- 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.
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.
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.
Oh yeah there is definitely that, too.
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.
Not sure I see a path to fees and collections after a person has left their rental, but I 150% believe that they can and will do their best to find a way.
“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.
I do absolutely agree with the right-now horror stories that you’re bringing up. Those are already in our face. Particularly the 200 sq ft apartment. In Hong Kong they have workers living/renting in literal rabbit hutches.
Still, I believe the Dark Mirror-style social credit score will come into existence. They’ve already tried it in America, it was called “Peeple” and it failed. For now. Meanwhile, across the Pacific:
If an individual has a lower social credit score, they might find their ability to purchase what they want such as high-quality goods or a new home to be restricted. They might also be prohibited from buying airline and train tickets or renting an apartment. Some people with low social credit scores can expect to be blocked from dating sites and not be able to enroll their children in a school of their choice.
A social credit score affecting your ability to rent an apartment. This is the nightmare I described. It’s happening right now at this moment in China.
We can’t ever say “that can’t happen here” when it’s already happening elsewhere. We have to be vigilant. What’s going on in China is a Beta rollout. When it gets here it’ll be smoothed out and optimized for maximum suffering.
Not sure I see a path to fees and collections after a person has left their rental
The same way you’d assign fees and collections from a credit card or an auto loan or a mortgage you’d defaulted on.
Still, I believe the Dark Mirror-style social credit score will come into existence.
Do you mean “Black Mirror” per the episode “Nosedive”? You can read that as the horrors of a social credit system, but I primarily see it as a critique of the class system with social credit as a layer of abstraction that allows it to persist. Keeping the “wrong kind of people” out of your neighborhood isn’t something we invented in the last ten years. We’ve had redlining and sundown towns for centuries.
Re: Forbes
They’ve been running this same article for 20 years. Even setting aside that it largely neglects how these systems work in practice abroad, the real horror of the story is in enforced artificial scarcity for the purpose of inflating profits. And that’s something tied up far tighter in the Western economic system than in East Asia, because Western economics is driven by financialization and artificial scarcity.
A social credit score affecting your ability to rent an apartment. This is the nightmare I described.
Its merely an alternative to the existing US model of financial credit. The “nightmare” is only real for people who enjoy high levels of disposable income/high credit but low levels of social status. And, given how social status is already a critical component of one’s economic standing, this just isn’t a large number of people.
For lay citizens, its the same gray miasma of western economic credit. A host of opaque figures and metrics that are intended to force you into a queue behind your superiors.
Past that, the far bigger issue you have is in whether your economy prioritizes housing as a place to live or housing as a place to speculatively invest. In the case of China - and the recent collapse of Evergrande is a great data point on this - the answer from the state government is that Houses Are For Living In. For all the paranoia of social credit, the real root of the problem in the Chinese economy was a multi-billion dollar real estate speculator consuming valuable property for the purpose of generating profit rather than generating new housing units.
When you transplant this into the American Economy, the real fear manifests as a speculative market bubble around housing, wherein people are justified as homeless despite ample amounts of excess housing entirely due to their social credit score rather than by their economic status. Given an already expanding US homeless population, I get how this is terrifying. But the solution in the US is to organize with your fellow tenants and resist commodification of empty homes, not to crying into the void about how people are downgrading your credit based on your Facebook profile.
