“There’s not a shortage of housing. There’s a shortage of money to buy housing,” said Fred Sheil, a member of STAND Affordable Housing in Stockton. “Unless you’ve got Bay Area income, they aren’t interesting in talking to you.”

That’s garnered the attention of city leaders, especially Mayor Michael Tubbs, who became the youngest-ever mayor of a medium-sized city when he won a landslide election in 2016. Tall, gregarious, often besuited with a trim beard, Tubbs could become the new face of universal basic income, or as people abbreviate it, UBI.

Stockton won’t be the first UBI project in the Bay (pilots are already in the field in West Oakland and San Francisco), but it would be the first public attempt to show what a basic income can do for people. Unlike the secretive other projects, both the local government and the participants will be reporting what the cash does for them. And the project will be occurring within the context of a regular city government, with all the community engagement that entails.

“The [UBI] conversation is not being had with the people who are going to be impacted,” Tubbs said. “Mark Zuckerberg don’t need $500 a month.”

So, in Stockton, they are planning a six- to nine-month design process to incorporate the city’s residents into the program design, including precisely how the cash stipends will be awarded.

“My bias is that it should go to people who need it the most, but that’s not truly universal. That’s targeted,” he said. “The way our country is now, for something like this to work, everybody has to feel like they are a part of it.”

One idea they’re kicking around is that a specific number of slots would be reserved for what they call their “promise zone” in south Stockton, where they’ve done a lot of existing economic research and development work.

Tubbs, too, approaches the idea of a minimum income from an entirely different place than Silicon Valley’s scions. Most of the tech proponents of UBI have approached the topic through the lens of automation and the massive devaluation of human labor that they think could result from further developments in artificial intelligence. While giving cash to everyone has an egalitarian ring, when the message is delivered by the ultra-wealthy of Menlo Park and San Francisco, it can feel as if UBI is the crumbs being swept off the real-money table to buy off the masses.

But Tubbs referenced a strain of African American thought expressed by no less a leader than Martin Luther King Jr. “The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income,” King argued in 1967. Though Tubbs didn’t mention them, the previous year, the Black Panthers came out with their famous 10-Point Program. And there it is in point number two: “We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income.”