"Los Angeles banked on the idea that no one would care"

"It can be difficult to grasp that areas that are not pretty, like Skid Row, are home to people."

Ten Things You Need to Know. . .

. . . to live on the streets.

Summer Hunger

From the Food Research and Action Center:

The number of low-income children who are

receiving free and reduced-price lunch during the

regular school year is an excellent indicator of the

need for the Summer Nutrition Programs, so FRAC

uses it as a benchmark to measure summer

participation nationally and in the states. While the

total number of children participating in Summer

Nutrition grew by more than 49,000, or 1.7

percent, from July 2007 to July 2008, the number

of children enrolled in the regular year school lunch

program grew faster so that the reach of Summer

Nutrition decreased slightly. In July 2008, 17.3

children received Summer Nutrition for every 100

low-income students who received lunch in the

2007-2008 school year, compared to a ratio of

17.5:100 children in July 2007.

The disparities in participation among the 50 states

plus the District of Columbia are dramatic. Only 10

states managed to reach at least one quarter of

their low-income children in July 2008. The District

of Columbia, followed by New Mexico, South

Carolina, Nevada and New York had the highest

rates for Summer Nutrition participation by lowincome

children.

Eleven states failed to even serve one-tenth of

their low-income children through their Summer

Nutrition Programs in 2008. Mississippi, Oklahoma,

Kansas, Louisiana, and Colorado had the lowest

rates for Summer Nutrition participation by lowincome

children in July 2008.

The full Report is here.

Poverty and the Safety Net

From CBPP:

The good news is that the safety net reduces poverty substantially and is more effective at reducing poverty than has generally been recognized. When both broad social insurance benefits such as Social Security and programs targeted on low-income people such as food stamps are considered, the safety net lifts tens of millions of people out of poverty. More specifically, in 2005 (the latest year for which comprehensive data are available), the safety net as a whole:

• Cut the number of Americans living in poverty by nearly half (44 percent), lifting 31 million people above the poverty line.[1]
• Reduced the severity of poverty for those who remain poor, increasing their average disposable income from 29 percent of the poverty line to 64 percent.
• Helped protect Americans from the deepest extremes of poverty, cutting by 7.3 million — or more than three-quarters — the number of children living below half the poverty line. It also lifted 8.0 million children above three-quarters of the poverty line. (This analysis uses a poverty line equal to about $21,400 in 2005 for a couple with two children in a community with average housing costs, consistent with NAS recommendations.)
• Was more effective at lifting children in less-deeply-poor families from just below the poverty line to above the poverty line than it had been a decade earlier. Among children whose non-benefit income was between 75 percent and 99 percent of the poverty line, public programs lifted 65 percent above the poverty line in 2005, up from 51 percent in 1995.

The bad news is that the safety net has weakened over the last decade for families with children that have the lowest incomes and are in greatest need of help due to joblessness or other crises. In 2005, the safety net as a whole:

• Protected a smaller share of children from deep poverty than it used to. In 1995, the safety net lifted above half the poverty line 88 percent of children whose family incomes were lower than that before counting safety net benefits. By 2005, this percentage had declined to 76 percent. If the safety net had been as effective at keeping children out of deep poverty in 2005 as it was in 1995, there would have been 1.1 million very poor children in 2005; instead, there were 2.4 million.
• Protected fewer jobless workers from deep poverty than it used to. Among very poor unemployed workers looking for work in any given week, the safety net lifted 60 percent above half of the poverty line in 2005, down from 70 percent of very poor unemployed workers in 1995. [2]

Since these data were collected, the economy has entered a major recession, and Congress enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, designed to boost economic growth and ameliorate the harshest impacts of the recession on struggling families. The recovery package included many provisions that strengthen the safety net, though in most cases the improvements are designed to be temporary. These include a temporary boost in food stamp benefits, temporary expansions in the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, new incentives for states to make their unemployment insurance systems more accessible to jobless workers, and new funding for states that see an increase in the number of families receiving basic cash assistance through TANF programs and states that expand short-term help and subsidized employment programs for poor families.

