- A guaranteed-basic-income program in Austin gave people $1,000 a month for a year.
- Most of the participants spent the no-strings-attached cash on housing, a study found.
- Participants who said they could afford a balanced meal also increased by 17%.
A guaranteed-basic-income plan in one of Texas’ largest cities reduced rates of housing insecurity. But some Texas lawmakers are not happy.
Austin was the first city in Texas to launch a tax-payer-funded guaranteed-income program when the Austin Guaranteed Income Pilot kicked off in May 2022. The program served 135 low-income families, each receiving $1,000 monthly. Funding for 85 families came from the City of Austin, while philanthropic donations funded the other 50.
The program was billed as a means to boost people out of poverty and help them afford housing. “We know that if we trust people to make the right decisions for themselves and their families, it leads to better outcomes,” the city says on its website. “It leads to better jobs, increased savings, food security, housing security.”
While the program ended in August 2023, a new study from the Urban Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank, found that the city’s program did, in fact, help its participants pay for housing and food. On average, program participants reported spending more than half of the cash they received on housing, the report said.
The sad thing is that high cost of housing is entirely unnecessary exploitation anyway. Just pass a law that transfers all house and land ownership into collective hands and erases all dept based on houses. I bet the vast majority of people would vote for it lol.
Who’s collective hands?
I Holland we have woning bouw organisaties That are BY law obliged to offer services and structured management, checked by impartial state department and who can be relieved of function (transfering the properties to another organization or splitting them up etcetera). Yes, needs to be overview, laws and such. Maybe even subsidies for new buildings.
But NO PROFIT ANYWHERE.
Not for public basic housing. Come on, do we really wanna admit RUZZIA and CHINA beat us on this?
Yeah, but there’s a difference between a local housing authority, and what that guy is suggesting, which appears to be “the state now owns all property, including stuff I’ve already paid for”.
The only people that would vote for that are people that don’t vote.
I’m all for the government taking the role of building new houses everywhere, in vast numbers in order to stabilise and eventually reduce prices. We used to have this in the UK, they were called council houses and the local government rented them out at reasonable prices. Then Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher got in power and sold them all off, under the guise of letting people buy the property they were renting. This isn’t a bad idea in itself, but there was another edge to that sword. No more properties would be allowed to be build with the proceeds. In effect it became a state sell-off. It’s been fucked ever since.
No, it would BE BOUGHT by government at fair price (they know the fair price, just look your houses tax bill)
Or built by them.
And then rented out with a certain maximum rental price per Sq Mt like 10$ so 50sq m (500sq ft) = 500$/month
Most importantly, they would be obliged to make it Energy efficient by their contract with the state so much lower electric and heating bill, maybe even topped off with solar, would be small percentage of a new building but cut costs for actual people.
Not saying it’s perfect in Holland (they have shortages because no new land available to build new social housing projects), but it sure works!
I kept it deliberately vague, but the main idea is democracy and public accountability, and that we need to take certain things out of corporate hands. Because it only optimizes for profit and not for social benefit or the nation’s benefit. Basically all the fundamental needs of the people need to become a kind of guaranteed basic right - food water shelter education and communication. And there could be multiple different models.
There are widespread and established neoliberal myths now that only “private” institutions can work efficiently and unbiased. Definitely based on Thatcher, Reagan, Kohl, and then perpetrated by the “third way” leftists that declared democracy as an inefficient tool to order society.
But you can establish institutions with more useful motivations and that are more intelligent to withstand things like shortages. With things like healthcare you actually do want less efficiency, e.g. in a pandemic.
Right now it seems unthinkable, but with the climate and other crisis looming it might become feasible. At least if we have the actual ideology “at the ready”.
Yeah, surely nothing could go wrong with that plan.
Ever been to public housing? There’s a reason it’s usually shitty, and that’s because the people who live there don’t own it, so they have no reason to care for it because they could be moved somewhere else at any time.
The same is true of a lot of average apartment buildings, especially college housing, but they are rigourously maintained by staff.
Public housing in the US is rarely funded enough or maintained properly. It’s almost a cliche in the US, municipalities purposely underfund public programs so they fail, to encourage privatization.
This might sound surprising, but that’s because people are paying for it, and there are consequences for trashing the place (forfeiting deposit etc.)
I’m talking about state owned public housing, which is almost always a catastrophe. And that’s not just because of lack of funding, but because the people who live there have no sense of ownership, and suffer little to no consequences if they don’t keep it in shape.
