By Robert Davis
It’s easy to see the scars living unhoused has left on Hilliard McAlpin. Walking with me through the streets of Denver, Colorado, he’s quiet and moves like he’s trying to ward off a future attack. He will laugh at jokes, but quickly masks his smile. When we first meet, the forty-nine-year-old seems like he’s in a battle against the world.
Then we arrive at the spot where McAlpin used to live. Civic Center Park in downtown Denver sits between Denver’s City and County Building and the Colorado State Capitol. The pair of neoclassical structures loom over the park, projecting the ideals of order, reason, and democracy. But in 2021, Denver officials cleared about 100 unhoused people from the park ahead of annual holiday events. In effect, the city signaled that people like McAlpin were no longer welcome downtown.
McAlpin points out a section of the northeast side of the lawn where he used to camp. The grass was dead, trampled under the feet of tourists. Glittering streamers and holiday debris hang in the bur oak trees, food wrappers littering the sidewalk. After spending eight years in prison, McAlpin spent another eight years camping in the park and staying in some of the city shelters, which he described as dangerous places. The longer we walk, the more memories seem to come flooding back.
“Homelessness never really leaves you,” McAlpin says.
Across the street, a group of houseless people sit along the stone retaining wall separating the state capitol lawn from the sidewalk. A man yells sporadically and indiscriminately. McAlpin turns to me and says we need to go over there.
As soon as we arrive, McAlpin’s demeanor softens. He makes eye contact and shakes hands with as many people as possible. He greets some with a warm “You good?” He slips a $20 bill to one individual and tells him to share the wealth with his friends. He says he has done the same thing for his mother and his friends when they have had financial issues. McAlpin tells me he’s always been compassionate, but that a program called the Denver Basic Income Project (DBIP) has recently enabled him to give back.
The Denver Basic Income Project is one of the largest guaranteed income pilots in the country. The publicly funded private program was launched in the fall of 2022 and has since distributed more than $10.8 million of no-strings-attached cash benefits to more than 800 unhoused people in Denver. Benefits ranged from receiving $50 per month up to $1,000 per month. At its peak, the program deployed roughly $475,000 monthly in cash and benefits like free cell phones for participants, according to DBIP Founder and Executive Director Mark Donovan. About 45 percent of participants had secured housing within ten months of joining the program, according to quantitative research on the program conducted by the University of Denver’s Center for Housing and Homelessness Research. DBIP also contributed to approximately $590,000 in cost savings for the city in emergency services, hospital visits, and jail time over its first year.
For McAlpin, DBIP was a lifesaver. He struggled to find work or to receive other social benefits because of his criminal history. But that all changed soon after he entered the program. Being unhoused is among the most significant impediments to finding work. Travel to job interviews with no money for public transportation is impossible; it is also exceedingly difficult to consistently be punctual and dress professionally. Remote work can be challenging because of a lack of consistent Internet access, even when someone sleeps at a shelter or at supportive housing arrangements.
McAlpin now works at a local company called GRID Alternatives installing solar panels. He also used the money to pay bills and provide food, rent payments, and other necessities for family members when they needed help. McAlpin now dreams of buying land and building a small community of self-sustaining homes inspired by the Pueblo Indigenous peoples.
“It was really bittersweet,” McAlpin says about joining DBIP. “It was amazing to be able to help [my family], but it also accentuated the fact that our economic system and all these other things are in place to make things hard for the poor.”
However, like other guaranteed income pilots operating across the United States, DBIP has faced significant political opposition. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston endorsed DBIP during his campaign in 2022, and his endorsement is still quoted on the program’s website. But in 2024, as funding from the city waned, Johnston rejected the city council’s budget amendment to continue funding the program in the 2025 budget—despite the efforts of DBIP, which held multiple public rallies in support of continued funding, as well as participants who spoke before Denver City Council to advocate for the program.
DBIP made its last payments in September 2024 after the budget amendment failed. Donovan tells me the program still has $800,000 in the bank and is using the money to continue paying for phone services for its participants while he looks for additional funding. Beyond that, DBIP’s future remains uncertain. McAlpin tells me he’s no longer concerned about his own future due to the help he received from DBIP. But the potential end of the program still comes as a blow.
“It all goes back to America’s divisions, our lack of wanting to understand, and America’s moral compass,” McAlpin said. “It’s all off whack.”
Guaranteed income programs like DBIP emerged in the late 2010s as a way for governments to address the root causes of poverty. The programs are intended to create a so-called “income floor” that the most vulnerable populations can’t fall through by providing regular cash payments with no work requirements or other preconditions.
Though the terms “guaranteed income” and “basic income” are often used interchangeably, guaranteed income programs specifically target people from socioeconomic backgrounds more likely to experience poverty and homelessness, according to the Economic Security Project. This includes people of color and Indigenous populations. There are also guaranteed income programs for single mothers, community college students, and domestic violence survivors, to name a few. Despite the “basic income” term in its name, the DBIP is a guaranteed income program.
