Poverty in a First World Nation @povertyinafirstworldnation - Tumblr Blog

Head Start is a great program for young children facing poverty. Help Salt Lake Head Start today!

If you can't donate, please reblog! This is a 24-hour event, help Salt Lake CAP Head Start raise some funds!

The Food Access Research Atlas:

Presents a spatial overview of food access indicators for low-income and other census tracts using different measures of supermarket accessibility;

Provides food access data for populations within census tracts; and

Offers census-tract-level data on food access that can be downloaded for community planning or research purposes.

What can you do with the Atlas?

Create maps showing food access indicators by census tract using different measures and indicators of supermarket accessibility;

View indicators of food access for selected subpopulations; and

Download census-tract-level data on food access measures.

#food desert #poverty #hunger

Even as the United States as a whole makes steady progress in its fight against homelessness, those gains are not experienced everywhere.

ThinkProgress examined data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which compiles an annual count of homeless people across the nation. We looked at changes in states’ overall homeless populations between 2008 and 2013 to determine which states are winning the battle against homelessness and which are falling behind.

Roughly half the states saw their homeless populations increase over the past five years, even as the national number has declined. Overall, the five states where homelessness numbers increased the most were North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Vermont, and Montana. The five states that improved the most were Michigan, Kentucky, Colorado, Oregon, and Nevada.

#homelessness #poverty

Is Your State Winning The Fight Against Homelessness?

#homelessness #poverty

aljazeeraamerica-blog

Rise of homeless families

How close is your family to being on the street? Nearly ½ of US families live check to check & an unforeseen crisis could mean homelessness. Families now account for 41% of the homeless. Obama has vowed to end homelessness by 2020. But with funding cuts forcing shelters to close, limited affordable housing & laws penalizing the homeless is it just talk? Has the helping hand turned into a fist? We discuss at 7:30pmET.

What do you think?

#poverty #homelessness #child poverty

I am grateful for SNAP and TANF. I am grateful for people who are willing to stand in lines, for a turkey from a food bank or for a toy someone is expecting from Santa. I'm grateful for the people brave enough to boycott Black Friday (and Black Thanksgiving, thanks to some companies), and I am grateful for those who know Black Friday is their only opportunity to make the holidays happen for their families. I'm grateful for workers who stand up for a better standard of living, and I'm also grateful for workers who are too afraid of jeopardizing their families' well-being to stand up.

I'm grateful for those who, even in the most vitriolic debates, take the time to respect their opponents as people. I'm grateful for the kindness of strangers, and for the politicians who genuinely believe in helping people. I am grateful for the parents who work hard to make their kids think they're not poor. I'm grateful for the kids who survive poverty, and all the problems it creates.

Finally, I'm grateful for all of you, the people who believe the world can be a better place, and that life shouldn't be so hard for so many. I'm grateful we can all come together and try to understand the complex details of such a complex problem. I'm grateful for a platform upon which we can all educate each other and learn from one another.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

#poverty #Thanksgiving #Black Friday

Poverty is growing at a faster rate in the suburbs than in the cities, and the Pittsburgh area is ahead of the curve -- but not in a good way.

Nationally, about 55 percent of the population living in poverty is outside of cities, but in Allegheny County, 61 percent of people living in poverty are in the suburbs, and the number rises to 79 percent when the Pittsburgh metropolitan statistical area is measured. That area includes Allegheny and its six surrounding counties.

Those numbers come from Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and co-author of "Confronting Suburban Poverty in America."

Ms. Kneebone said suburban poverty has been growing since 2000 and became more significant than urban poverty even before the economic meltdown of 2008 and 2009. The recession exacerbated it.

#poverty #pittsburgh

When Bret Lane was laid off from his telecommunications sales job after 16 years, he wasn’t worried. He’d never been unemployed for more than a few days since he started working as a teenager. But months passed, and he couldn’t find a job. One day, he heard the Purina plant in his Turlock, Calif., neighborhood was hiring janitors for $14 an hour. When he arrived early at 4 a.m., he counted more than 400 people lined up to interview.

“That’s when I realized things had gotten serious,” said Lane, 53, who called being out of work “pure hell.”

Lane’s experience is hardly unique. As of September 2013, 4 million people had been unemployed for six months or more. The economy has been slow to regain the 8.7 million jobs lost during the Great Recession, making prospects grim for many of the long-term unemployed.

Older workers like Lane make up a larger percentage of the persistently jobless than ever before. Nearly 40 percent of unemployed workers are over the age of 45 — a 30 percent rise from the 1980s. And for this group, the job hunt can be particularly long and frustrating. Unemployed people aged 45-54 were jobless for 45 weeks on average, and those 55 to 64 were jobless for 57 weeks, according to an October 2013 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

#poverty #unemployment

#poverty #Supplemental poverty measure

Larry Bossom, 41, who lost his job a few month ago, leaves the St. Ignatius food pantry with bags of items on Nov. 1 in Chicago. Bossom is relying on food stamps and the food bank to help him until he finds work again.

