Category: Poverty & income gap
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Cranky Strikes Again, Shows Rampant Cheating in Richmond Schools
I have been chronicling the administrative-cheating scandals in the Richmond Public School system, noting with each post that the situation is even worse than it appeared the previous time I wrote. Now it appears that administrative cheating is even more systemic than even I had suspected. In a statistical tour de force, John Butcher, writing…
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Counseling, Jail Time, and the Cycle of Violence
Families in south Richmond have long held community cookouts at the Carter Jones Park. Last Sunday evening, an altercation broke around at a basketball/skateboard facility nearby. Gunshots were fired. Nine-year-old Markiya Simone Dickson and an unnamed 11-year-old boy were struck by bullets. Markiya died. Community members and city leaders gathered at a vigil yesterday to…
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Housing’s Supply-Side Revolution
IndieDwell converts shipping containers into affordable housing. The Idaho-based business has taken an idea championed locally by entrepreneurs Sheila and Sidney Gunst (see “Thinking Outside the Container“) and turned it into a growing business enterprise. The company now sells 640-square-foot dwellings, including the cost of delivery and installation, for $78,000. Add $11,500 to build a…
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Helping the Poor by… Replacing Lower-Income Housing with Mixed-Income Housing?
The premise behind public housing is that “market failure” fails to supply enough decent and affordable housing for poor people. Government must intervene in the housing marketplace not only with subsidies but as a real estate developer to fill the gap. What government succeeded in creating all too often — from Chicago’s infamous Pruitt Igoe…
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“It Is Becoming OK Not to Go to School”
Zenobia Bey is CEO of Community 50/50, an organization dedicated to promoting “positive thinking” and “social skills” in Richmond inner-city youth. As a civic activist who works and lives in the community, she has a different take on the high dropout rate in Richmond Public Schools than what we hear from well-meaning white, middle-class politicians,…
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Migration Chains and Trickle-Down Housing
Call it trickle-down housing. When developers build luxury housing for the wealthy because more expensive housing provides bigger profit margins, do the poor go homeless? No. When an affluent household moves into a luxurious new penthouse apartment, it creates a vacancy in its previous residence…. which a less well-to-do family moves into, creating yet another…
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Do Female UVa Faculty Suffer from Pay Discrimination?
To crib a gag line from the Instapundit blog, why are liberal and leftist institutions such cesspools of sexism? The Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia’s student newspaper has found that female faculty at the university are earning almost $34,000 less this fiscal year than male faculty members on average. Only six of the top…
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More Unaffordable Affordable Housing
The Lawson Companies., a Virginia Beach multifamily development company, is planning to construct a $19.25 million, low-income housing project in South Richmond, reports Richmond BizSense. The apartment complex will have 96 units, for an average cost of $200,000 each. Rent for two-bedroom apartments will average around $1,000 a month, while three-bedroom units will go for…
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Virginia’s Unaffordable Approach to Affordable Housing
If the public policy debate over affordable dwellings is as impoverished as that described in The Virginia Mercury this morning, poor Virginians are doomed to lives of housing misery. Here’s how reporter Ned Oliver sums up the controversy: “Is affordable housing something for the state to tackle, or should it be left to cities and…
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Mugged by Reality: Sedgwick Gardens Edition
A conservative, as the saying goes, is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. Well, it appears that a large number of liberals in the affluent Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C., have been mugged by reality. Whether they become conservatives remains to be seen. In a social experiment that could have implications here…
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Wealth Shocks and Wealth Creation in the South
The abolition of U.S. slavery after the Civil War, along with the accompanying decline in land value, triggered one of the greatest episodes of “wealth compression” in world history. Slaves accounted for roughly half the accumulated wealth of Southern whites in ante-Bellum society. Reflecting a loss in productivity after the war, the value of land,…
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How Government Creates Poverty: Fines and Fees
Government is much better at creating poverty than at curing it. Yesterday the General Assembly voted to end the practice of suspending driving licenses for non-payment of fines or restitution or both and ordered Department of Motor Vehicles to restore driving privileges for hundreds of thousands of Virginians. If you need to do business at…
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Promoting Financial Literacy
Here’s a government initiative I like. The City of Richmond’s Treasurer’s Office is holding its first Financial Literacy Fair this Friday. States the press release: The purpose of this fair is to empower the citizens of Richmond to take more control of their finances and begin the initial steps needed to build personal wealth. The…
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Brace Yourself for the “Food Justice” Movement
“Food justice” is a thing now. My first instinct when I read the phrase was cynical: While some people are busy running food banks and food pantries, growing urban gardens, and setting up grocery stores in Richmond’s inner city — you know, doing things that actually feed poor people — food justice warriors are busy…
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Yes, Let’s Restore Drivers Licenses. But…
The General Assembly spiked bills in the 2019 session that would have ended the practice of suspending the drivers licenses of Virginians who fail to pay court fines and other obligations unrelated to driving. Without some kind of repercussion, foes of the bills argued, those obligations often would go unpaid. Now Governor Ralph Northam is…