LA Board Of Supervisors Approves Expansion Of UBI Program

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved an expansion to it’s “Breathe” universal basic income pilot program on Tuesday, despite a growing number of failing UBI programs statewide.

Guaranteed income/universal basic income (UBI) programs have continued to pop up more and more across the state since the late 2010’s, with programs giving individuals a certain amount of money each month for around 1-2 years. To date, UBI programs have been in Stockton, Sacramento, Compton, Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Some cities, including Francisco, have had multiple short term UBI programs, affecting different groups of people found to have been struggling to make ends meet as a whole. All of the programs have been monitored to some extent, as city governments have wanted to see if the programs even work, and what the pros and cons are in the projects.

In the midst of all these programs have been a high number of failures or simple non-renewals. Most UBI programs have never gotten past the ‘pilot program’ stage, either because of low public support, programs not fitting in with leaner city/county budgets, lawsuits against the programs, or researchers finding that the programs simply did not work. Even the state of California, who gave $25 million to UBI programs in 2022, has pulled back, largely in part of the state budget crisis. Just last month, San Francisco’s GIFT program, one of the most well known UBI programs in the state, abruptly ended because of both budget cuts and lawsuits.

Despite this, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors gave a green light for expansion of the Breathe UBI program on Tuesday. The Breathe program began in 2022 like most UBI programs, with monthly funds specifically going towards 1,000 residents “in-need”. Last year, the program was expanded to include 200 more people, this time former foster care youth who just left the system. Even as the program isn’t exactly popular in the county, the Board expanded it again on Tuesday to include around  2,000 non-minor dependents in the foster care system – over doubling the size of the program.

“While Breathe’s initial expansion supports 200 former foster youth, the continued support of transitioning foster youth can provide essential financial stability during such a critical and pivotal time in their lives where data has demonstrated the risks youth exiting care face, including homelessness to justice system involvement,” said Supervisor Holly Mitchell of the Breathe program.

Breathe expansion

While Breathe isn’t the County’s only UBI program looking at expansion, with other ones aimed at foster youth and other groups currently looking at expansions in the millions of dollars, it could soon become more targeted for lawsuits. Legal experts told the Globe on Wednesday that some groups may be looking at programs like Breathe soon and finding out demographic information to see what laws they may be breaking.

“LA’s UBI programs are not as blatant as San Francisco’s when it comes to targeting certain groups of people,” explained lawyer Antonio Calderon to the Globe on Wednesday. “LA, as well as other areas, have been targeting low-income, abused mothers, and those in and recently out of foster care. Generally areas people can support. But what it will really boil down to is what the demographics look like. What percentage is it Hispanic? What percentage black? What percentage white? What percentage Asian? Any huge discrepancy, especially when matched against county statistics, then you can have a case that something is wrong there.

“The difference is is that San Francisco blatantly said it was going for certain demographics, and made the legal case much easier. Here? It’s not so clear cut, especially if the percentages of foster care recipients matches what the county statistics are for them. But you can be sure people are looking very closely at every program and every expansion. A lot of people are not in favor of these programs because of how they disperse taxpayer money.”

More on UBI expansions and possible legal action is to come out soon.