Yet a study that involved giving homeless people money without strings attached showed that most spent it on things to improve their future, like buying a used car, paying off debt, pursuing education, starting a business and getting a home. There were no adverse outcomes for any of the participants.
But still our society will judge the homeless and make out they’re all feckless addicts who can’t be trusted with help.
It’s fucking rich parasites that have brainwashed the people through the media they own that the homeless cannot be trusted with themselves. Meanwhile the world’s richest man is addicted to ketamine and being racist on his social media platform.
The brainwashing is more to do with wealth/class. Making it seem that if an individual is homeless or poor then it’s solely and purely their fault and not the predatory society/economic model we live in thats dominated by parasites.
A rich drug addict is still seen as a success and positive contributor to society.
A poor/working class drug addict is seen as an abject failure and a drain on society.
Besides the general class bias, a lot of this stems from people not understanding how invisible homelessness is. People see the homeless as just the dirty, disheveled ones muttering to themselves incoherently on street corners where it’s easy to attribute it to being a tweaker.
But a lot of homeless people don’t outwardly look homeless. A lot of them even have jobs, they present as “normal” and find ways to obscure their housing insecurity.
I had a full time job the entire time I was couch hopping. But in 2008, there was alot of uncertainty about keeping that job. Getting treated differently by police when they saw the very large back pack on my back was definitely an eye opener.
I will never judge those living rough for drug or alcohol abuse. Being high or drunk can make an evening bearable that would otherwise be hellish.
And if you have thousands of dollars you can do stuff like make a payment on a used car or maybe pay the deposit on a rental home.
If you have 2 dollars you can get a beer. So obviously if all you get is the 2 dollars at a time, its rough to save up for the apartment payment and especially if you can’t guarantee reliable rent payment from then on and while you have to keep all your stuff on you and a limited ability to access banking… but you can get a beer.But the people who are totally out on the streets do not constitute all homeless.
Had someone give me the why are you giving money to beggars they will just spend it on alcohol speech once while we were out drinking.
The randomised controlled trial, funded by Citi Foundation and St Martin-in-the-Fields Charity, will show the impact on participants’ housing stability one year after they received the money when final results are published in 2027.
2000 pounds for housing stability impact? In this economy? Without a stable job and/or subsidised housing, the homeless people are only being given a temporary chance to maybe improve their situation. It’s likely not enough cash to get a person back on their feet, unless they only recently became homeless
One woman said the money had come at the perfect time as she was heavily pregnant and had just been offered a move-on property.
Obligatory fuck the land leech who forced this homeless pregnant woman to give them a deposit.
Well, we’re supposed to be leftists who value analysis, science, and intelligence, so let’s analyze.
If you read the actual paper on this program, the participants are extremely cherry picked.
5.1.1 Inclusion criteria
To participate, individuals must:
- have significant experiences of homelessness, as judged and documented by the referring delivery organization;
- be currently placed in any type of temporary accommodation (e.g. hostels, supported housing, private rented sector), or rough sleeping, supported by the delivery organization;
- be nominated by the delivery organisation as suitable for the project; and
- have a bank account, or can be supported to open one.
5.1.2 Exclusion criteria
Delivery partners will be instructed that participants should be excluded from the study if they:
- use restricted substance(s) or alcohol, assessed as a risk of harm;
- have attempted suicide or have had suicidal ideation within last 6 months, assessed as a risk of harm;
- are at risk of exploitation, assessed as a risk of harm;
- have a history of gambling, assessed as a risk of harm;
- have previous convictions for fraud/deception; and
- have £4000 or more in savings.
They pretty clearly designed this program to help those with the greatest chance and disposition towards rehabilitation and improvement. People who are already clean, competent, and above the homeless “second kill line”. This is good. The scarce resources for help should absolutely be allocated towards where it can do the most good.
Below this homeless kill line are the languishing homeless. They excluded this group for a reason. Because the results would be much, much different. The drug and alcohol addicted, violent, mentally ill homeless which people think of stereotypically. Let me cherry pick samples like this but in the other direction in my neighborhood and I will show you a 100% rate of failure.
