By some measures, Massachusetts has the dismal distinction of being the most expensive state in the country in which to live and raise a family. We all know the litany: the cost of housing, health care, utilities, and child care is too damn high. Even a subsistence living wage — with nothing left over for savings or the smallest luxuries — is beyond the reach of many families. In 2023, family homelessness in Massachusetts increased 29 percent over the previous year, one of the largest spikes in the nation. All of the opulent condo developments and lavish spending so evident in Boston’s more gilded precincts obscure the fact that tens of thousands of people in Massachusetts can’t afford the basics to live.
Now a pilot program has come to Somerville with a profoundly simple idea: The cure for not having enough money is money.
Last month Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne announced that the city will be joining a coalition of cities experimenting with a guaranteed basic income by giving 200 families at risk of homelessness $750 a month for a year. “We’re trying to use any tool possible to help these families become stable,” the mayor said in an interview. Her office worked with the public schools and local social service agencies to identify the residents in need, part of the city’s comprehensive effort to offer financial literacy, rental vouchers, and other measures to keep vulnerable Somerville residents in their homes.
Unlike food stamps, Medicaid, or other supports for people with low incomes, the basic income grants, beginning in July, will come with no strings attached. “Poverty can be really grinding,” said Ellen Shachter, Somerville’s director of Housing Stability. The payments are free from the bureaucratic hoops and complicated criteria that come with most government benefits. Shachter said the unrestricted funds tell needy families: “We trust you to make your own good decisions.”
Next year, the program will be evaluated by teams at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and if the results are anything like at least 100 other similar experiments (including in Boston and Cambridge), the families will be healthier and more stable, and the children will be doing better in school — all because their lives were marginally relieved from the stresses of poverty. Since the concept was pioneered in 2019 in Stockton, Calif., recipients have mostly used the money for food, household essentials including repairs, and transportation.
The roughly $2 million for the Somerville experiment comes from the American Rescue Plan Act, which President Biden signed in early 2021. One of the underappreciated lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is that we actually know how to address the nation’s chronic social ills. Thanks to pandemic relief programs that gave tax credits and direct payments to families, for just one example, child poverty dropped by 76 percent in 2021, the largest decrease on record. But most of the COVID-era supports are expiring.
And now a phalanx of Republican-led states is passing legislation or going to court to bar guaranteed basic income experiments in their own cities, calling the programs “free money” and “socialist.” Never mind that they didn’t squawk when former president Donald Trump issued $1,800 checks to eligible Americans during the pandemic (plus more for each child). Or that reliably red Alaska distributes an average of $1,200 each year to each resident as part of a permanent oil profits fund. What these states really object to is not that the government is handing out free money but that the money will be targeted to people in need.
To those objecting, a good reply would be “Count your blessings.” Being poor is a relentless, exhausting job anywhere, but especially in a high-cost state like Massachusetts. The $750 grants don’t come close to the calculated living wage in Middlesex County, which for a single adult with one child is closer to $10,300 a month. According to the mayor’s office, roughly 35 percent of Somerville renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.
In his fierce new book, “Poverty, by America,” sociologist Matthew Desmond praises basic income programs but recognizes they don’t go far enough. “We should go big,” he writes. “No more nudges, no more tinkering, no more underfunding an initiative and then asking why it didn’t work.”
Maybe the guaranteed basic income pilot in Somerville can’t close the yawning income gaps that plague the state. But it can buy a little peace of mind for 200 families. And that’s a start.
Renée Loth is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.