Since the end of WW2, we've torn down at least a million SROs* in the US and not really replaced them with anything comparable. In their absdnce, people have turned to living in RVs, the Tiny House movement has been born and there are too many chronic homeless, many of whom eventually end up in California which seems to take the heat for the failed policies of an entire nation.
The Tiny House movement began as an idea for how to live with less and when it ran up against the fact that it's not legal to build a house that small, rather than fight city hall, they slapped wheels on them as a hack to get around the rules.
The reality is that the US has made it illegal to build a lot of the housing that we once had in abundance and which worked well: small residential spaces in walkable, mixed use neighborhoods where life without car ownership was quite feasible and even the norm.
Cars have only been in vogue for around a hundred years. In that short time, we've whored out our urban planning processes to the worship of the car and we tell anyone for whom that doesn't work for any reason to quit their bitching and stop bothering people. If you can't drive for any reason, you are a second class citizen and how dare you get all uppity and act like you should have some reasonable quality of life without needing to either be able to drive or so rich you can hire a chauffeur to do it for you.
UBI won't fix our problems anymore than student loans fixed our problems. Student loans didn't level the playing field for the less privileged. It made them slaves to paying their debts, often while unable to get the kind of good job their degree supposedly guaranteed them.
Throwing money at this problem won't fix it. UBI won't buy poor people a basic, decent life. The kinds of goods and services needed to provide such largely do not exist in much of America and it's a fevered pitch uphill battle to try to establish any of them in far too many cases.