In Mountain View, low-income families are unable to afford basic necessities including food, rent and medical expenses. Parents and guardians are faced with working long hours, sacrificing quality time with their children and dismissing their mental health.
Elevate Mountain View launched in December 2022, aimed to provide families who fall below 30% of the Area Median Income a stipend of $500 a month without any conditions. Tom Myers, the executive director of the Community Services Agency of Mountain View and Los Altos, believes the pilot program will upend the way social services operate.
“There are several residents that talked to us about their successes,” Myers said. “We are going to find we already have preliminary data. A lot of this money is being used to pay rent, so the former rent money can be used on other things, like educational supplies or family time.”
Myers said families were chosen through a randomized selection by the University of Pennsylvania and collecting data to study their spending habits. The program will conclude in December 2024 and the results of the study will follow. Myers would like to see it expand to different demographics if the study shows positive results.
“My hope is this turns into a successful pilot that we can duplicate, and use to help with basic income for other communities,” Myers said. “One of the fastest-growing groups falling into poverty is seniors.”
Guaranteed income is not a new practice. According to the Pension Research Council at the University of Pennsylvania, annuities have come in different forms since the Roman Era by providing soldiers with retirement pensions. Sean Kline, the director of Stanford’s Basic Income Lab, said old ideas are becoming new again to address the inequalities and inequities that have been growing since COVID-19.
In the last four years, Kline said the lab has seen over 200 guaranteed income pilot programs with at least 60 of them still active nationwide. Kline looks forward to more pilot program studies, but experiments such as in St. Paul, Minnesota, already proved successful to him.
“I think the genie is out of the bottle,” Kline said. “Cities and counties recognized how powerful giving money directly to people is rather than working through intermediaries identifying who they should spend it on. It’s a powerful policy tool that’s now gaining a lot of traction and visibility.”
Sukhi Samra, the executive director of both Mayors and Counties for a Guaranteed Income, worked alongside former Stockton, Calif., Mayor Michael Tubbs when he implemented the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration in 2019. This was the first mayor-led guaranteed income program and it was radical for the time, Samra said.
“The pandemic was exposing a lot of inequalities and shining a light on the disproportionate impact of income inequality on Black and Brown folks,” Samra said. “We launched measures for guaranteed income in response to capitalism and racism.”
Samra believes the Guaranteed Income Works National Tour – a national campaign her organization formed with local leaders and participants – will remove biases towards the
program. There is a growing pushback from conservatives with Samra’s work but she hopes her tours will bring people together.
“We hope to keep laddering up to the state level, continuing to keep the drumbeat vote going,” Samra said. “This is a policy people care about and the electors are behind it.”
Elevate Mountain View is one of many guaranteed income programs nationwide. Although the program is in its early stages, supporters suggest future experiments will expand to new community groups, increase in popularity at varying levels of government and continue to relieve more people of financial hardship.
