Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia announced on Wednesday that the city would be providing $500 a month to eligible single parents as part of the city’s pilot Guaranteed Income Program.
The pilot program will provide a $500-per-month stipend to as many as 500 participants for one year.
The direct payments will be focused on the 90813 zip code area, which is the highest concentrated area of family poverty in Long Beach and has a median household income 25 percent lower than any other zip code in the city, according to the mayor’s statement.
The Long Beach Economic Development Department will oversee applications, which will be open in the coming months. The goal is to start distributing money by the end of 2021.
“This is a historic step for our city in prioritizing the most basic needs of our residents, and it puts Long Beach at the front of a national movement committed to ending poverty,” said Garcia.
The program is restricted to single-parent households, “mostly consisting of single mothers, with incomes below the poverty line,” said the mayor.
The application will also consider household income and hardships experienced by the COVID-19 pandemic.
On top of the monthly payment, participants will receive “free child care, transportation support, workforce training and access to resources to support digital inclusion like cell phones and internet connection.”
The mayor told the LA Times that the city would be very involved in outreach to make sure elgible residents know about the program.
“We will be going door to door. We will engage with community organizations that are already working on the ground, just to get information out as much as possible,” he said.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, too, has plans for a guaranteed income program.
Garcetti included a $24-million Basic Income Guaranteed pilot program for the city in his 2021-2022 budget.
The program would provide $1,000 a month to 2,000 local families for a year with no restrictions on how families could spend that money.
Garcetti tweeted of the pilot program in April, “We’re betting that one small but steady investment for Angeleno households will pay large dividends for health and stability across our city and light a fire across our nation.”
The Pew Research Center found that a narrow majority of Americans, 54 percent, disapproved of a universal basic income of about $1000 a month provided by the government. However, the center’s survey found stark divides along party lines with 78 percent of Republicans being opposed to and 66 percent of Democrats supporting a basic income.
Another major California city, Stockton, has already experimented with a universal basic income.
From Feb. 2019, 125 participants in the program received a monthly, no-strings-attached check of $500.
A study of a two-year guaranteed income project in Stockton found that recipients of the stipend were “healthier, showing less depression and anxiety and enhanced well-being” than those in a control group, according to the LA Times.
Recipients were also able to move into full-time jobs at almost twice the rate of the control group the paper reported.
“What we saw was that individuals were able to leverage the $500 in ways that enabled them to show up and fill out a job application — if you’re working part time and taking care of a child, there’s not a lot of time in your day,” Stacia West, an expert in social work at the University of Tennessee, told The LA Times.