Unfortunately it's really easy to exaggerate the implications of the finding. I went down a pretty massive rabbit hole reading the study being referenced here (“Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness” (Ryan Dwyer, Anita Palepu, Claire Williams, and Jiaying Zhao 2023)). and looking at where the numbers came from, and that $8277 per person cost savings shows up in the discussion of the results but directly contradicts the findings. When they directly estimated the cost of services provided to the people in the study by counting the days the people used those services, they found a savings of around $2400 per person over the year - meaning with the $7500 lump sum payment, it was $5100 more expensive to give people a lump sum rather than $777 cheaper.
So where did the $8277 value come from? Why was it brought up in discussion? As far as I can tell, it comes from
Saying the participants who received cash spent 89 fewer days homeless and assuming, contrary to what they measured, that ALL days homeless were spent in shelters (as opposed to on the streets, in cars, couch surfing)
Assuming a cost of $94 per night for shelter
... based on a different study
... which had ranges of $14 to $144 per night for different kinds of housing
... which includes the MARKET VALUE PRICE OF THE BUILDING AMORTIZED AS A CAPITAL EXPENSE
which you would find if you dug through that study's appendix.
And if you pick that value you see a "cost savings", even though you measured a loss in the work at hand.
Now, this study has some other major problems, but that one seems glaring. Come on. You calculated the cost based on the actual number of days spent in the shelter, found that it was only $2400ish lower, and then made a worse estimate based on other people's approximations and intentionally misrepresented how long people spent in the shelters?
anyway. there are a dozen other glaring issues but I think the main point is well-summarized by figures they left in the appendix. These figures show the standardized outcomes for a bunch of things they measured at the 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12-month surveys:
Blue lines got cash, grey lines didn't.
By the end of the study period - really, after the first three months - there was virtually no difference on any metric between the cash and non-cash groups. None.
This study was pre-registered. It stated its hypotheses ahead of time as well as the way it was going to do its power analysis, and
EVERY SINGLE HYPOTHESIS IT PREREGISTERED FAILED. Not significant.
Even in the exploratory findings, they found short-term benefits but "The cash transfer did not have overall impacts on employment, cognitive function, subjective well-being, alcohol use severity, education, or food security."
Like, yes! Giving people money increased the time they spent in stable housing by about 55 days over the year. That's valuable! That's good! But it didn't have any meaningful effect on whether they ended the year in stable housing, or whether they got a job, or even the value of their savings.
There's a whole nother rabbit hole, which I'll spare you, about the sampling bias they have here (only people 19-65 years old, homeless LESS THAN 2 YEARS, citizen or permanent resident, with nonsevere levels of substance use, alcohol use, and mental health symptoms, which excluded 69% of the shelter population) (and who agreed to participate, and stuck with the study - down to just 35 people in the sample group, <5% of the shelter population) - and two more rabbit holes about their "people don't want to give homeless people cash transfers because they think they'll spend it on drugs" studies. The news story screenshotted in the tweet kinda misrepresents that aspect too - if you explicitly exclude people with substance use and alcohol use issues from your study, the people you study don't spend money on drugs and alcohol! and water is wet. But that's a post for another day.
the program did not save money. and the study sucks.