The number of poor people in America is 3 million higher than the official count, encompassing 1 in 6 residents due to out-of-pocket medical costs and work-related expenses.

#poverty

This chart, from this Census Bureau report, explains the different criteria established by the Official Poverty Measure (currently in use) and Supplemental Poverty Measures (not in use). Under the Supplemental Poverty Measure, one on six Americans is considered poor. As explained in this article, these new criteria are not presently used in an official capacity. This means that even though the government has identified more Americans at risk for hunger, foreclosure, and other poverty-related dangers, they cannot use this data to help until the new standards are accepted by Congress.

#poverty #Supplemental Poverty Measure #US Census Bureau

progressive-politics-deactivate

It’s surprising how numbers can humanize the problem of families making do with slashed benefits.

Interestingly, Stateline’s map shows how cold, hard numbers can also serve to humanize the problem. For instance, as the map shows, in Oregon, 304,000 kids and 159,000 elderly people and those with disabilities have seen their benefits cut.

Another fact that jumps out when looking at the map: While Republicans have led the call to slash the SNAP program in the House, many of the states whose residents are most reliant on food stamps are reliably Republican and located in the GOP’s Southern heartland. About 20 percent of the population in Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, and South Carolina, for instance, receive benefits from the federal food assistance program.

#poverty #SNAP

In 2003, leaders of [Mount Holly, New Jersey] decided that crime in the Gardens had made the neighborhood–home to many black and Latino families–irredeemable. They devised a plan to buy the aging homes, raze them and replace them with higher-end housing the residents couldn’t afford.

Neighbors resisted, banded together as Mount Holly Gardens Citizens in Action and sued.

In court, they challenged the township’s designation of the neighborhood as blighted and accused Mount Holly of discriminating against residents on the basis of race.

Even if the discrimination wasn’t intentional, they said, the redevelopment project would have a disparate impact on the township’s only neighborhood where blacks and Latinos are the majority, destroying their hard earned homes.

The township denies that race had anything to do with the decision, saying that it was a last ditch effort to rid Mount Holly of crime and improve its economy.

#poverty #discrimination #new jersey #civil rights

Almost 6 million young people are neither in school nor working, according to a study released Monday.

That's almost 15 percent of those aged 16 to 24 who have neither desk nor job, according to The Opportunity Nation coalition, which wrote the report.

Other studies have shown that idle young adults are missing out on a window to build skills they will need later in life or use the knowledge they acquired in college. Without those experiences, they are less likely to command higher salaries and more likely to be an economic drain on their communities.

#unemployment #poverty

According to U.S. Census Bureau data and economic website 24/7 Wall St., two of the poorest cities in the nation are in Texas.

Data shows that the Brownsville-Harlingen area has overtaken McAllen as the poorest city in the country, putting them in the first and second spots.

Rounding out the poorest top five cities are Lake Havasu City, Ariz., Dalton, Ga., and Gadsden, Ala.

The richest city in the country is California's San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area. Other cities the richest top five include Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Bridgeport, Conn.

Of Brownsville's 415,557 residents, 36 percent live below the poverty level, compared to just 10.8 percent in San Jose. Texas' overall poverty rate is 17 percent. In Brownsville, 22 percent of the population has only a high school diploma or other equivalent certificate. 37 percent do not have a high school diploma.

#poverty #texas

A temporary stimulus boost to SNAP or food stamp benefits from 2009 expires on November 1, which means $5 billion in funding cuts to a program that provides much-needed support for low-income families and individuals across the nation. An estimated 47 million people currently rely on SNAP benefits, nearly 49 percent of which are children, a number that has increased during the current economic recession. The total cuts will amount to about a five percent reduction for families who already struggle to make ends meet, and some states already began making cuts. Talks around the contentious farm bill resume this week, which could add an additional $40 billion in cuts if the Senate approves a House bill proposed earlier this year.

#poverty #SNAP #food stamps #hunger

Video Report: An Oasis in a Food Desert

Since opening last month, America’s first nonprofit grocery store is bringing fresh and affordable fruits, vegetables, meat and dairy to Chester, Pa., a community that has struggled to find healthy food options since the city’s last supermarket closed in 2001.

Chester, home to 35,000 people, has been designated a food desert, a low-income area lacking easy access to healthy food, by the US government. For the residents of Chester the Fare & Square grocery store — seven years in the making — is a welcome relief: “It’s a beautiful supermarket,” said employee Geraldine Carter.

The store is the brainchild of Bill Clark, the executive director of Philabundance, a nonprofit hunger relief organization. Chester has a 36 percent poverty rate and unemployment is 13 percent. Clark said at one time Chester had five grocery stores, but they all closed when the city fell on hard times after manufacturing virtually disappeared.

#food desert #poverty #pennsylvania

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