When the idea of universal basic income began gaining popularity in the mid-2010s, the eventual breakthrough of no-strings-attached cash transfers seemed most likely to transpire anywhere but the United States. After all, the US never had a strong welfare state to begin with, and famously did away with “welfare as we know it” in 1996 (Soss et al. 2011). American’s deep-rooted disdain for the welfare state shares DNA with all the country’s structural limitations, from omnipresent racism, to skepticism about economic redistribution, to an electoral system that requires legislative supermajorities to enact even modest policy changes (Hacker et al. 2021). Why would a country where the minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for 17 years take the lead on a policy that radically reimagines the welfare state? And why would cities, who lack both the legal authority and resources to run basic income programs, lead the charge?
Any attempt to answer these questions requires clarifying what basic income is. The popular shorthand moniker “UBI” refers to a regular, irrevocable and no-strings-attached cash payment made to everybody in a polity (Van Parijs and Vanderborght 2017). This is the policy that Andrew Yang popularized as the signature initiative of his failed 2020 presidential campaign (Alemany 2020). Advocates typically invoke this universal form of basic income as a solution to the threat of mass job loss due to automation, and, less commonly, as a way to update welfare states for the problem of precariousness.
This latter focus, on aligning social programs with the modern plagues of multiple-job-holding, working poverty, wildly oscillating work hours and other indignities that both upend workers’ lives and move them in and out of eligibility for social programs, provides an important clue about cities’ interest in basic income. Economic inequality and vulnerability stand as the defining issues of contemporary cities (Adkins et al. 2021; Christophers 2022). Since the Covid-19 pandemic in particular, the ratchet of ever-increasing housing prices in cities of all sizes has rendered the previously daunting balancing acts low-wage workers negotiate to pay the bills functionally impossible. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, low-wage-work, soaring housing costs and austerity budgets triggered rising interest in basic income among US cities. Basic income landed its first US test site in 2019, when Stockton, California, mayor Michael Tubbs negotiated a privately financed basic income of $500 per month (the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, “SEED”) for 125 residents (Ghuman 2022). Other trial balloons, like a proposal by Chicago city council member Ameya Pewar, generated headlines but not programs.
Since 2023, a different version of basic income has flourished in US cities. While press accounts of large-scale basic income trials such as Chicago Resilient Families (extended after initially paying 5,000 households $500 per month) and Los Angeles BIG:LEAP ($1,000 per month to 3,200 households) occasionally refer to those programs with the “UBI” shorthand, that label is incorrect and very much to the point. Cities have aggressively run away from the universal in basic income, instead embracing “Guaranteed Basic Income,” means-tested or eligibility-based basic income programs.
The pragmatic move from universal to guaranteed basic income serves two important functions for cities. First, limiting eligibility restricts the total budget needed to run basic income trials. The twenty-plus large, publicly funded basic income trials initiated since the pandemic limit eligibility to households experiencing some version of economic hardship: residents of high-poverty zip-codes, low earners, households economically harmed by the pandemic, and so forth. These restrictions allowed cities to tap the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the landmark economic stimulus package passed in 2021. Among its other features, ARPA provided $350 billion in unrestricted aid to cities and counties (Rocco and Kass 2022). Means-testing fashions cities the, well, means of adding basic income to the menu of experiments they finance with ARPA funds.
Second, exchanging universality for restricted eligibility has the advantage of tying basic income to existing social policy, political issues and political constituencies. Alongside large-scale publicly financed basic income trials, US cities have also hosted hundreds of privately or joint public-private basic income programs focused on specific sub populations, including people experiencing homelessness, people exiting incarceration, new mothers, black artists and LGTBQ+ seniors. Controversial, if not heretical, to the global network of universal basic income activists, these highly targeted programs have several practical advantages. For one, they effectively tap philanthropy networks with considerable budgets and programmatic discretion. Additionally, issue-specific basic income programs appear to grow political legs. In Denver, for example, a privately funded basic income program for homeless individuals successfully made it to the top of the city’s policy agenda, where the city financed a program extension out of its standing budget, rather than temporary ARPA funds. [1]
To date, the returns have handily beaten expectations. With few exceptions, evaluations of basic income trials find that recipients’ lives improve across the board (Doussard and Quinn 2024). Perhaps surprisingly, no-strings-attached cash payments appear to increase the amount recipients work. It’s only a counterintuitive finding if the reader ignores the context in which the working poor operate. As Matthew Desmond’s ethnography Evicted portrayed, the working poor in the US balance their lives on the head of a pin (Desmond 2016). When everything breaks their way, they can get by. But a single problem—a sick kid, a flat tire, a late rent payment—throws the whole system out of whack, almost inevitably leading to a lost job, an eviction, a week of missed meals. The narrative portions of basic income program evaluations trace the astonishingly simple ways cash helps these households. One after the other, recipients explain they used the basic income payments to fix their car (and find a better job), to buy hypertension medication that helps them sleep, to catch up on rent, to purchase daycare. As one evaluator told me with exasperation during my research, “we found that giving money to people helps them.”
