Category: Poverty & income gap
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More Unaffordable Affordable Housing
The Lawson Companies., a Virginia Beach multifamily development company, is planning to construct a $19.25 million, low-income housing project in South Richmond, reports Richmond BizSense. The apartment complex will have 96 units, for an average cost of $200,000 each. Rent for two-bedroom apartments will average around $1,000 a month, while three-bedroom units will go for…
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Virginia’s Unaffordable Approach to Affordable Housing
If the public policy debate over affordable dwellings is as impoverished as that described in The Virginia Mercury this morning, poor Virginians are doomed to lives of housing misery. Here’s how reporter Ned Oliver sums up the controversy: “Is affordable housing something for the state to tackle, or should it be left to cities and…
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Mugged by Reality: Sedgwick Gardens Edition
A conservative, as the saying goes, is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. Well, it appears that a large number of liberals in the affluent Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C., have been mugged by reality. Whether they become conservatives remains to be seen. In a social experiment that could have implications here…
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Wealth Shocks and Wealth Creation in the South
The abolition of U.S. slavery after the Civil War, along with the accompanying decline in land value, triggered one of the greatest episodes of “wealth compression” in world history. Slaves accounted for roughly half the accumulated wealth of Southern whites in ante-Bellum society. Reflecting a loss in productivity after the war, the value of land,…
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How Government Creates Poverty: Fines and Fees
Government is much better at creating poverty than at curing it. Yesterday the General Assembly voted to end the practice of suspending driving licenses for non-payment of fines or restitution or both and ordered Department of Motor Vehicles to restore driving privileges for hundreds of thousands of Virginians. If you need to do business at…
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Promoting Financial Literacy
Here’s a government initiative I like. The City of Richmond’s Treasurer’s Office is holding its first Financial Literacy Fair this Friday. States the press release: The purpose of this fair is to empower the citizens of Richmond to take more control of their finances and begin the initial steps needed to build personal wealth. The…
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Brace Yourself for the “Food Justice” Movement
“Food justice” is a thing now. My first instinct when I read the phrase was cynical: While some people are busy running food banks and food pantries, growing urban gardens, and setting up grocery stores in Richmond’s inner city — you know, doing things that actually feed poor people — food justice warriors are busy…
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Yes, Let’s Restore Drivers Licenses. But…
The General Assembly spiked bills in the 2019 session that would have ended the practice of suspending the drivers licenses of Virginians who fail to pay court fines and other obligations unrelated to driving. Without some kind of repercussion, foes of the bills argued, those obligations often would go unpaid. Now Governor Ralph Northam is…
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Fatherless Households and SOLs
We know that the percentage of “economically disadvantaged” students in a school district is correlated significantly with Standards of Learning failure rates. But is poverty the driver behind low test scores, or is it just correlated with a third factor that is the real driver? Over on Cranky’s Blog, John Butcher ran an interesting analysis:…
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Health Care and the Oppression Narrative
Correlation does not equal causality. That’s a fundamental tenet of statistics, but the concept apparently is so rarefied that a Virginia Mercury article based the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings appears to be unfamiliar with it. The result is a headline — “In Virginia, health outcomes follow geographic and racial lines” — that has become…
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Richmond Schools Weaken Anti-Truancy Initiative
It has long been a pillar of Virginia education policy to increase the high school graduation rate. To advance that goal, several school districts have cracked down on students skipping school. The Richmond Public School system, for instance, has long employed a team of “school attendance officers” to round up truants and get them back…
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Moral Measures, Skin in the Game, and K-12 Education
Four former state secretaries of education banded together to publish an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch today in support of Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney’s proposal to raise real estate and cigarette taxes to fund the Richmond public school system’s strategic plan. In the op-ed they made a statement that is core to liberal thought: The moral…
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What Can Educators Learn from ChallengeU?
It’s a heart-warming story: Thanks to the intervention of the nonprofit ChallengeU program, four former high school dropouts from the Petersburg school system received their high school diplomas in a ceremony Wednesday. (A fifth diploma earner could not participate.) “The event was much the same as a traditional graduation ceremony, complete with speeches and a…
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Blacksburg Tapping the Brakes on Student Housing
While the People’s Republic of Charlottesville grapples with mandatory parking (see previous post), the People’s Republic of Blacksburg is wrestling with the problem of privately developed student housing. Apparently, too many developers want in on the opportunities created by expanding enrollment at Virginia Tech. Town Council voted 7 to 0 recently, according to the Roanoke…
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Squeezing the Most from Every Health Care Dollar
Medicaid expansion in Virginia is forcing Virginia’s free clinics to make a fundamental choice. Should they participate in Medicaid or not? Accepting Medicaid payments would provide a new source of funding for clinics, which don’t charge for medical services, and would allow them to continue treating patients who qualify for Medicaid and would otherwise need…