LA could bring back its guaranteed basic income program

The results of the city of Los Angeles’ 12-month guaranteed income pilot program are here, more than a year after 3,202 low-income people received their last payment with no strings attached.

Researchers touted an increasing sense of financial well-being, parents spending more time with their children, and lower levels of psychological and sexual abuse as city officials promised a push to expand the program.

Each participant was given $1,000 each month, for a total of $12,000 over the course of a year, to use however they wanted as part of the “Basic Income Guaranteed: Los Angeles Economic Assistance Pilot program,” otherwise known as BIG:LEAP.

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And Councilmember Curren Price, who led the effort in L.A., said the data speaks for itself — researchers found positive trends in food security, sense of community, and reducing intimate partner violence and fear of community violence.

“But we witnessed transformation in the participants that went beyond data,” Price said at a news conference outside City Hall on Tuesday. “It also empowered participants to start businesses, to move into their own homes, and to reclaim their hope from despair.”

About the people in the program

The goal of the program was to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty, according to the research report, and more than 50,000 people applied in just 10 days.

The selected participants were in deep poverty and “teetering on the edge” of losing housing, struggling to pay their bills, and battling to meet their most basic needs, the researchers noted.

The average age of people in the program was 37 years old, almost every household had children, and 80% were women.

Nearly half identified as either Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish, a little more than a quarter identified as Black, 15% white, and about 3% identified as Asian.

The average annual household income was a little more than $14,200, and 71% of people in the program received SNAP/CalFresh benefits.

A map of the city of L.A. with the number of program participants in each council district.

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BIG:LEAP Research Report

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The highest number of participants were in Price’s 9th district, which includes Exposition Park and South Central, followed by Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s 8th district and Imelda Padilla’s 6th district.

What the research shows

Researchers from USC, UCLA, and the Center for Guaranteed Income Research found that people in the program immediately prioritized savings after describing a sense of stress that “this was their one and only shot at stability in an extremely unaffordable city.”

Bo-Kyung Elizabeth Kim, an associate professor at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health and one of the authors of the report, said they saw a positive impact on the financial well-being of people in the program, including their ability to pay off a $400 emergency expense.

“Families with children have a really difficult time covering these emergency expenses, and we saw that people who received guaranteed income in the city of Los Angeles were significantly more likely to be able to cover this cost,” she said.

About 10% of people said they would be able to cover an emergency expense before the payments, which grew to about 15% by the time the program ended.

Poverty and food insecurity go hand in hand in Los Angeles County, according to the report, with 44% of low-income people struggling to put dinner on the table last year. But Kim noted they saw significant strides among those receiving guaranteed income.

With L.A. being one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, housing security was another major consideration. Nearly half of the people in the program spent more than 70% of their monthly income on housing expenses.

But they were able to hold onto housing and put the payments toward rent, which the researchers said worked to prevent homelessness for some people who had been falling through the cracks.

The monthly payments also became a tool for escaping and healing from unsafe relationships or intimate partner violence, which includes stalking, psychological aggression, sexual and physical violence. More than half of the people in the program reported psychological abuse from intimate partners in the past year, with 30% reporting physical abuse.

Some used the money to escape unsafe living situations and avoid returning to an abusive environment. The researchers noted that “healing took place physically and emotionally,” including through prioritizing therapy and reconstructive surgery.

Plus, Kim noted that people were becoming better parents throughout the program.

“They were able to spend more time with their kids,” she said. “They were able to provide more quality attention to the kids, and especially in the quantitative findings, we saw a significant increase in participants more willing to put kids in child enrichment activities, extracurricular activities, sports, and whatnot.”

What people in the program say

Ashley Davis, a 37-year-old single mom to an 8-year-old son, told LAist the BIG:LEAP program helped her financially, mentally, and physically. 

She said she used to be stuck in a routine of constantly worrying about bills and covering car repairs, but the monthly payments gave her some much-needed breathing room.

“Essentially, a lot of the stress that I had been dealing with, it was being alleviated by that extra income,” she said.

Davis had developed gastroesophageal reflux disease, otherwise known as GERD, and her doctor was considering putting her on heart medication, so one of the first things she bought was a juicer and healthier food options.

She started to take walks, because “walks are free,” and signed her son up for an indoor playground that allows them to chase each other around in a safe and secluded space.

Then she realized she wasn’t able to celebrate her son’s recent birthday, so she ended up getting passes to Legoland, and the payments helped Davis take Sundays off her cosmetology job.

“Instead of me working pretty much every day of the week, I now had an off day to go spend time with him,” she said.

Davis also started feeling better about her future, and she ended up enrolling in nursing school. The program paid for the books while she “knocked out all the classes with straight A's.”

Overall, she said the money helped cover a lot of basic bills their household needed to stay afloat. Davis is now looking forward to finishing school and acing her exams, but she’s still taking it one day at a time.

“The situation was just wonderful,” she said. “I didn't even realize like you're basically being helped out of struggle mode or focusing on when is your paycheck going to come.”

What’s next

Price said they can’t stop here with “full momentum,” and that’s why he’s introduced a motion to launch another $4 to $5 million guaranteed basic income program, along with Councilmembers Harris-Dawson and Hugo Soto-Martínez.

If approved, he said this program would specifically target people experiencing intimate partner violence, domestic violence, and transitional age youth, which are young people aging out of foster care of juvenile justice systems.

Price added that he’ll allocate $1 million of his district’s discretionary funds to go towards people experiencing homelessness.

“We will move forward, we will guarantee income,” he said. “That's been proven to break cycles of poverty and housing insecurity, and these are issues that have plagued our region for decades, and now we have research to show that it can be alleviated.”