“No fair! I went to work today! Those people didn’t and deserve to die horribly of exposure for it!”
Yes, and I’d like to not see it happen either 🥰
/s obviously
I know someone who is homeless and sheltering them (in shit conditions) is costing the local council almost twice as much per month as just giving them an apartment.
Explain?
The councils pay landlords for 1 room in a 8+ room house.
In the area I’m thinking of, this costs £900 (or $1100) a month. For comparison,
- Council flats (1 person flat) cost £500-600/month
- Market rate for apartments is £1000 / month.
I think the absurd rate being charged for abysmal conditions is partially rationalised by the fact that it’s paid to those landlords on a daily basis, but it’s obviously completely inefficient.
I don’t want to go into the horrors of being in a homeless shelter, but it would be better for everyone involved if housing was more accessible.
Rent by the hour does tend to be more expensive…
Taking a tangent: with reliable UBI the homeless and poor would have enough of their own money to reliably pay for whatever type of shelter they desire, whether that’s a standard apartment, or a bed in a big shelter dormitory for less per night, but either way: they would have a reliable source of income to pay for it with, instead of having to scrounge needs-tested welfare + whatever else they can scrape together.
It may also be cheaper for the government as they wouldn’t need to spend so much on bureaucracy trying to figure out whether someone deserves money.
All in all UBI would be a huge win, the poor could do more with a STABLE small income than they do with the unreliable sources most of them operate off of now. The whole needs testing bureaucracy can just die, saving Billions in administrative costs. Services and stores for low income people could do much better when their clientele has reliable income instead of being flat broke most of the time.
In my view, if UBI is good enough, there’s no more need for minimum wage, let people volunteer if they want to, pay to work in some highly desirable jobs, that’s fine.
I believe the primary objection comes from the people who hire the poor, they can’t imagine people working without the imminent threat of starvation and homelessness. If that’s how your workplace operates, that needs to change. With UBI I believe a lot of workplaces would self-regulate better, because if they don’t their employees will just quit.
See The End of Policing for stats on why locking people up costs more than housing. See According to Need podcast for why housing-first costs less.
Friend of ours is a well educated psychologist, she does drug counseling in lieu of jail. Convicts in her program have 4x better outcomes and her program (including her salary) costs the county less than 1/10th what they pay to keep drug charge convicts in jail. Still, the county refuses to expand the program and pays far more to send the majority of their drug cases to jail, because that’s how the judges want to handle it.
Aghhhhh. I hate this so much. The same with head start programs. Like every $1 spent on early childhood programs saves $7 (at the low end!) in the long run. We have the answers. Makes me want to scream honestly.
Florida is making some progress on the early childhood side, they’ve been funding “Free VPK” for 20+ years now, and unemployed parents get automatic “Florida KidCare” insurance (basically Medicaid) for their children. Still, could be better.
Yeah, but giving them housing and food doesn’t punish poor people or increase our slave population!
you could have benches shoot fire periodically like every hour or so. regular users would rarely be affected, but if anyone tries to sleep on it, they won’t do it again.
The few people injured by the fire benches are likely to be poor so they can’t sue anyway.
I say go ahead with the fire benches. Can we add spikes that shoot up out of the bottom every 4 hours over night? Spikes with aids on them?
finally a good leftist meme
More incentives for private funding of housing? ;-)
defenestration
