Communities of Concentrated Poverty: A Proposal for Oregon

This paper is a proposal for how to address poverty in Oregon based on information gathered from interviewing experts in the field and reviewing literature produced by scholars and organizations that address issues related to poverty. The following outlines how we can best address communities of concentrated poverty in Oregon by (1) Addressing communities of concentrated poverty as well as individuals in poverty; (2) Designing efforts that focus on race, equity and social mobility; (3) Defining communities of concentrated poverty using a multidimensional definition based on the dimensions of poverty outlined in The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2016 DAC Guidelines; (4) Identifying communities of concentrated poverty using the “High Poverty Hotspots” list from the Oregon Department of Human Services Office of Forecasting, Research, and Analysis and measuring poverty using the Self-Sufficiency Standard developed by Dr. Diana Pearce at the University of Washington and adopted by Elizabeth Morehead, Ph.D., and Sheila Martin, Ph.D., at the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies at Portland State University; and (5) Developing Communities of Opportunity (CoO) using the Center for American Progress State Promise Zone Framework

Talking About Poverty in a Jobs and Economy Framework

Reducing poverty substantially is not a small project. Unfortunately, only 1 percent of Americans point to "poverty" when asked about the most important problems facing the nation. This presents anti-poverty activists with a strategic problem: we need major policy reforms to substantially reduce poverty, but hardly any Americans -- including, it must be said, those officially categorized as poor -- view "poverty" as a major issue.The good news is that most Americans currently point to "jobs" or the "economy" when asked to identify the most important problem. The poverty rate is largely determined by job availability and job quality -- specifically unemployment, median earnings, and wage inequality, which explain most of the trend in poverty over the last several decades -- so poverty is actually best understood within a jobs and economy framework.This paper looks at two general recommendations for doing this

The Roots of Discriminatory Housing Policy: Moving Towards Gender Justice in Our Economy

Today's housing crisis—and its disproportionate impact on women of color—are rooted in centuries of underinvestment and discriminatory government policies that helped white men build wealth while stripping wealth from women and people of color. Our housing system has turned discrimination, exclusion, and exploitation into assets for the wealthy. This paper underscores that housing justice is gender justice and outlines solutions to advance housing as a human right, not a commodity

Healthy Families in Hard Times: Solutions for Multiple Family Hardships

New research by Children's HealthWatch finds that the cumulative effects of multiple hardships on young children, including a lack of nutritious food, unstable housing and inadequate home heating and cooling, decrease the chances of normal growth and development in very young children. The research shows that the greater the level of hardship experienced, the less likely a child was to be classified as 'well' on a composite indicator of well-being and the more likely their parents were to be concerned about their development.These current findings raise serious concerns about the future well-being of America's youngest children. Deprivations in early life can change the lifetime trajectory of children's health and development. Enhanced coordination across safety net programs, strong child nutrition programs, and an adequate supply of affordable housing could help offset the impacts of hardship on our nation's youngest and most vulnerable children

The Price We Pay: Economic Costs of Barriers to Employment for Former Prisoners and People Convicted of Felonies

Despite modest declines in recent years, the large and decades-long blossoming of the prison population ensure that it will take many years before the United States sees a corresponding decrease in the number of former prisoners. Using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), this report estimates that there were between 14 and 15.8 million working-age people with felony convictions in 2014, of whom between 6.1 and 6.9 million were former prisoners

Doing More for Our Children: Modeling a Universal Child Allowance or More Generous Child Tax Credit

Child poverty in the United States remains stubbornly high, with 12.2 million children living in poverty in 2013. Nearly 17 percent of children in the United States lived in poverty in 2013 -- a higher rate than for other age groups, and considerably higher than the child poverty rate in other advanced industrialized countries. The U.S. deep child poverty rate -- children who live in families with incomes less than half of the poverty line -- was 4.5 percent of all children in 2013, meaning nearly 1 in 20 children live in families that cannot even afford half of what is considered a minimally adequate living.One key policy for reducing child poverty is the child tax credit (CTC) -- which reduces the child poverty rate from 18.8 percent to 16.5 percent of American children. There is broad acceptance of the importance of the CTC, and key expansions to the CTC were made permanent at the end of 2015. At a moment when leaders ranging from President Barack Obama to Speaker Paul Ryan are talking about poverty, now is an opportune time to explore policy options that would build on this success. This report models two approaches to reduce child poverty in the United States even further -- a universal child allowance and an expanded CTC.A universal child allowance is a cash benefit that is provided to all families with children without regard to their income, earnings, or other qualifying conditions, and that could be subject to taxes for families with high incomes. The U.S. child tax credit, in contrast, is provided only to families that meet a threshold for earnings, phasing in as earnings increase and then phasing out as earnings rise higher. While most other advanced industrialized countries have some kind of universal support for children, the United States does not.For each approach, we begin with a modest reform, and then model increasingly generous versions. In our simulations, we find that even the modest reforms generate important poverty reductions. Our results also make clear that the more we spend on these programs, the greater the reduction in poverty the United States can achieve

Unemployment Insurance: Fix It and Fund It

During the 2020–2021 pandemic, the federal-state unemployment insurance (UI) system in the United States nearly reached the breaking point. The surge in joblessness was matched in history only by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Congress hurriedly crafted temporary pandemic benefit assistance programs to fill benefit and eligibility gaps in state-run UI programs, handing them off to capacity-starved state UI agencies that fitfully served millions of workers and employers. After years of policy neglect and contraction, state UI programs have low benefit recipiency, meager earnings replacement rates, and inadequate benefit financing. It is time for comprehensive federal UI reform legislation, which should require state lawmakers to improve program access, benefit adequacy, financing, and reemployment services to meet the challenges of the new labor market. In this paper, the authors offer essential elements for practical UI program reform that includes explicit sharing of program costs between business and labor

Resilient But Not Recovered: After Two Years of the COVID-19 Crisis, Women Are Still Struggling

To better understand the impact of the pandemic on women and their families, NWLC collaborated with Sprout Insight to conduct in-depth interviews and focus groups with women around the country in December 2021, and with polling firm GQR to conduct a nationally representative mixed mode survey of 3,800 adults from February 7–25, 2022. At the state level, we oversampled residents of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and West Virginia.This report combines analysis of federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau with the findings from this qualitative and quantitative research to reveal how women are really faring at work and in their lives after two years of a punishing pandemic. And in profiles drawn from the polling data, NWLC spotlights the experiences of four groups who were especially hard-hit by the pandemic, and who were failed by U.S. policies long before the pandemic began: Black women, Latinas, mothers, and LGBTQ women and nonbinary people