The “universal basic income” has a new neighbor.
A team of researchers, including Kinder Institute for Urban Research co-founder Michael Emerson, have coined a new framework known as the “universal basic neighborhood,” which establishes minimum standards for ensuring residents can live a healthy life.
The model details 35 health-related metrics and baseline standards across four domains — environment, housing quality, social support and transportation — that are scientifically linked to a target benchmark: average life expectancy of 80 years old. In Harris County, the neighborhood-level life expectancy ranges from the mid-60s to late 80s, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis.
For Emerson, who now serves as a fellow in religion and policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, the universal basic neighborhood theory provides a consistent road map for communities working to improve local conditions. While many municipalities across the country develop neighborhood-level plans — including Houston, with its Complete Communities initiative — few of them are rooted in scientific research tying specific health metrics to a target result.
The challenge now, Emerson said, is getting local leaders on board with the framework.
“We can easily say ‘here's the solution,’ and that doesn't mean it will happen or even come close to happening. You have different departments, you have different egos, you have politics,” Emerson said. “For this to really happen, you do need grassroots movements demanding it, asking for it, requesting it, marching for it if they need to.”
In an interview with Urban Edge, Emerson detailed the promise of the universal basic neighborhood theory, how to turn it into action, and the decision to brand it alongside the better-known but politically charged universal basic income model. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
What was the genesis of the idea for a universal basic neighborhood?
There are 54 nations at a minimum in the world that have longer life expectancies than us. Fifty-four. We spend inordinate amounts on our health care. But when we're ranked against other places, we come in dead last for inefficiencies in the amount of money we spend and the outcomes we get. And the reason is we're so hyper-individually focused. And we're ignoring what's happening in our neighborhoods that impacts us.
So the idea was, we want to have something that focuses on the social aspect of health, and that's at a level at which people actually live their lives. We spend a lot of time arguing for why it is a neighborhood and not some other level. And you don't have to have every neighborhood be River Oaks. You need a basic minimum level. That becomes very doable when you think of it in (those) terms, instead of just everybody's trying to be a River Oaks. We don't want that. We don't need that.
So for you and your team, what did you ultimately hope to accomplish with the creation of the universal basic neighborhood framework?
We want to start a discussion and try to change the focus for cities about caring about the health of all their citizens. That's why we spend a lot of time in this paper providing an actual legal template. We had an attorney, a law professor on our team, and that's what she spent her entire time on the project doing. And so we lay it out very clearly how it can be done.
Many municipalities have some kind of initiative that's designed to improve quality of life and health at a neighborhood level. Houston has Complete Communities. Louisville, where you base this work, had Neighborhood Transformation Plans.
What does the universal basic neighborhood framework do that these other initiatives maybe don't?
One, it says you can tie actual health outcomes to all of those kinds of plans. Two, it specifies specifically what are the actual metrics that you need to be keeping track of. We combed the world's research on what matters in neighborhoods for impacting and raising people's health and longevity. So we're providing that for people. And then how you tailor it, you can't have a one size fits all. One of my critiques of Complete Communities would be that. It's got a general idea of “here's what every neighborhood needs,” so we need to do that. … Every neighborhood's different, every neighborhood has its own culture, its own background, different people. So you've got to be able to tailor it.
So we're also trying to show that by tailoring it to each community, you're getting a better impact to ultimately help outcomes.
How do you precisely tailor? Is it in terms of the metrics that you're evaluating? Is it the cutoffs for where you meet the threshold of a basic minimum?
Yes and no, right? The cutoffs we use, the thresholds, the measures are going to vary across states, across communities. So you're looking at, what are the average outcomes? How can we improve upon those within each area? Kentucky is very different than Texas, for example.
But each neighborhood has its own culture. We talk very much about, no matter what neighbor you are — very wealthy, very poor — every neighborhood has assets, every neighborhood has liability. So you're trying to minimize liabilities and increase the strength of the assets. We did a neighborhood that's so poorly off, it's in the bottom 1% of all census tracks in the nation in terms of life expectancy. People die extremely early there. But it has incredible assets. Very tight-knit community, where people support each other. So we're saying you can build on that. It's extremely important to build on whatever assets are already there.
One thing that I could see that would be interesting here is the consistency of the framework. Because I imagine if you look at what Houston does in this space, compared to Louisville, compared to any other city, they may kind of follow similar ideas, but I assume everyone is kind of doing things a little bit differently, their own way.
Is consistency part of the benefit of this if it were to be adopted on a wider scale?
Yeah, absolutely. And it gives you very clear guidelines. Let's go back to Complete Communities. If you read about it, it sounds wonderful and they have some ideas of what they're doing, but there's no real clear target. What's the end goal? It's kind of a vague thing. We're very clear. The end goal is that every single neighborhood in your community, your city, the people will live on average 80 years or more. If they don't, you have work to do. That is as clear and precise as it gets.
Municipalities are often governed by siloed departments. Public works, parks, health, housing, transportation, the things that you talk about in the universal basic neighborhood framework. And they don't often work really well with each other.
What do you see as the governance structures that a city needs to actually implement this?
If you say as a city, “we will have every neighborhood with a life expectancy of 80 years or more,” then it is absolutely imperative that, despite all those silos, they have to figure out how to work together to get to that target.
I often think about (how) in the military, when they decided we don't have the diversity of people we need in leadership, they started penalizing leaders who weren't able to train and prepare and promote people of different racial backgrounds. And if they weren't able to do that, they weren't allowed to give an excuse. They lost their jobs or they were demoted. We actually have to do the same thing. Each city needs to hold itself accountable to this. …
Are there cities or governing bodies that you've seen that have that kind of strong structure? And what made them so strong?
Delaware and the cities within Delaware, because they made it a state-level impetus, to strengthen the actual legal requirement of it. So they put legal force behind it. What Delaware did specifically was they legislated a greater legal authority for comprehensive plans, so that you can't just have a comprehensive plan and then not carry it through. You have to carry it through. So that's an important thing to have happen. And of course, you have to have an evaluation process. “We're falling short here. Why?” And figure it out.
The best ones are not in the United States. When I was part of the Kinder Institute, as part of research, I moved to Copenhagen, Denmark. And one of the things that stood out to me so much was everything was neighborhood-based. Every neighborhood had a council, every neighborhood put forth what they were hoping for for their community. The city government collated all of that, and then they measured themselves always on the performance of meeting neighborhood needs. So, for example, crime. They just won't allow there to be more crime in one neighborhood than another. If so, they have fallen short. They have to figure out a way or they don't get reelected. The U.S. is so individually based, we don't really have good examples in the U.S. yet, but we're getting there. Even Louisville itself has tried.
The “universal basic” moniker has kind of most commonly been associated with universal basic income, which is politically popular in more progressive circles but politically toxic among many conservatives.
Why did you pick this name? What are the positives that you see of it? And what are the things you have to overcome to persuade people who may associate it with something political that they don't agree with?
Obviously, universal basic income is controversial. We chose it for a couple reasons. One, because it's an existing concept that can get people's reactions right away. Even though we know it's an emotionally charged term, it at least gets people immediately thinking about what that is.
Second is, we aren't talking about equality between individuals. We're talking about equality between neighborhoods. And we are making an argument, “this is less controversial.” Every citizen, every neighborhood deserves to get clean drinking water. Every neighbor deserves to have some parks. We've kind of come to accept those things, to some level, even though we don't agree that every individual should get certain things. So we're trying to take advantage of that and to emphasize the social aspect and get away from the individual.
