More then a few places have done this. Like everything upsides and downsides but overall i think its a good idea. Obviously it would not work in places with housing shortages unless you seize the means of the money grubbing landlords or build more housing.
It definitely doesn’t help that we don’t build any rental properties that can be hard for 500/month or less in major US cities really.
Giving your socks and underwear to someone who needs it > voting for a government socks and underwear program
We just need to give everyone money. It’s becoming progressively harder and harder to be an economically viable human, and highly productive jobs that pay well are fully out of reach for most people. For a lot of people it’s subsistence poverty working a garbage job like driving an uber, delivering packages/food, or working retail/restaurants… or homelessness.
I’m not shocked some people choose to be homeless instead.
There are a lot of people that would work for, but there are a lot who need something different than just cash.
Yeah mental health care in this country is basically not a thing. Obviously we need that to change in a big way. It’s very obvious that a majority of the people with major mental illnesses are on the street.
For those people working the subsistence poverty jobs isn’t even an option because they generally can’t hold them. Anyone who has ever worked one of those jobs has stories about a ‘crazy’ coworker who lasted 24 hours or less before they did something bizarre and got fired.
Yes they probably are crazy. Disabled crazy. Society should be taking care of them while helping them get better. Currently we throw them on the street until they get too disruptive, at which point we throw them in jail… where their inability to be compliant usually leads to a downward spiral of their behavior being more and more penalized.
I’m not saying this is you or anyone here, but I think some of the skepticism about Yang is a suspicion that “just give them cash” is a way to still say “if you’re going to blow this cash on beer, I WANT you to sleep in the gutter. You deserve it.” ie Standard conservative thinking.
And yet he wants to vastly upgrade the mental health system. He just doesn’t think poor people are inherently inferior and incapable of making good decisions for themselves. The idea that the government will do a better job of figuring out how to improve your life than you will is pretty silly IMO. Unless you’re straight up mentally ill. That’s obviously different.
If anything giving the homeless 1000 a month would create a market for 200/month dwellings that capitalists could justify providing to the currently homeless. Would they be nice? Obviously no… but definitely nicer than a tent under an overpass. It would also very likely create entire communities of people who just live off the 1k a month UBI. That would draw the homeless away from the areas they currently flock to because of the viability of panhandling.
Also giving the subsistence poor 1000 a month would be life changing for them. They could survive without a job, which would give them infinitely more leverage than they currently have with their employers.
And speaking as someone who has been subsistence poor for a serious time period most of them do not get any public assistance at all at present. Unless you’ve had kids you get nothing under the current system. At most you get some food stamps, maybe 100 a month. Personally I never bothered to jump through the hoops required to get even that.
I don’t think that would happen, at least not in the larger cities.
I think $1000/mo would be good for the subsistence poor in general.
I don’t know about Yang’s plans with the mental health system, but medical care and counseling won’t fix everything up for everyone either.
Nothing is going to fix everything for everyone to be fair. The economically unviable probably need to leave the big cities to live in communes or something. The only reason they go to cities is because pan handling works there.
I have nothing to add, but I’m deeply interested in this subject because my city is the only city with homeless services in like a three county region, so we have a very large homeless population ratio compared to the general population.
It’s really bad, and nobody has a very good solution to it. A friend was hired as a consultant a few years back to do some work for the city/county, and his conclusions were that there were no homes/apartments available in the entire county that low paid workers could afford that made between $9 and $14/hr.
My thoughts are that there’s really three buckets of homelessness - those that are too poor to afford housing (give them keys to a home), those that are mental ill (provide mental care), and those that for whatever reason don’t want to live within societies rules (may crossover with the mentally ill, but I can’t think of a good solution for them).
There’s also the additional piece that cities and communities are stuck trying to fix a problem that is caused at the federal level due to the inherent nature of capitalism.
The people who need more help need to be in cities where it is more readily available and it’s easier to provide. And what they need are services directly provided and certainly not a bus ticket out of town.
And the panhandlers have exactly the same right to be in the city as you do and everyone who gives them money has the absolute right to do that. One thing the “economically unviable” need, along with everyone else, is freedom.
The complete lack of a social safety net dooms millions of people in America. No question that universal health care, constructing low-cost housing, improved public transportation, universal internet access, and better funded job training/job seeking programs would cut homelessness dramatically.
Of course NIMBY liberals and conservatives who call any welfare communism prevent that from happening.
Reality is that most people want to end homelessness not out of the goodness of their heart but because they don’t like looking at homeless people. They consider them a blight on their neighborhood to be displaced. If they were out of sight, they’d quickly stop caring about the structural deficiencies that led them to become homeless.
Yeah. At one point some people put up a bunch of tiny home/sheds around LA (like freeway overpasses) and just let people live in them. This was obviously a better way for people to live than in tents and tarps. For one, it let them have a modicum of security for their stuff if they tried to do anything like go obtain social services or try to get cleaned up to work. But, you know, better to have the police constantly tear down their encampments and chase them from area to area around the city. Just not being constantly chased around by the police would help a lot of people.
This is how shanty towns without electricity or sewage happen… so yeah I’m going to say it’s a terrible idea final answer.
Those homeless people are there because that’s the only place they can get money to live through panhandling, not because they want to be there.
I want mental healthcare for the ones for whom that’s the problem, UBI for the ones who simply can’t afford to live, and the ones who don’t want to cooperate with society at all? IDK the status quo seems pretty fair for that minority of the homeless population. I’m sure there will always be some number of homeless people in every city.
Then go ahead and give them electricity and sewage.
What? I thought you were against shanty towns without electricity and sewage?
Oh, you just want roving shanty towns that are constantly stirred up by the police? That’s the policy?
It’s a much smaller group of people at that point made up entirely of the portion of the homeless who are basically conscientious objectors to living in modern society. I’m sorry but there does come a point where my sympathy dries up entirely.
We’re offering mental healthcare services AND a UBI in this scenario. You’ve chosen to be homeless at that point to a pretty extreme degree. I’d be fine with making that illegal to the point of jailing people. It’s really not OK.