Category: Poverty & income gap
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Poverty and the Virginia Welfare State
Let’s say you’re a woman living in the City of Richmond. Let’s say you have two children, ages three and seven, but no husband. Let’s say you work 40 hours a week earning the minimum wage, or $15,080 per year. How much can you potentially receive in public benefits? Sean Gorman, the Richmond Times-Dispatch PolitiFact reporter,…
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Reinventing another Failed Public Housing Project
Kippax Place, a seven-story building in downtown Hopewell, is a product of 1970s-era public policy housing. Like so many public housing projects, it became almost unlivable. In an effort to restore the facility to habitable standards, the Hopewell Redevelopment and Housing Authority has contracted with the Community Housing Corporation to give the home for more than…
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Suspended Licenses in Virginia a Social Scourge
In the fiscal year ending June 2015, the Old Dominion suspended licenses of nearly 39,000 Virginians for drug convictions unrelated to driving. The practice is a relic dating back to 1991 and the war on drugs, and all but 12 states have abandoned it. Suspending licenses for drug possession is just one facet of a widespread abuse,…
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Food Pantries, the Latest College Craze
There’s a new wrinkle on the college affordability crisis. Some students are so strapped for cash that colleges are setting up food pantries. As CNN reports, membership in the College and University Food Bank Alliance has quadrupled in the past two years to 398 members. “Even if you don’t hear about hunger being a problem,…
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The Cosmetology Licensing Rip-Off
William E. Grobes IV has pleaded guilty to charges of committing wire fraud and money laundering in the operation of the College of Beauty and Barber Culture in Chesapeake. The case against him, according to WAVY-TV: Grobes represented to the [Veterans Administration] that CBBC provided full-time schooling to hundreds of veteran students beginning in October 2011.…
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Hillbillies Coming Apart
The year 2013 brought the publication of “Coming Apart: The State of White America,” in which sociologist Charles Murray argued that the white working class was not only economically challenged but dissolving in an acid of social dysfunction. Poor and working-class whites suffered from a decline in marriage, an increase in out-of-wedlock births, a rise in substance abuse…
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Jones’s Bet on Mixed-Income Housing
Can Church Hill North break Richmond’s cycle of poverty? by James A. Bacon Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones most likely will be remembered for boondoggles like the Washington Redskins stadium and fiascoes like the proposed Shockoe Bottom baseball stadium. But he should be recognized, too, for a mixed-income redevelopment project in the city’s poverty-stricken east…
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Digging Deeper on the Link Between Spending and Educational Achievement
A few days ago I posted data showing that K-12 spending in Virginia was 10.2% lower in 2014 than it was in 2008, yet National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for Virginia students had climbed over the same period. Given the evidence that Virginia schools showed they could do more with less, I asked,…
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How Land Use Regulation Aggravates Income Inequality
The thesis advanced by economists Daniel Shoag and Peter Ganong in their paper, “Why Has Personal Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined,” is not new. Market-oriented urbanists have made the same connections for years: that land use restrictions drive up the cost of housing, and that high housing costs aggravate income inequality by throttling the flow…
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A Crimped View of Poverty
by James A. Bacon Life is hard on poor people, the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy tells us in a new special report, “The High Cost of Being Poor in Virginia.” While the number of poor Virginians declined to 11.2% in 2015, considerably below the national average, poor people still get a raw deal. They pay…
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Lottery Winnings and College Attendance
by James A. Bacon My mother was acquainted some forty years ago with a woman who lived on welfare and then won a life-changing amount of money in the lottery. As the story has been passed down to me, the woman used the money enjoy the high life, buying expensive clothes and expensive liquor, giving…
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Fighting Joe Takes on Jefferson Davis
by James A. Bacon As long as Joe Morrissey is in the public eye, politics in Richmond will never be dull. Yesterday, with his young wife at his side, Morrissey stood in front of the Jefferson Davis statue on Monument Ave. and declared that it was time to remove the sculpture. “The Jefferson Davis statue is…
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Rethinking the Relationship between the Courts and the Poor
by James A. Bacon A new law passed by the General Assembly this year waived the interest on court fines and penalties accrued by prison inmates. To get an idea of what that could mean to a felon re-entering society, consider the example of a man identified by the first name of Lacy. Of the $7,740 he…
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Cranky Not Optimistic about Woodville Elementary’s “Reconstitution”
Woodville Elementary School in Richmond is by some measures the poorest-performing school district in the school system. To be sure, the school has one of the highest percentage of economically disadvantaged students, but even then, it’s still the worst, as can be seen in the chart above. Performance that bad can’t be blamed on just the students’ socioeconomic…
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Can America Import Scandinavian-Style Socialism?
by James A. Bacon In the never-ending debate that rages in the comments section of Bacon’s Rebellion, defenders of an extensive welfare state often refer to the success of the Nordic countries — Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway — as proof that the United States “blue state” governance model can succeed. The Nordics combine high state…