. “they do not. And they’re not eligible for it and they’re not getting into it,” Blasi said.
“We’re kind of communicating if you could lie on the street for four years, you’d be so stressed out that you’d be on the top of our list. This is absolutely madness.”
