One of the most infamous is/was New York City's SOTA program [1], which attempted to relocate and provide one year's rent for people from NYC's shelters. They basically shipped families and individuals out of state to other cities, hoping they'd find a job and affordable housing there. NYC is an economic powerhouse if you're credentialed and high enough on the treadmill to make it work, but not an area you want to start out with nothing; you can imagine that someone had the bright idea that there are cheap houses and entry-level manufacturing jobs in other growing cities, someone homeless and jobless might have a better chance of integrating into society than panhandling on Wall St.
The program met with outrage from the destination cities whenever anyone (utterly broke, with a history of homelessness, with no local family or connections...the program worked for some but did not for others) ended up in trouble and the locals found out they'd come from NYC. Turns out a lot of people would rather have their bright and bustling new-money "innovation hubs" and "tech corridors" unsullied by undesirables from dying cities.
It's one thing to turn a saloon and general store into a quaint Old West ghost town when the gold mine runs out. It's another to turn dying cities that once had populations of millions working in bustling industries of rail, coal, steel, or automotive manufacturing (like Bessemer, named after the inventor of the Bessemer steel converter, or other cities like St Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Flint, Dayton, etc.) into not just the current Rust Belt cities but an enormous ghost metropolis.
A good first step is a country wide housing, healthcare, food, and job guarantee. If bezos zuck musk gates etc can be billionaires we can provide a minimal standard of living for everyone. I'm open to considering any research that says doing so is impossible, but I doubt any such research exists.
Subsidize 2 luggages and a 1-way bus ticket per household member, to anyone that wants to move to a new location. No questions asked. You can do it X amount of times in your life, and anyone with income below (a multiple of poverty rate here) qualifies. That's it.
I don't follow how you made that assumption about OP of the comment
(noting there's a difference between "I'm a student living with parents, I'd like a job but can't get one so I'm unemployed" and "I have 3 kids and a sickly partner and I'm overdue on rent and I'm unemployed and I have no social/family safety net")
I wouldn't call it "not having a real actual problem" - again, it's relative and so on; but a charitable read as "never been on brink of famine/poverty" may be a good interpretation?
Is having to make a decision to take your child off life support a "real actual problem in your life"? How about being told that your visa won't be renewed and you have to leave your entire life, job, friends and family behind and move somewhere else? Is that a "real actual problem in your life"? How about a cancer diagnosis? A cheating spouse?
Not all "real actual problems" in life have to be related to money - you can have plenty of it and still be in an extremely difficult and distressing situation in your life, which won't naturally lead to increase in violence(cancer diagnosis is probably one of the worst events you can have in your life and yet I cannot imagine it's corellated to increase in violence rates at all). I frankly also find the attitude of the previous poster to be condescening and jugemental.
And frankly, you don’t have to have experienced anything remotely similar to understand how economic desperation leads to crime, it just requires a capacity for, and willingness to employ empathy.
On the other hand, “Cancer patient goes on crime spree to pay for chemo” sounds like it could be a very funny film, in the hands of the right writer.
Unemployment is a cause of or certainly concomitant with having very high stress and a very poor outlook on the future. In a town like Bessemer the thought process is something like “I don’t have a job, I’m not going to get one, I have no money, and this situation is not going to change.” And it’s not just you thinking this, you see your friends and family having the same problems. You reach out for help but after a while the good graces of others run out. So do unemployment checks.
After a few months you get evicted, so no one else will rent to you, and you are either homeless or at least not in control of your living situation. A slum lord may be involved. The food bank (which was already not a great source of food) is now useless since you need a kitchen to make most of the raw supplies they hand out.
The stress and pressure to take care of ones self and ones family under these conditions often leads so serious mental health issues, drug use, and domestic violence. For some it leads to other crimes like stealing, mostly stealing food or stealing things to buy food and drugs. You see your friends falling victim to these issues, getting arrested, dying of exposure, or losing themselves to mental illness. Prospects don’t look good.