Basic Income Trials

The concept of basic income payments is gaining attention in both living rooms and legislatures. However, the realistic implementation of distributing money to individuals without conditional stipulations remains a challenge for many state and federal lawmakers.

Despite this, short-term basic income trials are becoming increasingly popular. The successes of these trials may offer equity planners a modest opportunity to develop policies aimed at alleviating long-term inequity.

In "Planning With a Basic Income: Achieving Equity Planning Goals With No-Strings-Attached Cash" (Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 91, No. 1) Marc Doussard and Kevin Quinn have assessed the documented contributions of basic income to common equity planning goals.

By examining over 100 basic income trials and conducting interviews with 75 program designers and administrators, they explore how short-term basic income trials can pave the way for and potentially extend into long-lasting programs.

Figure 1: Basic income program count by state.

Public, Private, Pilots, and Hybrid

Basic income programs include publicly funded pilot programs, privately run trials, and hybrid pilots that combine both public and private financing. These trials serve various populations and offer different scales of financial resources.

For instance, private programs have targeted populations that public programs cannot legally address. Specialized program populations included:

• Ex-offenders
• Black mothers
• People experiencing homelessness
• Youth
• Black youth
• Artists
• Survivors of domestic violence

Often driven by desperation, these basic income trials highlight the importance of providing basic social services to stigmatized populations.

Large-scale public basic income trials are more likely to lead to reforms in state-level social policy. Hybrid programs, with multiple pathways for renewal, expansion, and replication, can generate spillovers across both the public and private sectors.

These hybrid programs have the potential to introduce and pave the way for unconditional cash transfers to other institutions, funders, and social service programs.

Opportunities for Funding Basic Income Trials

Understanding where basic income fits into a planning agenda is challenging. While basic income does not solve any single problem, it contributes to the solution of many, making it difficult to identify an obvious institutional champion or a clear path into equity planning practice.

Moreover, the proven value of basic income alone is insufficient to secure federal support for a universal basic income or the extension of such resources across the population. This limitation hinders planning scholars' and practitioners' engagement with a policy that is otherwise popular, growing, and highly successful at improving basic equity outcomes.

Cumulatively, evaluations of basic income trials have proven to be extremely successful at addressing planning problems such as homelessness, food insecurity, poor transit access, and limited uptake of basic social services, including health services.

The bottom line is that cash consistently achieves results in ways that typical interventions in the U.S., such as job training and housing vouchers, do not.

The authors found that basic income trials have already generated significant policy and program spillovers, including permanent legislation and financing from city general revenue funds.

These spillovers include changes to existing programs, such as cash stipends, simplified eligibility criteria, and lightened restrictions on participant spending. They conclude that elaborating these pathways from trial programs to policy is a crucial next step for research and a means for equity planners to expand basic income implementation in various contexts.

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