LOS ANGELES -- A monthly payment of $750 to $1,000 would allow thousands of the city's homeless people to find informal housing, living in boarding homes, in shared apartments and with family and friends, according to a policy brief by four prominent Los Angeles academics.

Citing positive preliminary results of pilot studies in several cities, including Los Angeles, they argue the income could provide access to housing for a portion of the population who became homeless primarily as the result of an economic setback. This could ultimately save millions of dollars in public services, they argued, and leave the overstretched and far more expensive subsidized and service-enriched housing for those who have more complicated social needs.

"If the idea is to reduce the number of people on the street, definitely the fastest way to do that is money and not this incredibly complex system that we have built up primarily to help people with serious disabilities," said lead author Gary Blasi, a professor emeritus in the UCLA School of Law.

The paper offers no prescriptions for how the payments should be funded or who should receive the money. Instead, the authors, coming from four separate disciplines, contrast the simplicity and documented effectiveness of basic income with the high cost and inadequate results of programs to provide standard housing for every homeless person.

"The truth is, we cannot afford not to do better than the current system, which spends a huge amount of money to house a small fraction of those in need," they wrote.

That system, relying on housing navigators to "seek very scarce subsidized housing subject to strict criteria" is a "lengthy and expensive process" leaving thousands of rental subsidy vouchers unused and thousands of people unable to find housing.

"Providing interim housing during this process can be very costly, as is adding to the supply of housing," they wrote.

Meanwhile, a source of readily available affordable housing goes untapped.

"Informal housing, once a subject of study only in developing countries, means housing that does not conform to the standards of the formal housing market," they wrote. "It includes shared housing arrangements, housing that does not meet all code requirements, rooms rented in single-family homes."

"There's a vast informal rental market going on already all across California," co-author Sam Tsemberis, a clinical community psychologist with the UCLA School of Psychiatry, said in an interview. "People are renting out single-family homes. They have two or three beds in each of the bedrooms and are charging $400, $500 a month for people to sleep."

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