Minimum Income

Anna Billstrom
Nov 3 · 3 min read

Walking the streets of Lund, Sweden’s Oxford, with my 4 year old son, we pass a stroller parked, unattended, outside of a café, with a sleeping infant inside. We ride our bikes all day and don’t carry a bike lock. I watch a stranger’s stroller while she darts in a bathroom. A playground hosts a dozen or so toys and play cars. Back in SF, my son’s scooter is stolen 15 minutes after left unattended at a public park. My bike was stolen after leaving it for a similar time inside his preschool. Just this week, I walked briskly with Nigerian and Ghanian visitors, stepping over urine and consciously ignoring a slightly clothed man on sleeping on the sidewalk. Visitors help me see our city as they see it. “The homelessness. It’s pretty bad.” I stutter out, addressing the obvious, but keep on topic of their careers at our burgeoning start-up.

Crime is a result of opportunity and desperation. I think most people think thieves want to steal a fancy new iPhone, when in reality they just want to eat, to fence something as fast as possible.

I sat in a jury on a man who took his AIDS medication, provided for free by the city, and immediately sold it for $200 a pill, right outside the pharmacy doors. It would pay for his monthly food and rent. He had an infant daughter, and her mother and her were waiting outside the pharmacy for the rapid-quick drug deal to transpire. According to police officers in the case, at the time that SF General provides the prescriptions each month, 500 arrests occur at the same corner where 3 participating pharmacies are located (Eddy/Jones). The police officers quickly make their arrest quotas, another symptom of the system.

The easy solution, to me, is to mimic what Stockton is doing — America’s Foreclosure Capital . This city, in the Central Valley of California, is starting a minimum basic income. Sending $500 debit cards to the most at risk families.

What people usually say when I present this idea is- we already provide services. We provide food, shelter, medicine. What I think is unsaid- either folks are too embarrassed for me to hear, but I’m pretty sure they’re thinking, is a basic lack of trust in what people will do with that money. Similar to food stamps, they want some guidelines on what to spend: not cable subscriptions and drugs. Paternalism towards the poor is nothing new. It’s basically baked into every charity, and every charitable act.

I was dramatically brought down to earth about how bad my money management skills were, during a time in my life, raising a newborn. His father is a teacher well versed in living, and being happy, in the city on a low income. I, as a software engineer in the tech bubble, did not. I was ridiculously bad at it, to be honest. To think that wealth gives you some kind of skill at handling money or making good decisions for another family, is ridiculous. Most wealthy people, I’d argue, are worse at it because they were either born into wealth, born into privilege, or otherwise their circumstance is not a result of their own doing.

Minimum income takes money out of services and gives it to people to spend as they see fit. It also, you could argue, benefits the community as it gives those people ways to spend money in their community for services they want or need. Along with universal healthcare, this could be a situation that solves everything. Theft- the act of desperate people. Opportunity theft, same thing. The man waiting for his AIDS medicine, does he need to sell it or could he always have that money for food/rent and instead take the medicine? SF’s healthcare has made our city’s solution to universal.

To those that worry about the expense: we are already spending quite a lot of money. In fact, this could lower the cost. I was in the emergency room and witnessed a woman “falling” and the orderlies told me she comes in here.. daily.. .to injure herself so she is admitted. When I see homeless people wheeling their wheelchairs into harms way I think of the falling woman- if we give these people the money themselves, it basically upends the entire paradigm of screwing the system. Stockton’s not alone- Alaska, Canada, and Oakland also have pilot projects.

Anna Billstrom

Written by

Engineer , co-founder of @pickaxemobile, bloggeuse at @banane

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