The Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity (CLiME) has generated mappings of the child poverty concentration in Detroit, by race and ethnicity, for the years 2000 and 1990.
Read MoreWhat kind of special education accommodations are required by law to be provided for students suffering from Traumas? At a minimum, school districts have to identify emotionally disturbed children and create an individualized education plan to accommodate their needs. Some of those services include social work and psychological services. Unfortunately school districts do not follow the rules laid out in the IDEA and end up expelling students, under classifying students, and ultimately not accommodating those students. Those failures cause emotionally disturbed …
Read MoreMunicipal court cases account for the bulk of all legal filings and are often the only interaction that many people have with the judicial system, yet there is a significant lack of research on the impact of municipal courts on our daily lives. Scholarly discourse on the provision of municipal services tends to focus on municipal services which play a key role in our day to day lives such as education, waste management, or park maintenance. While the role of municipal courts in our daily lives may not be as visible as other municipal services, they serve a key judicial and municipal …
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The low wage labor market today is characterized by the increased utilization of part-time and temporary workers with volatile work schedules. These practices shift business risk to workers, and place their lives in a constant state of instability. Unpredictable work schedules prevent workers from pursuing supplemental employment, training, or attending to caregiver responsibilities. This diminishes the future economic potential of workers, effectively creating a worker caste system, and establishing a structural barrier to income mobility.
Read MoreRecent studies estimate that 25-30 million Americans live in communities that lack basic access to healthy food retailers, such as supermarkets or grocery stores. The majority of these communities are in urban environments. Within these communities, the cost of the food that is available is typically 3%-37% more than comparable food available in a suburban supermarket. Food scarcity and lack of access is more likely to affect minority communities, even when accounting for differences in income, household wealth, and housing discrimination.
Read MoreAs the first state to pass a comprehensive anti-discrimination statute after the Reconstruction Era, New Jersey has a demonstrated commitment to civil rights. This commitment, coupled with several characteristics unique to the “Garden State,” has laid the groundwork for, what is arguably, the most contentious affordable housing debate in the country. New Jersey is the only state in which there is a judicially recognized constitutional mandate that all municipalities provide for a “realistic opportunity for the construction of [their] fair share of the present …
Read MoreSince the early 1970s, finance reformers have argued that the unequal distribution of educational resources is primarily responsible for producing and perpetuating persistent inequalities in achievement and opportunity in New Jersey’s schools. Even though it is indisputable that in some sense “money matters,” the problem vexing education reformers continues to be the mutually reinforcing contingencies of race, class, and place. Textbooks, teachers, supplies, and facilities all cost money, and a community that lacks the funds to furnish its schools with these basic …
Read MoreOver the last three years, St. Louis County municipalities have chronically violated the constitutional rights of indigent citizens by issuing unreasonable amounts of traffic tickets – tickets accompanied by slews of hefty fines and court costs. When indigent citizens are unable to pay the aforementioned, they are thrown in jail for extended periods of time. Civil rights groups allege that these practices, which are performed solely as a means of funding municipal endeavors, have created the functional equivalent of debtor prisons. The Rutgers Center on Law in Metropolitan …
Read MoreThe ultimate objective of regional equity activities is to reform those policies and practices that create and sustain social, racial, economic and environmental inequalities among cities, suburbs and rural areas -- and to bridge the gap between marginalized people and places and the region’s structures of social and economic opportunity. In my book Inside Game/Outside Game, I described three domains of work …
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Presented November 21, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
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Presented November 21, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
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Presented November 21, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
Read MorePresented November 7, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
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Presented October 10, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
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In order to understand affordable housing and the issues surrounding public housing, we must know the background of how it evolved. The following section will provide landmark history of affordable housing and its development in the United States. This section will also discuss the evolution of affordable housing and the impact it has had on American families.
Read MoreFaced with a growing crisis of homeowner residents whose properties are “underwater” or already in foreclosure, many cities around the United States have explored the possibility of expediting mortgage principal write-downs through the extraordinary exercise of eminent domain. As of this writing, no city has actually followed through, and one, Richmond, California, has already been sued. Several cities in New Jersey are contemplating the use of redevelopment law as the only available local power to stabilize their tax bases and bring relief to homeowners.
Read MoreConnectivity is the measurement of how easily one can travel in and out of a place. Connectivity is what makes a commute to work, or a simple trip to the grocery store, possible. A state can have one thousand fancy trains. But, if you have no car, none of those trains stop in your town, and there are no bus stops either, you’re not going anywhere. Conversely, your hometown could be the most well-connected and transit- friendly town on the planet. But, if the job you want is in a town where there is no transit, you cannot get to work.
Read MoreNewark’s story is one that has been told and retold. Once a bustling industrial power and an engine of the middle class, in recent decades the city has been wounded by racial strife, suburban flight, and industrial abandonment. From a high in 1948 of nearly half a million, Newark’s population today has plummeted to 277, 540. The intersection of Broad St. and Market St., once the busiest retail nexus in the country, is now a shadow of its former self. More than a quarter of Newark’s people are in poverty, and its black population is hypersegregated from its white population …
Read MoreEducation attainment in the United States has a direct causal link with economic success. In 2012, the plurality of unemployed persons is represented by those with less than a high school diploma; higher level of education has an undeniable negative correlation with unemployment. Furthermore, those with little or no educational attainment who are employed find themselves making wages significantly less than those with a higher level. An individual’s level of educational attainment, therefore, has a direct correlation with his monetary earning, and distance away from …
Read MoreSoon after the initial shock of largest hurricane to ever hit the Jersey Shore began to dissipate, scholars, reporters and advocates began to look deeper at the implications of the disaster. Like Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy exposed fundamental inequities in our society that resulted in frightening racial and economic disparities between those devastated by the storm, and those less affected. We learned from Hurricane Katrina that “outsiders who wonder why residents ‘chose’ housing susceptible to flooding disregard the legacy of laws and hostility that excluded …
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