From left, Danielle, Laura, Greg, Grace, and Phyllis. Photo: Michelle Groskopf

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Soon after Michael Tubbs became mayor of Stockton, California, at the age of 26 — the youngest to be elected to a city of over 100,000 and Stockton’s first African-American mayor — he directed his policy fellows to research ways to reduce poverty. Four years earlier, in 2012, the city had declared bankruptcy, and it was still mired with high unemployment and crime. The team came back to report that one way to end poverty was to give people money.

This solution had a name, “universal basic income” (or UBI), and a long history in America as a social-policy idea. It had been embraced by Thomas Paine and Milton Friedman and made a cornerstone of the Poor People’s Campaign advanced by Martin Luther King Jr. Both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter had proposed replacing welfare with a guaranteed income. More recently, the idea had been revived by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who saw it as a remedy for the burgeoning “useless class” — all those people whose jobs technology is making obsolete.

Tubbs was skeptical, but the following May he attended a conference on the future of work, where he sat next to the economist and developer Natalie Foster. Along with Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, Foster had launched an advocacy group dedicated to advancing the conversation about guaranteed income. She told Tubbs they were looking for a test city, and he suggested that Stockton might be the perfect place.

Less than two years later, this past February, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration gave 130 individuals, randomly selected from neighborhoods with a median household income at or below Stockton’s $46,033, their first monthly payment of $500, no strings attached. Over the program’s 18 months, SEED would track how the money was being spent and assess the subjects’ financial security and well-being as well as more subtle measures of the money’s impact, such as their feelings of hope and of mattering.

Since SEED launched, interest in UBI has only grown, in part thanks to Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who has made guaranteed income a cornerstone of his platform. There have been encouraging signs from Stockton: A preliminary report from the first six months found that 39 percent of the money goes to food, which hardly anyone would argue was money misspent. But there are limits to what data analysis can reveal about something as complicated as humans and money. Since February, I have followed a handful of UBI recipients to watch, closely, how this unexpected windfall has changed their lives. These five accounts are a first look at what a basic income policy actually does to people. The money can be transformative, yes, but it also seems to make them more themselves.

There’s perhaps no better city to stress-test UBI than Stockton. “Stockton is a microcosm for the rest of the country,” says Mayor Tubbs, “if you look at our population, if you look at our demographics, if you look at our history. People talk about the Midwest, but you have a similar confluence of automation, loss of manufacturing jobs, low educational attainment, poverty, and violence in Stockton, not too far from Silicon Valley.” As in the rest of the country, home prices in Stockton are rising faster than wages. Someone earning the minimum wage of $12 would have to work 78 hours per week to afford the average rent for an apartment without being “rent burdened” — meaning not spending more than 30 percent of your paycheck on it. Across the country, members of the middle class have steadily lost hope that their children will enjoy a better lifestyle than they do, a sentiment that has been expressed in Stockton through the conventional wisdom that you had to leave if you wanted any chance of success. That’s certainly the lesson that Tubbs, now 29, received as a kid. He grew up poor in the south end of town. His mom was a teenager when he was born, and his dad has been incarcerated for almost Tubbs’s entire life. Normally, those facts would consign a child to failing schools, violent neighborhoods, and blunted expectations. “The world I was born into was shaped by structures that had nothing to do with me or my family,” Tubbs says when we talk in his office in August. His mother and his aunt had the chance to get him out using their father’s military pension — the very first form of public assistance in the U.S., established in 1792 for disabled veterans of the Revolutionary War. They put Tubbs, his brother, and his cousins into a private elementary school, which set him on an alternate trajectory that eventually landed him at Stanford University. While there, Tubbs secured internships at Google and the White House. His plan was to land a job at a consulting firm so he could take care of his mother, aunt, and grandmother, who had all sacrificed for him to have a better future. One morning while at the White House, Tubbs got a call from his mom. His cousin had been murdered at a house party. “What was the point of me being at Stanford, what was the point of me being at the White House, if I was powerless to help my own family?” he said in a TED Talk last spring. In his senior year, Tubbs decided to return home and run for City Council, representing his old neighborhood in South Stockton. That was 2012, arguably the lowest point in the city’s history: Stockton had just declared bankruptcy, the first major city in the United States to do so, after earning the title of foreclosure capital of the country during the mortgage crisis. Forbes had named Stockton the most miserable city in America twice. Tubbs won the City Council race. Four years later, in November 2016, he was elected mayor. When he began looking into UBI, no American city had yet to try it. Large-scale social-science experiments were carried out in the 1960s and ’70s to test the concept, particularly whether giving people money would discourage them from working. Studies in the U.S. and Canada showed a small decline in labor-force participation, but it was mostly attributed to new mothers’ taking longer maternity leaves and to teenage boys’ staying in school rather than dropping out to work. Attendance, grades, and test scores, especially for younger kids from poorer families, went up. In Canada, in the only study to measure health outcomes, participants had fewer hospital visits. Yet Southern Democrats shot down Nixon’s UBI proposal in part because, “direct payments to poor people in the South, especially poor blacks in the South, would have disrupted the economic model that a lot of the Southern economy was based on,” explains sociologist Brian Steensland, who authored The Failed Welfare Revolution, a history of UBI in the United States. The South’s economy depended on African Americans for low wage labor. “I can’t get anybody to iron my shirts!” shouted Louisiana Senator Russell Long during a hearing. After SEED was announced, conservative commentators ridiculed the plan. “Mayor of bankrupt city will give free money to the poor,” read one tweet from Chuck Woolery, the conservative podcaster. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin shared an article about the program with the comment “You’ve got to be kidding!” Tubbs, a master of the clapback, tweeted in reply, “Actually modeled after the Alaska Permanent Fund. Are you familiar with it?” Since 1982, Palin’s own state has put 25 percent of its oil revenues into a fund that pays dividends to every adult and child in Alaska in the form of a cash dividend that ranges from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand dollars a year. It’s part of the data that advocates of guaranteed income cite to prove unconditional cash doesn’t encourage people to work less. But the criticism was telling. A blog post published by the SEED team, led by 23-year-old Stanford graduate Sukhi Samra, acknowledges that “data alone doesn’t change hearts and minds,” which is why the team allowed me to follow a handful of subjects. I’ve sat in their homes, met their families (and their dogs), learned intimate details of their lives as told through their financial histories. They shared their hopes and fears and how this money has helped (or not) to achieve or assuage them. The recipients weren’t chosen to be a representative sample — they were simply the people who volunteered. Still, their stories do represent the many ways the American Dream eludes people. SEED’s preliminary report from the first six months provides a bigger picture: 43 percent of recipients are working full or part time and 10 percent are looking for work, while 30 percent can’t work because they are disabled or a primary caregiver. Their median monthly household income is $1,800. Researcher Amy Castro Baker of the University of Pennsylvania says the results so far suggest that “people are rational and strategic when leveraging the $500.” My own experience has been that the money doesn’t change the recipients’ behavior — if anything, it serves as an accelerant for whatever path they were already on — but it is changing their lives by making them less stressful. “My hope is, as the stories [of the recipients] get out, that people begin to see themselves, their neighbors, and people they have warm feelings for,” Tubbs says, “and not this caricature we create in our minds when it’s someone different who we think is undeserving.” Read More

