In February 2021, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or SEED, officially ended, completing a project that had given $500 monthly, with no restrictions, to 125 residents of Stockton, California, for two years. (The project was originally slated to last eighteen months but was extended due to the coronavirus pandemic.)

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Real power is what happens when people connect what they do to who they are. Many assume power comes from “outside-in.”. They believe power is granted to a person by someone else.

The results from the first year of the program were released in March, and they are promising: Recipients had improved mental health, were more economically stable, and were even more likely to find full-time work. “I sleep better,” said one SEED participant. “My mind’s not racing all the time thinking about next month’s rent.”

Preliminary, anecdotal findings from SEED had shown similar potential—and then a pandemic spiraled into an economic crisis, intensifying national interest in the project. In June 2020, then-Mayor of Stockton Michael Tubbs created a network of mayors committed to the concept of guaranteed income for their own cities. They called it Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, or MGI.

Cash with no strings attached allows people to spend money on what they decide they need—whether it’s diapers, a new washing machine, or a birthday party for their kid.

At the time of the announcement, Tubbs, who lost his re-election campaign in November, had ten other mayors on board; now there are fifty, all Democrats. Mayors in cities from Shreveport, Louisiana, and Gary, Indiana, to Montpelier, Vermont, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, have signed on, and the group is still growing. As of mid-May, more than a dozen cities had guaranteed-income pilot programs in various stages of the planning and implementation processes. (Not all mayors in the network plan to conduct a pilot.)

Of MGI-partnered cities, twenty-one have publicly announced pilots and some are currently providing benefits, many supported with initial grants from the MGI network. Several more pilots plan to launch this year, including some non-MGI pilots run by private organizations, rather than cities.

Generally, these pilots are similar to the Stockton model in that they provide small-scale cash distributions to a small sample of people; but they differ in size, cash amount, and target population. For example, Hudson, New York, is providing $500 per month to twenty-five residents, while Compton, California, is sending monthly cash payments of $300 to $600 to 800 residents and Los Angeles may send $1,000 monthly to 2,000 families for one year.

Most participants live in low-income areas, and some pilots may also target specific populations. Gainesville, Florida, is planning a pilot for the formerly incarcerated, and Richmond, Virginia, is sending cash to people who are ineligible for public benefits but still don’t make a living wage.

While media headlines have touted the projects as “universal basic income pilot” programs, they are in fact not universal, and the payments are too small to cover anybody’s basic needs. Most pilots intentionally call themselves “guaranteed income,” yet universal basic income, guaranteed income, and basic income continue to be conflated. What they do have in common, however, is that they are all unrestricted cash payments.

For some, the diverse political bases supporting unrestricted cash payments add to their appeal, with early proponents ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to Milton Friedman. President Richard Nixon attempted to pass such a program (it failed after he got spooked by advisers warning him that people would turn into profligates). Tech enthusiasts in Silicon Valley, seeking answers to the “what-about-the-robots question” (i.e., automation), have signaled their support. And feminists have long seen unrestricted cash payments as potential compensation for unpaid care labor.

Yet the lack of shared ideological consensus around unrestricted cash payments should give us pause.

Conservatives and libertarians including Friedman often favor unrestricted cash payments as a neat way to dismantle the welfare state. Instead of the bureaucracy of dozens of different public assistance programs, there’s just the one. Democratic 2020 presidential primary candidate Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividend” would have replaced the safety net for those receiving the dividend.

“Guaranteed income is a step toward alleviating economic vulnerability.”

Meanwhile, on the political left, as expanding inequality has dovetailed with wage stagnation and a decline in job opportunities, a guaranteed income is seen as something that could beef up, rather than replace, the current safety net. After all, the welfare system is so attached to work and administrative hurdles that many low-income people don’t currently receive the assistance for which they’re eligible.

The Mayors for a Guaranteed Income website greets visitors with a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr: “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” It is from his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

King had in mind a more expansive version of guaranteed income than in any of these pilots. He wanted to peg it to the median income so as not to create a floor that would “freeze into the society poverty conditions.” Still, King’s justice-focused vision is what undergirds MGI.

The network of mayors is “using guaranteed income as a tool for racial and gender equity,” says Sukhi Samra, director of MGI and director of SEED. Because so many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, Samra says a guaranteed income of roughly $500 provides “an income floor” through which people experience less income volatility and can pay for an emergency expense without facing financial ruin.

Meanwhile, she says, MGI’s pilots are building public support and the political will necessary to win a federal guaranteed income.

Sumbul Siddiqui, the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, joined MGI last October. In mid-April, Cambridge RISE (Recurring Income for Success and Empowerment) officially launched.

Cambridge is home to some of the nation’s oldest wealth, via Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and some of its newest, through biotech companies like Moderna. In the shadow of these behemoth institutions are families living in poverty.

Siddiqui grew up in public housing in Cambridge and knows from experience the value of unrestricted cash to low-income families.

“People need cash, and they know what to do with cash,” the mayor says. “We shouldn’t be dictating how [families] spend it.” Cash with no strings attached allows people to spend money on what they decide they need—whether it’s diapers, a new washing machine, or a birthday party for their kid.

Cambridge RISE will deliver $500 monthly to 120 families with children headed by a single caretaker. “Guaranteed income is a step toward alleviating economic vulnerability,” Siddiqui says in an interview. “It’s not going to solve everything.” There will still be economic and racial inequities in housing, policing, and education. But, the mayor says, “it represents one thing that we can do.”

When the pandemic rocked Saint Paul, Minnesota, and homelessness surged, tens of thousands of city residents applied for unemployment insurance. The city’s response, says Mayor Melvin Carter in an interview for this article, had to be “reciprocal to the scale and scope of the problem.”

People want to “have the knowledge and peace of mind that they could survive and eat and feed their children while they are learning how to transition into this new world.”

Under Carter,

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