Leaders of other cities told him that instead of displacing existing residents, they would work harder to keep them in place as rents and property values increased. Duggan returned to Detroit and worked to help carry out an ordinance requiring developers who buy discounted city-owned land or receive a certain level of municipal support to include a minimum of 20 percent of permanent affordable-housing units in their buildings.
He adopted a philosophy that stops short of the “chicken in every pot” pledge attributed to Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign. But he and Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, and Michael Tubbs, the mayor of Stockton, California, agreed that a healthy city must help its lower-income citizens, instead of simply ignoring the poverty in its midst.
Wylde said that Amazon was bringing 150,000 jobs to New York because the city’s universities had worked hard to develop skills within the city’s workforce.
“They are not coming because of the incentives we offered,” she said. “They’re coming for talent; they need a talent pipeline that is very big and that they can tap.”
Duggan also required developers who received subsidies to ensure that 51 percent of their employees were Detroit residents. Those who did not meet that requirement paid a penalty that went into a fund to help train local residents to be plumbers, carpenters and electricians.
In four years, developers who had started out with 6 percent local residents have risen to about 30 percent, he said.
When Tubbs took office, he talked to his staff about Stockton’s high poverty rates — 22 percent of its residents were under the poverty line in 2017. “The crux of all our issues is poverty,” he told staff members. “Let’s find the most radical intervention for poverty. Give me a policy.”
After extensive research, his staff came back and told him, “Give out a basic income; give people money.”
At first, they had conversations about “the dignity of work,” Tubbs said. “Work has dignity,” he said. But he added that it was “inherently undignified” for people working 14 hours a day or driving lengthy Uber shifts to try to pay their bills.
Starting early next year, the Economic Security Project, a private foundation, will pay a group of Stockton residents $500 a month for 18 months, with no strings attached. It is part of an experiment to determine how people use money, Tubbs said.
“I started out as a skeptic,” he said. “But now I’m 100 percent resolved. Folks need an economic floor, at least to build on.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.