economic justice

Cross-Posted From the Institute for Southern Studies Facing South Blog

With Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich erroneously claiming that "more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history," we take a by-the-numbers look at the food assistance program.

The location of affordable housing is driven by land-use planning. My new BankTalk entry puts the context of the Wake County school board decisions in a national context. A new study shows that more and more schools are increasingly constituted as private-public schools. These schools have very few poor children. Those districts exist even when a larger MSA is well-off. Certainly, Boston and San Francisco harbor plenty of wealth. Drilling down, it is easy to see that these are places without enough affordable housing. Wake County is ready to go to "neighborhood schools." Does that mean that soon, we'll witness a community that allows its schools to filter opportunity based on class and race? In 2000, Wake had 25 census tracts where fewer than 3 percent of its school-age children lived in poverty. Elementary schools often draw from just a handful of tracts.