November 14, 2011 | 12:00 PM | By

Reducing D.C.’s Digital Divide

Although much of D.C. is wired for high-speed Internet, not everyone is connected. The District’s digital divide has resulted in many low-income residents never learning basic computer skills, such as how to use word processors and conduct Google searches. The Washington Post profiles one neighborhood effort to reduce the digital divide.


In the meantime, organizations such as Bread for the City are preparing their clients, typically low-income residents in need of free health care and legal services, with computer skills to use the Internet as it becomes available to them.

“For our clients, Facebook can change lives,” said Bloom. “In a real way, poverty is a result of a person’s social network having been diminished and not being able to access resources.”

Read more at: www.washingtonpost.com

November 14, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By

Seven Food Desert Myths

WELS net / Flickr

In its efforts to combat disproportionately high obesity rates and poor health in low-income communities, the Obama administration has turned its focus to food deserts, defined as low-income communities lacking supermarkets or large grocery stores.

The idea is simple: if you don’t have cheap, nutritious food around, you’ll see health problems in your community. Hence the emphasis on bringing more supermarkets into neighborhoods. But improving a community’s health is more complicated than that, as other factors influence people’s health. Here are seven myths surrounding food deserts:

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FILED UNDER: Government, Class, Food Deserts
November 11, 2011 | 11:30 AM | By

Veterans Battling High Unemployment

Times are tough for everyone, but veterans face a more dismal economic outlook than the average person. The unemployment rate among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is higher than the rate for the general population, a trend reflected in the D.C.; 13 percent of District veterans are unemployed, compared to 11.1. percent of the entire population.


[Cris] McRae says despite some opinions to the contrary, his experience on the battlefield makes him the perfect hire.

“A lot of employers have a hard time hiring veterans. They look at the veterans as the crazies,” he says. “The way they should look at it is this guy is so professional, he’s been doing one of the hardest jobs in the world and now he can bring his experience here. He can bring that professionalism, that leadership, and that drive to succeed anywhere he goes.”

Read more at: wamu.org

November 11, 2011 | 9:57 AM | By

D.C. Poverty Rates Could Increase With New Measurement

David Chess / Flickr

A new government method of measuring poverty takes into account many factors the old rate didn’t: geography, taxes, government benefits, housing costs and other expenses. For D.C., this means many more people would qualify as poor due to the city’s high cost of living, DC Fiscal Policy Institute analyst Jenny Reed said on Thursday’s Kojo Nnamdi Show.

“Here in the District, we’ve seen median rent actually rise by 35 percent over the last 10 years, and incomes, at the same time, have only grown by 15 percent. So our costs of living are growing very rapidly,” Reed told Nnamdi.

While housing prices have been slow to recover in the wake of the recession, the District is one of the only cities where home prices increased from 2010 to 2011. Renting has gotten more expensive in the past year, too.

Under the new nationwide rate, poverty among children decreases while increasing for seniors. This is because government assistance families with children receive count as income. Meanwhile, out-of-pocket medical expenses paid by seniors count against them, so poverty among that group rises under the new rate. The drop in childhood poverty shows social safety net programs are helping children, but more needs to be done for seniors, the Urban Institute‘s Sheila Zedlewski said on Thursday’s Kojo Nnamdi show.

A state-by-state breakdown of the new measure isn’t yet available, but regional data show western states have the highest rate, followed by the southern region. Experts on Thursday’s Kojo Nnamdi Show spoke about the ramifications of the data and why poverty measures are important — for example, they determine who’s eligible for government assistance programs. You can listen to the entire segment here.

FILED UNDER: The People, Class, Kojo Nnamdi Show, Poverty
November 10, 2011 | 3:15 PM | By

DCentric Picks: FotoWeek DC Exhibit

What: FotoWeek DC’s “7.4.11″ exhibit.

Where: Carroll Square Gallery, located at 975 F St., NW.

When: On display until Nov. 18.

Cost: Free.

Why you should go: FotoWeek DC includes a number of events and exhibits. The “7.4.11″ exhibit features photos documenting how diverse Americans celebrated July 4th. Participating photographers are a part of the nonprofit Facing Change: Documenting America, which aims to portray critical issues facing Americans of all stripes.

 

FILED UNDER: Culture, DCentric Picks, The Arts
November 10, 2011 | 10:12 AM | By

Digital Divide: Cable Providers Discounting Broadband for Poor Families

Adikos / Flickr

Starting next summer, the nation’s major cable companies will offer broadband Internet at a discount price to certain low-income families. The service, part of a Federal Communications Commission initiative, will cost $9.95 a month for two years, The Chicago Tribune reports. The rate is available to families with children who qualify for free lunches, meaning households with yearly incomes of $29,055 or less.

