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In the spring of 2022, Tydricka Lewis finally bought a car that started every time she asked it to and no longer left her stranded.
Her 2020 Nissan Rogue was essential to her new job as a peer-support specialist — helping people in mental-health crises required her to be able to get places reliably and fast. And it was essential to her new life outside prison, where she’d spent six years and four months for chasing fraudulent checks.
It was a car that Lewis, a 32-year-old single mother of three, would not otherwise have been able to afford. But when she was selected for Durham, North Carolina’s guaranteed-income pilot program, she knew exactly where her $600 monthly stipend would be best spent.
In late 2020, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged $15 million to the national advocacy group Mayors for a Guaranteed Income to help select cities and towns across America kick-start basic-income programs. Durham was one of 25 recipients and received $500,000 from Dorsey and another $500,000 from local philanthropy and the city’s coffers.
Durham’s mayor pro tempore, Mark-Anthony Middleton, who helped oversee the program, had been advocating for his city to introduce a basic income for years. “We wanted to see what a stream of income, without any determination of virtue or vice attached to it, would do,” he said.
As Durham’s population has ballooned, many of its lower-income and Black residents have been pushed to the fringes. Once one of the South’s centers of Black commerce, with its own Black Wall Street, the vibrant Hayti community, home to the renowned historically Black North Carolina Central University, Durham has become much whiter — by 51% over the past 20 years, according to US Census data. And as wealthier residents moved in, Durham’s median home price rose by more than 50% between 2010 and 2019.
So the city decided that all of the $1 million in basic-income funds would go to a single, vulnerable group: formerly incarcerated residents.
Many taxpayers were not happy about this. As the program neared its launch in March 2022, Middleton’s inbox and mailbox were flooded with messages filled with epithets. They came from white residents in the more conservative counties near Durham to recent transplants from liberal strongholds like New York City and the Bay Area. They demanded to know why the city was underwriting criminals, disincentivizing work with free handouts, and spending public dollars to help people who, in some opinions, might not deserve help.
Middleton’s answer to all criticism was steadfast, simple, and by his own admission, “very selfish.”
“We’re going to have to pay for these people one way or another, either in incarceration, benefits, homeless shelters, whatever it is,” he told me. “It seems to me that spending more money up front makes more sense than housing folks, monitoring and feeding them, and taking care of their healthcare in prison.”
He encourages skeptical taxpayers to look at universal basic income from the same “selfish point of view.” “By virtue of your humanity, your citizenship, and your residency,” he added, “there’s a certain line we will not allow you to fall under because it’s good policy for us.”
Though the data is still nascent, basic income has proven to be good policy everywhere it’s been tested in America. The Durham program would be one of its greatest tests yet.
The idea that the government should guarantee all citizens a set amount of money has been discussed at the margins of American policy throughout the nation’s history.
In his 1797 pamphlet “Agrarian Justice,” Thomas Paine argued that all citizens had the right to a guaranteed lump sum when they became adults. During the Great Depression, Louisiana’s governor, Huey Long, proposed a guaranteed annual household income of $2,000 to $3,000 (some $40,000 to $60,000 in 2023). In 1972, when Senator George McGovern was running for president, he proposed writing a $1,000 check annually to every American. Though the concept faltered in the Reaganomics era of the 1980s and the Clintonomics of the 1990s, talk of a universal basic income reemerged during the 2020 presidential-election campaign, when it became a major platform point of the candidate Andrew Yang.
“What’s helpful about cash is that it’s cash, and you can use it for whatever you need.”
A large part of the renewed interest is that “we have a higher degree of inequality now than we did before the Great Depression,” said Anna Jefferson, a principal investigator at Abt Associates who studies data from basic-income programs across the country.
In the past few years, aided no doubt by the economic consequences wrought by the pandemic, centuries of theory have at last been put to the test. A few dozen cities across the country have begun basic-income programs, and the early results have been overwhelmingly positive. In Denver, more than 800 of the city’s most vulnerable residents received monthly stipends of up to $1,000. So far the program has reduced homelessness, increased employment, and bolstered the mental-health outcomes of participants. A similar program in Stockton, California, had similar effects — the unemployment rate among the 125 participants was nearly halved. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studying the program concluded it could have “profound positive impacts on local public health.”
Pilot programs have sprung up across the country, from liberal strongholds such as Los Angeles and Baltimore to more centrist and conservative cities like Columbia, South Carolina; Birmingham, Alabama; and Gainesville, Florida. Just Income, the Florida program, also focused its stipends on formerly incarcerated individuals, with a rationale similar to Middleton’s. “It costs Floridians about $28,000 a year to hold someone in prison,” the director of the Gainesville program said in a press release earlier this year. “Alternatively, we’re investing just $7,600 directly to one of our valued neighbors, giving them a vital income floor.” In city after city and cohort after cohort — old, young, single parents, ex-convicts — universal basic income has improved health outcomes, raised employment, and bolstered childcare opportunities (and recipients have had consistently better outcomes than control groups).
