My point is that $1k/month does not do this. Hell, minimum wage is approximately 1.5x to 2x greater than UBI (depending on the area), and even it does not quite take "starving and freezing to death" off the table.
"Working Homelessness" is a thing - https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652572292/working-while-homel... and https://newrepublic.com/article/154618/new-american-homeless...
You can live a spartan life on $12,000/year in many places in the midwest and not die of poverty.
I live in the Midwest, and this is simply not an accurate description of Midwest finances. These people who live on $12k/yr are either already asset rich (i.e., own their own house/car/etc) or are having their friends/family/roommates or the state pick up some of their living expenses, in one way or another. If they don't, they are literally dying of poverty.
According to the US Census Bureau, a $12k/yr income would put you below the poverty line, even for a single adult with no children living in the Midwest (Michigan).
The federal poverty line for the lower 48 states is $12,490. Is your objection only that you want to make the UBI $12,500 instead of $12,000?
Notice that you could also make up the other $500 by working a minimum wage job for less than two weeks out of the year.
Yes it is.
> it's insufficient local housing
Insufficient housing given wages and insufficient wages given housing costs are the exact same thing. If you have one you, ipso facto, have the other.
California has insufficient low-end wages (and poverty support programs) given the prices (not just for housing, though that's a particularly significant aspect of the issue) created by the wealth of California's high-end workers and capitalists.
They're not. If you need housing for two million people and you have housing for one million, and you refuse to build any more housing, you don't have enough housing. It doesn't matter how much money people have because whoever has the most would just bid up housing prices so they can have it and there would be people left at the bottom without it.
Whereas if you had enough housing for twice as many people as actually live there then housing would be very inexpensive and even people not making very much money would be able to afford it, because getting a unit wouldn't require outbidding someone with a lot more money than you.
California has several times as many unoccupied housing units as homeless people. California doesn't have a hard shortage of housing units, certain people that need housing in California have insufficient material means to convince the people that own existing unoccupied housing units to rent or sell to them.
It also fails on the other end because there are many alternatives to local housing other than homelessness, like selecting less local housing with an unreasonably long commute or living in units designed for fewer occupants in violation of the fire code. You essentially have unaccounted for over-occupancy. People having more money doesn't solve any of those problems without more housing for the money to buy, and interferes with solving homelessness as well because higher wages in general could cause people in those situations to move to existing unoccupied units before the existing homeless do.
$1k/month doesn't cover average rent in the most populated cities because the most populated cities have the highest rents and its purpose is not to make you average, it's to provide a floor. Supplying enough for the lowest rent in the lowest cost of living place is sufficient for that, and if you want more you can go get a job or find some other way to make money -- which the UBI continues to supplement, so it doesn't even have to pay very much.
It's not supposed to make it so you can live a happy life for a hundred years without ever working. It's just supposed to take starving and freezing to death off the table, and give you a lot more runway when you're trying to start a new business.