Solution to Homelessness: Cash … No Strings Attached

MY TURN-I don’t know about you … but the report that “Homelessness” went up 12% in the City of “Angeles” really hit me.  Couple that with another report that stressed one’s educational success was directly tied to the neighborhood you grew up in … and we have a two punch knockout! 

If things continue like this we won’t have to worry about ISIS … we are castrating the next generation.  Yes, lots of hand wringing by our politicians and promises to do something, but so far we have spent loads of tax payer money and show little results. 

There are approximately 44,000 people classified as “Homeless” and in a city like ours that has so much brain power, creativity and abundance … it is a damn shame! 

One of my favorite LA Times Columnists, Steve Lopez, spelled it out pretty well in Wednesday’s California section headed “No Excuse on Homelessness”.  He compared our 44,000 to the size of Calabasas or South Pasadena and referred to the” bla bla bla" regarding ending homelessness.  There is little will because “The Homeless don’t vote, for one thing and a lot of people don’t give a hoot about them for another,” Lopez wrote. 

The Times Editorial Board gave the reasons we are all aware of and suggested that instead of making it a Downtown problem, each neighborhood  should take responsibility.  Hey, Neighborhood Councils how many of you have a Board Member or a Committee in charge of the Homelessness in your Neighborhood? Or, our city for that matter? 

If the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (BONC) is going to, as the City Charter suggests, make policy, how about stepping up and  drawing a blueprint for NC’s to add to their bylaws or whatever the City Attorney needs to make it  conform. They can get together with the service and religious organizations in the Council area and make a coordinated plan to help the homeless in the neighborhood. 

What bothers me the most is that I don’t have the answers either!  I know that Neighborhood Schools are the backbone for Pre K-12 education and where you live makes all the difference.  I was helping my 12 year old Grandson with his homework the other night.  What was the subject?  An elective called “Banking”!  Yes, at sixth grade his PUBLIC school offered him the chance to learn about deposits, simple interest, capital etc.  How many LAUSD middle schools have this as part of the curriculum?  They don’t even have it in high schools where it is one of the vital tools to help function in this world.

I have my “Gym” buddies.  We discuss all of the world’s problems including our trainer’s dating life.  We are different generations and come from different backgrounds.  I often use them as a sounding board; so today’s question, in-between the plank and sit-ups was, “How would you solve the Homeless question? 

Our trainer volunteered, we should legalize all drugs and use the money collected from that tax to go for health and social welfare costs.  He pointed out that countries that had done that had a much lower addiction problem.  He also told me about some articles which showed different countries introducing innovative solutions to the homeless problem. 

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An interesting experiment that has been done in several countries with a great deal of success is giving the recipients cash … not housing … not food ... but cash.  One group did it without any strings and others have had certain obligations such as making sure the children went to the doctor and school on a regular basis.  No, neither group went out and spent it on booze, brothels and drugs. 

According to The Economist, Google and other donors contributed money to Give Directly, a charity which hands out no-strings-attached cash to the poorest people it can find. 

The idea sounds as loony as throwing money out of automobiles. But this program, and others like it, are part of a shift in thinking about how best to use aid to help the poorest. 

For decades, it was thought that the poor needed almost everything done for them and that experts knew best what this was. Few people would trust anyone to spend $1,000 responsibly. Instead, governments, charities and development banks built schools and hospitals, roads and ports, irrigation pipes and electric cables. They set up big bureaucracies to run it all. 

Around 2000, a different idea started to catch on: governments gave poor households small stipends to spend as they wished—on condition that their children went to school regularly and visited a doctor when sick. These so-called “conditional cash transfers” (CCTs) appeared first in Latin America and then spread around the world. They did not replace traditional aid, but had distinctive priorities, such as supporting individual household budgets and helping women (most payments went to mothers). They were also cheap to run. 

Projects such as Give Directly in Kenya are the latest elaboration of these ideas. Their designers saw that CCTs had boosted household incomes, and asked whether extra conditions, such as mandatory school attendance, were necessary. They also argued that, if CCTs were cheap to run, unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) would be cheaper still. 

Now enough of these programs are up and running to make a first assessment. Early results are encouraging: giving money away pulls people out of poverty, with or without conditions. Recipients of unconditional cash do not blow it on booze and brothels, as some feared. Households can absorb a surprising amount of cash and put it to good use. But conditional cash transfers still seem to work better when the poor face an array of problems beyond just a shortage of capital. 

When Give Directly’s founder, Michael Faye, went to traditional aid donors with his free-money idea, he remembers, “They thought I was smoking crack.” Silicon Valley, though, liked the proposal—perhaps because Give Directly is a bit like a technology start-up—- challenging traditional ways of doing things (in this case, aid). 

The first independent study of Give Directly’s methods, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro (who is a former board member of Give Directly), suggests this sort of spending is unusual. In randomly selected poor households in 63 villages that have received the windfalls, they say, the number of children going without food for a day has fallen by over a third and livestock holdings have risen by half. A year after the scheme began, incomes have gone up by a quarter and recipients seem less stressed, according to tests of their cortisol levels. 

There was another small sample in England according to the Washington Post in December 2013:  It was written by a Dutch blogger, Rutger Bregman.  Here is an excerpt:

 

“In May 2009, a small experiment involving 13 homeless men took off in London. Some of them had slept in the cold for more than 40 years. The presence of these street veterans was far from cheap. Police, legal services, health care: Each cost taxpayers thousands of pounds every year.

 

“That spring, a local charity decided to make the street veterans — sometimes called rough sleepers — the beneficiaries of an innovative social experiment. No more food stamps, food-kitchen dinners or sporadic shelter stays. The 13 would get a drastic bailout, financed by taxpayers. Each would receive 3,000 pounds (about $4,500), in cash, with no strings attached. The men were free to decide what to spend it on.

 

“The only question they had to answer: What do you think is good for you?

 

“I didn’t have enormous expectations,” an aid worker recalled a year later. Yet the homeless men’s desires turned out to be quite modest. A phone, a passport, a dictionary — each participant had ideas about what would be best for him. None of the men wasted his money on alcohol, drugs or gambling. A year later, 11 of the 13 had roofs over their heads. (Some went to hostels; others to shelters.) They enrolled in classes, learned how to cook, got treatment for drug abuse and made plans for the future.

 

“After decades of authorities’ fruitless pushing, pulling, fines and persecution, 11 vagrants moved off the streets.

 

“The cost? About 75,000 pounds, including the wages of the aid workers. In addition to giving 11 individuals another shot at life, the project had saved money by a factor of multiples. Even The Economist concluded: “The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.”

 

“What if this pilot program has broader implications? Societies tend to presume that poor people are unable to handle money. If they had any, people reason, the poor and homeless would probably spend it on fast food and cheap beer, not on fruit or education. This kind of reasoning nourishes the myriad ingenious social programs, administrative jungles, armies of program coordinators and legions of supervising staff that make up the modern welfare state.”

 

There has been talk about forming another Commission on Homelessness.  Los Angeles is not the only City facing this problem.  There are reams of social experiments and research.  I pointed out these two experiments because they go against convention.  The articles are fascinating and longer versions appear at these links: ● The Economist  ● Washington Post

 

I’m excited to receive your ideas for solving LA’s homeless crisis … at [email protected].

 

(Denyse Selesnick is a featured CityWatch columnist.  She is a former Publisher/journalist/international event organizer. Denyse can be reached at: [email protected])

-cw

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 40

Pub: May 15, 2015