This project was supported by a grant from the investigative news site Capital & Main.

I. D a n i e l l e Danielle has just one goal: no debt, no debt, no debt.

Danielle with her daughters in her backyard. Photo: Michelle Groskopf

Month One W h e n s h e n e e d e d e x t r a m o n e y , D a n i e l l e w o u l d c h a n g e h e r t a x - f i l i n g s t a t u s t o t e n d e p e n d e n t s s o s h e c o u l d t a k e h o m e e n o u g h t o p a y f o r g r o c e r i e s .

Danielle didn’t recognize the return address, but she opens all her mail so she took out the letter and read something about completing an online form to receive $500 a month. What is this?, she thought, wondering if it was a scam. That night, she was watching the local news and it mentioned the SEED program. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I just got that letter,’ ” she says. She filled out the questionnaire but missed a section and couldn’t use the back button to complete it. Oh well, she thought. The whole idea that someone would give her $500 a month seemed so far-fetched anyway. Then, a week or two later, she got a text saying she’d been selected to receive the money.

“It was very surreal,” she says. We’re talking in the SEED office downtown, where she has come after work to fill out the paperwork to get the debit card on which she’ll begin receiving her monthly disbursements. She has never met any of the staff before; they’ve communicated only by text, with the last message instructing her to come to this address. Her husband dropped her off, and she told him to note the building number “if anything happens to me,” she says. As I start to reassure her, she waves away my concern. “That’s just me. I worry,” she says. “I never stop worrying or having anxiety.”

Continue reading Danielle’s story.

II. G r a c e Grace has too many big plans to settle for just a job.

Grace in her at-home day care. Photo: Michelle Groskopf

Month One “ I f I o n e d a y d e c i d e t o w o r k f o r a c o m p a n y , m y s t a r t i n g s a l a r y w o u l d b e e a s i l y $ 1 5 0 , 0 0 0 i f I d o n ’ t e v e n d o v e r y w e l l . ”

I visit Grace at her apartment in an ­affordable-housing complex in one of the city’s “hot zones” — so called for their high crime rate. It’s three days before the first disbursement. We sit side by side on a bed in her living room, which is otherwise empty except for a crib and a large playpen containing a few toys and stuffed animals. Grace’s 1-year-old daughter, Jackie, is with her father so Grace can focus on her career. She and Jackie’s father are “on a kind of break,” she says.

Grace tells me she just got back from a ski trip to Lake Tahoe with a group of 40 “women in tech” organized by Arielle Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s younger sister. She shows me pictures on Facebook of herself among the women gathered in front of the ski lodge’s fireplace, all of them wearing matching facial masks. Grace doesn’t ski, so she rented the gear and bought herself a jacket and ski pants, putting about a thousand dollars on a credit card.

