D.C. experienced the nation’s fastest population growth for the first time in more than 70 years, according to newly released U.S. Census Bureau data. The District’s population grew by 2.7 percent between April 2010 and June 2011. Much of the population growth can be attributed to increases in white and Hispanic residents; at the same time, D.C.’s black population has declined.
Getting unemployment compensation payments are now easier for D.C. residents without bank accounts; this week, the District’s Department of Employment Services began issuing unemployment benefits through debit cards. Only 2,000 people have volunteered for the pilot program, but starting in January, the agency will stop sending checks to anyone receiving unemployment compensation. Cashing unemployment checks can be costly or inconvenient for the more than 12 percent of D.C. households without bank accounts.
The debit card system will work similar to the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) for youth. “The recipient doesn’t need to have a bank account. The card can be used at any of the thousands of ATMs in the area,” Thompson said.
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Perhaps creating more jobs is a way to lessen D.C.’s unemployment disparities. But do government subsidies to private developers spur such economic development? According to a new report by nonprofit Good Jobs First, the subsidies the D.C. government currently provides to developers include few requirements for job creation, wage levels or employee health benefits. D.C. has the fewest requirements of anywhere else in the country, when comparing the District to all 50 states.
Although the D.C. metro area doesn’t rank as one of the regions with the most economic inequality, this map of the District proper shows a stark divide between neighborhoods east of the Anacostia and in upper Northwest.
Here’s something to ponder as the holidays approach: people spend money to offset their perceived lower statuses in society. That’s according to a set of University of San Diego studies examining the effects of racial stereotypes on shoppers’ spending habits.
More Americans believe that fixing the overall economy, rather than reducing the gap between the rich and poor, should be a top governmental priority, according to a recent Gallup poll. The issue of income inequality has become a topic of public discourse in recent months; it’s been the main focus of the Occupy movement.
There have been a number of responses to Forbes technology writer Gene Marks’ article, “If I Was A Poor Black Kid.” Here, News One blogger Terrell Jermaine Starr shares his path to becoming a Fulbright Scholar. Starr writes that what Marks “failed to touch on is that overcoming poverty is not only about access and citing statistics. It is a major — sometimes painful — cultural shift, both mentally and socially.”
New bars and restaurants can help spur growth or change in a neighborhood, or they can be viewed as “tangible evidence of gentrification,” writes GOOD‘s Noreen Malone. Sheldon Scott, owner of Marvin and other D.C. restaurants and bars, explains the difficulty of securing a liquor license in D.C.
It’s easy to assume that a neighborhood dependent on bars for growth would stay young. People might move to such a place in their 20s and live with roommates before settling down elsewhere to start a family. But that’s not the case. Even in Williamsburg, where the unappealing housing stock makes a certain amount of transience and turnover inevitable, some of the first wave have decided to stick around and raise kids. U Street appears to be headed for a mature sort of neighborhood change, as well. Where there’s a parenting Listserv, there are people in it for the long run—and U Street Tots has been active for more than five years.
Read more at: www.good.is
Striving to do better than your parents can also be fraught with pain. Famed dancer a choreographer Bill T. Jones shares his experience with “class climbing” as he recounts this moving story evoked by his NPR winter song pick, Franz Schubert’s “Winterreise.”
“And then I saw a lone figure walking across on a very, very cold day,” he continues, “and you know how it is when the wind blows and you have to turn your back against the wind, and I felt so sorry for that person, and then I realized it was my father. That my father, who was completely out of work, had been the director of his own business as a contractor in the heyday of the migrant stream back in the late ’50s, but now that business had died. He was up in the chilly north with family, broke and sick, and he had to get to this very insignificant job in a factory, miles and miles away. A black man with no car, trying to hitchhike, and no one picking him up, and he has to walk that 10 miles to get to the factory. And I’m sitting in this warm classroom, getting educated, not paying attention to the teacher, and suddenly feeling torn between two worlds. And this music, when I hear it, I feel for my father. There’s something about art that can be, yes, depressing, but helps us bear the pain through sheer beauty and intensity.”
Jones’ emotions at that moment were understandably dramatic. But, as he says, they were also intensely complicated. He couldn’t just run out of his classroom and bring his father inside.
“One of the reasons I was in school was so that I didn’t have to be out there with him,” Jones says. “And that was the painful thing about this class climbing that we all in this country are subjected to: We’re supposed to do better than our parents. And did I want the whole class to say, ‘Look! Look out there; there’s my father, impoverished, freezing, walking by the road!’ It was a very strange moment, Melissa, very strange. I was, in a way, paralyzed, doing what I should do, and not knowing what I wanted to do.”
Read more at: www.npr.org
Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images
What: Singer, actor and activist Harry Belafonte book talk.
Where: Busboys and Poets, 14th and V streets, NW.
When: 5 p.m., Sunday.
Cost: Free.
Why you should go: Belafonte is one of the most prominent celebrities-turned civil rights activists of the 20th century, and he has plenty of stories to share, from his role in the March On Washington to popularizing Calypso music. Belafonte, who appeared on WAMU 88.5.’s Kojo Nnamdi Show last month, will discuss his new book, “My Song: A Memoir.”
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