By Noah Sheidlower and Katie Balevic
- The largest basic income pilot in the US reported positive results for those receiving cash.
- They reported fewer housing burdens, better food security, and safer home situations.
- The study participants were more likely to secure full-time work than remain unemployed.
The results are in for the largest basic income pilot program in the US.
Participants in the Los Angeles-based program reported that they had better employment outcomes, felt safer at home, enrolled their kids in more extracurriculars, and were more likely to leave domestically abusive situations, according to the pilot study’s results.
The Basic Income Guaranteed: Los Angeles Economic Assistance Pilot, or BIG:LEAP, gave over 3,200 households $1,000 in monthly no-strings-attached cash payments for 12 months starting in January 2022. Participants had to have or be expecting a dependent child and fall below the federal poverty threshold, with average household incomes of slightly above $14,000 a year.
BIG:LEAP compared the outcomes of households receiving cash payments to nearly 5,000 households with similar incomes and family situations in the control group.
“There’s this really open question in the research and among policymakers around how much cash does it take over what period of time to create change,” said Amy Castro, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania who coauthored the study. “What we’ve seen with BIG:LEAP is that in that 12 months, families really engaged in an accelerated decision-making process to establish safety.”
The study found that participants were significantly more likely to find full-time jobs than remain unemployed and not looking for work, feel able to cover housing costs, have greater food security, and establish more harmonious home environments compared to the control group.
Within the first six months of the program, participants left situations of intimate partner violence more frequently than the control group. In the last six months, participants were more likely to establish proximate safety and work toward protecting themselves in the future.
Participants were also significantly more likely than the control group to enroll their kids in enrichment activities. Bo-Kyung Elizabeth Kim, an associate professor at UCLA, told BI this result suggests parents are using the cash to better their children’s futures and increasingly have the time to take their kids to these activities.
Participants reported significantly fewer worries about their family’s safety compared to control participants across all measurement periods — including six months after the last payment.
“By establishing that sort of immediate safety right away, participants were then able to engage in their neighborhoods because they had the time to do so,” Castro said. “They had the time to parent, and they had the time to build relationships with community leaders.”
Though many of these effects are significant, the effect sizes aren’t large for some variables. For instance, 50% of control group participants reported having to eat less in a day because of a lack of food compared to 42% of recipients.
Across the board, the study reported no negative effects of cash payments on participants, who were “significantly more likely to secure full-time employment than to remain unemployed not looking for work” than those in the control group.
Castro said this study reveals a wider range of positive impacts on participants receiving unconditional cash payments than many of its predecessors.
Overall, it stands in contrast to what some critics of basic income argue, including that cash payments majorly reduce employment or don’t prepare participants for the future. Some critics have argued these programs cost millions of dollars, often from taxpayer money, and foster dependency on the government for help.
Guaranteed income as a ‘super vitamin’ for the social safety net
The pilot, which was one of the first to receive both private and public funding, was announced in October 2021 during the Eric Garcetti mayoral administration. It continued under current Mayor Karen Bass with many of the same staff.
“This is really the end result of many, many years of organizing and development within government,” Castro told BI. “There had been a lot of momentum for a lot of years around saying, we keep trying to solve the same problems of poverty with the same tools, and we’re not getting anywhere.”
The authors stressed that the program worked alongside the social safety net, not in place of it. As millions of Americans struggle to stay above the poverty line (or have already slipped below it), social services are failing to keep them afloat.
“Guaranteed income functions as a super vitamin, and what it did was it filled in the gaps that the safety net had,” Castro said. “Because of the pandemic, because of the scale of poverty that the city is experiencing, what it did was it really shored up those cracks in the system.”
Housing cost burdens decreased among all study participants. Six months after the cash payments stopped, the recipients were slightly more likely to be able to afford rent, and fewer of them had to live with friends or family.
“Even in cases where they couldn’t afford a massive change in housing, they were able to move out of situations where they’re sleeping on couches in a friend’s house — doubling or triple up and living in really tight, cramped quarters — and live independently,” Castro said.
To be sure, the rate of homelessness increased for both groups 18 months after the payments began, though the authors noted that the pilot was not designed to impact the homeless population. Castro noted improvements in the rate of intimate partner violence — one of the city’s leading causes of homelessness — may have kept homelessness levels from rising even more.
Researchers on the study anticipated higher increases in emotional well-being than what materialized, Castro said, though they attributed this in part to higher degrees of stress during the pandemic.
“If you’re sitting in despair for the future because you can’t find a pathway out, you’re going to have a really difficult time engaging with opportunities that may come your way,” Castro said.
But those who did engage with the program by applying and participating made the most of it, researchers said.
“A really big message is that people are not going to take this cash that they receive and stop working and engaging in the labor market,” Kim said. “They are still going to be contributing. They’re still going to struggle, but they are trying to move forward with some hope that they can be in a better place with the extra $1,000 a month.”