The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) program in Stockton, California, is one of the first guaranteed income pilots in the United States. It launched in February 2019 and gave 125 residents $500 of unrestricted cash per month for two years. Over those two years, the program reduced public expenditures on emergency services and helped more than 40 percent of participants land a full-time job. Many participants also reported feeling less stressed and anxious about their financial health. These results led former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs to form the group Mayors for a Guaranteed Income in June 2020, which, according to its website, now includes 166 mayors and county officials across the country.
More than 150 guaranteed income initiatives have been launched since 2017. Yet, despite their numerous successes, these programs have faced significant and well-funded opposition. Opponents often rely on straw man arguments—such as claims that guaranteed income increases low-income households’ reliance on welfare and disincentivizes people from finding full-time work.
But according to the Stanford Basic Income Lab, guaranteed income programs have the exact opposite effect on welfare reliance and workforce participation. Census data indicates that there are more than 1.4 million married couples with children under the age of eighteen who live below the poverty line, a total that has increased by 3 percent since 2019. Federal data from 2023 also shows there are 168,699 people in families with children who are houseless, a population that has grown by 16 percent since 2022. The country’s affordable housing shortage has primarily driven this trend, which speaks to the need for additional support systems like guaranteed income.
Rightwing advocacy organizations such as the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) and politicians such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton have been the main propagators of lies about guaranteed income. For instance, FGA argued in a report from February 2024 that guaranteed income pilots fundamentally stifle the economy and degrade American cultural values like self-determination.
Paxton took this opposition a step further when he sued Harris County, Texas, in April 2024 to prevent it from launching a guaranteed income program called Uplift Harris. The program sought to use $20.5 million of federal COVID-19 relief funds to provide $500 monthly payments to approximately 1,900 low-income-earning residents. Two lower courts in Houston rejected Paxton’s attempts to block the program before the ultraconservative Texas Supreme Court ruled in June that the pilot likely violated the Texas state constitution’s prohibition on “gratuitous payments to individuals.”
In August, Harris County officials tried to revamp the program to require that participants spend the money only on necessities like food, utilities, and shelter. These requirements are largely redundant, as research from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research found that most recipients spend their money on life-sustaining expenses like housing.
Paxton responded to the changes by suing Harris County again in September 2024. He argued that using public funds to support low-income-earning households in this way “directly violates the law” and accused Harris County officials of “[undermining] the legal process out of apparent desperation to push this money into certain hands as quickly as possible.” A Harris County judge struck down Paxton’s second attempt to block the program in October, although the MAGA firebrand continued to fight it and appealed the decision. As of December 2024, the final appeal is pending, so no payments can be made.
The backlash is having a sustained impact on guaranteed income pilots nationwide, with many programs being shut down when pilot periods end. Even progressive cities like San Francisco have had to shut down guaranteed income programs because of Republican backlash. Funding for Chicago’s guaranteed income program, which was established in 2022 to help those who experienced economic hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic, was cut from Mayor Brandon Johnson’s $17.3 billion 2025 budget.
Some Republican-controlled state legislatures have stepped into the fight as well. South Dakota, Iowa, and Idaho have all passed laws prohibiting basic and guaranteed income programs. Arizona, Mississippi, and Wisconsin lawmakers have all introduced similar legislation, although it failed to pass in those states.
For DBIP participants like Rosemarie Palafox, the impact of guaranteed income is too good to pass up. Palafox tells me she had experienced homelessness on and off for most of her life. Her most recent spell came after she lost her job doing asbestos abatement. To make matters worse, Palafox was in a car wreck around the same time, preventing her from finding another job. She ended up moving into a Safe Outdoor Space—a city-sanctioned campsite for homeless people—operated by the Colorado Village Collaborative, where she was then put into a lottery to join DBIP.
Palafox was accepted into the program and received an initial payment of $6,000 plus $500 per month for a year. That money was life-changing, she says. Palafox was able to enroll in classes at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she studied construction management. She spent about half of her stipend on rent and utilities for a two-bedroom apartment and used the remaining funds to buy necessities like a laptop for school, as well as clothes and bedding for her nine-year-old niece, who lives with her.
Before connecting with DBIP, Palafox says she relied on Section 8 housing vouchers and welfare benefits to make ends meet. That patchwork required a lot of paperwork, which made it hard to find another job, and to make it to doctor’s appointments for the knee injury she had sustained in her car accident.
Now, Palafox says she doesn’t stress about money or losing her benefits. She is graduating from MSU a semester early so she can have knee surgery and start looking for a job in the construction industry. None of that would have been possible without the guaranteed income from DBIP, she says.
“I’m not just, like, sitting around doing nothing,” Palafox says. “I’m trying to get stable and start a career, so I don’t have to depend on nobody.”