Continue reading Grace’s story.

III. L a u r a Laura just wants to retire with dignity — and maybe visit her new great-granddaughter.

Laura at home with her dog. Photo: Michelle Groskopf

Month One “ I f e e l l i k e I h a d b e a t m y b o d y u p e n o u g h 2 0 - s o m e t h i n g y e a r s f o r t h o s e p e o p l e . ”

When I arrive, Laura is smoking on the top of the stairs outside her apartment in a sprawling affordable-housing complex on the north side of Stockton. Her Pomeranian-Yorkie, Poopee, stands beside her. “I guess they haven’t got to the gate,” she calls down after I get out of my car. The gate into the complex requires a code, but Laura told me on the phone that people keep busting through it, so I might be able to just drive in.

Laura, who is 68, moved to Stockton from Oakland five years ago in search of more affordable rents. She’d just been fired from her job at the Oracle Arena after working there for 21 years. She collects about $1,500 a month in Social Security and a small pension for her years as a union officer in the SEIU, which isn’t enough to live on in the Bay Area.

Continue reading Laura’s story.

IV. P h y l l i s Phyllis knows she’s more than her circumstances.

Phyllis at her office. Photo: Michelle Groskopf/Michelle Groskopf

Month One “ I s a i d , ‘ I ’ m g o i n g t o n e e d s u r g e r y , t o o . ’ H e s a i d , ‘ W h y ? ’ I s a i d , ‘ M y t h y r o i d . I h a v e c a n c e r . ’ ’

I ring Phyllis’s doorbell, setting off a cacophony of barking inside. I can hear Phyllis directing her daughter to put this dog in the kennel, that one outside, hold on to the other one. When she finally opens the door, she’s gripping the collar of a large pit-bull mix who eyes me suspiciously. “Just stand still and let her smell you,” she says. “Come on, Bella, easy.”

Twenty minutes later, Phyllis and I are on the couch in her living room and Bella is spread across our laps. She’s my 85-pound lapdog, Phyllis says, stroking her head. A big frisky puppy, Marley, tries to join us on the couch, but Bella growls, warning her away. The two small dogs, Lilly and Max, and Phyllis’s 13-year-old daughter wander in and out. An inversion table stands in the middle of the living room. Family photos, ceramic tchotchkes, and a menorah decorate an armoire. A nail-gun compressor, two different vacuum cleaners, and a case of seltzer line the low wall marking off the dining area.

A week or so before Phyllis’s SEED letter arrived, Phyllis got a call from her doctor with the results of a biopsy of a nodule on her thyroid. She was at work, on two different phone lines, registering clients for Covered California, the state’s version of Obamacare. Phyllis sells insurance and provides investment advice. She clicked over to the doctor, and he told her she had cancer that required surgery. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to you Wednesday. I don’t have time to deal with this now.”

Phyllis headed straight home after work. Her husband had taken the puppy to the vet that day because she’d been limping after chasing a ball into a wall. “The minute I walked in the door, he tells me, ‘Marley broke her kneecap. She needs surgery. It’s going to cost like $7,000 or $8,000.’ He finishes telling me everything, and I said, ‘I’m going to need surgery, too.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘My thyroid. I have cancer.’ And he said, ‘Oh. Well, what are we going to do about the dog? How are we going to pay for this?’ ” Phyllis rolls her eyes at me and laughs ruefully.

Continue reading Phyllis’s story.

V. G r e g Greg just tries not to think about the bills and the debt and his bad credit.

Greg at the garage outside his house. Photo: Michelle Groskopf

Month One “ I h a v e n ’ t b e e n r e a l l y g e t t i n g a n y w h e r e . J u s t b e e n w o r k i n g . T r y i n g t o m a k e p l a n s b u t n e v e r f o l l o w t h r o u g h w i t h t h e p l a n . ”

The day before the first $500 installment hits, I meet Greg at his house on the north side of Stockton. Small ranch homes with three-car garages line the street. Cars pack the driveways, one behind the other, suggesting households with too many adults in them. We were supposed to meet elsewhere, but Greg’s car is leaking brake fluid and he barely made it home from work. When I arrive, the 1999 white Integra is sitting in the driveway with its hood up.

Greg comes out in jeans and a dark T-shirt. He has a short goatee, and his face is covered in freckles, which make him look younger than his 30 years. His head is shaved, and he rubs it a lot when he talks. Later, he’ll tell me he has gray hairs from stressing too much. Greg has four kids, two girls and two boys, who range in age from 2 to 8.

We drive to a park and talk in my rental car. Greg tells me he’s going to try to sell the Integra tonight because he doesn’t want to bother fixing it. He has been saving up for a new car, an older BMW for $1,100. “It’s tagged and smogged and good to go,” he says. He just needs his $500 tomorrow morning and somebody to drive him. Greg plans to use future SEED disbursements to pay off his debts. “So by next year, I’ll be able to possibly get me and my kids a house or something like that. Get us going instead of just the same cycle going over and over again.”

Continue reading Greg’s story.

*A version of this article appears in the October 14, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!