It sounds like a possibility, although one of the problems with so many of these people is that years of having the government do everything for them has created such passivity and ignorance that it’s going to be hard for them to take even that much responsibility for themselves.
I had a family member who worked for a Habitat chapter in the South. Theoretically, the people who received the houses (the “homeowners”) were supposed to be employed, but in practice, they had ended up accepting people with 100% “government income,” as it’s called. And while the program was open to anyone, virtually all of the families (loosely speaking - usually an older lady with her grandchildren or even great-grandchildren) were black.
The problem is that they really had none of the skills that would enable them to run their own lives, much less own a home, because they were so used to having government come along and pick up after them. There were exceptions, but many of them (and their strapping but lazy grandchildren) managed to avoid the sweat equity, and then when they got the house, they could never manage to realize that they actually had to make the mortgage payments.
And they couldn’t do even the lightest maintenance chores on their houses: if a doorknob fell off, they didn’t know how to go and get a screwdriver and reattach it, and in fact, they felt that it wasn’t their responsibility to even do such menial tasks. They were encouraged to take the basic home repairs classes that the local Home Depot offered (for free) but they never did. And it’s not like they were too busy working to fit it into their schedules...
In fact, even routine cleaning was beyond them. Within a couple of years, the originally nice shiny new Habitat homes looked like every other decaying slum house around them.
I honestly don’t know what can be done about the bottom of the bottom. Clearly, what we’re doing now isn’t working.
I’m not sure this would work either. Ryan’s plan offers them a lot of carrots to change their behavior, and I do think that’s necessary; but Habitat certainly offered them a lot of attractive benefits, and they didn’t change because they knew that in the end, they really wouldn’t have to. The government would rescue them once again, and the grandchildren could go on dealing drugs, stealing granny’s check and committing robberies, using the proceeds to buy themselves new rims or maybe street guns to blow away their rivals.
In other words, in addition to the carrots, there probably needs to be a stick in this plan, where failure to meet standards would result in a reduction of benefits. That was actually what worked to get a lot of people off their backsides and off of welfare several years ago.
It’s very hard to deal with, because these people (not only blacks, btw; we have some rural poor whites around me who are no better) now have accumulated generations of helplessness and dysfunction and don’t even know anybody who works.
This is really the crux of the matter, and I can't really see how Ryan's proposal addresses this very basic problem. However, I grudgingly give him credit for at least trying to take the feds out of the micromanagement of it all.
That chapter wasn’t run well. I have worked on 7 habitat homes and often met other new homeowners. All of the home owners I built for were employed and only one probably wasn’t ready to own a home. Home repair courses were mandatory as well as build time on the house. The hard part with that was working with the new homeowners that normally worked on Saturdays. Although we mostly had single mothers, we built for a forty something women who cared for two elderly relatives. That house was neat because it’s the first time I really learned about disability modifications. One house was for a sister and a brother. I met some married couples. Two builds that were a few years apart happened to be in the same neighborhood. The houses from the first build still looked great and a few of my group visited the sister/brother house and the interior looked great. They worked hard to keep up the house.
HOWEVER, a friend that works with the homeless will back up everything you say once a homeless person gets a place to live. Having to find a new place to do laundry, grocery shopping and meal prep, buying clothes, paying bills and finding ways to socialize all require serious adjusting and some homeless find it easier just to be on the streets.
Wow that was long.