Denver gave homeless people $1k/mth. Year later, nearly half had housing

People who received $1k/month: 44% housed

People who received a $6500 lump sum followed by $500/month: 48% housed

The control group who received $50/month: 43% housed

Yes, the control group, who received less money, also did well in some metrics, but in most metrics they also started off better, so the delta in their experience is in fact smaller.

Furthermore, the control group also experienced a drop in full-time employment, while both of the subject groups experienced gains.

I agree the headline isn't a useful representation of the importance of the data, but it does seem like this was a fairly impactful program.

The program would need a 90% success or it means that the rules are easily breakable, there are no strings attached to the free money, and people will absolutely figure out the loopholes.

This could be a step in the right direction if there is some form of filtering out people who will misuse the money, potentially making their situation worse by buying even more drugs or other bad decisions, and like anything else it will spready by word of mouth and the damage could be much worse than the current problem.

Yet, that's now what we do. Many people view homelessness as some kind of personal moral failure. when, in the US in particular, you'll be surprised how close most Americans are to homelessness. It takes surprisingly little to go wrong to end up there.

We would rather spend money on things like policing homeless people, even incarcerating them, which is objectively more expensive than simply housing such people.

Ugh, this is a horrible article. 45% of people found housing, but there was zero difference between the treatment group (given $1,000/month), a group given a large lump sum, and a control group given $50 a month!

https://www.denverbasicincomeproject.org/research

A lot of people rotate in and out of homelessness, so we should expect some percentage to find housing after a year, even if nothing is done. Indeed, this seems like pretty strong evidence that giving more money does not help people find housing (at least in the range from $50/month to $1,000/month).

They cite a decrease in public service costs, but again, there is no difference between treatment and control! See page 6 in this PDF: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64f507a995b636019ef88...

They calculate "saved costs" by estimating the difference in costs between the start of the program (a year ago) and a year into the program (now). However, since they are tracking a particular group of people, some of them will find homes and jobs on their own, so we should expect costs for that cohort to trend down no matter what. (This wouldn't lower costs overall, because in equilibrium, they would be replaced with newly homeless people with higher costs. But this is a cohort study, so those people wouldn't be included here.)

However universal really has to be universal e.g an entire country. This lets one measure the demand frenzy and resulting inflation.

What works really well is supplementing incomes for the poor.

Giving money out seems like the easiest thing to do, but much more effecting is increasing supply for basic goods and services. E.g housing, education, food, healthcare.

I think they should try doubling the payments and multiplying the number of recipients by 10.

Probably don't have the money for that though and won't consider it even if they did have it.

The thing to look for are the charts that have the yellow star on them (statistically significant, p < 0.05). AFAICT, that means that those are the only 'real' findings in the study. I'll summarize for everyone:

- All 3 groups found a positive Change in Perception of Stable Housing

- All 3 groups found a positive Change in Financial Well-Being

- The Lump sum group found a positive Change in Health

- The $50/mo group found a negative Change in Energy (?)

- The lump sum group found a positive Change in Sleep Quantity (6 to ~7 hours/night)

- The $50/mo and $1k/mo groups found a negative Change in Sleep Quality

- The lump sum group found a lowering of Food Insecurity

- The $50/mo and $1k/mo groups found a lowering in Change in Parenting Distress

- The $50/mo group had lower Hope Scores

- The $50/mo group had lower Agency Scores

- All groups had less Hours Per Day Spent Accessing Resources

- the $50/mo and $1k/mo had greater Hours Per Day Spent for Social and Leisure

- The $1k/mo had higher Transportation Security

- The lump sum and $50/mo groups had lower Client Connection and Satisfaction with DBIP Partner Agency

The actual data of the study starts on pg 58.

A key finding is on the very last page; Changes in Public Service Costs. From there we find that the TOTAL COST SAVINGS was -$589,214. I'm not entirely sure of what is going on in the chart, but I believe (and please correct me) that a negative cost savings means that the costs then increased? So this program increased, by about $600, usage of Public Services. One wonders if they corrected for inflation over the time period.

Overall, an amazing study. Honestly, I kinda can't believe they got it funded. I think it's added a lot to the conversation about UBI and has, like any good study, prompted a lot more questions than answers.

Personally, I think muddied the waters more than anything. None of the measures of getting people off the streets were statistically significant, but that may be me misreading the data here. And a lot of the less key, but still good measures had people less well off than before (Client Connection and Satisfaction, Agency Scores, Hope Scores, Sleep Quality, Energy). It seems to me that most of the groups had an overall sense that this study was helping them out, kinda. But overall, I'm not all that sure it really did help anyone get off the streets here. It did seem to help with employment. This study, to me, really speaks to the difficulty that people have in becoming housed once homeless. That there are a lot of obstacles and that even an extra grand a month for a year isn't really enough.

I'd like to see a study that does the Mythbusters approach and sees what it takes to get people off the streets, just upping things until it happens. But, per this study, that is going to take a lot of money to accomplish. If anything, this work kinda bends one towards the idea that addressing homelessness isn't really worth it; it's just too hard of a problem. So, maybe another study is needed on how to keep people from being homeless in the first place?

Again, amazing work here. I feel this is going to be a seminal study for policy planners to argue over for decades.