Following in Cambridge’s footsteps, Somerville has launched a guaranteed basic income pilot program, with 200 families set to begin receiving monthly payments of $750 in July.
With the decision to launch a program in Somerville, Mayor Katjana Ballantyne joins Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a coalition of more than 100 leaders from across the country who establish and advocate for guaranteed-income programs, which provide cash payments to residents experiencing poverty.
“The data shows that if you give some additional unrestricted income to families, they will use it well, and it will help them,” Ballantyne said.
Cambridge’s former mayor, Sumbul Siddiqui, launched a program in 2021 that gave $500 each month to 130 households for 18 months, after joining Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. To be eligible, households had to be headed by a single caregiver, include at least one child under 18 and fall below 80 percent of area median income, though most participants fell under 50 percent.
“The response to this initiative was absolutely amazing: We had Harvard and MIT contributing, we had local businesses contributing, we had individual families contributing. Our smallest gift was $5 and our largest gift was $500,000,” said Geeta Pradhan, president of the Cambridge Community Foundation.
After the pilot period ended in February 2023, Cambridge committed $22 million to continuing the direct-cash program using funds received by the city as part of the American Rescue Plan Act, which was established in 2021 to support Covid pandemic recovery efforts.
“Most places that were in the MGI network just stopped at the pilot and that was it, but we are the first place to say we’re going to do a non-lottery program where anyone who’s eligible will be eligible. That’s what’s really unique here,” Siddiqui said.
The new Rise Up Cambridge: Cash Payments for Families With Kids is the only citywide cash assistance program of its kind in the country. Low-income Cambridge households with children 21 or younger earning at or below 250 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible, and roughly 2,000 are being served.
The Rise Up program is a collaboration between Siddiqui, the Cambridge Community Foundation and the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee, the city’s anti-poverty agency. The group was willing to bet on the success of its test, and now data backs them up. Families in the program were studied by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research, which published a report recently finding that the receipt of guaranteed income improved financial health, enhanced housing, utility and food security, and increased time and space for parenting.
“We all really loved that final finding, and this came up a lot in the stories we heard from people: Guaranteed income allowed recipients to give more attention and support to their children,” Pradhan said. “This resulted in improved educational outcomes as compared to similar families, with children having fewer disciplinary actions and out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, better grades and aspirations beyond secondary education.”
The mixed-methods randomized controlled trial evaluated the program by studying the 130 caregivers who got the aid alongside 156 control caregivers who did not. Both groups were made up of majority female, Black, single-caretaker-headed households with an average of two children, with the mean annual household income at $23,255 for the treatment group and $20,246 for the control group. (The calculated living wage for a single household with two children in Cambridge is $132,109.)
Somerville’s test targets
The Somerville program announced March 20 aims to support housing stability across the city by enrolling families struggling with high housing costs.
“If somebody is unable to pay their rent they face housing instability, and if somebody is paying their rent first, they’re often going without really important things like food or medicine,” said Ellen Shachter, director of the Office of Housing Stability.
Her office, along with the Somerville Public Schools’ Somerville Family Learning Collaborative, identified households they serve who are experiencing housing instability. This selection method is different from Cambridge’s, which used a lottery in selecting the families that would benefit from its test program.
Each family enrolled in the Somerville Guaranteed Basic Income Program will get $750 each month for a year, starting this July. The funds, which will in the end total about $1.8 million, also come from the American Rescue Plan Act.
“We are trying to design programs where we can use this funding, and the wonderful thing about this funding is that it allows us to pilot things, to be a little more entrepreneurial,” Ballantyne said.
Shifting the narrative
Both programs in Cambridge and the one in Somerville were aimed at lifting recipients – which is why Siddiqui said it was crucial to work with the Department of Transitional Assistance, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and affordable-housing agencies to ensure that the cash assistance wasn’t being counted against recipients in terms of getting benefits.
“Usually as soon as you get extra money, your rent goes up, you lose benefits and so forth,” Siddiqui said. “The first step in the program was getting these benefit waivers.”
Once the money is disbursed, it is completely up to the families’ discretion how to spend it.
“The best part of the simpleness of this is that we’re trusting our families, and saying we know you know what’s best for your families, and you know the value of what additional cash can do,” Siddiqui said.
This is where the research comes in, Pradhan said. For those who might doubt guaranteed income programs, it’s important to show that families overwhelmingly use cash assistance responsibly, even when there are no restrictions on what they can use it to buy.
“So much of this work is about long-term narrative change and shifting the narrative about families in poverty,” Siddiqui said.
Future research
Cambridge wanted its second program to have a research component too; this time, it is being conducted by MDRC, a social policy research organization that has done work on cash assistance and guaranteed basic income nationally and internationally. Sixty-nine percent of participants in the program have agreed to be part of the research, which amounts to about 1,300 households, Pradhan said. That makes this research group 10 times the size of the group in the Penn study.
“I think the research that will come out of the expansion is going to have national consequences, because we are the only city that is doing a citywide program that’s a non-lottery program,” Pradhan said.
The study will look at participants across income levels and across race and ethnicity, considering key issues such as educational outcomes for children, economic mobility and housing stability, Pradhan said.
There’s a research component to the Somerville program, too. In partnership with two research centers at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the Center for Social Policy and the Edward J. Collins Jr. Center for Public Management, the pilot program will be evaluated based on impact, efficacy and the feasibility of continuing a similar program like Cambridge was able to do after its pilot program. The study will focus on health alongside housing stability, including social determinants of health such as food security, time with family, anxiety and depression levels, Shachter said.
The hope is to maintain the program beyond the test period, but Shachter noted that this is only one piece of a puzzle of programs that Somerville is implementing to try to prevent displacement, including a recently introduced municipal housing program that will cap participating families’ rent and utility costs at 30 percent of their income, with the voucher covering remaining costs.
“It’s really exciting for my staff, this office and the city to be able to do something that will bring so much relief and happiness to our clients,” Shachter said. “We’re often dealing with residents who are in very stressful and highly anxiety-producing situations, and it’s been a really wonderful opportunity to be able to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to help you, no strings attached.’”
Some of the background in the feature image of Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne on this story was added digitally during a retouching process and is not real. The bricks at the far left were created digitally and are fake.
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Good News all around, and glad to see this idea spreading.