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I don't think the design was fraudulent or the researchers stooges, but the reporting of anything will become trivial if you add enough conditions and disclaimers. Obviously if you give some people thousands of dollars, /some/ of them will be /some/ degree of better off. But the bridge between the magnitude of that benefit from the study to "And that's why this would be a good policy for governments to implement" is weakened by every one of those conditions and disclaimers which reduce the level of generality the study is good for.
No, but the design is so obviously flawed before the data was gathered and further ignoring those they lost track of should have been more than enough for any reputable journal to reject the paper. I’m personally suspicious even of the good faith of the team here, these flaws are so large and obvious to outsiders that it seems impossible that people doing professional research could just accidentally make them.
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I think the opposite is true, though, in this case. You don't need a well-designed study to tell you that drug addicts and the mentally ill and people who prefer sleeping on the street when shelter beds are available probably aren't going make the wisest decisions when given large sums of money. We already know that; the more interesting question is what happens if we give people who don't have all these problems large sums of money, because homeless people are usually lumped together into one homogeneous mass of derelicts.
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