Cities
"You Do Not Have Health Insurance"
Published August 09, 2009 @ 09:06AM PT
There's a great post up at The Baseline Scenario concerning the diffuse worry that healthcare reform will negatively impact those with health insurance in the US. It basically eviscerates the lie that "employer-subsidized health care for the duration of your employment" is health insurance: "as long as your health insurance depends on your job, your health is only insured insofar as your job is insured – and your job isn’t insured."
Unlike NycWeboy, who believes no one is paying attention to the needs to reform Medicaid for better coverage and care of the poor, James at TBS thinks "people remain convinced that health care reform is for poor people. [But] It’s for everyone – everyone, that is, who isn’t independently wealthy or over the age of 65. Because all of us could lose our jobs."
FYI: Medicare = health insurance.
More great links to while away your Sunday afternoon after the jump.
Modeling Harlem Children's Zone
Published August 08, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
I'm sort of putting this post up today as a reminder to myself to come back to it - it's a WaPo profile of Harlem Children's Zone, Geoffrey Canada's unique, high-intensity community & human development organization that President Obama sees as an anti-poverty and neighborhood development model.
This is the starting point for the Harlem Children's Zone: the womb. Geoffrey Canada's nonprofit has created a web of programs that begin before birth, end with college graduation and reach almost every child growing up in 97 blocks carved out of the struggling central Harlem neighborhood.
Folks over at PostBourgie are discussing a recent biography of Canada and HCZ. And I've mentioned HCZ in passing a couple times around this blog.
What do you think of this program? What's not to like? Anything?
Should We Encourage Low-Income Homeownership?
Published August 07, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Sociologist Dalton Conley argues yes, and now especially, given the affordability of a bottomed out market:
"the solution to our troubles is not to restrict homeownership, but to expand it...owning a home can be one of the best ways for a poor family to save and accumulate assets: recent history aside, the value of a house does typically rise, and its owner avoids paying rent and gets a tax break."
I've gotta be honest with you, I'm extremely wary of this argument. At a most base level, and this shows you how far I've moved back to the left since entering MIT in 2004, when I would have supported Conley's argument 100%, there's an argument to be made for providing more affordable, safe, rental housing as a basic good in society, not just as a sorry, second-class substitute for homeownership. And it's the argument for rental housing that seems especially timely to me. Secondly, homeownership has a lot of additional costs beyond renting, that without a better all round safety net to gird low-income homeowners, I fear would undermine the assumed economic security and gain homeownership offers.
A New Approach to the Old Food Bank Model
Published August 06, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Visiting the local food bank has always been viewed as somewhat of an impersonal experience chalk full of long lines, barren walls and sunken faces. You show up, wait your turn and then, if you're lucky, receive a few grocery bags full of post-expiration goods.
It is this routine that sometimes causes people to avoid taking advantage of a food bank's services, even if they desperately need them.
Sasha Abramky, in his book Breadline USA (which I've referenced before), visits a food pantry in Sacramento, California and offers this reflection:
I stopped at the table with whittled-down pencils and short charity request forms to fill in. Once inside, I made a U-turn, going back down the interior side of the brick wall that I had just advanced along from the outside. To my left was a painted wall with a sheet of metal, etched with years of graffiti; to my right, dull white-and-blue painted bricks...This wasn't a supermarket without cash registers, a consumer place of choice, of lifestyles realized. It was, I felt, rather a place for the spreading of tuberculosis or the flu, as well as every other germ, real and imagined; it was truly a last-stop hotel, a room where dignity came to die.
It was probably the desire to move away from such an institutional setting that pushed the University District Food Bank (UDFB) in Seattle to develop a new way for clients to get their hands on much-needed food.
States of Disarray... Out in The Woods
Published August 05, 2009 @ 11:15AM PT
I've been on a little vacation the past week or so, the kind of vacation my family excels at: a little 
relaxation, a lot of political discussion.
As the trip got underway, Mom and I shared a moment of dismay and horror over this story in the New York Times, illustrating the problems many states are having financially (in this case, Alabama):
It is hardly unusual these days for a government building to forgo a fresh paint job or regular lawn care to cut costs. But last week, the director of the Jefferson County public nursing home was told that the county could no longer afford to bury indigent patients.
