Doug Smith

Los Angeles Times

Monthly payments for housing could get thousands of homeless people off the streets. It sounds like a voucher idea where the funds could only be used only for housing, apartments and heat and electricity. Or paid directly. A stipulated basic income to house thousands of homeless people in various situations (apartments, boarding, with family or friends, etc.) as advocated by researchers.

The idea or potential policy is being presented as “Basic Housing Grants to Reduce Homelessness in Los Angeles, a rough draft by USC, UCLA, Homeless Policy Research, Pathways – Housing First, and the Economic RoundTable.

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The argument is the income could provide access to housing for a portion of the population who are homeless primarily as the result of an economic setback. Alternately. It could potentially save millions of dollars in public services. It would leave an overstretched and more expensive subsidized and service-enriched housing for those who have more complicated social needs.

To reduce the number of people on the street, the fastest way to do so is money outside of the system developed primarily to help people with serious disabilities, This according to lead author Gary Blasi, professor emeritus in the UCLA School of Law.

The paper offers no prescriptions for how payments should be funded or who should receive the money. Instead, the authors, coming from four separate disciplines, contrast the simplicity and documented effectiveness of basic income with the high cost and inadequate results of programs to provide standard housing for every homeless person. As written . . .

“The truth is, we cannot afford not to do better than the current system, which spends a huge amount of money to house a small fraction of those in need,”

That system, relying on housing navigators to “seek very scarce subsidized housing subject to strict criteria” is a “lengthy and expensive process.” It leaves thousands of rental subsidy vouchers unused and thousands of people unable to find housing.

“Providing interim housing during this process can be very costly, as is adding to the supply of housing,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, a source of readily available affordable housing goes untapped. Adding . . .

“Informal housing, once a subject of study only in developing countries, means housing that does not conform to the standards of the formal housing market. It includes shared housing arrangements, housing that does not meet all code requirements, rooms rented in single-family homes.”

Clinical community psychologist with the UCLA Department of Psychiatry Sam Tsemberis writes

“There’s a vast informal rental market going on already all across California. People are renting out single-family homes. They have two or three beds in each of the bedrooms and are charging $400, $500 a month for people to sleep.”

More in the LA Times article . . .