Affordable housing is not just a collection of construction material and land costs. It’s a purse that must stretch to cover a rental or purchase . . . after any and all other essential costs have been plucked out. Food and utility costs are some obvious essentials.
This series of articles covers essential costs or benefits that might not seem so obvious, but nonetheless, depending on how they are structured, can turn affordable housing into unaffordable housing.
REALLY reliable income (we’ll come to Universal Basic Income, which is just one form of REALLY reliable income)
Over Christmas and New Years 2019, many people worldwide were drawn to the cliffhanging suspense of the standoff between the American Congress and President Trump over funding a wall on the U.S. southern border. It resulted in a government shutdown.
For those who followed the events, it was hard to miss reading or hearing about the dilemma of many thousands of employees who had reasonably well-paying jobs (and government jobs at that!) who suddenly found themselves laid off. When it comes to salary that arrives on time, even governments can not always be depended upon.
The solution that is always preached? Be sure to have enough savings to tide you over. But for people who are housing burdened (i.e. paying more than 35% of their gross salary as rent), saving isn’t an option.
Nevertheless, cost-burdened tenants, particularly where landlords have the right to evict when and whom they choose, are extremely vulnerable to even a slight blip in weekly or monthly payments.
The cost to a family being evicted and rendered homeless, even briefly, is high. With affordable housing becoming more and more scarce, social service agencies are turning attention not just to finding homes for the homeless, but to preventing homelessness in the first place.
One idea to provide reliable income is known as Universal Basic Income (UBI). With UBI, the government pays every citizen a small basic wage weekly.
UBI is not new. The Province of Manitoba, Canada gave it a try in the 1970’s. To date, trials are increasing in number, but it has yet to be wholeheartedly embraced anywhere.
A recent United Kingdom study indicates that as ambitious as it seems to pay everybody a basic wage, it is not prohibitively expensive. Read more in The Guardian: Universal Basic Income ‘Would Cost Less Than Value Of Benefit Cuts Since 2010’
A national study in Finland searched for evidence that receiving UBI would improve employment and well-being. It concluded that UBI recipients were neither more nor less likely than anyone else to find employment.
But the other important finding of the Finland experiment was that participants reported a sense of greater well-being while participating in the UBI experiment. Read more about Finland’s UBI experiment in Wired: Finland’s Grand Universal Basic Income Experiment Raises More Questions Than It Answers
How does this apply elsewhere?
UBI should be considered as an evidence-based homelessness prevention strategy. Homeless prevention research indicates that as a system to reduce poverty, UBI would be effective in preventing homelessness when integrated with other systems and services.
What about digging deeper into the personal well-being finding? There is ample evidence that home moving is an extremely stressful human experience1. Further UBI experiments could investigate whether that sense of well-being is connected to housing stability.
