There’s someone on YouTube I sorta watched from time to time when the pandemic hit. He’s located in Venice beach, German in Venice. He was exposing the homeless issue and lack of government response.
Fast forward to now. The city offered everyone a free place to go and many took it. There were still a lot of people who refused. Now the garbage trucks and police evicted them. The garbage people packed a lot of stuff and put it into storage.
What’s your take? They were offered housing while they get back on their feet and chose not to take it.
First, some people took it and some did not. Yet you are trying to suggest we judge all homeless based on those who did not without knowing any further details. Damn them all to hell because some were offered housing and said "no."
A lot of services offered to the homeless are really terrible. I never stayed in a shelter while homeless. They have rules that make it just shy of being a form of prison, they tend to not be safe and they often have serious mold problems, among other things.
They also offered me no option to continue living as a family with my adult sons. Every service I spoke to urged me to take shelter as a single woman and to wait-list my sons for shelter as single adult men. There were zero programs to help us find shelter as a family of three blood relatives who still need each other to make our lives work.
I have done a lot of writing about homelessness and housing issues over the years. I could direct you to several of my blogs if you actually are sincerely interested in my take. I doubt that you are. That's likely a rhetorical device.
I am doing what I can to continue researching the issue, to provide useful information for small communities to use, etc. I don't know how to get traction and I don't know how to adequately monetize my work which makes it difficult to keep writing about it in hopes of other people benefiting because I need to eat and pay rent too. I'm certainly not independently wealthy.
I took it as negative because you closed with this:
They were offered housing while they get back on their feet and chose not to take it.
It's full of implicit accusation that the homeless are difficult, uncooperative, causing their own problems and you can't help them because they are irrational pains in the butt.
I interpreted it that way in part because many homeless services are so bad they help keep the problem alive rather than helping to solve it.
As just one example: Most homeless people have serious health issues. It's an underlying cause of their financial problems and a barrier to employment.
But if you go to a soup kitchen, you are exposed to other sick people, plus cigarette smoke and marijuana smoke. I eventually quit going to soup kitchens and just worked at finding other ways to keep myself fed because my health issues are my number one problem making my life not work, so anything that makes it harder for me to take care of my health is a very serious problem.
I think we should lower the barrier to food stamps in the US. It's a good program that allows you to access food from normal middle class venues which are actually clean etc. I think we should do all we can to cut the bureaucratic costs and as much as humanly possible say "If you want food stamps, here you go" without asking people to prove they need them.
But I don't expect anything like that will ever happen. Talk of UBI appears to be code for "And now rich people can say Shut up. You are getting a check, you ingrate." rather than a genuine attempt to give meaningful relief to poor Americans.
Cutting a check is an easy answer to a hard problem, so likely won't solve anything.
I've listed my blogs elsewhere in another comment if you genuinely want to know more about what I think about homelessness, housing issues and community development.
I am wondering why you think a basic income check wouldn’t help anything, because it seems to exactly solve the issue you describe. You sign up for the check (or a lot of the times, get it automatically from the IRS), get it regularly, and buy food with it. Very little bureaucracy compared with food stamps. I agree that one must not call those who rely on the checks entitled and refuse them any further assistance. I think the best thing is to do what we can to help people get back on their feet or at least in a stable situation, and a basic income check would be only one (albeit major) element of that.
I concede that distributing the checks may be difficult to those without stable mailing addresses. Then it may help to for example allow distribution in cash at the local post office.
The pandemic stimulus checks appear to have had a tremendous impact in reducing poverty, see https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-government-program-cu..., at least based on the studies there. I don’t know what the path is for this becoming regular policy, but the proposed child tax credit is projected to greatly decrease child poverty (although it has its own problems, it’s tough to get people to understand it exists and how to use it).
The amount they are proposing for UBI wouldn't even cover rent in some parts of the US. Or it would barely cover rent in some places with little or nothing leftover. Online conversations about UBI frequently include comments to the effect that "If you had UBI, you could move someplace with lower rent."
It amounts to the latest version of putting homeless people on a bus and shipping them elsewhere so they stop being a local problem.
If rent is lower, it is probably because services are less available. If you need those services, such as specialized health care, telling you "Here's a check. Move someplace where it covers rent." is essentially a big fat fuck you.
We have torn down more than a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build new Missing Middle Housing in mixed use, walkable neighborhoods. So you not only need to cover a high rent, you also need to have a car which is another huge expense and another big fat fuck you if you simply can't drive for some reason (as is true for me -- I am handicapped and no longer drive).
If we pass UBI, I believe it will only get harder to convince people to build SROs and Missing Middle Housing and walkable neighborhoods. That would be an important part of actually solving things.
We also need universal healthcare coverage in the US. Medical expenses are another huge hardship in the US.
If it were possible to find cheap housing, live without a car and get medical care without it being a hardship, that would make it possible to live on very little and then most people could make their lives work even if they only worked part-time. Currently, if you can't work full-time at a well paid job with benefits, you can't make your life work and we aren't creating enough jobs of that sort. We are increasingly moving to gig work which would be fine if you didn't need a job with good benefits to get medical care and if you could find a cheap place where living without a car really worked and you mostly can't arrange that in the US.
Throwing money at the problem doesn't fix those systemic issues and likely just makes people in power feel like they did something and don't have to feel guilty while they shirk on dealing with resolving the hard problems because actually fixing anything is hard work and painful and no one wants to actually do that if they can find an easy out like "I cut you check. Stop bothering me."