The combination of multiplying programs and unexpectedly positive results raises an unexpected question: are US cities the current vanguard of basic income? The answer depends on the audience. To the Basic Income Earth Network and the global network of activists working to develop basic income as a tool for transforming the welfare state, the US’s tactical embrace of means-tested basic income makes it a problematic standard-bearer. The feeling appears mutual, as the principal agents behind basic income’s spread in the US, the Economic Security Project and Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, mostly steer clear of the global basic income conversation. It is easy to see why: US mayors’ loud-and-proud embrace of basic income leaves little immediate reason for that famously pragmatic group to engage in philosophical debates about universality. With the question of how US cities became improbable leaders in basic income settled, we can turn to the question of why the US, formerly a site of punitive experimentation with social policy, seems to have veered the other way.
Runaway housing costs, precarity and generalized urban crisis
To assess what the popularity of basic income tells us about cities, consider their state on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic. With the revolutions of deindustrialization and globalization complete, the typical US city was reaching levels of income inequality and economic precariousness that left few segments of the population untouched. Low-wage work features a slew of indignities beyond low wages (short shifts and erratic schedules, widespread wage theft and workplace harassment, extreme employment instability) everywhere, and those problems appear more intensely in smaller and southern cities that have escaped the growing wave of city- and state-level policy raising pay and working conditions (Doussard and Schrock 2022; Schragger 2016). Furthermore, vanishingly few places have escaped housing affordability problems. The figures are sobering: Over the past three decades, housing prices have increased faster than wages in metropolitan areas of all sizes. As sales prices and rents push upward with no end in sight, affordability problems are no longer the exclusive domain of poor, or even middle-income households. In the past decade, the number of households classified as housing cost-burdened has doubled for the middle and high end of the housing distribution. Even the drastically shrunken city of Detroit, and even households earning six figures, feel the squeeze (Berglund 2020).
Basic income trials feature as the latest entry in a proliferating list of tools cities use to address the political and economic-development pressures of mass inequality. They follow a range of employment regulations including the $15 minimum wage, free college “promise” programs, pilot programs for universal child care programs, experiments with land trusts and banks, burgeoning municipal support for cooperative businesses and more (Doussard and Yenigun 2022). The length of the experimental policy laundry list helps explain mayors’ bullishness on a policy that by any measure seems out of step with the US’s punitive approach to the poor and precarious. In my research interviews with mayors and public servants running basic income trials, they endorse the program with surprisingly direct language on the previously taboo goal of targeting assistance for low-income households.
For example, Los Angeles city council member Curren Price endorsed the city’s $1,000-per-month pilot (named with its acronym “BIG:LEAP” in mind) with these unequivocal words:
Through this program, we witnessed transformation beyond measure…. BIG:LEAP didn’t just help Angelenos address health issues, school expenses, child care, or emergency needs; it empowered participants to start businesses, move into their own homes, and reclaim hope from despair. The undeniable impact of programs like BIG:LEAP speaks volumes — it has the power to rewrite destinies and is vital for a brighter future. [2]
Some states have chosen to pre-empt local basic income programs, an inevitable outcome in an era of fierce political polarization in the US (Kim and Warner 2018). Significantly, legislative opposition from hostile state assemblies has not translated into opposition to basic income within cities. My research included interviews with the administrators of dozens of basic income programs, none of which has generated significant local opposition. Instead, the popularity of basic income trials appears to spill over to other government jurisdictions, most notably the 15 states who now offer refundable child tax credits. The threat posed by pre‑emption, and now by a US Congress likely to, at best, continue inattention to precarious workers’ problems, is real. So too is the remarkably broad-based understanding that inequality at its current scale has transformed from the subject of political critique to a practical problem elected officials must address.
Deliberate crisis response and accidental social policy
None of this will save basic income programs in cities in the coming years. The principal threat comes from ARPA itself, which has a December 2026 spending deadline. The prospects of cities self-financing basic incomes after that due date are close to nil, simply because of the resources involved.
In the meantime, basic income will diffuse in other forms. The experience of running basic income trials appears to change public servants’ world views. After decades of administering policies that nibbled at the edge of inequality, the experience of overseeing something as simple and direct as a basic income trial was shocking. In response, many civil servants are now seeking opportunities to incorporate cash into their work. Several cities with basic income trials have decided to add cash stipends to their job-training programs, an overdue measure designed to stop trainees from dropping out in order to pay the rent (Doussard and Quinn 2024). With the blessing of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Philadelphia is experimenting with converting affordable housing vouchers into cash. Elsewhere, the administrators of basic income programs have translated another fundamental basic income lesson, that means-testing and elaborate program qualification criteria are expensive and wasteful, into efforts to lift paperwork requirements for other city programs.
These measures provide an important window into a future in which cities necessarily play the role of laboratories of democracy. First responders to the crisis of mass inequality, cities have evolved from cautious allies of the market to surprisingly vigorous advocates for action against precariousness and the indignities of low-wage work. The reason is more practical than principled: Unequal incomes and soaring housing prices threaten cities’ elected officials at the ballot box and in their day-to-day work. Their actions presage a future in which unconditional cash transfers and other policy interventions too controversial for federal action find life in cities desperate for solutions.
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