Austin becomes the primary Texas city to experiment with ‘assured income’

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Austin would be the first major Texas metropolis to use native tax dollars to give cash to low-income families to keep them housed as the price of dwelling skyrockets in the capital city.

Under a yearlong, $1 million pilot program that cleared a key Austin City Council vote Thursday, the city will ship month-to-month checks of $1,000 to 85 needy households at risk of dropping their homes — an try to insulate low-income residents from Austin’s more and more expensive housing market and forestall more people from changing into homeless.

“We will discover people moments before they end up on our streets that forestall them, divert them from being there,” Mayor Steve Adler said at a press conference Thursday morning. “That would be not only wonderful for them, it could be smart and smart for the taxpayers within the metropolis of Austin as a result of it will be quite a bit inexpensive to divert somebody from homelessness than to help them discover a residence once they’re on our streets.”

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Eight Austin City Council members voted Thursday to determine the “guaranteed earnings” pilot program and contract with a California nonprofit to run it.

Austin joins no less than 28 U.S. cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago and Pittsburgh, that have tried some type of assured income. Regionally, the concept got here out of efforts to rework how town tackles public safety in the wake of protests over police brutality in 2020.

Different Texas metro areas have experimented with guaranteed earnings packages through the pandemic. Packages in San Antonio and El Paso County have sent regular payments to low-income households utilizing a mix of federal stimulus dollars and charitable contributions. Austin is believed to have the only program fully funded by native taxpayers.

Austin officials are working out how exactly the program will work and which families will obtain the cash. Austinites who qualify received’t have restrictions on how they will spend the cash — but the concept is that they’ll use it to pay household prices like lease, utilities, transportation and groceries.

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City officers have floated some potentialities relating to who ought to qualify for help: residents who have an eviction case filed against them or have trouble paying their utility bills, in addition to people already experiencing homelessness.

Forward of Thursday’s vote, some council members voiced concerns about the relative lack of details about the program and questioned whether it was a good idea for Austin to use local tax dollars to fund the program, reasonably than letting the federal government or nonprofits take the lead.

“I imagine that we do must spend money on folks and their primary wants, but I’m undecided that that is the correct approach immediately,” council member Alison Alter mentioned at Thursday’s meeting before voting towards the measure.

Brion Oaks, the city’s chief fairness officer, instructed city officers in a memo that the Urban Institute, a nonprofit think tank primarily based in Washington, D.C., will help measure the program’s impression by factors like individuals’ financial stability, stress levels and total wellness over the course of receiving the funds.

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Preliminary findings from a similar pilot program confirmed some promising outcomes. UpTogether, the California nonprofit that will run the Austin program, ran a separate guaranteed earnings program funded by private dollars in Austin and Georgetown that led to March, the nonprofit mentioned in an announcement Thursday. That program gave 173 families $1,000 a month for a year, and the nonprofit said contributors used the money for bills like lease and mortgage payments, child care, gas and groceries.

Some have been able to boost their savings, more than half of recipients slashed their debt by 75% and greater than a 3rd eliminated their household debt, the nonprofit mentioned.

According to Austin’s Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, town has more than 3,100 individuals experiencing homelessness. An area ban on most evictions through the pandemic stored the number of eviction case fillings low in contrast with other main Texas cities, but that quantity has exploded since the ban ended final year.

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Assured income could also be one technique to put a dent in these problems, proponents stated.

“This is about preventing displacement, preventing eviction and guaranteeing that our families are able to keep in their home, that we now have that stability,” council member Vanessa Fuentes stated.

Disclosure: Steve Adler, a former Texas Tribune board chair, has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news group that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Monetary supporters play no role within the Tribune’s journalism. Discover a full checklist of them here.

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Clarification, May 6, 2022: This story has been updated to reflect that Austin is the first Texas metropolis to use local tax dollars for a “guaranteed earnings” program, and that other Texas cities have experimented with comparable programs using different forms of funding.