There are as many ways to think about what poverty is as there are to chronicle its historical roots. For many of the 47 million Americans currently living with incomes below the federal poverty line, being poor is working poverty—they manage low-wage, often contingent work, or see their incomes fall temporarily below the official line while struggling through a career transition, a divorce or a serious illness. For every poor person or family, poverty represents a deprivation of key resources that is accompanied by a loss of power over how to reclaim them. For persistently poor …
Read MoreFor poor Americans, the place they call home can be a matter of life or death.
The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.
In those differences, documented in sweeping new research, lies an optimistic message: The right mix of steps to improve habits and public health could help people live longer, regardless of how much money they make.
Read MoreThis memo is the first in a series of documents prepared as part of the Center on Law, Inequality & Metropolitan Equity's (CLiME) Trauma, Schools, and Poverty project. At this stage in the research, CLiME does not propose that existing special education and antidiscrimination law are the optimal means for providing legal protection to victims of childhood trauma. Rather, we asked whether there currently exists a public duty to provide supportive services to traumatized children. This point of entry led our research to the school system, which holds a central presence in the …
Read MoreThe Great Recession may have ended in 2009, but despite the subsequent jobs rebound and declining unemployment rate, the number of people living below the federal poverty line in the United States remains stuck at recession-era record levels.
The rapid growth of the nation’s poor population during the 2000s also coincided with significant shifts in the geography of American poverty. Poverty spread beyond its historic urban and rural locales, rising rapidly in smaller metropolitan areas and making the nation’s suburbs home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. Yet, even as poverty spread to touch more people and places, it became more concentrated in distressed and disadvantaged areas.
Read More"In this post we will explore the degree of income inequality seen in New Jersey’s municipalities. Using the same process as in our previous analysis where we explored the Gini Index and 80/20 Household Income Ratio of US counties, here we can get a more granular view of inequality seen within our counties.
Using the interactive map and table feature below, we can see the Gini Index, the 80/20 Household Income Ratio, and the income limits for the 20% and 80% cutpoints for every New Jersey municipality. This information, along with margins of error are displayed when hovering over or clicking a municipality on the maps. Options for filtering the maps and table are found on the right-hand side of the feature."
Read MoreABSTRACT: Housing policy can play an important role in improving or impeding the economic well-being of low-income households. Through this paper, we aim to better equip researchers, policymakers, and practitioners for conversations about the links between housing policy and economic mobility. The first half of this paper clarifies common definitions and measurements of inequality and mobility. Adopting the lens of economic mobility for examining how housing policies can address challenges of inequality in society today, the second half of the paper looks at five categories of housing policy levers that affect economic mobility: tax policy, block grants, rental assistance, fair housing, and homeownership programs.
Read More"According to the latest United Way of Northern New Jersey ALICE Report, 1.2 million households in New Jersey are unable to afford the state’s high cost of living. That number includes those living in poverty and the population called ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained,Employed.
The ALICE study provides county-by-county and town-level data; cost of living calculations for six family size variations; analysis of how many households are living paycheck to paycheck; and the implications for New Jersey’s future economic stability."
Read MoreSince the economic collapse of 2008, American citizens have grown increasingly skeptical oftheir government’s ability to pass socially and economically beneficial legislation. As citizens criticize large-scale government entities, such as the federal government or state legislatures, lower-level politicians have attempted to keep the masses at bay by passing legislation that will appease the voters in their districts. However, much of this newfound legislation is at odds with the policymaking efforts of their superior levels of government. In particular, over the last three years …
Read MoreOver the past year, scenes of civil unrest have played out in the deteriorating inner-ring suburb of Ferguson and the traditional urban ghetto of inner-city Baltimore. The proximate cause of these conflicts has been brutal interactions between police and unarmed black men, leading to protests that include violent confrontations with police, but no single incident can explain the full extent of the protesters’ rage and frustration. The riots and protests—which have occurred in racially-segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods, bringing back images of the “long, hot summers” of the 1960s—have sparked a national conversation about race, violence, and policing that is long overdue.
