- A guaranteed-basic-income program in Austin gave people $1,000 a month for a year.
- Most of the participants spent the no-strings-attached cash on housing, a study found.
- Participants who said they could afford a balanced meal also increased by 17%.
A guaranteed-basic-income plan in one of Texas’ largest cities reduced rates of housing insecurity. But some Texas lawmakers are not happy.
Austin was the first city in Texas to launch a tax-payer-funded guaranteed-income program when the Austin Guaranteed Income Pilot kicked off in May 2022. The program served 135 low-income families, each receiving $1,000 monthly. Funding for 85 families came from the City of Austin, while philanthropic donations funded the other 50.
The program was billed as a means to boost people out of poverty and help them afford housing. “We know that if we trust people to make the right decisions for themselves and their families, it leads to better outcomes,” the city says on its website. “It leads to better jobs, increased savings, food security, housing security.”
While the program ended in August 2023, a new study from the Urban Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank, found that the city’s program did, in fact, help its participants pay for housing and food. On average, program participants reported spending more than half of the cash they received on housing, the report said.
Greetings from the average American family 20 minutes in your future:
Rents have gotten so expensive now that national bidding companies have arisen to address the crisis. Now renters can decide their own prices by bid-scoring on property and rental housing. Average monetary bid on housing in Austin is $5000 for a bachelor’s pad but the money is only part of the bid-score. It also includes the usual credit rating and income reporting, but also your social media connections, the stability of your job (calculated by opaque market analysis firms), letters of recommendation from your employer, friends and family, and your overall “social credit” score (how many people give you 5-stars on every day interactions?).
This actually turned out to be an incredible democratization of housing! Landlords no longer control rents! We now have 1.2 million homeless in America but hey that’s their faults for being poor, working jobs vulnerable to automation and offshoring, and especially the shut-ins, glad to see we’re flushing them out and forcing them to socialize and be popular, or get thrown into the streets!
I love this country!
Chapter 1 from “Not Your Parents’ Dystopia”, coming to your reality soon!
It also includes the usual credit rating and income reporting, but also your social media connections, the stability of your job (calculated by opaque market analysis firms), letters of recommendation from your employer, friends and family, and your overall “social credit” score (how many people give you 5-stars on every day interactions?).
If you could put up $5k for a permanent address in an apartment complex and all you had to do was stay the fuck off social media so as not to embarrass yourself, do you really think that would be… dystopian? All the rest of that stuff already factors into getting an apartment spot. I needed a referral for my first apartment and proof of a steady job and a good “credit score” accrued through regular credit card payments. I consider an enormous monetary incentive to steer clear of flame wars on Facebook more of a fringe benefit than a nightmare.
The dystopian horror I see coming is is if you have no social media, you have no online reputation to boost your standing / social credit score. The landlord sees you as anti-social and will dock your rental bid score bigly for that. After all you might be anti-social and that Karen/Daren landlord doesn’t want that! (Yes, asshole dirtbag logic in general is endemic to Capitalism.)
The 2nd dial-to-11 factor of my prediction is not that you need a steady job - it’s that if (for instance) you work as a screenwriter with 10 years of rock solid employment, you just took a huge hit to your “rental bid score” because in this dystopian scenario the landlord’s arbitrary algorithm has decided that automation/AI is threatening to make your job redundant in the near future (whether or not this is true). Plus said algorithm is opaque and unknowable so you will have no idea why it rejected you… kinda like job applicants of today.
Also today you need one or two referrals from your landlords and maybe also a family member. In the dystopian future I see coming, the more friends and bosses and such that you have to vouch for you, the higher your rental bid score will be. References from two landlords and a family member are trumped by refs from 3 landlords, your coworkers, your boss, and your family.
Overall? What I see coming is landlords will use unaccountable algorithms which want to know every tiny thing about you and they will tweak that algorithm in unknowable ways to judge your fitness as a renter using 29 (or more) additional dimensions than they do now. Most of the time they’ll use it to sell your personal information and have no intent of renting the place out at all. We’re sliding in that general direction now with rental scams driven by the actual landlords. Plus on top of that there absolutely will be a brutally insidious “set your own rental price” encouraging rental applicants to bid to the moon.
I expect most who read this to say this is out of this world sci-fi overexaggeration. Our grandkids will call it reality. Rental bidding is already here on a small scale. The thin end of the wedge is already in the door.
The dystopian horror I see coming is is if you have no social media, you have no online reputation to boost your standing / social credit score.
Given the state of modern social media and the slap dash approach that most landlords take in accrediting future tenants, I don’t see how this is meaningfully different from a back office that runs your regular old credit score and rejects your application because you don’t have enough debt to your name.
Like, that’s the real modern-day standing. Do you use your credit card? Do you have student loans? Do you have a car note? Can you pay them on time? Everything outside of that (possibly with the exception of “Does your race/religion/sexuality/appearance upset my high rollers?”) is unimportant.
the landlord’s arbitrary algorithm has decided that automation/AI is threatening to make your job redundant in the near future
I think this is presuming a heavily overengineered model that fixates on things other than “How high can I raise your rent right now?” So long as eviction laws are loose enough, there are plenty of landlords who will find ways to make money by simply withholding your deposits and evicting you on short notice. What’s more, there’s been a growing trend of predator application processes, wherein landlords charge a vig to even consider you for their residence and make money keeping spots open indefinitely as bait.
In that sense, it doesn’t matter who you are or what your future prospects are. All the landlord cares about is how much you can be milked for right now.
I expect most who read this to say this is out of this world sci-fi overexaggeration
I think it overstates how these businesses plan ahead and underweights how much they’ll try to stick a prospective tenant right up front.
If we want to get really sci-fi horror, I more see a future in which landlords find a way of sticking tenants with fees and collections long after that person has left the unit. Also, the increased slum-ification of existing housing, as big corporate landlords cut further and further back on maintenance.
“Living in the pods” is the real sci-fi nightmare. Paying thousands a month to effectively lease a bunk in a contract that affords a landlord direct access to all your incomes and assets indefinitely. That’s the horror story I’m more worried about than anything.
