> This is one reason why people are interested in things like UBI
Can you elaborate on how UBI would help? Homelessness in high-opportunity low-housing-supply regions is not a problem of individuals not having enough cash, and neither is the inability of non-profit workers to live in these places. If we handed everyone cash, we would simply be writing a check to the landlords in high-opportunity regions like the Bay Area, because everyone would still be bidding up prices on the same housing supply.
The core problem on both sides of this is that these places, the Bay area in particular, make it extremely difficult and expensive to expand the housing supply to mitigate this problem, and the article alludes to this:
> We have the empty lot to do it in and we hired an architect but it came out to cost so much we postponed
At the end of the day, high rents push people on the margin onto the streets and they make it expensive to house the people who need to help them. Solutions that purport to dodge this problem with cash handouts (UBI, renter's credits, etc.) will only help landlords unless we also ease supply restrictions.
That said, for people who are already living on the streets, the solutions are even more complicated, as there are often confounding issues like mental illness, substance abuse, etc. that require shelter space and intervention by non-profit workers (and then we're back to the housing supply problem).