How Equal are New Jersey’s Towns and Cities?
"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."
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Attitudes Toward Exploited Cities Helped Poison Flint
"Flint is one of the extreme examples of how our country has allowed geographic divisions by race and income to result in reverse–Robin Hood exploitation of those with the least power.
We’ve used free trade agreements, race-to-the-bottom economic development poaching, and inconsistent union rules to allow corporations to make a fortune off of cities like Flint and then pack up and leave for cheaper workers.
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De-Exoticizing Ghetto Poverty: On the Ethics of Representation in Urban Ethnography
INTRO: To write an ethnography about poor urban people is to risk courting controversy. While all ethnographers face questions about how well they knew their site or how much their stories can be trusted, the tone and content of those questions typically remain within the bounds of collegial discourse. Ethnographers of poor minorities have incited distinct passion and at times acrimony, inspiring accusations of stereotyping, misrepresentation, sensationalism, and even cashing in on the problems of the poor (Fischer 2014; see Boelen 1992; Reed 1994; Wacquant 2002; Jones 2010; Betts 2014; Rios 2015).
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What Is Publicly Engaged Scholarship?
Presented December 12, 2015 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship writing seminar series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark.
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The Gap in Conceptualizing Achievement in America’s Public Schools: An Analysis of the Achievement Gap
The achievement gap is often defined as the difference in academic achievement of minority and/or low-income students and their White and/or more affluent peers. Its status is evaluated through state standardized assessments, mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), as well as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
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Housing Policy Levers to Promote Economic Mobility
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.
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ALICE New Jersey: Study of Financial Hardship
"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."
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Defying the Greater Government: Local and State Governments’ Innovative Approach to Policymaking
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 …
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Architecture of Segregation: Civil Unrest, the Concentration of Poverty, and Public Policy
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.
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Child Poverty By Race, Detroit
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.
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Single Moms And Welfare Woes: A Higher-Education Dilemma
Out of the 12 million single-parent families in the United States, the vast majority—more than 80 percent—are headed by women. These households are more likely than any other demographic group to fall below the poverty line. In fact, census data shows that roughly 40 percent of single-mother-headed families are poor.
Why? Experts point to weak social-safety nets, inadequate child support, and low levels of education, among other factors.
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Are Children With PTSD Being Neglected By Their Schools?
What 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 …
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Childhood Trauma and Its Effects: Implications for Police
NTRODUCTION: 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.
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Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing
SUMMARY: Through this final rule, HUD provides HUD program participants with an approach to more effectively and efficiently incorporate into their planning processes the duty to affirmatively further the purposes and policies of the Fair Housing Act, which is title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The Fair Housing Act not only prohibits discrimination but, in conjunction with other statutes, directs HUD’s program participants to take significant actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination. The approach to affirmatively furthering fair housing carried out by HUD program participants prior to this rule, which involved an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice and a certification that the program participant will affirmatively further fair housing, has not been as effective as originally envisioned. This rule refines the prior approach by replacing the analysis of impediments with a fair housing assessment that should better inform program participants’ planning processes with a view toward better aiding HUD program participants to fulfill this statutory obligation.
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Municipal Contradictions: How To Provide An Equitable Municipal Court Experience
Municipal 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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Holding Schools Responsible for Addressing Childhood Trauma
It’s no secret that U.S. schools have a lot to work on when it comes to offering mental and emotional support for students. Whether due to budgetary constraints or ideological ones, it can be difficult establish an educational standard for how to treat psychological issues that occur outside of the classroom. Yet the supply of professionals equipped to alleviate those problems is diminishing: By 2020, the National Association of School Psychologists estimates there will be a shortage of nearly 15,000 school psychologists nationwide—a statistic that could spell a grim reality for the future of mental-health services in schools.
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The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates
ABSTRACT: We characterize the effects of neighborhoods on children’s earnings and other outcomes in adulthood by studying more than five million families who move across counties in the U.S. Our analysis consists of two parts. In the first part, we present quasi-experimental evidence that neighborhoods affect intergenerational mobility through childhood exposure effects. In particular, the outcomes of children whose families move to a better neighborhood – as measured by the outcomes of children already living there – improve linearly in proportion to the time they spend growing up in that area. We distinguish the causal effects of neighborhoods from confounding factors by comparing the outcomes of siblings within families, studying moves triggered by displacement shocks, and exploiting sharp variation in predicted place effects across birth cohorts, genders, and quantiles.
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The Effects Of Exposure To Better Neighborhoods On Children
ABSTRACT: 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.
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The Best And Worst Places To Grow Up: How Your Area Compares
Location 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.
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Unstable Schedules in Low Wage Work: A Hidden Employment Crisis
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.
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