Starting this year, an experimental program in Stockton, California will give its low-income residents $500 a month.

Mark Zuckerberg advocated for the concept that could potentially counteract lack of job opportunities and high housing prices.

“I think Stockton is absolutely ground zero for a lot of the issues we are facing as a nation,” said Stockton's mayor, Michael Tubbs.

The mayor of Stockton, Calif. wants to provide a universal basic income for the city’s poorest residents.

Starting this year, an experimental program called the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) will pay $500 a month to a few hundred of the city’s low-income residents, no strings attached.

The idea behind universal basic income, or UBI, is to provide a degree of economic security for the most vulnerable people in a community. The goal is to counteract the destabilizing forces of globalization and technological innovation that has lead to job loss and wage stagnation for countless workers, according to CNBC.

A lot of big names in Silicon Valley support UBI — Mark Zuckerberg advocated for the concept in his commencement speech at Harvard in 2017. Another Facebook executive who supports providing people with free money and no restrictions is Chris Hughes, who has personally donated $1 million to help Stockton’s program get off the ground this year.

It’s no accident that much of the support for UBI comes from Silicon Valley, where the potential for mass unemployment is starker than most other places in the U.S. Major companies there are in neck-to-neck competition to create labor-saving technologies — such as self-driving cars — that will inevitably replace greater numbers of humans with automation and robots.

Stockton is a town already facing these problems — the city has been plagued by a lack of job opportunities, low wages and high housing prices as Silicon Valley exploded around it, replacing once attainable middle-class security with a job market that requires highly skilled workers and relies heavily on automation, according to KQED News. The Bay Area city even had to declare bankruptcy in 2012.