Social Programs
Incomes Up 14% through Opportunity NYC
Published September 22, 2009 @ 10:03AM PT
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is hosting the Organization of American States today to discuss anti-poverty initiatives in the Americas. Featured at the meeting with be the City of New York's Opportunity NYC, a program of conditional cash transfers to low-income families to reward them for specific behaviors: attending school, attending doctor's appointments, working full-time, etc. The Bloomberg Administration, which launched the initiative as one of many anti-poverty programs managed collectively through its Center for Economic Opportunity, has renewed the program for a third year.
The program is both promising and controversial for providing what many deem paternalistic incentives that isolate behavior as the reason households are poor. I agree. But let's face it: Opportunity NYC is increasing annual household incomes by as much as 14% per year. Do we really want to condemn such a result?
Target Takes Food Stamps
Published September 21, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
So many Americans are now using food stamps that more and more chain stores have begun accepting them, rather than lose these customers to economic hardship. New or expanded recipients include Target, CVS, 7-11, Costco, BJ's and Sam's Club.
Food stamp use was up 22% this summer from 2008, with more than 35M Americans using them. Food stamps now come on a card identical to a debit or credit card, offering discretion and privacy for Americans self-conscious about relying on public assistance. For businesses, Costco finds that food stamp users spend an additional $50 or so on purchases not covered by the benefit.
There's a message in here about economic hardship becoming mainstream, becoming normal. I'm trying to generalize it to an ideal world where one is not punished for being poor, where a low-income parent can stand in line at the grocery store without a sense of shame - that she's even at the better grocery store rather than an overpriced bodega or food bank is an accomplishment. (Of course, see the original link above to understand transportation issues.)
Expanded food stamp acceptance at more stores is one of these situational responses that becomes permanent. From the sound of it, businesses have to invest in some degree of technological or process change to accept these cards. These are likely not upgrades that will be rolled back once the recession really lifts. As anti-poverty activists, we should be thinking about emergency services and about long-term changes we can push through during moments of crisis. Yes, we've got to expand eligibility for food stamps so all the many million more bellies don't go hungry, but if there was ever a moment to update the poverty measure to reflect the costs of housing, health care or decline in wages - It's Now.
Bush Years Lost Economic Decade
Published September 17, 2009 @ 11:00AM PT
There's been a great deal of coverage of the latest census data on the increase in poverty in 2008. The bottom line? Bush stole all your money, and your health insurance is short-lived.
Fortunately, there's a growing push to modernize the poverty measure, which is based on 1955 data on the cost of food, calculated in haste in the 1960s. Back in the day, food costs were a third of a family's budget. Now they're one-seventh. Exactly - you don't even know how much that is, but it's relatively nominal compared to the expense of housing, medicine, clothing, etc.
Here's a quick round-up of coverage - the infuriating and the promising - you don't want to miss.
Housing Choice in Crisis
Published September 12, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
My organization, the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC), recently released an audit report about discrimination against Housing Choice Voucher holders (“HCVP” or “Section 8”) in the Greater New Orleans rental market. Our study revealed that landlords refused to consider voucher holders as tenants 82% of the time. Preliminary results also suggest that, due to intentional discrimination and program dysfunction, voucher holders end up relegated to a small, isolated, and likely low-resourced segment of the rental housing market. This is particularly problematic, since one of the stated goals of the Housing Choice Voucher Program is to promote race and class integration.
Audits in other areas of the country have turned up similar findings and point to the need for serious reform in federal housing policy. We recommend 10 actions to make housing policy more inclusive, fair and effective.
Our study demonstrates that while 75% of landlord refusals were outright rejections, 7% of the time, landlords added additional terms and conditions for voucher holders that were tantamount to a denial.
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.
Poverty as a Political Issue
Published August 31, 2009 @ 09:20AM PT
The American Prospect featured a great piece last week about how politicians frame poverty - and how that impacts public sentiment towards the poor. After Reagan effectively boogey-womaned mothers on welfare, President Clinton reframed Democratic economic policy as one concerned with the middle-class. This was a political maneuver to fight poverty subtly using a more inclusive rhetoric; many political observers claim that President Obama is doing the same thing today. What's especially interesting here is how their policy actions within our economic circumstances influence our general attitudes toward the poor. Is the best time to fight poverty now - during an historic recession - or when the good times roll again?