These provisions will soften the impact of the recession on the extent and depth of poverty. (A previous Center analysis projects that the expansions in the EITC, Child Tax Credit, and the new Making Work Pay tax credit will stop 1 million children from falling below the poverty line. [3]) When the recession abates, it will be important to measure precisely the impact of these temporary measures and consider what longer-lasting improvements should be made in the safety net.

Race, Age, Education, and Voting

Via Andrew Gellman at Nate Silver.

Wonk Resource Reminder

If you're interested in the unfolding debate about healthcare, you should add Ezra Klein to your bookmarks. Visit early, visit often.

Squat to Co-Op

The Poor Give More

from McClatchy

The One Line America Will Not Cross

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Moral Kombat
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Housing Projects from Hell

Via Oobject. h/t Kottke.

Fighting Foreclosures

White Collar Crime Scenes.

On "The Wire"

David Simon speaks with Bill Moyers about one of the best things ever to appear on television.

Why are Children in East Harlem Obese?

Plastics?

Disappearing Nonprofits

Who Gets It?

UPDATE:

from CBPP

Where's it Go?

Fun with Sub-Committee Hearings!

Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, and testimony about lessons for today from the Great Depression. Including people who actually know things! Watch here. C'mon, you know you want to. . . . . .

Nickelsville

Why No Riots?

From Sudhir Venkatesh in the NYT:

But it was only several years after the stock market crash that large-scale protests, bread riots and street rebellions began to occur in small towns and big cities. That’s the most pertinent lesson of the Great Depression: people waited, with relative patience, for years for some government response before anyone looted a grocery store or fought off police officers who were evicting families. So it’s possible that if our economic hardships endure, civil unrest could follow.

But if American anger remains corralled on the Internet, into e-mail messages to Congress and in sporadic small-group protests, it is unlikely that the Obama administration will do much to assuage the anger of taxpayers. Administration officials certainly don’t seem concerned that rage will heat up and overflow; after all, anticipating unrest would mean a broad and intensive campaign to shore up housing, food and welfare safety nets. The proposed budget contains a few such line items, but a comprehensive, coordinated program to prevent violence and defuse anger would need sustained commitments from mayors, service providers and civic leaders.

Perhaps the lack of concern is warranted, as several factors make widespread revolt less likely today. Our cities are no longer dense, overcrowded industrial centers where unionized laborers and disgruntled strikers might take a public stand. Concentrated inner-city poverty has declined, too, so don’t expect 1960s-style ghetto unrest.

Our urban centers are instead corporate hubs and the victims of this recession include hundreds of thousands of white-collar workers. For obvious reasons, these folks tend not to have the particular sense of grievance — that a select few are receiving preferential treatment, that they’re on the losing end of a rigged game — that usually sets off a conflagration.

And in today’s cities, even when we share intimate spaces, we tend to be quite distant from one another. Mass disturbances are not highly orchestrated ballets. They require spontaneous interaction, a call and response among unidentified cries of rage, the possibility for a unified mass to form from a gathering of loosely connected individuals.

But these days, technology separates us and makes more of our communication indirect, impersonal and emotionally flat. With headsets on and our hands busily texting, we are less aware of one another’s behavior in public space. Count the number of people with cellphones and personal entertainment devices when you walk down a street. Self-involved bloggers, readers of niche news, all of us listening to our personal playlists: we narrowly miss each other. Effective rebellions require that we sing in unison.

More Tent Cities

From the NYT:

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

In Seattle, homeless residents in the city’s 100-person encampment call it Nickelsville, an unflattering reference to the mayor, Greg Nickels. A tent city in Sacramento prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to announce a plan Wednesday to shift the entire 125-person encampment to a nearby fairground. That came after a recent visit by “The Oprah Winfrey Show” set off such a news media stampede that some fed-up homeless people complained of overexposure and said they just wanted to be left alone.

Read the rest. But remember at all times: this is not new, it is only the scale that has changed. People who are homeless in more ordinary times are no less "deserving."