Across town at the juvenile detention center, the man in charge was trying to figure out how to feed the 28 children in his custody when the entire cafeteria staff is let go. The tax collector warned local school districts to expect a six-month delay to get their share of property taxes. In family court, administrators plan to delay child support, custody and child abuse cases, leaving some children in the hands of the state indefinitely....
“Outside of the city of Detroit,” said Robert A. Kurrter, a managing director with Moody’s Investors Service, “it’s fair to say we haven’t seen any place in America with the severity of problems that they’re experiencing in Jefferson County.” Moody’s rates Jefferson County’s credit lower than any other municipality in the country.
Evicting a Dying Woman?
Published August 05, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
Is this what our affordable housing policy has come to?
I am sure stories like this happen nationwide, all the time. It's part of the problem of funneling people's lives through large bureacracies. But good beaureacratic systems have people on the front lines who can trigger pauses and detours here and there through the system, so as to prevent this kind of travesty - courtesy of my radical activist networks in New Orleans:
On Friday Arlene Craft, a terminally ill Katrina Survivor, received a notice of eviction from her apartment on Touro Street in New Orleans. The eviction notice came despite promises from HANO ,dating as far back as March, that the housing authority would provide housing voucher assistance to help Arlene pay her rent. The assistance has yet to come. Arlene, at last count, owes her landlord $2,000 in back rent. The only source of income that she is receiving is a $579 a month Social Security check. Too add insult to injury HANO is threatening to pull Arlene from its housing voucher program on August 15th even though she has yet to receive even a penny in housing assistance.
Read on for the rest. If you live in the NOLA region, there's a press conference today at 2pm at 2651 Touro St. You can email Mike, the main organizer, at howellnow at bellsouth dot net to learn more about how you can help.
Remember that just last week the UN arrived in New Orleans to investigate the government's trend of forced evictions since Hurricane Katrina. I should have more on their findings as they become available.
More eviction coverage at PiA is here.
(Photo from the LA Public Library collection of the eviction of Aurora Vargas from Chavez Ravine. "Last eviction, 1959. Plans for the housing project were thrown to the winds in favor of Dodger Stadium.")
Saving Middle-Class Kids at the Expense of the Poor
Published August 04, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Ok, this blog post is going to be totally contrarian, so I want to say up front that I like the research findings on which it's based, especially from a racial equity perspective, and am curious to see how/if public-private investment follows from it. But I just have to pick at something; stay w/me here...
A report from the Pew Charitable Trusts came out last week that shows that the #1 reason about half of middle-class African-American kids experience downward mobility as adults (i.e., they are poorer when they grow up) is because they grow up in high poverty neighborhoods. Lots of research has shown that middle-class and low-income Blacks often live in the same or proximate neighborhoods to one another. "Half of black children born between 1955 and 1970 in families with incomes of $62,000 or higher in today's dollars grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods." And the data is not much different today.
The report authors (disclosure: I used to blog with Pat Sharkey at the now defunct Foresight) have this to say:
Sharkey and Morton said policymakers can take heart in one finding: Black children in neighborhoods in which poverty fell by 10 percent had higher incomes as adults than those who grew up in areas where the poverty rate stayed the same. This is a sign, they said, that simply improving the overall economy and quality of a given neighborhood can have beneficial effects on those growing up in it.
But the report also concludes that the data shows that we need more cradle-to-crave, neighborhood based investments, a la Harlem Children's Zone, a strategy that "holds more promise than dispersing poor families into middle-class neighborhoods by giving them housing vouchers, a strategy that has had mixed results and could be difficult to implement on a large scale."
But, doesn't dispersal of low-income Americans, by vouchers and HOPE VI, for instance, make their prior neighborhoods better off for the middle-class kids living there? So doesn't this report suggest that we should sacrifice the poor on behalf of the middle-class?
At a minimum, it points to the need to face the persistence of poverty in the U.S., and its drag on us all.
(Marching band practice in Detroit; photo by Karpov the Wrecked Train)
