Upworthy · 16 hours ago

An Experiment Gave Homeless People a Lump Sum of cash, No strings. Most Went to Rent and food.

When a Vancouver charity handed 50 recently homeless people $7,500 each with no conditions attached, the results quietly dismantled one of the more stubborn assumptions in public life: that people who have fallen through the cracks can't be trusted to climb back out. Over the following year, recipients moved into stable housing faster, saved more money, and - counter to what most observers predicted - actually reduced spending on alcohol and drugs by 39%, directing the funds instead toward rent, food, and transportation. The study, eventually published in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, was careful about its limits: participants were screened, and the researchers made no claim that cash alone solves chronic homelessness. What it does reveal is something both simpler and more unsettling - that for many people, the obstacle really is the obvious one, and that the refusal to believe this costs more, in money and in human time, than the alternative. Ray, one of the participants, used his share to take a computer course, find housing, and begin working toward a career helping others with addiction; "a seed," he called it, "can grow into an oak tree."