Working homelessness is a thing in California because of outrageous housing costs. The problem there isn't insufficient wages, it's insufficient local housing.

You can live a spartan life on $12,000/year in many places in the midwest and not die of poverty.

> 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).

> According to the US Census Bureau, a $12k/yr income would put you below the poverty line

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.

> The problem there isn't insufficient wages

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Measuring by occupancy rate isn't accounting for landlords withholding units from the market in the expectation that they'll find a tenant/buyer willing to pay more for them later, which is an allocation of supply the same as if someone was living there, and is caused by overall supply constraints creating the expectation of continued high rents.

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.