Create incentives and remove disincentives for affordable housing alternatives in the private rental and owner-occupied sectors. People will resist moving out of social housing without having a decent place to move to…Overcome the potential employment disincentives created by hard income limits for tenancy. Instead, allow tenants to remain in social housing as they climb the socioeconomic ladder, setting rents proportional to the household’s income at all levels while ensuring rent increases are always much less than any increase in income. As tenants’ rents increase, they will eventually approach market-rate levels, creating an incentive for the better-off tenants to transition out of social housing.

Social housing is rental housing provided at sub-market rates and allocated according to specific rules of eligibility for prospective tenants. Most social housing developments target vulnerable communities, such as refugees, the elderly, disabled persons, and low-income households (OECD, 2020). Social housing used to be called “public housing” in the US, but that term became associated with all sorts of bad things so it’s gotten a name change. No matter what you call it, new social housing is back on the policy to-do list in many countries, especially those with a dearth of affordable housing.

Not all low-income households having rent trouble are good candidates for social housing. Some are just going through a rough patch or are young adults living on the wild side. Some are students with excellent job prospects once they finish school. Others simply wouldn’t be interested or have decent options if things really get bleak, like move back in with the folks for a year or two. The individuals most likely to benefit from social housing are those with few options, who have serious barriers to decent-paying work, such as disability, or are single parents with limited earning capacity. But social housing isn’t the only solution for these individuals. There are plenty of other safety net programs that might be a better fit for them, from food stamps to tax credits to housing vouchers. (And if I had my way, an Adult Student Basic Income. But that's another story). Social housing is an expensive and risky investment that should only be considered as a last resort for the chronically cost-burdened.

I live in Alameda County California, across the Bay from San Francisco. Alameda County has the fifth largest homeless population in the US and the fourth highest percentage of homeless individuals who are unsheltered. …Clearly, Alameda County is doing something wrong – but what?

In a search for answers, I Googled “US cities where homelessness is declining” and came up with Houston, where the homeless population has more than halved since 2011.

In this post, I’m proposing that offenders be allowed to accrue $300 a month of their ASBI benefit when participating in education and training programs while incarcerated, with the correction facility receiving the balance of $700/month for program expenses. The offender would then receive their accrued ASBI after they’ve been released and have met with a probation or parole officer. The ASBI payout could be substantial, as follows…

Equally important, the formerly incarcerated often lack the financial resources to support themselves while they look for work or upgrade their job skills through further education and training. And when you don’t have enough money for reliable transportation, stable housing, or even something decent to wear at a job interview, the barriers to success can seem insurmountable. At least crime pays, if only for a while.

Too many Americans are plagued by chronic poverty, income volatility, job instability, and lack of social mobility. In previous posts (here, here, here, and here), I proposed an Adult Student Basic Income (ASBI) that would effectively address these societal ills without diminishing labor market participation or labor productivity. …The beauty of an ASBI is that it’s affordable: it would be funded partly by the elimination of some government programs, but mostly by declining demand for other programs. Here’s a possible funding breakdown…

How many Adult Student Basic Income (ASBI) recipients would not have pursued further education or training without getting paid for it? I’m guessing millions of US adults who are struggling financially but have limited job prospects. These include many of the over 40 million adults in the US with low literacy, as well as a good number of low-income individuals with okay literacy but limited education and skills, such as the 48 million adults with no formal education past high school. Then there are the 19 million immigrant workers who lack proficiency in English. Yes, some of these groups overlap, but it still adds up to a lot of people.

In Part I of this series (What is Affordable Childcare and Whose Childcare Should Be Subsidized?), I concluded the federal government should fully subsidize childcare for low-income families and partly subsidize the childcare of middle-income families…The cost of my proposal? Just four billion a year (or thereabouts). Here are the numbers…

Note that my hypothetical family with a take-home income of $5,000 a month can barely save anything for emergencies, retirement or the kids’ education after high school. Their budget would still be tight if they paid just 7% of their income on childcare, but at least they wouldn’t be teetering on the brink. Now consider parents with net incomes of just $2000 a month….