I think it’s disingenuous to pretend simply giving out cash is some panacea for homelessness and completely ignores the structure that we must create in society to avoid this funnel downwards into the kill line. We need social workers to help and house (or at least institutionalize) these people, a goal which is often against their own consent and desires. We need to provide them a structured incentive program, and, if they don’t want that life, at least provide a bare minimum QOL for them where they can’t hurt anyone. We need drug rehabilitation programs and addiction programs. We need reeducation and reintegration programs to have these people become functional laborers in society, to the extent of their ability, and receive to the extent society can give, as the communism we claim to follow dictates.
I think too many of us imagine some kind of utopia where nobody works and everyone is rich and completely ignored the concept of labor. This thinking around homelessness is another symptom of this Star Trek view of reality.
It’s more evidence how important and effective preventive social services are than after-the-fact cash handouts.
If you’re unstable and homeless you’re feared and abandoned. People just want you out of sight and nobody thinks where you came from.
If you’re stable and homeless you’re viewed as a lazy person. People won’t do anything until it’s too late.
The study is more about that these “Stable” homeless people aren’t actually just lazy and wouldn’t spend all the 2000 british dollars on plastic crack. Hopefully it makes people open up to the idea that they should be helped and now it’s your job as a leftist to push for more radical change where the issues are directly addressed, instead of sticking to lib solutions like UBI.
Well, we’re supposed to be leftists who value analysis, science, and intelligence, so let’s analyze.
Someone actually needs to transform this theory into praxis, without that it is worthless. That’s like the most important part of being a leftist.
I doubt a lot of “Leftists” are willing to actually betray their own class interests and contribute to opening a “Center for Addressing Homelessness” where you put your awesome theories to practice, but I suppose it fits the theory; that things have to get much worse, before they start getting better. Until then best we get is this half-assed lib solutions.
5.1.2 makes this study unrepresentative and ungeneralizeable to the point where I don’t even know what it proves.
No-one is saying giving out cash is a panacea for homelessness. I’m saying let’s not just automatically judge every homeless person as a druggie waster.
You shouldn’t give money to your landlord. They are most likely going to waste it all on drugs and alcohol anyway.
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Give them money so that they can buy necessities, and a little more for the drugs 😌
I say “I don’t give homeless money because I need to spend it on drinking/drugs”
My response to those people is who cares, so do you. They never like that because it’s the truth
The people who spend a significant amount of their paycheck on drugs (especially when you add in caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol) are telling you that it’s bad if homeless people have money because they’ll probably spend it on drugs is the biggest self-report. Just because you would do that if you had extra money because you already have your basic needs met doesn’t mean that you can universalize that experience and project it onto homeless people.
Also if I was homeless I’d basically need drugs and/or alcohol to cope with it - I can barely handle working a cushy office job while having stable accommodation without needing to rely on drugs as a crutch, do you really think that I’d rely on drugs less if my circumstances were significantly worse?
If we want to talk about addiction and enabling, let’s talk about useless NGOs and charities that are addicted to public funding and policy that enables them to redirect most of that money to shit like the salary costs for a bloated corporate hierarchy and so they can do shit like invest in property rather than effectively addressing the social ills they purportedly have a mission to fix.
Also if I was homeless I’d basically need drugs and/or alcohol to cope with it - I can barely handle working a cushy office job while having stable accommodation without needing to rely on drugs as a crutch, do you really think that I’d rely on drugs less if my circumstances were significantly worse?
I’ve read studies where giving the homeless a no strings attached apartment was the single most effective way to reduce their drug and alcohol use.
Study reveals that profits have to come from somewhere, more at eleven.
They just want poor people to die, this is why they systematicaly deny them any livelihood.
I appreciate these studies because giving resources to poor people is in the best interest of poor people. But lets do some studies where they give 5-20 bucks to the homeless because that more faithfully replicates me handing them money as opposed to a Universal Basic Income.
