What If We Just Gave Poor People a Basic Income for Life? That’s What We’re About to Test.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

157. Links. Try to be progressive. There is no sarcasm about this. People's lives are at stake.

Housing First: get the homeless housing and then all the other problems become more tractable.

Medicine Hat: http://www.theplaidzebra.com/a-city-in-canada-tried-giving-free-housing-to-the-homeless-and-its-working/

Thankfully, Canada has been relatively accepting of the Housing First initiative in places other than Medicine Hat. Six other cities in Alberta, including major cities Edmonton and Calgary, have taken a Housing First approach, and have seen a 16 per cent overall drop in homelessness since 2008 as a result. In Vancouver — a city notorious for its rapidly increasing homeless population in the 1990s and early 2000s — hundreds of homeless people have been put into permanent homes, though the city still has much work to do in this respect. The federal government has also devoted itself to a Housing First plan until at least 2019.

Other countries have followed suit, with the Obama administration listing the method as a best practice for eliminating chronic homelessness, and Finland and France both instituting similar measures.

Medicine Hat: http://www.mhchs.ca/
Medicine Hat: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/05/15/medicine-hat-homeless_n_5332531.html

Until recently, Clugston was on the other side of the debate about how to end homelessness. He spent six years on council before becoming mayor late last year. “When I first got elected on council I was a bit of a cowboy, and I was actually speaking against a lot of these projects. I was one of their biggest detractors,” he said. But Clugston said the members of the Medicine Hat Community Housing Society spent six years making a convert out of him.

“And now I’ve become their advocate and have to admit it’s the right thing to do, it’s the moral thing to do. And it makes sense financially,” he said.

“If you can get somebody off the street, it saves the emergency room visits, it saves the police, it saves the justice system — and so when you add up all those extra costs … you can buy a lot of housing for that amount of money.”

And once people are housed, it’s easier for support workers to help them with a co-ordinated delivery of social services to address issues such as substance abuse and mental health problems, Clugston said.

Utah: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free

It may seem surprising that a solidly conservative state like Utah has embraced an apparently bleeding-heart approach like giving homeless people homes. But in fact Housing First has become the rule in hundreds of cities around the country, in states both red and blue. And while the Obama Administration has put a lot of weight (and money) behind these efforts, the original impetus for them on a national scale came from the Bush Administration’s homelessness czar Philip Mangano. Indeed, the fight against homelessness has genuine bipartisan support.

Almost free housing in San Francisco ($375 avg): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Housing_Partnership

Still think it is a stupid idea worthy of a sarcasm tag?

Or is it a progressive idea proven to work that is worthy of more serious consideration than you are willing to give it?