Housing
Action Alert: Modernize Poverty Measurement
Published August 11, 2009 @ 01:01PM PT
Two bills have been introduced in Congress to update our federal poverty measure that is based on an extremely antiquated estimated proportion of a family's budget spent on food. Both the House and Senate bills rely on National Academy of Science recommendations in which "the cost of food, clothing, housing, utilities and medical expenses be considered. Income from non-cash benefits, such as food stamps and government tax credits, should also be counted" in an updated poverty measure (right now, these social supports can tip people over the poverty line and deny them much needed assistance).
The linked news piece above shows that by following the NAS recommendations, the new poverty line for a family of 4 (2 adults, 2 kids) in 2007 $$ would jump from about $21k to almost $28k, an increase of almost 25%. To my eye, it still looks extremely low. We really need to make geographic considerations when tying assistance programs to estimated costs of living.
This reform is at the heart of the work we do as anti-poverty activists. So far, the House bill, introduced in June, has 10 sponsors, all Dems, and has probably gone on to a quiet convalescence in the House Ways and Means and House Oversight and Govt. Reform Committees. The Senate Bill is less than a week old, introduced by Dodd and co-sponsored by Sen. Bingaman of New Mexico (D). It's gone on to the Senate Health (etc.) Committee, which might have its hands full right about now.
Healthcare reform or not, this is one issue that can't wait. Contact Your Representatives (and Committee Members above) and tell them to support an updated poverty measure today!
(Difference in NAS and official poverty measures, from The Stanford Ctr for the Study of Poverty & Inequality)
Desegrating Westchester
Published August 11, 2009 @ 07:07AM PT
Westchester County entered into a landmark desegregation agreement on Monday that would compel it to create hundreds of houses and apartments for moderate-income people in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market them to nonwhites in Westchester and New York City.
The lawsuit was filed by a non-profit advocacy group known as the Anti-Discrimination Center, which states that the multi-year affordable housing production plan to be paid for the county is not a guarantee of racial desegregation, but opens up the possibility of such an outcome. I'm a bit confused by the equivocation there, but what's more interesting is how an affordable housing program to racially desegregate communities points to the nefarious intersection of race and class.
Prison the New Public Housing
Published August 10, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Affordable housing advocates, esp. pro-public housing folks like myself, spend a lot of time comparing the various subsidized housing options out there: public housing, Section 8 vouchers for renting in the private market, tax-credit funded housing built by non-profit developers. Turns out, we've been miscalculating by half the 4-6M or so units these different options provide, because we've been leaving out a major new source of publicly subsidized housing for the poor: Prison!
Yep, according to Ehrenreich's latest missive in the NYT (see our previous coverage of her series here and here), "the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing."
Ehrenreich wonders if the collision of rising extreme poverty and excess criminalization and incarceration policies will lead us to descalate both - resorting instead to humane treatment of the poor and a move away from criminalizing low-income people as, she fears, disgustedly, a revenue source in this extreme recession. I'd add the masses find it morally uplifting to torment the poor during tough economic times, as it reassures us with a strong "us" vs. "them" dichotomy and gives us a sense of control of the more chaotic zones of life, given we can't seem to stop the corporate pillaging going on above us.
I too wonder if sheer economic necessity will work in our favor differently, by leading to de-crowding of prisons and cessation of expensive housing demolition and development programs. Of course, our desire to clamp down on "concentrated poverty" and its alleged ills bodes differently for prisons versus public housing. Dispersal strategies suddenly seem a lot more worrisome when we're casting offenders into the winds.
Most importantly, reversing these punitive, cruel, expensive cycles really requires to see the poor as human beings like us, our brethren, locked in a similar struggle for economic stability and justice. It requires a framework that focuses less on poverty alleviation and more on poverty eradication. It requires a common framework that embraces all of us. Gee, I wonder what that could be...
(Photo of Fremantle Prison, a decommissioned prison in Australia, by amandabhslater)
Our Economic Human Rights
Published August 10, 2009 @ 07:09AM PT
Perhaps it's the dog days of summer, or, more likely, the harsh realities of our current economic environment, but the poverty news is more and more of the same lately: states running out of funds just as more and more people join the various assistance programs. Legal aid faltering just as more people need help navigating the court system. And so on.
If there was ever a time to revisit a more fundamental view of poverty and inequality, it's now. Courtesy of regular contributor Jan Lightfootlane, I want to talk about economic human rights. Jan recently joined anti-poverty activists from around the world to strategize around ending poverty at the conference, "Building the Unsettling Force: A National Conference to End Poverty." The conference embraces the human rights framework to confront the intertwined, structural hardships that drive people into poverty and keep them there; workshops were organized around the human right to housing, the human right to healthcare, the human right to a living wage, and so on. These rights are enshrined in the UN Convenant on Economic & Social Rights, a 1960s era document that the US has recognized but never fully ratified, leaving us as a nation ambivalent over whether our citizens have these rights as much as we enjoy the rights to free speech and political participation.
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.
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.")
