1. A new report by the Urban Land Institute provides a nuanced view of U.S. suburbs, including classification, maps, and important insights for policy and planning. 2. Frameworks Institute, a research organization that applies the cognitive and social sciences to policy messaging, has released recommendations for a variety of equity-related topics, including criminal justice and affordable housing. 3. The Coalition on Human Needs issued the Human Needs Report summarizing current actions of the 115th Congress in the areas of safety net, healthcare and labor, as well as a freeze on all new agency regulations.
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Equity is not just an ideal to admire. It can be defined, measured, and mapped. Visualizations are an increasingly important medium to communicate our values in a digital era. We have compiled some of the best visualizations that came our way this past year that featured measures of inequality and equity. We commend the researchers and institutions for their commitment and investment to this work.
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It is with great pride that the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME) announces the release of our literature review for the Trauma, Schools and Poverty Project (TSP). "A Critical Review of the Psychological Literature" provides a critical and comprehensive review of the empirical literature literature on the sequelae of childhood exposure to potentially traumatic events (PTEs), with special emphasis on low socioeconomic status populationsat disparate risk for exposure to PTEs across the lifespan.
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Last week, the New York Times reported on fundamental changes occurring to the State of Connecticut's public school financing, in response to a decade long lawsuit claiming that the state's poorest districts were producing poor outcomes. Supported by new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the New York Times concluded: "In the long run, over comparable time frames, states that send additional money to their lowest-income school districts see more academic improvement in those districts than states that don’t. The size of the effect was significant."
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The inequality that the report examines is heavily correlated with race; and the report also expounds upon how the amelioration of racial disparities would benefit not only people of color, but the District of Columbia as a whole. Specifically, the report cites the National Equity Atlas which predicted that if black and brown DC residents had income parity with white DC residents, the DC economy would have been more than $65 billion larger in 2012.
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The presidential election that was too vulgar for us to write about, with accusations too inarticulate to describe policies, and an intimidating atmosphere of racist, nativist and sexist extremism inflaming every imaginable social division, finally received the emotional outcome it created. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in a historic upset destined to be known as the ultimate political demand for change. For those dedicated to working against structural inequality, this may be the transformative change we …
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This past September, CLiME began this series on housing issues in Newark by reporting on a demonstration at City Hall, part of the National Tenants Day of Action. I met many organizers and tenants from the Terrell Homes, who have been fighting to preserve the residences of over 200 families in this public housing development located in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood. Terrell first made headlines in 2014 as the tenants fought against talks of demolition. Now the Newark Housing Authority …
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This election is giving me high blood pressure, and I don’t mean the man in the Great Pumpkin outfit who is running for president. No, my friends, it is the folks on “my side” who bring me despair. The blue-hairs and kids that can afford to work in politics and policy are of the same breed and dependent on the same hierarchy that they claim to be against. Case in point: in a moment of panic I recently volunteered at a local political organization. They told me that they needed to hire five part-time workers at $10 per hour.
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“Given the right resources and opportunity, people can bring about a change in their lives,” community organizer and social worker Jack Farrell explains to me. For over 40 years, Farrell has served as a bridge between community members and policymakers to address issues of trauma and violence in Northern New Jersey. His career started with substance abuse recovery– “and I see violence in the same way,” Farrell explains, “it’s a learned behavior.”
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Our 2015-2016 Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellows have spent the Spring semester completing coursework with Prof. Troutt and advancing their qualitative research projects that span an array of issues in place-based inequality and opportunity, including the topics of Diverse and Inclusive, Moderate-Income municipalities (DIMIs) to accompany the ongoing work by David Ruske and David Troutt; investigation into the impact of state takeover in troubled cities, including Camden and Atlantic City; interrogation of the theoretical benefits of localism in two affluent …
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Beginning in the fall of 2015, CLiME’s Trauma, Schools and Poverty Project (TSP) is a multi-year effort to understand the relationships between structural inequality and the pervasive experience of complex psychological stress and trauma. Psychological research has demonstrated the cumulative destructive effects caused by exposure to complex trauma—traumatic experiences linked to school and community violence, family separation as well as domestic abuse and neglect that are often repetitive, if not continuous—on children and adults, especially those …
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The Center on Law, Inequality & Metropolitan Equity (CLiME) was proud to host the Trauma-Informed Care Roundtable on April 15th, 2016 at the Rutgers School of Law-Newark, co-sponsored with the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. CLiME Director David Troutt and Assistant Attorney General Wanda Moore served as the facilitators for three panels on the following topics: Understanding Trauma in Adults and Children, Understanding Trauma-Informed Care Practices in Action, and Understanding the Capacity to Provide Trauma-Informed Care.
