Scott Santens: Another basic income pilot focused on homelessness has released preliminary results after only 6 months because halfway through the experiment, it is already showing incredible effectiveness. $750/mo for 6 months led to homelessness dropping to 12% versus 23% in the control group on a wait list.

Another basic income pilot focused on homelessness has released preliminary results after only 6 months because halfway through the experiment, it is already showing incredible effectiveness. $750/mo for 6 months led to homelessness dropping to 12% versus 23% in the control group on a wait list.

$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless peoplewww.latimes.com A study by USC and a San Francisco-based nonprofit has found that a $750 monthly stipend improves the lives of homeless people.

For those keeping track, similar results have been found recently in Denver’s basic income pilot, and also in San Francisco and Vancouver, BC. Here are links to those: 1. www.denverpost.com/2023/11/20/d... 2. basicincometoday.com/thanks-to-50... 3. basicincometoday.com/providing-75...

The thing that annoys me most is the lack of thought about existing disability programs.

How I intend this: UBI isn’t UBI unless it universal. Amount given isn’t that different from the amount one gets on SSI. People on SSI cannot accept the money you hand out and are docked money if they don’t pay rent on so much as a couch. SSI is overly restrictive and and needs to be updated.

Expanding SSI to create a genuine safetynet that catches disabled people, which in my heart of hearts includes anyone who is chronically homeless as all of those people are disabled… As well as that financial target group for rent goals… *just hand them money* sure would be nice…

Canada has very similar issues with disabled with the added sting of MAID.

Disability programs are overly exclusionary of psychiatric disabilities which have the hardest time being accommodated or hired. Please fix. You magically have that “UBI” program and you improve the lives of those in poverty.

This kind of thing along with building much more low income housing is needed badly in the USA. But so many are way too selfish to allow these to expand.

Cheaper housing access is diametrically opposed to extremely high home valuation for those who own - and that VERY powerful electorate will fight it with everything they have.

NIMBYs suck

they do - but nearly every incentive in our society is abetting their behavior

This is key. People talk about NIMBYs like it's a personality trait, but really it's the natural consequence of most people having most of their wealth tied up in their home. Also, kill and eat all landlords.

Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.bsky.social just published a screed against planned economies and their failures regarding the housing crisis in the US - "decision-makers largely uninterested and uninformed about the needs of the people beneath them... steering their nations towards stagnation and poverty."

In Defense of Economic Libertywww.liberalcurrents.com Taking an important idea back from the right

No argument on that comment!

This! ⬆️⬆️⬆️ Somewhere along the way Real Estate Investors convinced Homeowners that protecting house prices was paramount. If you intend to keep living in your home, it's selling price matters little. Real Estate Investors want YOU to protect THEIR investments.

True of course, but also many middleclass families have their wealth tied up in their homes, so that a decrease in home valuation deeply impacts their bottom line. We could stop treating housing as an investment and start treating it as a right! If we wanted to.

That wealth argument always seemed a little weak to me. Mostly a generational transfer unless the plan was to sell out and move to some lower cost jurisdiction like a small town in Italy or Croatia. Artificially limiting housing supply is a strategy of developers & investors making entry daunting.

Putting a lot of sweat equity into an unsafe house in a transitional neighborhood funded my unexpected need to retire due to disability. I moved to a much smaller home in a less expensive state. My original plan involved selling at 55 and doing a career downshift. I know many genx folks doing this.

Right, but how do we get from here to there? We can't just pull the rug out from all those homeowners who bought recently, right?

I favor a market approach of just removing zoning restrictions and building like mad. Ideally, this would avoid pissing off a very large group of Americans.

If prices stabilized or even fell in the short term it would have no impact on anyone who was continued to live in their recently purchases home. And if they sold, they would be purchasing a replacement in a lower priced market.

This isn’t really true, I can remove equity from my home by borrowing money against it

...which I assume is easier to do if your home is worth more

Yes but it matters what you paid and what’s left on the mortgage. My point is that increasing equity isn’t just something investors care about. It’s what you leave your kids, or it’s what you sell to get cash in an emergency, or just end of life care.

San Francisco reduced affordability requirements to encourage new housing development. What it is going to get are developments like a 71-story building with rents over $8,000 a month for a 1,000 sq ft apartment.

wsj.comwww.wsj.com

I live in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) where a early 2000s rezoning has created a very similar dynamic. And yeah, it does NOT make housing generally more affordable.

And we will still have thousands of poor who will remain unhoused as there is NO WAY IN HELL that prices will drop enough here to be affordable to anyone other than the well off. (or those like me who live in same rent controlled place for 34 years)

I suspect the target market for these apartments is second (or third or fourth) homes for wealthy visitors

They target high paid tech workers and second homes or places for the ultra rich to park their money outside of their nations.

...and AirBnBs!

I own a house and I DESPERATELY want housing prices to drop

Nobody gave these people cheap housing. All they gave them was cash, and they housed themselves.

I know! The solution is so simple!

If you’re a home owner and really think about it, high home values only hurt you in the form of increased property taxes. You’re never going to be able to sell the house and buy a new one at your original price, so why are you excited about the price going up. You pay that too!

Not in California. Back in the 1970s we passed Prop 13, which freezes property taxes at the initial rate when you bought the property. So there's a big incentive to stay put, watch the equity appreciate.

Oh interesting I didn’t know this!

Worst of all, it applies to commercial as well as private real estate. Bank of America is as protected from real estate taxes as any elderly widow.

Not totally the case in California, where Prop 13 has held property taxes down for decades

In Seattle your property taxes only go up due to an increase in valuation if your house value increases *relative to other people's*. They set the tax percentage according to the total pot of money they need to get, and your share of that can go up or down.

Not sure I like that, but as one who will never be able to buy a home I will never have to worry about this issue directly.

As somebody better-informed than I said (I would cite if I could remember), if we had an adequate pension/retirement system such that people weren't depending on the equity in their houses to pay for old age, we might get some movement on that front. It's all connected.

Right, even people who should feel pretty comfortable are still worried about paying for health care and long-term care in old age, and not without reason. But they won't all need that money. Pay for society to be insured, and they can hoard less.

Just FYI, I probably will need all the equity in my condo to afford whatever final illness I have. LTC is fabulously expensive, dementia care more so, and while I'm still working at 66, it's hard to tell how long my luck will hold. As a low-end writer, I haven't saved nearly enough.

I find this link dubious and cynical and would like someone with rigor to dig into it. Surely homeless encampments near high value locations (where services and money are) are also holding down home prices. I don't buy that it's zero-sum.

I don't disagree with you that the sentiment and political reaction pressure exists, I question their rationalization that robust public housing hurts private home prices. I also live in Houston where we have no zoning so there are many things going wherever we don't question so why start now?

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