A guaranteed basic income provides a safety net in Somervile

Last month, Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne announced that the city will join 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 are trying to use every tool we can to help these families become stable,” the mayor said in an interview. Her office worked with the public schools and local social services to identify residents in need, as part of the city’s comprehensive efforts to provide financial literacy, rental vouchers and other measures to keep vulnerable Somerville residents in their homes.

Unlike food stamps, Medicaid or other forms of support for low-income people, basic income subsidies will be optional starting in July. “Poverty can be very dire,” said Ellen Shachter, Somerville Housing Stability Director. The payments are free from the red tape and complicated criteria that come with most government benefits. Shachter said the unrestricted funds say to needy families, “We trust you to make your own good decisions.”

Next year the program will be evaluated by teams from the University of Massachusetts Boston, and if the results are anything like those of at least 100 other similar experiments (including in Boston and Cambridge), families will be healthier and more stable, and the children will do better in school – all because their lives were marginally freed from the stress of poverty. Since the concept was introduced in Stockton, California, in 2019, recipients have primarily used the funds for food, household necessities, including repairs, and transportation.

The approximately $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 country’s chronic social problems. For example, thanks to pandemic relief programs that provided tax breaks and direct payments to families, child poverty fell by 76 percent in 2021, the largest decline on record. But most COVID-era aid is expiring.

And now a phalanx of Republican-led states are passing legislation or going to court to ban experiments with guaranteed basic income in their own cities, calling the programs “free money” and “socialist.” It doesn’t matter that they didn’t screech when former President Donald Trump issued $1,800 checks to eligible Americans (plus more for each child) during the pandemic. Or that reliably red Alaska pays out an average of $1,200 to each resident every year 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 go to people in need.

For those who object, a good response would be, “Count your blessings.” Being poor is a brutal, exhausting task anywhere, but especially in a high-cost state like Massachusetts. The $750 subsidies do not come close to the calculated living wage in Middlesex County, which is closer to $10,300 per month for a single adult with one child. About 35 percent of renters in Somerville spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to the mayor’s office.

In his fierce new book “Poverty, by America,” sociologist Matthew Desmond praises basic income programs but acknowledges that they don’t go far enough. “We have to go big,” he writes. “No more pushing, no more tinkering, no more underfinancing an initiative and then asking why it didn’t work.”

Maybe Somerville’s Guaranteed Basic Income pilot won’t close the yawning income gap plaguing the state. But it could provide some peace of mind for 200 families. And that’s a start.

Renée Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe.