Housing
Don't Forget the (Faux) Middle
Published September 11, 2009 @ 05:07AM PT
As policy wonks and politicians try to convince us of recovery, the rest of the country is focused on white-knuckled survival. Far too many are in dire straits. Take Laura and her 2 teen sons, crammed in a ramshackle trailer with Laura's prematurely aged parents in Franklin, a little town south of Indianapolis.
Her parents live, like many housing-challenged seniors do, in a trailer park. Laura and her sons doubled-up with them because they are homeless, their abode lost in this latest fiscal crisis that continues to bedevil our country (despite all the "happy" talk). Her parents own this humble single-wide. From the outside it looks like the rest of the units in the park, but the inside tells the story.
1 in 5 Elderly are Poor
Published September 05, 2009 @ 10:38AM PT
When calculating poverty using the modernized measure from the National Academy of Sciences, the number of older adults living in poverty is nearly double the official rate. The whole article is worth reading for the ways current poverty numbers - among children, single mothers, in cities, etc. - would change if we updated the federal poverty measure.
Everyday that I blog I find more features, reports, news items, etc. than I can possibly cover here. But I don't want to let these stories slip by. So consider this your weekend afternoon news dump on poverty in the U.S.
Obama Restores Civil Rights
Published September 01, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Good news this morning: the Obama Administration is "restoring" the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice - the agency for anti-discrimination enforcement in the areas of housing, voting rights, employment, and so forth. Under Bush, the division was notoriously politicized, with conservative and Christian loyalists with little civil rights experience recruited and charged with prioritizing religious cases at the expense of the division's core focus on racial/ethnic discrimination. Why am I writing about this at Poverty in America? Because discrimination has historically reinforced racial, gender and other forms of inequality in housing, jobs, etc. - leading to the disproportionately high rates of women and people of color living in poverty.
Keep Poverty on the Agenda
Published August 30, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
With the death of Sen. Kennedy and the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina both happening this week, the topic of poverty was fresh in the public's mind. In eulogizing Kennedy, most of us could take pride in remembering his service to "working people" everywhere, his commitment to poverty reduction over the life of his career. With Katrina, it is also about a job unfinished, but with a much less nostalgic, sweet glow - the enduring problems of blight, housing insecurity, racial inequality and poverty are glaring, graphic, and depressing.
Whether you're motivated to action by the inspiring good works of folks like Senator Kennedy, or fueled by a sense of outrage over injustice, this past week offered plenty of reminders that poverty is a persistent, entrenched, political problem for which solutions exist. Investments in early childhood education pay lifetime dividends. Economic boycotts and union movements highlight workers' rights and benefits. Providing childcare, fair pay, and extensive family leave policies give mothers better opportunities to compete economically and earn enough to care for their families. And universal health care bankrupts neither households nor the entire medical system.
Change.org is just one platform where you can commit (and re-commit) to fighting poverty in the U.S. To start, let's begin by keeping poverty on the public agenda - as a problem we can and must solve. Let's not let it slip away as our weekend tributes wrap up. As Uncle Teddy and 15k volunteers in New Orleans remind us, the cause endures and the work goes on.
("Not Everyone in SF is Rich..." by Son of Groucho)
Grant My Birthday Wish: Support Rebuilding Together New Orleans!
Published August 26, 2009 @ 04:00AM PT
Happy 34th Birthday to Me! In honor of my birthday, I've set up a Facebook page where you can donate $34 to the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, a non-profit dedicated to the architectural and historic preservation of the city. Focused on more than just buildings and materials, the PRC also runs a program called Rebuilding Together New Orleans that rehabs the homes of the disabled and elderly so they may rebuld their lives and communities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
In less than two months I'm marrying an historic preservationist, a former VISTA volunteer who came to community planning and historic preservation through spending most of his 20s working as a resident services coordinator in a low-income housing community in Minnesota. Together he and I share a deep commitment to fighting poverty, to honoring and respecting the culture and histories of the communities in which we work and live, and a love for the City of New Orleans.
You can help me today continue the work of the PRC by making a donation through my Fb page. Please help bring older and disabled New Orleanians home to improved neighborhoods and more peaceful lives.
25% NOLA Public Housing Residents Lost
Published August 25, 2009 @ 08:53AM PT
Saturday August 29 marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's destruction of the US Gulf Coast. The pre-storm problem of deep poverty and racial inequality has worsened, and gone largely unreported. Those of us at Change.org have an opportunity to reverse that trend. It begins by educating ourselves on the enduring struggles down there to provide a safe, affordable place to live for all those who lost their homes due to a lethal combination of a natural disaster and wrongheaded public policy. To start: HUD cannot locate over 25% of public housing residents who were living in the now-demolished "Big Four" projects prior to the storm.
More, including what you can do, after the jump.
1 in 5 Americans are Poor
Published August 22, 2009 @ 11:34AM PT
As summer melts away and non-profit organizations gear up for a difficult fall, anti-poverty activists need an accurate picture of just how tough it is out there. Following up on Greg's great post from Thursday that captured the growth of hunger nationwide, we offer now a quick summary of the latest recessionary figures:
- 37.3M people were living below the official poverty line in 2007; 2008 should see another 1.5M added, for a statistically significant growth to 12.7% of the population. Experts anticipate an even worse result by the end of '09, and estimate we could hover around 15% of the population officially considered living in poverty. Even acknowledging how outdated this poverty measure is, we have not counted 1 in 7 people living in poverty since the recession of the early 1990s. And if historical census figures that include the "near poor" are anything to go by, we can expect 1 in 5 people, or 20% of Americans, to be living in or near poverty by the end of this year.