Read MoreThe 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 MoreNTRODUCTION: Repeated exposure to traumatic events during childhood can have dramatic and long-lasting effects. During the past 20 years, there has been an enormous increase in our understanding of how being repeatedly traumatized by violence affects the growth and development of preadolescent children, especially when such traumatized children lack a nurturing and protective parental figure that might mitigate the impact of the trauma. In this paper, I summarize the current understanding of the effects of ongoing trauma on young children, how these effects impair adolescent and young adult functioning, and the possible implications of this for policing.
Read MoreABSTRACT: The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families living in high poverty housing projects housing vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We present new evidence on the impacts of MTO on children’s long-term outcomes using administrative data from tax returns.
We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were young (below age 13) when their families moved. These children also live in better neighborhoods themselves as adults and are less likely to become single parents.
Read MoreLocation matters – enormously. If you’re poor and live in the New York area, it’s better to be in Putnam County than in Manhattan or the Bronx. Not only that, the younger you are when you move to Putnam, the better you will do on average. Children who move at earlier ages are less likely to become single parents, more likely to go to college and more likely to earn more.
Every year a poor child spends in Putnam County adds about $150 tohis or her annual household income at age 26, compared with a childhood spent in the average American county. Over the course of a full childhood, which is up to age 20 for the purposes of this analysis, the difference adds up to about $3,100, or 12 percent, more in average income as a young adult.
Read MoreOver the course of sixty years, the United States has moved human services from public to private provision. The poor, who used to go to county health departments for their medical care, now go to nonprofit health clinics or even for-profit hospital emergency rooms. Mental healthcare famously moved from state hospitals to nonprofit outpatient services. Vocational training is now offered by nonprofit contractors. Even legal services in many jurisdictions are handled by nonprofit legal clinics or private attorneys funded by counties as piecemeal public defenders. As Steven Rathgeb Smith and Michael Lipsky have articulated, the public-private “contract regime” is here to stay.1
Read MoreFROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Equity and access to opportunity are critical underpinnings of TOGETHER North Jersey’s Regional Plan for Sustainable Development. Therefore, the planning process includes the preparation of this assessment of Fair Housing and Equity in the Northern New Jersey region.
As part of the process to develop a Regional Plan for Sustainable Development (RPSD) for the TOGETHER North Jersey planning region, the TNJ Project Team worked with the TOGETHER North Jersey Steering Committee and Standing Committees to conduct a Fair Housing and Equity Assessment (FHEA) for the region, resulting in this report.
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 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 MoreSUMMARY: The goal of Helping Traumatized Children Learn is to ensure that children traumatized by exposure to family violence succeed in school. Research now shows that trauma can undermine children’s ability to learn, form relationships, and function appropriately in the classroom. Schools, which are significant communities for children, and teachers—the primary role models in these communities—must be given the supports they need to address trauma’s impact on learning. Otherwise, many children will be unable to achieve their academic potential, and the very laudable goals of education reform will not be realized. Trauma-sensitive school environments benefit all children— those whose trauma history is known, those whose trauma will never be clearly identified, and those who may be impacted by their traumatized classmates. Together, we can ensure that all children will be able to achieve at their highest levels despite whatever traumatic circumstances they may have endured.
Read MoreIn August 2014, a Ferguson, Missouri, policeman shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. Michael Brown’s death and the resulting protests and racial tension brought considerable attention to that town. Observers who had not been looking closely at our evolving demographic patterns were surprised to see ghetto conditions we had come to associate with inner cities now duplicated in a formerly white suburban community: racially segregated neighborhoods with high poverty and unemployment, poor student achievement in overwhelmingly black schools, oppressive policing, abandoned homes, and community powerlessness.
Media accounts of how Ferguson became Ferguson have typically explained that when African Americans moved to this suburb (and others like it), “white flight” followed, abandoning the town to African Americans who were trying to escape poor schools in the city. The conventional explanation adds that African Americans moved to a few places like Ferguson, not the suburbs generally, because prejudiced real estate agents steered black home buyers away from other white suburbs. And in any event, those other suburbs were able to preserve their almost entirely white, upper-middle-class environments by enacting zoning rules that required only expensive single family homes, the thinking goes.
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