Conor here: The following piece from Fran Quigley, director of the Health and Human Rights clinic at the Indiana University McKinney School of Law, offers first-hand accounts of the struggle to avoid homelessness. They point to ongoing research, such as a report from the University of California, San Francisco released last year — the largest study of the state’s homeless population in three decades — that surprisingly finds that economic factors are the main drivers of homelessness, including low wages, unaffordable costs, and rising costs. of houses.
According to many experts on this issue, the first step to make any progress on this issue is to prevent people from losing their homes. Here Quigley offers a simple solution: give them money. Why not?
Government plutocrats have no problem coming up with funds when the issues are important to them:
As Rebecca Riddell, economic justice policy lead for Oxfam America, tells Newsweek:
“Persistent poverty in the US is really about policy choices,” he said. “The decisions that have been made on taxes, on social security, on corporate power, on public services—those are not designed to eliminate poverty and hardship, and in many ways, have contributed to the increase in inequality.”
Written by Fran Quigley who directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at the Indiana University McKinney School of Law. Originally published in Common Dreams.
Katrina is a mother of three children, one of whom lives with a severe disability that requires Katrina to spend most of her time as a caregiver. Katrina was already struggling, but unexpected car repairs and reduced work hours caused her to fall behind on wages.
Darren was injured at work and lost six weeks’ wages. Now he tries to use as much work time as his employer will give him, but the pay is only $17 an hour. Darren shares custody of two very young children, aged three and nine months, and is struggling to meet rent arrears.
Sheila’s husband was arrested and sent to prison for abusing her. Safe for now, Sheila has returned to work as a manager in a retail business. But you owe several months of rent, plus late fees and court fees. It’s more than she can pull together, so Sheila will have to move within a month. He puts most of his things in storage. And she’s packing a few garbage bags of clothes to take with her to her new home—a friend’s unheated garage with no plumbing.
I teach a law school clinic in Indianapolis, where my students and I represent Katrina, Darren, Sheila and other clients in eviction court. They have a joint demand, which also applies to the nine million US households currently behind in rent:
They need money.
Katrina, Darren, and Sheila are among three out of four families who qualify for subsidized housing, but do not receive it because we do not fully fund these programs. They are forced to try to pay market rate rent, which takes up a large portion of their income even in good times. In bad times, the rent is more than the income. So we see them in eviction court.
We can do better than this. We know we can, because just a few years ago Katrina, Darren, and Sheila and almost everyone we see in eviction court were now safely housed. Emergency rental assistance, expanded child tax credits, more food stamps, and more unemployment benefits have prevented more than three million eviction cases, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In fact, poverty rates actually decreased during the Covid pandemic.
Since then, researchers at Columbia University and the City University of New York, CUNY, have studied the impact of those benefits, and confirmed what we saw in the lives of our clients. “We find that direct cash payments were one of the most useful tools in helping people end the epidemic and primarily, they were used to cover basic needs, including rent or housing, utilities, and food,” they said.
That is powerful evidence that points us to what we can do to help. Add that to the pile of research that shows wireless money leads to great results. Specifically in housing, research has shown that unconditional cash given to homeless people reduced homelessness and saved money that could have been spent on recipient government programs. Cash works so well because this and other studies show that low-income people are more likely to use cash assistance for rent, food, and transportation than for “temptations” like alcohol or drugs.
More broadly, an analysis in the Annual Review of Psychology reviewed a number of studies examining what actually makes people happy. It turns out that some of the usual suspects—volunteer work, random acts of kindness—may not have the effect of bringing happiness as we’d hoped. But what works? You guessed it: money, especially low-income people.
Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn, professors of psychology at the University of British Columbia say: “A growing number of rigorous pre-registered trials suggest that such cash transfers and other forms of financial assistance can provide an effective way to improve happiness.” “The money appears to be as good or better than other interventions that carry similar costs, including psychotherapy and job training.”
This analysis is consistent with what we see in court. Would Katrina and Darren and Sheila benefit from psychotherapy? It is possible. But for many clients it seems that their financial problems cause mental health problems, more than the other way around. Can job training help? And, maybe. But these people are already doing work in the community—home health care, food, utilities, retail jobs, custodial work, etc.—that are essential to our economy. So, shouldn’t those jobs pay a living wage?
As we examine the presidential candidates’ responses to our housing crisis and the clamor for more housing, it’s worth remembering this simplicity. Until and unless we build more subsidized housing, which is a real solution to this problem, what our customers need most is direct cash.
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