Do Section 8 Recipients Work?

I must say that I really kind of love the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Off the Charts Blog.  They provide great information on a wide range of topics, but most importantly, they provide me the data to back up arguments I have with my friends about these same topics.  One of the ongoing arguments I have with a couple of friends is that people who receive housing vouchers (specifically Section 8) are lazy and don’t work.  Today on the Off the Charts Blog, Barbara Sard, CBPP’s Vice President of Housing Policy, posted about just this topic.

In her post, she summarized a new CBPP report analyzing the demographic characteristics and labor force attachment of voucher recipients.  The analysis shows:

Voucher recipients who do work make around $17,000 per year, which is not enough to afford decent housing in most places.

The analysis also shows:

Read Full Post »

New Neighborhood Initiative Seeks ‘Catalytic’ Investments

The Washington Times reports on a new program proposed by the Obama administration to transform poor neighborhoods across the nation. The initiative, which builds on the Hope VI model, will concentrate action and funding on urban neighborhoods and coordinate investments ranging from public transit to new housing, early childhood education, farmer’s markets, and school reforms:

The HUD budget request Congress will consider in coming months says the program will seek to transform poor neighborhoods into “functioning, sustainable mixed-income neighborhoods by linking housing improvements with appropriate services, schools, public assets, transportation and access to jobs.” …

“The goal of the program is to demonstrate that concentrated and coordinated neighborhood investments from multiple sources can transform a distressed neighborhood and improve the quality of life of current and future residents,” the administration argues in the budget, also saying the initiative “would challenge public, private and nonprofit partners to identify neighborhood interventions that would have the largest return on federal investments.”

If only there were a neighborhood in Tulsa where something like that is already happening? Oh wait – there is!

Read Full Post »

Webinar: Children and the Foreclosure Crisis

Chapin Hall and the Urban Institute’s next edition of “Thursday’s Child” will cover the impact of the foreclosure crisis on children and families. Register here.

Children, Families, and Foreclosures: The Economic Crisis Hits Home

March 12, 2009
Listen to a live audio webcast
9 am ET / 8 am CT / 7 am MT / 6 am PT
Program length: 1.5 hours

The national housing crisis is exploding, with 2.2 million foreclosure actions started last year alone. Renters and homeowners have been forced to move, and the trauma is rippling across neighborhoods and anchor institutions of every size and description.

Read Full Post »

Thoughts on Residential Mobility

The Annie E. Casey Foundation sponsored a webinar today called “Implications of Family Mobility for Place-based Work.” The event is part of a series titled Strengthening Families through Community Change, whose intent is to share lessons-learned from their Making Connections program. That program seeks to improve prospects for children by strengthening families and transforming communities through place-based strategies. Members include Denver, Des Moines, Indianapolis, Louisville, San Antonio, and Seattle.

We’ve been worried about mobility lately at CAP, because we think it mitigates some of the benefits of our early childhood program and makes it more difficult to build successful long-term relationships with our families. So I wanted to hear about how the Making Connections sites are responding to mobility in their communities. The fear, as expressed by a fellow listener, is that we are “wasting” our investments in a community when families remain highly mobile. (A moderator responded that that sentiment is a bit like saying we’re wasting our investments in elementary school because kids move into high school, as if the investments don’t benefit the people we serve.)

Read Full Post »

The 20K House

Image used under a Creative Commons license from flickr user Public Design Center.

Physical poverty is not an abstraction, but we almost never think of impoverishment as evidence of a world that exists. Much less do we imagine that it’s a condition from which we may draw enlightenment in a very practical way.

A good friend of mine called me yesterday to tell me about the $20K houses being built in Hale County, Alabama, one of the poorest rural communities in the country. She had just read an article about it in Metropolitan Home and wanted to share it with me. (As a side note – this is what I love about being associated with the Tulsa Initiative – I’ve had a lot of friends start sharing their ideas, inspiration, articles, and creative approaches to solving poverty. It’s awesome.)

Read Full Post »

Americans Moving Less

Warning: What follows is kind of a wonky post, especially for the holiday week.

Via the New York Times comes a report that Americans are moving less than at any other time since the Census Bureau began tracking the figure:

The monthly Current Population Survey found that fewer than 12 percent of Americans moved since 2007, a decline of nearly a full percentage point compared with the year before. In the 1950s and ’60s, the number of movers hovered near 20 percent.

The number has been declining steadily, and 12 percent is the lowest rate since the Census Bureau began counting people who move in 1940.

An analysis by the Pew Research Center attributes the decline to a number of factors, including the aging of the population (older people are less likely to change residences) and an increase in two-career couples.

Read Full Post »