Lowering the cost of broadband as a way of reducing the digital divide could be particularly effective in a city like D.C. where most communities have access to the cables required for high-speed Internet. D.C.’s digital divide “absolutely has to do with wealth,” says John Dunbar, who authored a study examining D.C.’s high-speed adoption rates. “If you have a low income, you just don’t subscribe.”

The D.C. region’s digital divide also breaks down along racial lines. Even when adjusted for income, Latinos in the area are less likely to subscribe to high-speed Internet than whites or African Americans. The reason isn’t entirely clear — it may be due to disparities in education or poor marketing to Latinos, Dunbar says.

An even more obvious reason lower-income families aren’t signing up for high-speed internet? Not having a computer. The FCC is trying to tackle the issue by getting companies such as Microsoft to sell computers for $250 or less. But whether such efforts will be enough to reduce the digital divide is yet to be seen.

FILED UNDER: Government, Digital Divide, Race and Class
November 10, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By

The Power of Rhetoric: ‘Post-Racial’ and the ‘Race Card’

The term “post-racial” became popularized after the election of President Barack Obama, and it’s reemerged ahead of the 2012 election. But many argue a “post-racial America” is a myth and that racism is still alive today. In his New York Times opinion piece, “No Such Place as ‘Post-Racial’ America,” Touré writes that frequent usage of such terms perpetuates the idea that racism is no longer exists. “In that way the lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he writes, “and thus feeds the notion that it’s O.K. to be somnambulant about race or even aggressively dismissive of it.”

“Post-racial” is just one of several terms that only pervert and distort the discussion of race and give people who wish to disrupt the conversation a place to park their ideas. Others include “race card” and “reverse racism” and “race baiter.” The naïve term “race card” always refers to a black person racializing a situation that the person using the term thinks doesn’t need to be racialized. It’s as if race was not part of the situation, and no one was being black or white, and everybody was being color blind, and whistling sweetly, until a black person came along and ruined everything by pointing out race. But race is like weather—we only talk about it when it’s extreme but it’s always there.

Read more at: campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com

November 9, 2011 | 11:37 AM | By

Want To Create Jobs? Don’t Build New Houses

Cathy / Flickr

A slowdown of new home construction is sometimes cited as a reason behind high unemployment rates, but building a new house may not always be the best way to create jobs.

Emily Badger at The Atlantic Cities reports that redeveloping older homes actually produces more jobs than does building brand new houses:

This intuitively makes sense. Rehabilitating old buildings is more labor-intensive than new construction, since much of the cost of new construction goes literally to bricks and mortar. But we asked Heidi Garrett-Peltier, an economist with the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for some data to back this up. She ran some estimates based on national 2009 data, the most recent numbers available. And it turns out that repairing existing residential buildings produces about 50 percent more jobs than building new ones.

It would seem that D.C. is prime for such job creation; more than half of the District’s houses were built before 1950. Plus, the D.C. wards with the most blighted and vacant properties — Wards 5, 7 and 8 — also have the city’s highest unemployment rates:

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FILED UNDER: Housing, Unemployment
November 9, 2011 | 8:49 AM | By

New Poverty Measure Ranks Latinos as Poorest Americans

The U.S. Census Bureau’s new way of measuring poverty won’t replace the government’s official method. But it does control for geography and includes living costs, medical expenses and other data not factored into the official rate. Latinos are the poorest Americans according to the new measure, with poverty at 28.2 percent. African Americans are the poorest Americans under the official, older rate.


The result [of the new measure]? There are even more poor people in the U.S. than previously counted, and more of them are Latino, Asian, and foreign-born. Latinos make up the biggest group of the poor under the new measure, compared with black Americans, still the poorest as counted by the official measure…

The report notes that the Census Bureau data doesn’t explain why the poverty rates for Latinos and other ethnic groups change when the alternative measure is used. However, a footnote mentions that Latinos are less likely to have health insurance, thus spending more on out-of-pocket medical costs, and that many tend to live in parts of the country where housing is more expensive, such as California.

Read more at: multiamerican.scpr.org

November 8, 2011 | 11:41 AM | By

Job Openings On the Rise

There are more available jobs now than there were 3 years ago, according to new labor data. Job openings in nearly every industry, including construction, hospitality and retail, have increased since 2009. But the national unemployment rate remains quite high, at 9 percent.

Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington show there were 3.4 million job openings on the last business day of September. The number of job openings has increased 38 percent since the end of the recession in June 2009, the Labor Department says.

Read more at: www.bizjournals.com