These objections don't seem as strong to me as they seem to you.
> you'd only have enough money for $10k/yr for 5,000 individuals
5,000 out of the 80,000 total individuals seems to be a sizable number, no? Even 2,500 seems like a lot when your population is so small. Nobody claimed the problem is solvable by a single city, but it seems like you could easily make a difference at the margin.
> lots of people from neighboring cities would want to move there to claim the subsidy.
You could have some process that gives preference to existing residents of a certain period of time, I doubt many poor people living in the area would move to a city and live there for a certain time just for a chance to get a rent subsidy.
This problem of "people moving here to claim benefits" is both generally overstated and pretty easily solved by a number of cities.
I mean... it's just not the responsibility of cities to redistribute income.
In addition to people moving in, you have people paying high taxes who will move out to neighboring cities without this tax. I don't want to pay a 5% wealth transfer tax.
This idea is based on some sort of pseudo-socialist view of the world, except implemented at the worst possible level (municipal). Cities deal with keeping crime down, building roads, etc. They're not here to implement a socialist wealth transfer program.
> you'd only have enough money for $10k/yr for 5,000 individuals
5,000 out of the 80,000 total individuals seems to be a sizable number, no? Even 2,500 seems like a lot when your population is so small. Nobody claimed the problem is solvable by a single city, but it seems like you could easily make a difference at the margin.
> lots of people from neighboring cities would want to move there to claim the subsidy.
You could have some process that gives preference to existing residents of a certain period of time, I doubt many poor people living in the area would move to a city and live there for a certain time just for a chance to get a rent subsidy.
This problem of "people moving here to claim benefits" is both generally overstated and pretty easily solved by a number of cities.