The housing voucher wouldn't cover school books, electricity bills, gas to get to work, or materials to keep a small business going. All of which also come up in the GiveDirectly outcomes.
On point 3, the initial Givedirectly interventions gave cash to the poorest members of a village, which created resentment and social problems; going forward, they just give money to everyone in a village. If anything, they've learned to use /fewer/ evaluations on giving money out, and explicitly avoid getting involved in accountability beyond exit surveys. The point is to reduce overhead and increase impact, exactly what we hope to have from a basic income scheme.
I'm definitely in the camp that believes that basic income doesn't take the place of things like alcohol rehab programs or mental health facilities. But it will be a huge boon to people who are poor because they don't have money, people living paycheck to paycheck in bullshit jobs (if they can manage to find jobs at all), which is an increasingly large slice of the US population.
> A housing voucher would cover analogous issues in the US.
Or it wouldn't. I don't really want someone to suffer just because a bureaucrat forgot to put an item on a list of approved purchases. Or someone suffers because they have a particular edge case that wasn't considered.
2) Being poor in a poor country is very different from being poor in a rich country.
3) I don't know the details of the program, but it likely involved different amounts of accountability and social influences than a basic income.