By Linnea Feldman Emison, The New Yorker, July 15, 2020
Last October, a fire tore through the apartment complex in Stockton, California, where Laura Kidd-Plummer had lived for five years. Nearly a decade earlier, Kidd-Plummer, who will turn seventy this year, had retired from her job in the wardrobe department at the Oakland Coliseum, where she had worked for twenty-one years. She eventually moved to Stockton in search of cheaper rent. After the fire, she and her dog, Poopee, a Pomeranian-Yorkie mix, were left homeless. Ever since, she told me, “I’m just trying to keep my head above water.” She stayed in a motel for a couple of months, which was covered by insurance, and then with acquaintances. In May, she moved into a loft in North Stockton. She was able to make the deposit on the apartment using funds she has received as a participant in the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or seed, a basic-income pilot program that has provided unconditional cash transfers of five hundred dollars per month to individuals over the last year and a half. Before seed, Kidd-Plummer “had credit cards and had to use them to eat,” she said, because she was only eligible for sixteen dollars per month through food stamps. Now she’s able to cover food. “I’ve always worked, so most programs I’m not eligible for,” she told me. “I didn’t expect to be chosen. When I got the letter in the mail, I was floored.”
Tubbs, who is twenty-nine, is Stockton’s first Black mayor, and its youngest ever. After four years serving on the city council, he ran for mayor on a platform focussed on recovery from the 2008 crash, and was elected, in 2016, with seventy per cent of the vote, defeating an incumbent plagued by a string of scandals. seed has relied on significant outside funding, as have several other projects that Tubbs has pursued, including an education initiative that has been run on a twenty-million-dollar private donation. Tubbs first encountered the concept of a universal basic income, or U.B.I., while he was an undergraduate at Stanford, in 2009, in a course that covered Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s advocacy for the idea late in his life. The possibility of issuing unconditional payments to a group of Stockton residents came up soon after Tubbs took office, in 2017, as a part of his staff’s research project on addressing poverty. Twenty per cent of Stockton’s residents fall below the poverty line, which is well above the state average, and residents of color are disproportionately affected. Still, Tubbs was initially skeptical—he worried about funding and thought that the idea could prove unpopular with voters. “This was my first time being elected,” he told me. “I didn’t want it to be my last.”
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