- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
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.
Another factor is that you’re a lot less likely to freeze to death living on the street in California than in a lot of states.
If you are homeless, hopping a freight train south can be a simple survival tactic