If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?
That question was at the core of a controlled study conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.
Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered.
So do I, but their sacrifice has led to good quality data that shows that giving unhoused people money without conditions helps them to reintegrate, become housed and hopefully employed and again contributing to society as a whole. It’s a silver bullet against thinking like “don’t give that homeless person money; they’ll just spend it on drugs!” that we have been force-fed for decades. Hopefully, that may lead to better outcomes for them.