According to Jefferson, guaranteed income — which she calls “unrestricted cash transfers” — impacts recipients’ lives almost immediately. Early results from her firm’s analysis, she said, “really show that cash can improve people’s financial stress and mental health remarkably and quickly.”
With more data at hand than theoretical projection, the evidence is overwhelming: Universal basic income is working nearly universally.
To qualify for Durham’s guaranteed-income program, which the city called Excel, applicants had to be Durham residents 18 years or older, incarcerated no later than 2016, and fall below 60% of the city’s annual median incomee. From a pool of 247 eligible applicants, 109 were randomly selected to be recipients, and the rest were part of the control group.
One element that was essential to Middleton was that the money Excel handed out come with no strings attached. He wanted to see how the beneficiaries chose to use their money. None were required to check in with StepUp — the Durham-based nonprofit that administered the program — or the city to explain how and where they were using their income. There was no work requirement and no surveys to fill out. Recipients all received a debit card preloaded with $600 a month for a year — $7,200 to spend as they pleased.
“Folks paid their rent, they bought clothes for their children, they bought medicine, some people took a weekend trip,” Middleton said. “Mostly, people did normal stuff; they paid bills and bought food. Surprise, surprise.” Others paid off long-standing student loans.
Jefferson has found this is typical of how basic-income recipients across the country spend their stipends. While it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where each dollar goes, the vast majority of recipients spend them on the basics: healthier food, school supplies, and extracurriculars or developmental support for their children.
“What’s helpful about cash is that it’s cash, and you can use it for whatever you need,” Jefferson said.
After she was released from prison in 2019, Tydricka Lewis cobbled together a living by holding two, sometimes three, jobs at once, including at a KFC and a Habitat for Humanity resource center. A few months after her release, she was certified as a peer-support specialist and began working with a nonprofit that provides community mental-health and substance-abuse treatment. She could have used her Excel money to buy food or clothes for her three children, who were 18, 11, and 3. But she saw a car as the lynchpin through which she could provide for her family, a foundation to hopefully pull them out of the poverty that she has been mired in for so much of her life. The Rogue also afforded Lewis peace of mind, knowing that she and her kids would no longer have to worry about the car’s heater fritzing out in the middle of Durham’s icy winters.
By all early accounts, Excel has been a resounding success. The employment rates and housing rates among the recipients have steadily climbed. And during the program’s yearlong run, there was a zero-percent rate of recidivism.
“Economically stable people make better neighbors. When they aren’t worried about how they’re going to pay their bills, they tend not to come through your window at night.”
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studying the program plan to have data comparing recipients’ outcomes to the control group’s outcomes in 2024. But based on early results, Durham County is now set to roll out a $750-a-month guaranteed-income pilot to 125 local families who have children at home and fall beneath 30% of the county’s annual median income. Meanwhile, Middleton has secured another $1 million in the city’s budget to continue the initiative with public dollars, which he hopes will kick off in mid-2024.
Promising as these pilot programs are, the chances of a truly universal basic income in America remain remote. For one, empirical evidence does not equal political will. UBI researchers often point to Congress’s decision not to renew the Covid-era Child Tax Credit — even though it slashed America’s monthly child poverty rate by 30% — as a measure of how difficult passing a nationwide UBI would be. The main political roadblock is its cost. A 2022 Washington Post story about UBI noted that “providing $1,000 a month to every American regardless of income” would cost more than $3 trillion a year, “nearly half the federal government’s entire budget.”
But as that same article noted, a mass of evidence suggests that “pulling people out of poverty generates a huge increase in tax revenue as well as savings on public assistance programs.” And as Jefferson noted, if new pilot programs produce the same results as what’s already been tested, they may help sway the court of public opinion yet. If still more data shows, she said, shows that guaranteed income “is reducing the need for food assistance or housing subsidies or criminal justice systems or burdens on healthcare systems, it may be something that pays for itself.”
As for Tydricka Lewis, basic income afforded her the latitude to start her own nonprofit. The New Generation Movement offers peer support to the kinds of young girls she once was — raised in poverty, often from single-parent homes, and in some cases acquainted with the carceral system. Lewis has taken them to a Durham Bulls baseball game, hosted cookouts and dance parties, and helped them create vision boards imagining their own futures.
Though she’s making more money than she ever has in her life, Lewis still struggles to make ends meet. Staying above Durham’s rising tide has proven difficult. This September, her rent on a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Durham rose from $1,486 to $1,680 a month, forcing Lewis, along with two of her children and a niece, to move in with her mother.
“We are literally being thrown out of our town, of the community where we’ve been in our whole life,” Lewis said. “But me and my family, we will escape poverty. We’re not where we need to be, but we are damn sure on our way.”
