What would an equitable DC look like? Communities of color have faced decades of systemic racism and discriminatory policies and practices. These actions have barred people of color from certain jobs and neighborhoods and from opportunities to build wealth, leaving a legacy that persists today. If the nation’s capital were free of its stark racial inequities, it could be a more prosperous and competitive city—one where everyone could reach their full potential and build better lives for themselves and their families.

Washington, DC, is one of most racially segregated cities in the United States, stemming from public policies and private actions that once limited where black residents could live, whether they could secure mortgages, and whom they could buy homes from. Today, Wards 4, 5, 7, and 8 on the east have a majority of black residents, and Wards 2, 3, and 6 on the west are majority white. About half of Hispanic residents live in Wards 1 and 4.

While it is commonly understood that the 7 million foreclosures that occurred between 2004 and 2015 fueled the Great Recession and have held back a robust recovery, the role of adverse public records is just as significant and less recognized. Nearly 35 million consumers had adverse public records between 2004 and 2015 including bankruptcies, civil judgments and federal tax liens.

Combined with the 7 million foreclosures, this means more than one in five Americans with credit records suffered an adverse event during this period. While It is also commonly understood that the Great Recession ended on June 2009, the total number of consumers having their foreclosure or negative public records still on their credit report actually peaked in 2015. This paper examines the lasting impact of these negative records on consumer spending and economic recovery.

Cheryl Sharp, MSW, MWT, Karen Johnson, MSW, LCSW, and Pamela Black from the National Council on Behavioral Health present an excellent overview of on Trauma-Sensitive Schools, including the following seven domains:

Domain 1 Student Assessment

Domain 2 Student and Family Involvement

Domain 3 Trauma Sensitive Educated and Responsive District and School Staff

Domain 4 Trauma-Informed, Evidence Based and Emerging Best Practices

Domain 5 Safe and Secure Environments

Domain 6 Community Outreach and Partnership Building

Domain 7 Ongoing Performance Improvement

Oakland stands at the center of a perfect storm. The city and surrounding Bay Area region are experiencing extraordinary economic growth, but housing production is not keeping pace with the escalated demands, nor is sufficient housing affordable to many existing residents and the expanding lower-income workforce. The current displacement crisis undermines the health and well being of its residents, and threatens the historic diversity that gives Oakland its strength and vitality.

The red-hot Bay Area economy is feeding a displacement crisis. Nearly 150,000 new jobs are expected to be added to the East Bay economy by 2020, but housing production is not keeping pace with escalating demands, nor is sufficient housing affordable to many existing residents and the expanding lower-income workforce. According to A Roadmap Towards Equity: Housing Solutions for Oakland, CA, the majority of current Oakland residents could not afford to rent or purchase homes at the current prices in their neighborhoods.1 This has strong implications for Oakland families who lose their housing due to eviction, foreclosure, or other events. The housing crisis imperils seniors on fixed incomes, artists, students, low-wage workers (there is no market level apartment listing affordable for a worker earning Oakland’s minimum wage of $12.55/hour), and even teachers, nurses, and first responders.

Whereas many U.S. cities have experienced a post-recession economic revival, the accompanying run-up in housing costs is threatening to undermine this success by pricing workers out of cities, lengthening commutes, and diminishing livability, the report notes. As a result, local officials are turning to inclusionary zoning (IZ) as a way to combat the shortage of housing that is affordable to moderate- and lower-income workers.

IZ policies take a market-based approach to affordable housing development by requiring or incentivizing the creation of below-market-rate units in exchange for approval of a market-rate project. Inclusionary zoning leverages private development to achieve a public benefit.

Already the majority of children under five years old in the United States are children of color. By the end of this decade, the majority of people under 18 years old will be of color, and by 2044, our nation will be majority people of color. This growing diversity is an asset, but only if everyone is able to access the opportunities they need to thrive. Poverty is a tremendous barrier to economic and social inclusion and new data added to the National Equity Atlas highlights the vast and persistent racial inequities in who experiences poverty in America.

On June 28, we added a poverty indicator to the Atlas, including breakdowns at three thresholds: 100 percent, 150 percent, and 200 percent of the federal poverty line. We also added an age breakdown to the new poverty indicator, in response to user requests for child poverty data, which allows you to look at poverty rates across different age groups including the population under 5 and 18 years old as well as those 18 to 24, 25 to 64, and 65 and over.

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 …

For 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.

This 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 …

The 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.

"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."

ABSTRACT: 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.

"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."

Since 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 …

Over 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.