Last October, a fire tore through the apartment complex in Stockton, California, where Laura Kidd-Plummer had lived for five years.
The possibility of issuing unconditional payments to a group of Stockton residents came up soon after Tubbs took office, in 2017, as a part of his staff’s research project on addressing poverty.
The organization was looking for a city in which to test a pilot, and gave Stockton a million-dollar grant.
A hundred recipients in the program are anonymous, while the rest, including Kidd-Plummer, have volunteered to speak publicly about their experience.
Alcohol and tobacco has accounted for less than one per cent of spending per month.