Category: Poverty & income gap
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Unpaid Bills, Debt Collection, and Hospital Profits
Carlos Ortiz underwent tests last year at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg for dizziness stemming from an inner-ear problem. When the 65-year-old uninsured gardener couldn’t pay his $15,000 bill, the nonprofit institution took him to court. Mary Washington was suing so many patients that day that the circuit court had cleared the docket to hear…
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How Crime-Prone Students Worsen Educational Outcomes for Everyone
Exposure to crime-prone students in school has “large and significant” effects on test scores, school discipline and even adult criminal behavior, finds a new study by Stephen B. Billings and Mark Hoekstra published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Exposure to crime-prone peers in the same neighborhood also has an effect, but the negative influence…
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A Nonprofit Insider’s View on Child Nutrition
Last week I asked the question how, given our nation’s’ extensive social safety net, it is possible that children in Virginia go hungry and suffer from malnutrition. Are government support payments deficient? Are food deserts to blame? Do people squander their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) stipends? Is something else going on? The explanations we…
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If Kids Are Going Hungry, Does Anyone Care Why?
No one wants to see children go hungry, so one’s natural instinct is to sympathize with a new initiative like No Kid Hungry, which is helping parents and caregivers locate free meals in their communities with a simple text message. But a Richmond Times-Dispatch article profiling the program makes a startling statement: The school year…
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As Arlington Housing Prices Soar, Supply Is Unresponsive
The worst fears of Amazon critics are coming true. Housing prices are becoming increasingly unaffordable — even before Amazon sets up shop at its HQ2 facility in Arlington and floods the region with 25,000 employees. The average home price in Arlington County jumped 7% in the past year to $713,000, as investors poured into the…
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The Crux of Arlington’s Affordable Housing Crisis: $350,000 Per Unit
Amazon will donate $3 million to support affordable housing in Arlington County, the company has announced. While government officials and charities welcomed the donation, reports the Washington Post, critics contend that the sum is sufficient to build only a handful of units. According to the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance, new housing in the Virginia…
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Promoting Social Mobility via STEM Education
Job openings outnumber job seekers by a record gap, the Wall Street Journal reports today. There were a seasonally adjusted 7.45 million unfilled jobs at the end of April compared to 6.2 million Americans looking for work. With workers so much in demand, there exists a never-seen-before-in-our-lifetimes opportunity to increase social mobility. Here in Virginia,…
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Want More Affordable Housing? Try Free Markets.
Exclusionary regulation at the local level is the root cause of unaffordable housing, and a rollback of exclusionary regulation is the best long-term solution, argue Salim Furth and Emily Hamilton, research fellows at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “Contemporary American land use law embodies the bad idea that private land ought to be publicly planned.…
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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…