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Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote “Why We Can’t Wait“ to dispel the notion that African Americans should be content to proceed on an incremental course toward full equality under the law and in the wider society. King observed, “Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.” Yet waiting and whispering, rather than raising their voices for genuine inclusion, is what many seem to expect of the children and grandchildren of King’s generation even today.
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When President Obama visited the Rutgers Law School on November 2nd, it represented the startling achievement of two dream-like goals. First was the sheer specter of the occasion—seeing our president suddenly in our home, flanked by new flags and the familiar bars that adorn our atrium’s spiral stairs. Second was the occasion itself: to meet in a roundtable with formerly incarcerated persons and then to deliver a speech intended to reverse—by executive order—one of the single greatest public policy failures in American history.
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In this season of anniversaries, no two are more stark in their parallels than Ferguson a year after the shooting of Michael Brown and New Orleans 10 years after Hurricane Katrina killed 1,800 and displaced thousands. Both involve the senseless loss of black lives and the public horror at revelations long known in many isolated communities. Each said a lot about race relations in a country where the “postracial” election of the first black president suggested that we were too far beyond Katrina to produce Ferguson. Each also speaks of structural inequality and the idea of disappearance.
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Please join us at Rutgers University-Newark for the 2015 Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship culminating scholarship conference. The conference will take place on Thursday, September 24th, 2015 from 4-6:30pm in Esterly Lounge, located on the second floor of Engelhard Hall, 190 University Avenue in downtown Newark, NJ. Fellows will be presenting their year-long interdisciplinary research papers on how racial and economic inequality is reproduced to sustain geographies of relative opportunity throughout Northern New Jersey.
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It is tempting to look for signs of America’s direction in the late June ritual of reading the U.S. Supreme Court’s most momentous decisions of the term. Last week’s rulings in support of marriage equality, fair housing and Obamacare would suggest that on fundamental issues of daily life — the equal status of all love, the idea of housing as a link to life chances and the opening of access to healthcare for millions — the United States just took a giant step toward updating the constitutional principle of liberty with dignity.
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The death of Freddie Gray, a 25 year-old black man, in the custody of Baltimore police appeared to be just another suspicious death of an unarmed black person in what had become a litany. It followed the deaths of Walter Scott in South Carolina, and before him Eric Davis in Mississippi and before him Akai Gurley, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and Eric Garner going back to last summer. The country was not numb to acts of apparent police brutality anymore—far from it. But we had begun to study and protest its occurrences with the conviction of …
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2015 marks the second full year of operations for the Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity, and we are busy expanding the discourse on structural—often place-based—inequality in the Greater Rutgers University Newark region and across metropolitan America. Thanks to the support of Chancellor Nancy Cantor and Provost Todd Clear and a growing partnership with the Graduate School under Dean Kyle Farmbry’s stewardship, CLiME has been able to embark on a broad array of exciting (and challenging) new activities that demonstrate our mission to connect law with …
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The young man in front of me in municipal court, calmly reiterated his previous statement: “I’d rather take 10 days in jail right now, than go home and come back for a few more hours of court in a week. I’d rather you take my freedom away for 10 full days, than retain a public defender free of charge, and get my paper work in order.” That was the response I got from a defendant in traffic court in Newark, New Jersey on an otherwise normal afternoon. This was a simple case: A polite and generally pleasant young man was pulled over and charged with driving on a suspended license.
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