Guaranteed monthly income as a way to fight homelessness is showing promise in an ongoing study.
The program connects unhoused Los Angeles residents with phone call buddies. But about half the people who sign up are randomly selected to receive $750 a month with no strings attached — they’re just asked to track how they spend it.
The University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and San Francisco nonprofit Miracle Messages are collaborating on the trial, and released an interim report on the findings.
NSPR’s Alec Stutson spoke with USC Professor Ben Henwood, who helped design the study.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
On the history of the study
This is an ongoing trial. We started recruiting in May of 2022, and we will finish data collection in October of 2024. And we just released an interim report on the first 69 people who have gotten at least six months of monthly payments. But this is not peer reviewed. We will have a full report and a published study later in 2024.
What the report shows is that we saw reductions in unsheltered homelessness from 30% at the beginning of the study, down to 12% in the experimental group. Whereas our control group, we didn't see much movement at all. It went from 28% to 23%.
On what participants spent the money on
A lot of people described trying to meet their basic needs. But they did it in ways that were not always straightforward, or what you would imagine. [One participant’s] priority was to pay down a lot of credit card debt that she felt was just hanging over her head. So that's what she spent her year doing. And at the end of the year, while maybe the outcome from our standpoint didn't look great, from her standpoint this was a huge relief and put her in a better position to move forward.
We did ask people to submit a monthly budget to report how they're using their funds, and we had different categories for that. So the biggest expense was just people paying for food. One individual who has diabetes was talking about the fact that he's not able to get healthy food in the drop-in centers and the shelters that he goes to. So this allowed him to spend his money on healthier food.
On how the study’s findings could be used going forward
On the one hand, this was a sort of a larger experiment, when you consider 100 people received $750 a month for a year. This was over a $2 million project. But on the other hand, in some ways it serves as a pilot, a proof of concept that this does seem like a viable approach for people who are experiencing homelessness.
And it's not as if there isn't a ton of research that already shows guaranteed income has lots of positive benefits. We've seen that and we know that. But there's always been a reluctance to use these types of approaches for people who are currently experiencing homelessness. They might not be excluded in other programs, but they're not often the target of guaranteed income.
I think in part that has to do with stigma around how [unhoused] people will use the money, whether they'll use it for drugs or alcohol or other illicit purposes. So I think that's part of why we haven't seen guaranteed income used as an approach to address homelessness.
I think part of what we're doing here is just trying to show that this is a viable option. Hopefully it will get the attention of policymakers and be put on the table as another tool in the toolbelt of policymakers.
