In 2021, the city of Cambridge spent $1.5 million on a guaranteed-income program for low-income residents. 130 eligible households received $500 a month for 18 months, with no requirements for what the money could be spent on. In May 2023, Cambridge announced the program would be expanded. Using $22 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, the city is starting the Rise Up Cambridge program, which will allow hundreds more eligible, low-income households to receive direct cash payments. This is the only city-wide cash assistance program of its kind in the country, and it “aims to address the growing economic divide and racial inequities in Cambridge.”
To qualify for the program, you must be a Cambridge resident with an income falling below 250% of the Federal Poverty Line for your household size. You must also be 18 or older and have a child at or under 21 years of age in your household. Eligible households include single-parent families, two-parent families, and “non-traditional families” such as grandparents or relatives taking care of children. Applications opened on June 1 and remain open until July 31. Around 1,000 households – nearly half of the eligible households in Cambridge – applied on the first day.
Rise Up Cambridge may be the first non-lottery direct cash payment program to be implemented on this scale in the country, but it has its roots in pilot programs initiated in California. In 2017, the city of Stockton, California gave 125 people $500 a month for 24 months. As in Cambridge, these payments came without strings attached. Results from the first year of the pilot program were encouraging: researchers found that “the money gave recipients the stability they needed to set goals, take risks, and find new jobs.”
In 2020, the former mayor of Stockton, Michael Tubbs, created the organization Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (the mayors of Cambridge and Somerville, MA, as well as the city manager of Chelsea, are members). Since then, other cities in California, as well as cities in New Jersey, Washington, Colorado, and Massachusetts, have experimented with programs similar to the original Stockton pilot program. Cambridge has the opportunity to be a model for other cities hoping to move beyond small pilot programs. If Rise Up Cambridge is successful, we may see guaranteed income policies become more mainstream and widespread.
None of these policy ideas are particularly new, of course. Universal basic income, guaranteed supplemental income, “negative income tax”, and other similar ideas have long been debated in the public sphere. Thomas Paine, an American Founding Father, was advocating for a national income paid for by land taxes all the way back in 1797. Politicians and policy-makers, philosophers and economists have discussed, criticized, and promoted guaranteed income for two centuries. It’s an issue that has proponents and critics of all political persuasions.
Despite its long history, the data on its benefits and drawbacks are lacking. In March 2020, The Lancet Public Health journal released a large-scale review of the public health effects of “interventions similar to basic income”, and researchers were unable to make strong conclusions. They wrote that “evidence on health effects was mixed, with strong positive effects on some outcomes, such as birthweight and mental health, but no effect on others.” Employment effects were also inconsistent: small for men, but larger for women with young children. The researchers noted finally that “evidence for macro-level effects is scarce” and that more studies are needed.
Recent reports on pilot programs in cities like Stockton found that direct payments didn’t impact employment, and that families mostly spent the money on basic needs such as food. The results from older studies of similar programs are less positive, however. Between 1968 and 1980, policy-makers in Washington DC made four controlled trials of “negative income tax”, involving thousands of people across six states. According to the author and economist Milton Ezrati, “hours of work desired by all recipients fell some 9% below to those not in the program. They fell some 20% for married women and 25% among single women heads of household. Desired work among single men fell some 43% below non-recipients. If those receiving the negative income tax lost their job, the spell of unemployment lasted two months longer on average than with non-recipients and 12 months longer for married women.”
There are other questions regarding the basic sustainability of guaranteed income programs. Beyond the positive or negative impacts they may have on recipients, there are serious issues with how such programs would be funded and run. Rise Up Cambridge is funded with ARPA money, but that will run out soon enough. Many of the other guaranteed income pilot programs in the United States are funded through large private donations. These pilot programs are all small-scale – only a few hundred people are receiving money – but if the cities implementing these programs wish to expand them, as Cambridge has, they will likely have to find other ways to pay for them: higher taxes, for example.
Cambridge has recognized these issues, with Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui saying that the city is currently exploring ways to make the program permanent if it is successful. She also points out that the program is “not the thing that’s going to fix everything…It is a part of broader solutions, whether that’s looking at systems involving affordable housing, for example, better wages at jobs and so forth.” Rise Up Cambridge may help to stabilize low-income families in the wake of the pandemic and continued inflation, but Mayor Siddiqui is right: there are plenty of other problems, such as ongoing housing problems in Greater Boston, that require more complex political remedies. Regardless, Rise Up Cambridge will provide us with more data on the impacts of guaranteed income programs and continue the national conversation around what policies are truly effective at addressing poverty.
