> 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).
It’s certainly true that some fraction of non-profit work is hands-on social work, and yes, those people do need to live near the people they serve. But I think it’s fair to say that non-profits should think really hard about who really needs to live in NYC/SF/etc. versus the degree to which they’re just subsidizing the lifestyle choices of college-educated white workers who could do the same work from somewhere else.
> 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.
Let’s not overstate the “opportunities” available in places like SF and NYC. Lower income people live there because there are a lot of service jobs for unskilled workers. But it’s not like those people are going to be able to work their way up from the mail room at Facebook or JP Morgan. What you have is a situation where these workers have to be in SF or NYC because that’s where the service jobs are, and where landlord can capture a big fraction of the rent that the government might subsidize.
UBI addresses that problem by decoupling wages from location. Someone receiving UBI can move from SF to Bakersfield. That increases their standard of living while limiting the cost to the government relative to trying to support that person in SF of NYC. 1 in 12 people in SF broke their leases during pandemic. Imagine what would happen if the government told everyone tomorrow they they’d get $1,000 per month guaranteed, which they could draw upon either in SF or in Des Moines. It would have the double effect of reducing the demand for housing in places like SF and NYC, and enabling that demand to be diverted to places where building new supply might be much easier.
> What you have is a situation where these workers have to be in SF or NYC because that’s where the service jobs are
Well, yes, I intentionally was including everyone, not just people working six-figure office jobs: everyone else also benefits significantly from living in a place with a large and growing job market. Growth in high-paying white-collar jobs generally leads to even faster growth in the wages and number of less-skilled jobs in the same place.
Historically, there is also a wage premium for unskilled workers in larger metros - today much of that surplus flows to landlords instead, thanks again to under-building of housing in those areas. Even in SF, wages for the lowest-income workers have grown slightly faster than CoL over the last ~decade (thanks in part to the effect of rent-control for long-time tenants).
> Someone receiving UBI can move from SF to Bakersfield.
This is true iff UBI is generous enough that many of the people who work those service jobs would choose to live on it without being employed - at $1000/month, I suspect that would not be very many. If people want to be employed, living near the much larger and growing job market of the Bay Area would remain much more attractive than living in Bakersfield. The fundamental issue would be unchanged AFAICT.
In "The Legend of Bagger Vance", Hardy's dad becomes a street sweeper in the midst of the depression to pay his bills;
What if, instead of volunteering to clean up roads, the city collected taxes, and paid a living wage with benefits to people cleaning up the streets.
This line of thinking also applies to the Coronavirus, restaurant + school shutdowns; If only, instead of asking for volunteers, non profits were paid by the state to re-employ restaurants and/or their workers, to make meals for children now without a meal.
Viewed through the lens of equity concerns, I worry that the result of your hypothetical is a bureaucracy of unionized, mostly white college educated managers overseeing the street cleaners.
My hope is that recent events make us think hard about the nature of need in America and how we address it. Over 90% of white people are above the poverty line. The median income of a white household is $70,000, versus $40,000 for a black household. 60% of all homeless people are black or Hispanic. We talk a lot about middle-class "stagnation." But median wealth for white people has more than doubled, after inflation, since 2000. It hasn't budged at all for black people.
More than ever, we are recognizing today that a huge part of systematically addressing poverty in America is about addressing race disparities. That’s critical: the black-white income gap (at the median, so forget about Jeff Bezos) is proportionally the same size today in 2020 as it was when George Wallace ran for President in a segregationist platform. Meanwhile, we have spent vast sums on the premise that the best way to remedy racial disparities is through government programs for education and creating “good jobs with benefits.” State and local spending per person has therefore doubled since 1977.
But it turns out that much of that spending merely perpetuates those gaps. For example, increased education spending (which has tripled in inflation-adjusted dollars per student since 1970) has overwhelmingly gone to white, college educated teachers and administrators. (Indeed, black people were actively excluded from many of these jobs by unions.) Cities with majority black and Hispanic populations owe hundreds of billions in retirement and health benefits to retired teachers, police, etc., who are overwhelmingly white.
Now, that’s not an argument for saying that we should, for example, renege on those obligations. But we certainly shouldn’t perpetuate the disparities. If we are appalled by say homelessness in American cities (and we should be), we should figure out how to efficiently channel money to homeless people or people likely to suffer homelessness. Not to some government bureaucracy which by its nature is likely to be staffed with people who have various indicators of privilege (white, college educated, from a middle class household—who do you think government agencies tend to hire?)
Governments entail some degree of bureaucracy, much the same way that corporations require some degree of management. It's a question of balancing that overhead with actual results.
Civil services need to better align with making a meaningful impact. More focus on the actual impact of civil services, and less on aggregate budget allocation.
Be careful what you wish for...
I suspect the unpleasantness of prison plus the shackles of a felony on your record more than outweighs the benefits of the education you receive - at least in the USA. But like many people, I think that prisons should reform as well as punish, so I assign a strong weight to the importance of this (IMHO) very minor moral hazard.
I was being a little facetious before re: post protest cleanups rather than engaging with you properly, and I certainly support the idea of helping minority owned businesses in principle. I suspect (or hope?) that most cleanup companies would not try to make rioting worse. On the other, the moral hazard definitely exists, there are limited downsides (i.e. the off-chance that you get caught), and if the financial incentives for the cleanup operations became big enough...
The subtext of the article seems to be 'the Internet Archive doesn't pay their employees very much and makes up for it by helping to organise their lives'. I respect that, no complaints, good work. But it would be better to read 'internet archive so profitable that its employees can afford a nice house & retirement savings'. Things that make profits are more robust and reliable.
Really? This astounds me! I would have thought the vast vast majority of non-profit funding would be companies funding non-profit industry publicity bodies and standards bodies and similar.
https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/charity-pay-study-2019-highest...
Now not saying they aren't worth it - this person probably bought more money in than that so of course it's obviously worth it on the bottom line, and everyone's entitled to earn as much as they can negotiate, it's nobody's business but their own and the people paying them.
But don't hear 'non-profit' and think 'impoverished monk working on noble goals' as one or both may not be the case.
It actually would be interesting to know how the UN addresses hiring and diversity in the companies they contract with, but their hiring is not a force that's going to move society in any direction.
The thought exercise I want to promote is, imagine an earth ruled by a single government. How should that government handle equality across the globe ? and if we can come up with a good answer, let our local policies not be totally inconsistent with what we would do globally.
This is one reason why people are interested in things like UBI. It seems perverse for the government to use taxpayer dollars to say combat homelessness in San Francisco (the supermajority of whom are black, Hispanic, or multi-racial) only to have much of that money go to paying salaries for mostly white college educated people. Of course, non-profit workers of all ethnic backgrounds can be tremendous value-adds. But when we’re considering whether we want to subsidize housing for those workers, it’s worth stepping back for a moment. There is a lot of money on the line: even excluding universities and hospitals, non-profits spend $750 billion annually, more than the US military. When taxpayers spend money out of a desire to help certain groups of people—especially now that we are becoming more aware of the disproportionate impact of things like homelessness on certain groups—we should strive to make sure that the money helps the people taxpayers think they are helping.