State owned public housing has worked all around the world. Council houses in the UK for example looked good and helped lots of people get houses, and didn’t really get associated with poor people until Thatcher and her shitty policies. In Finland, like a third of their housing is public housing and they’ve managed to essentially eliminate homelessness this way.
I mean… it’s probably better than homeless, especially in cold climates, I’ll give you that. But it’s not great, neither here nor in Europe.
Having a sense of ownership is an important factor in motivating people to take care of their place of residence. Plenty of renters trash their apartments too.
And plenty of home owning people trash their homes, too. I think it’s just how some people are with their shelter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Check out the show Hoarders, for example.
Meanwhile, plenty of renters take care of their place because it’s where they live. I take care of my rented apartment more than my fucking landlord does, and he supposedly owns it. It’s supposed to be his only job to call people to fix things when I bring it up or point out an issue while it’s still small, yet it still is a coin toss whether someone will show up or not. I don’t think the categories are so easily placed.
Yes, and I’m sure not all people who live in public housing trash their apartments, but it seems to be more common there than with renters, and more common with renters than with homeowners. And it seems to me that perhaps it’s a matter of appreciation — the less you have to work for something, the less you tend to appreciate having it.
For instance, a lot of people only start appreciating being in good health once they’ve gone and ruined it, they don’t start exercising until they’re already overweight, they don’t appreciate having a job until they’re unemployed, etc.
Please note that this is NOT an argument against housing homeless people — it’s only an argument against the idea that some sort of collective action would somehow be able to do the most justice to the most people. That is rarely, if ever, the case. If history shows anything, it’s that the larger the collective action, the more injustice it tends to cause, regardless of intention.
Like others said, specific examples of failures are “anecdotal” and you’d need to look at this scientifically and account for variables. Propaganda and neoliberal ideology makes this very difficult for the US.
Well, in that case, assuming that collectivizing housing will solve the issue is just as erroneous as assuming it won’t, isn’t it.
Not exactly. Saying something cannot work can be disproven by showing a single example of it working. There are plenty.
What I am trying to say is that housing should not be run for the sole pursuit of profit. People should own their own house, should own and manage an apartment block collectively, or have institutions that “own” and manage housing not for profit but for social and global benefit. But Individuals or corporations shouldn’t be allowed to own other peoples houses for profit. Or land for that matter. At least not as “capital”.
So you can “own” your own house and keep it for your children but you’re more like a steward, you can’t rent it out or own the housing of lots of people. It would cease to become a commodity and be much cheaper then.
That’s very radical and faces many potential problems but you can’t say it’s erroneous proposition. What you’d need are scientific studies that compare different models in different countries and account for all the variables including political corruption to sabotage public housing. And what benefits can be shown.
I don’t propose state socialism because that kind of total concentration of all economic power was shown to be very corrupt. But we need better models because right now wealth inequality is so vast than most housing is being bought off and concentrated for the 0.1% - which is very similar to state socialism too!
But something working in a single instance does not automatically prove it will work in all instances (see: Prisoner’s Dilemma, Efficient Market Paradox)
Yes, collectivized housing CAN work. Private housing cooperatives, for instance (which is what you seem to be describing) DO exist and are a decent alternative for sustainable homeownership. They probably won’t solve the homeless crisis, however.
My point was/is not to argue and collectivized approaches to housing in principle, but only against the idea that there exists some sort of “one size fits all” approach that will do everyone justice. That is simply not the case, regardless of how much some people want it to be true.
Well any discussion about this is good because right now the acceptable ideology and mainstream discussion about this is overwhelmingly one sided. There is no resistance to insane wealth concentration.
I have the feeling that UBI is doomed to fail if the basic necessities of live will continue to be owned and run for profit. Give people $1000 bucks more and the prices will increase because “they” own and control everything.
So maybe there should be two economies: One socialist for the necessities to live a prosperous life (not luxurious or consumerist) and one for all the rest. The first one should be sustainable and some kind of circular economy where everything is build to last and be repaired and recycled, the other is free market made for competition to innovate and create new products and services.
Oh yeah, nothing wrong with a good discussion. Gotta look at the problem from all angles before deciding what is to be done about it, otherwise you often end up making things worse.
As far as that second economy goes… you kinda just have to build that yourself by making IRL friendships with people you can trust to reciprocate.