The roommate solution: direct cash payments could solve half of Silicon Valley's homeless crisis
Turns out that many unhoused in the streets of cities like San José don’t need an elaborate suite of social services, but just enough to help with the rent. Housing perfectionists should be reminded that college kids do it, even working professionals do it, so why can’t most healthy homeless folks rent a room in a house? LA Times’s Doug Smith explores how county-run General Relief could serve as a vehicle for basic income.
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.
“If the idea is to reduce the number of people on the street, definitely the fastest way to do that is money and not this incredibly complex system that we have built up primarily to help people with serious disabilities,” said lead author Gary Blasi, a professor emeritus in the UCLA School of Law.
“The larger perspective is that homelessness is a result of economic inequality and income at least as much as it is a lack of affordable housing,” [Dan Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable] said. “I don’t see a way that we can house our way out of homelessness. This is another tool, the tool providing people a basic income, that we need to be making a better use of.”
While not proposing a specific administrative plan, the authors point to a potential mechanism for implementing basic income: raising General Relief, the county program mandated to provide minimal assistance to people who are “destitute, unemployed and ineligible for any other form of assistance.”
Informal housing is no substitute for the thousands of units of supportive housing that are needed. But “somewhere around half of the people on the street and in those encampments don’t need supportive housing,” he said. “They don’t. And they don’t qualify for it and they’re not getting into it,” Blasi said.
“We’re sort of communicating if you can just hang on for four years on the street, you’ll be troubled enough that you will rise to the top of our list. That’s just crazy.”
Read the whole thing here.
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