Getting $750 a month didn’t end homelessness – but our study shows it still improved the …

by Benjamin F. Henwood, University of Southern California, [This article first appeared in The Conversation, republished with permission] Can giving homeless people US$750 a month to use any way they choose help them move into long-term housing? I am the director of the University of Southern California Homelessness Policy Research Institute. My research team, in partnership with Miracle Messages, a San Francisco social services nonprofit, set out to answer that question in a study that will be published in an upcoming peer-reviewed issue of Social Work Research. In one of the first randomized studies of basic income for homeless people in the U.S., 103 homeless people living in California received $750 payments every month for a year. Then we compared their housing situations with people who were homeless but did not receive this money. All study participants met the federal definition of literal homelessness. That basically means they either stayed in a homeless shelter or lived on the streets. In 2022, when we began this study, we expected the answer to our question would be “yes.” Beginning with optimistic expectations A similar experiment in Canada with 50 homeless participants showed that providing 7,500 Canadian dollars in cash as a lump
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