[macspoofing]

One unintended consequence that you run into is that people for whom the program was not designed for and targeted to will actively try to consume it (e.g. an able-bodied person instead of a homeless individual with mental health issues). This, by the way, occurs today. There was a social worker from LA (I think) that talked about how big of a problem this is and how much drain on time, and resources it is in practice.

Because we live in a finite world, you're always going to be resource constrained, what happens is that you have to necessarily create a massive bureaucracy to triage and control who should and shouldn't get access to this program - which explodes the cost, and incentivizes cheating by those that don't get access. It also sets up an arms race, where you keep increasing the bureaucracy in order to control for new inventive ways that the program is abused, leading to more costs. I'm not sure if you're suggesting that property rights be given to the individual, or if staying in social housing is dependent on certain criteria being continually met. Either way, you're looking at more bureaucracy, and corresponding cheating, that again, explodes costs and creates new unintended consequences (for example, preventing able-bodied people from moving around to seek better opportunities, in the same way that rent-control does).

In other words, you'll merely recreate our present system. Writing a check is easy and if that was all that was needed, we'd have solved every societal problem a long time ago. There is no free lunch.