Category: Poverty & income gap
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Tenant-Rights Activists, Meet the Housing Shortage
The debate over tenant evictions is gaining traction now that the Virginia Housing Commission has taken up the issue. Two concrete proposals were put before the Commission during a Tuesday hearing. One would extend the time from five days to two weeks before rent is declared to be late. A second wouldย give tenants more time…
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Proceed Cautiously with Eviction Reforms
Carlos Lopez, a Los Angeles landscaper, inherited a house and let it out to rent. When the original tenant went to jail, a woman Lopez had never seen before was occupying the premises and refusing to pay any rent. He engaged an attorney to evict her. The squatter lawyered up, too, obtaining free legal services…
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Millions More for Medicaid Expansion? Now You Tell Us
One of the conceits of Virginia’s Medicaid debate is that expansion would pay for itself. Uncle Sam would pick up 90% of the cost, leaving Virginia to raise money for only 10%. The Commonwealth would save a few hundred million dollars through reduced funding forย prison healthcare, mental health, indigent care funding, FAMIS pregnant women, and…
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OK, We Enacted Medicaid Expansion. Let’s Measure How Well It Works.
So… The General Assembly has enacted Medicaid reform. That’s a big win for Governor Ralph Northam and Virginia Democrats, and potentially good news for 400,000 of near-poor Virginia adults who now will qualify for a healthcare program that will be 90% funded by the federal government and 10% by the state. It’s not such good…
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Virginia Eviction Laws Stacked Against the Poor
by Marc Lockhart Last Tuesday I joined more than 100 people for the inaugural meeting of the Campaign to Reduce Evictions (CARE), sponsored by the Virginia Poverty Law Center, at First Baptist Church in Richmond. We assembled for two hours to investigate why Richmond has the second highest eviction rate in the country among large…
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A New Narrative for African-Americans
Hip-hop artist Kanye West has sent the Twitterverse into a frenzy by tweeting his approbation of psychologist Jordan Peterson, economist Thomas Sowell, and viral sensation Candace Owens. The thrust of Westโs comments is that African-Americans should be allowed to think for themselves. Intellectuals like Sowell and Walter Williams, read only by conservative intellectuals, fought the…
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Are Virginia’s Civil Courts Stacked Against the Poor?
Only one in 500,000 civil cases handled in Virginia’s general district courts each year have lawyers representing both plaintiffs and defendants, according to a new study by the National Center for State Courts. And what does that mean? “When only one side has an attorney and the other side doesn’t, then the system becomes dysfunctional,…
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Time to Reform Practice of Cash Bonds
Earlier this month Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael Herring announced that his office would no longer recommend requiring cash bond for people charged with crimes. Instead, prosecutors would recommend defendants either be held in jail or be given their freedom until the trial. Too many people are unable to raise cash for the bond, and Herring…
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Can Medicaid Expansion Address the Doctor Shortage?
With Virginia on the cusp of Medicaid expansion, it is heartening to see someone asking the obvious question: What good is Medicaid coverage if you can’t find a doctor? Bob Burke at Virginia Business states the obvious: Getting a Medicaid card doesnโt necessarily mean you have a doctor at hand. Plenty of places in Virginia…
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Henrico’s Housing Whack-a-Mole
Henrico County, following the priorities of its new Democratic Party majority on the Board of Supervisors, has created a $2 million fund to head off neighborhood blight by financing renovations and redevelopment of the county’s aging housing stock, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. As an example of what the fund can do, county officials pointed to…
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Spend Less, Invest More, Improve Credit Scores
The editorial board of the Virginian-Pilot finds it a matter for “concern” that African-Americans are denied mortgage loan applications in the Hampton Roads region at a higher rate than whites. “In Hampton Roads,” writes the Pilot, black applicants during the studyโs period โ 2015 and 2016 โ were 2.4 times more likely to be denied…
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Race, Responsibility and the Welfare State
๏ปฟ by Vic Nicholls What is the justification for taxing people to provide healthcare? There is no mandate for it in the Constitution. The “general welfare” was never considered to include health care. The campaign slogans of the Founding Fathers never included, “Free leech treatments for all!” Are all men “created equal”? No. Everyone has…
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The Crisis in African-American Student Indebtedness
The student loan default crisis is bad… and getting worse, finds Judith Scott-Clayton, a Brookings Institution scholar, based on her analysis of the latest student loan data released by the U.S. Department of Education. Debt and default has reached “crisis” levels among African-Americans, and even a bachelor’s degree is no guarantee of security.ย Black B.A. graduates…
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Poor Choices and Food Insecurity
Sparkpeople, a publisher of health, fitness and food information, created the graphic shown above to demonstrate that eating healthy food need not be more expensive than eating junk food.ย Sparkpeople blogger Stepfanie Romine recently wrote that sheย hears the excuses every day — “I can’t afford to buy healthy food,” “fruits and vegetables are too expensive,” “it’s…
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Supply-Side Experiment in Food Desert Goes Bust
Poor Jim Scanlon. He bought into the conventional wisdom that food deserts are a supply-side problem — an unwillingness of grocery store operators to locate in inner cities. Hoping to remedy that deficiency, the idealistic former Ukrop’s executive opened Jim’s Local Market in a low-income neighborhood in Newport News in May 2016. Now, a year…