Policy
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)
"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.
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.
Paying for Better Healthcare
Published August 04, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Good news! Turns out, we already are!
H/t to Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly, I see in 2008 we taxpayers spent almost $1,800 per federal worker to cover their healthcare:
Among the advantages: a choice of 10 healthcare plans that provide access to a national network of doctors, as well as several HMOs that serve each member's home state. By contrast, 85% of private companies offering health coverage provide their employees one type of plan -- take it or leave it.
Lawmakers also get special treatment at Washington's federal medical facilities and, for a few hundred dollars a month, access to their own pharmacy and doctors, nurses and medical technicians standing by in an office conveniently located between the House and Senate chambers.
In all, taxpayers spent about $15 billion last year to insure 8.5 million federal workers and their dependents, including postal service employees, according to the Office of Personnel Management.
There's also no "pre-existing condition" exclusionary cause for federal employees.
Check out the original article to read about Rep. Steve Kagen, a Democrat and former physician from WI who won't accept the federal package until all American's have the same coverage. No health insurance for Kagen, but he's got principles that clearly the rest of his colleagues lack.
(Photo from the rally for the right to healthcare in DC, June 2009, by NESRI)
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)
A Nation of Hustlers?
Published August 03, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
(Photo of "Hunger Amidst Plenty" by Kamal H.)
I have to ask: why do so many of our public policies assume the worst of human nature? Check this out from a depressing NYT piece on how unemployment benefits are going to run out by year's end for a frightening # of unemployed Americans:
Traditionally, many economists have been leery of prolonged unemployment benefits because they can reduce the incentive to seek work. But that should not be a concern now because jobs remain so scarce, said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard.
For every job that becomes available, about six people are looking, Dr. Katz said. “Unemployment insurance gives income to families who are really suffering and can’t find work even if they are hustling to look,” he said.
Look, $300 a week in unemployment benefits is nothing to sneer at, but honestly, is it really a negative incentive? It's slightly more generous than working full-time for a week at minimum wage, and it's about half of what the median hourly wage pays weekly in the US.
Why do we assume that by offering any shred of a safety net we're creating a nation of loafers, hustlers, thieves, layabouts, and their rapaciously needy offspring?
Seriously - what are the roots of these very disturbing assumptions? I don't get it.