I truly appreciate the insight you gave on zoning, housing, and healthcare. But I feel we are talking past each other, and you are attacking a strawman. I never implied UBI would be a catch all solution to the problem of homelessness. You are attacking the people who treat it as such when I said explicitly it is only one of several remedies.
I simply meant 1) it seems like a good solution for replacing food stamps, and it seems like you dropped this point entirely. I also think 2) it can be helpful in a wider sense. It is certainly easier to give people basic income checks than to rearchitect the entirety of American society away from cars, employer-based healthcare, and suburbia. While I agree with you that we perhaps should be on this more effective path, such a radical reorganization would take decades and massive political will that just isn’t there yet. Not even the New Deal, Great Society, or Eisenhower highway programs reached anything near this scope. UBI is something that has already had a test shot, and the data shows it has had a huge effect in reducing poverty during the pandemic. Unless I’m missing something big, it seems like a good way to start.
Okay, I’m really trying to have a good-faith conversation about this, maybe my questions weren’t super clear. I am very interested in your opinion, as you seem to have experience and also have thought about this a lot (and I think many of us on HN appreciate the unique perspective you have to offer). I am just having a hard time seeing the difference between “reducing barriers to food stamps in the US”, as you said and “giving regular checks to people”. Could you elaborate what this would look like? And how is it possible for checks to “not solve anything” when they have demonstrated effectiveness in decreasing poverty in the real world? Is the pandemic really that different a situation in this case? Maybe your definition of a solution here is different than mine?
EDIT: And of course I also don’t want to burden you with endless questioning. If you have written about this I would be happy to read links. You just have a lot of websites and a lot of content so it is difficult for me to find your writing on this particular topic.
The stimulus checks aren't a test of UBI in part because we were told they were one time relief for an emergency, not an entitlement you can count on forever. People spend money differently if they are told "it's a one-time gift" versus "you can expect this for the rest of your life."
Historically, when you inject money into a system without increasing availability of goods and services, the result is inflation. If you start giving people UBI as a regular thing, the value of those checks will promptly go down due to inflation.
All welfare programs have a long history of failing to keep up with inflation. Even food stamps tend to last only about three weeks out of the month. I see no reason to believe UBI would somehow magically escape this pattern.
Making college loans readily available didn't fix things. It didn't mean that everyone had equal access to a college degree and now ordinary people could readily pursue the career of their dreams. Instead, it resulted in tuition skyrocketing and students having trouble getting a professional job with which to pay off their student loans, so people are waiting tables, putting off marriage, putting off homeownership, putting of having kids, putting off their lives to try to pay their loans.
I see no reason to think UBI would somehow go differently. I read that they tried something somewhere and the result was the landlords just raised rent and it didn't provide real relief for poor people. It just enriched the landlords.
Two-thirds of lottery winners are bankrupt within five years and they are at dramatically increased risk of being murdered, among myriad other terrible fates. The money doesn't solve their problems. They trade poor people problems for rich people problems and they don't have rich people coping skills. It often has very ugly results.
If, instead, you give people access to food and medical care and you make smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods where it's possible to live cheaply, then people can manage their problems and make their choices and find a path forward. People aren't likely to eat ten times what they need just because you are willing to pay for it. People aren't likely to get ten times as many x-rays and surgeries as they need just because you won't bill them for it.
Covering basic needs and guaranteeing you can eat and see a doctor is fundamentally different from cutting a check and telling people to spend it any way they want. It's an important form of social safety net that helps when things go wrong and isn't as readily abusable as cash is whether through innocent mistake, ignorance or even willful irresponsibility.
If you go nuts and spend like crazy and can still eat, well you might survive long enough to learn better. If you piss away all your UBI and then people say "Nope. No food stamps. We ended that program to fund UBI. Go starve." you've got a serious problem and so does society.
I only asked the question because I wanted your input from your experience. Most of the people who didn’t want to leave were in various stages of addiction and alcoholism. Addiction is something I know about from my life. Not a fan of UBI. I worked endless hours in the Restaurant industry until I was 27 and got into IT and software development. Not trying to compare to your situation.
Food stamps and health care assistance should absolutely be raised. I have family who struggle with both costs.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be difficult. Sometimes people just have incompatible communication styles and it doesn't go well. (Or it just doesn't go well. Because life.)
I'm interested in reading more of your writing. I worked with TANF recipients, many of whom were homeless (although few of them were unsheltered) and would like to hear more of your perspective because I have some exposure personally, and also because there is a serious problem with providing services to a large number of homeless people in my local area.
Things don't get updated as frequently as I would like in part because I don't have traction, so I don't get the kind of feedback I need to help me figure out what to talk about and because I don't get enough from tips and Patreon to focus on these projects instead of on trying to come up with enough money to survive, but I have done a lot of writing over the years.
That list is not comprehensive. It's just stuff that has more than a few posts and most of that stuff is still being actively developed, just slowly.
> What’s your take? They were offered housing while they get back on their feet and chose not to take it.
If you are, say, addicted to drugs, and your options are 'Live in sober housing' and 'Live in a tent', is it that surprising that #2 is more appealing?
And before someone suggest 'They should just stop using drugs'. I'd also like to point out that we don't have a miracle cure for addiction, and that there are millions of upper and upper-middle class people with every service and support network, both professional and personal, who are unable to deal with their drug problems. What chance does someone sleeping rough, with nobody in their lives who gives two shits about them, have?
Fast forward to now. The city offered everyone a free place to go and many took it. There were still a lot of people who refused. Now the garbage trucks and police evicted them. The garbage people packed a lot of stuff and put it into storage.
What’s your take? They were offered housing while they get back on their feet and chose not to take it.