SUMMARY: Through this final rule, HUD provides HUD program participants with an approach to more effectively and efficiently incorporate into their planning processes the duty to affirmatively further the purposes and policies of the Fair Housing Act, which is title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The Fair Housing Act not only prohibits discrimination but, in conjunction with other statutes, directs HUD’s program participants to take significant actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination. The approach to affirmatively furthering fair housing carried out by HUD program participants prior to this rule, which involved an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice and a certification that the program participant will affirmatively further fair housing, has not been as effective as originally envisioned. This rule refines the prior approach by replacing the analysis of impediments with a fair housing assessment that should better inform program participants’ planning processes with a view toward better aiding HUD program participants to fulfill this statutory obligation.
Read MoreMunicipal court cases account for the bulk of all legal filings and are often the only interaction that many people have with the judicial system, yet there is a significant lack of research on the impact of municipal courts on our daily lives. Scholarly discourse on the provision of municipal services tends to focus on municipal services which play a key role in our day to day lives such as education, waste management, or park maintenance. While the role of municipal courts in our daily lives may not be as visible as other municipal services, they serve a key judicial and municipal …
Read MoreIt’s no secret that U.S. schools have a lot to work on when it comes to offering mental and emotional support for students. Whether due to budgetary constraints or ideological ones, it can be difficult establish an educational standard for how to treat psychological issues that occur outside of the classroom. Yet the supply of professionals equipped to alleviate those problems is diminishing: By 2020, the National Association of School Psychologists estimates there will be a shortage of nearly 15,000 school psychologists nationwide—a statistic that could spell a grim reality for the future of mental-health services in schools.
Read MoreABSTRACT: We characterize the effects of neighborhoods on children’s earnings and other outcomes in adulthood by studying more than five million families who move across counties in the U.S. Our analysis consists of two parts. In the first part, we present quasi-experimental evidence that neighborhoods affect intergenerational mobility through childhood exposure effects. In particular, the outcomes of children whose families move to a better neighborhood – as measured by the outcomes of children already living there – improve linearly in proportion to the time they spend growing up in that area. We distinguish the causal effects of neighborhoods from confounding factors by comparing the outcomes of siblings within families, studying moves triggered by displacement shocks, and exploiting sharp variation in predicted place effects across birth cohorts, genders, and quantiles.
Read MoreABSTRACT: The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families living in high poverty housing projects housing vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We present new evidence on the impacts of MTO on children’s long-term outcomes using administrative data from tax returns.
We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were young (below age 13) when their families moved. These children also live in better neighborhoods themselves as adults and are less likely to become single parents.
Read MoreLocation matters – enormously. If you’re poor and live in the New York area, it’s better to be in Putnam County than in Manhattan or the Bronx. Not only that, the younger you are when you move to Putnam, the better you will do on average. Children who move at earlier ages are less likely to become single parents, more likely to go to college and more likely to earn more.
Every year a poor child spends in Putnam County adds about $150 tohis or her annual household income at age 26, compared with a childhood spent in the average American county. Over the course of a full childhood, which is up to age 20 for the purposes of this analysis, the difference adds up to about $3,100, or 12 percent, more in average income as a young adult.
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The low wage labor market today is characterized by the increased utilization of part-time and temporary workers with volatile work schedules. These practices shift business risk to workers, and place their lives in a constant state of instability. Unpredictable work schedules prevent workers from pursuing supplemental employment, training, or attending to caregiver responsibilities. This diminishes the future economic potential of workers, effectively creating a worker caste system, and establishing a structural barrier to income mobility.
Read MoreRecent studies estimate that 25-30 million Americans live in communities that lack basic access to healthy food retailers, such as supermarkets or grocery stores. The majority of these communities are in urban environments. Within these communities, the cost of the food that is available is typically 3%-37% more than comparable food available in a suburban supermarket. Food scarcity and lack of access is more likely to affect minority communities, even when accounting for differences in income, household wealth, and housing discrimination.
Read MoreHomeownership is one of the most esteemed values in American society. As such, homeownership is heavily promoted and subsidized by both federal and local governments in the form of tax credits, tax deductions, federally subsidized loans, and federal mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Authority. The rationale for these subsidies is that homeowners make better citizens, which has been substantiated by researchers using measures such as local voting and church attendance.
Read MoreOver the course of sixty years, the United States has moved human services from public to private provision. The poor, who used to go to county health departments for their medical care, now go to nonprofit health clinics or even for-profit hospital emergency rooms. Mental healthcare famously moved from state hospitals to nonprofit outpatient services. Vocational training is now offered by nonprofit contractors. Even legal services in many jurisdictions are handled by nonprofit legal clinics or private attorneys funded by counties as piecemeal public defenders. As Steven Rathgeb Smith and Michael Lipsky have articulated, the public-private “contract regime” is here to stay.1
Read MoreFROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Equity and access to opportunity are critical underpinnings of TOGETHER North Jersey’s Regional Plan for Sustainable Development. Therefore, the planning process includes the preparation of this assessment of Fair Housing and Equity in the Northern New Jersey region.
As part of the process to develop a Regional Plan for Sustainable Development (RPSD) for the TOGETHER North Jersey planning region, the TNJ Project Team worked with the TOGETHER North Jersey Steering Committee and Standing Committees to conduct a Fair Housing and Equity Assessment (FHEA) for the region, resulting in this report.
Read MoreAs the first state to pass a comprehensive anti-discrimination statute after the Reconstruction Era, New Jersey has a demonstrated commitment to civil rights. This commitment, coupled with several characteristics unique to the “Garden State,” has laid the groundwork for, what is arguably, the most contentious affordable housing debate in the country. New Jersey is the only state in which there is a judicially recognized constitutional mandate that all municipalities provide for a “realistic opportunity for the construction of [their] fair share of the present …
Read MoreSince the early 1970s, finance reformers have argued that the unequal distribution of educational resources is primarily responsible for producing and perpetuating persistent inequalities in achievement and opportunity in New Jersey’s schools. Even though it is indisputable that in some sense “money matters,” the problem vexing education reformers continues to be the mutually reinforcing contingencies of race, class, and place. Textbooks, teachers, supplies, and facilities all cost money, and a community that lacks the funds to furnish its schools with these basic …
Read MoreOver the last three years, St. Louis County municipalities have chronically violated the constitutional rights of indigent citizens by issuing unreasonable amounts of traffic tickets – tickets accompanied by slews of hefty fines and court costs. When indigent citizens are unable to pay the aforementioned, they are thrown in jail for extended periods of time. Civil rights groups allege that these practices, which are performed solely as a means of funding municipal endeavors, have created the functional equivalent of debtor prisons. The Rutgers Center on Law in Metropolitan …
Read MoreSUMMARY: The goal of Helping Traumatized Children Learn is to ensure that children traumatized by exposure to family violence succeed in school. Research now shows that trauma can undermine children’s ability to learn, form relationships, and function appropriately in the classroom. Schools, which are significant communities for children, and teachers—the primary role models in these communities—must be given the supports they need to address trauma’s impact on learning. Otherwise, many children will be unable to achieve their academic potential, and the very laudable goals of education reform will not be realized. Trauma-sensitive school environments benefit all children— those whose trauma history is known, those whose trauma will never be clearly identified, and those who may be impacted by their traumatized classmates. Together, we can ensure that all children will be able to achieve at their highest levels despite whatever traumatic circumstances they may have endured.
Read MoreThe ultimate objective of regional equity activities is to reform those policies and practices that create and sustain social, racial, economic and environmental inequalities among cities, suburbs and rural areas -- and to bridge the gap between marginalized people and places and the region’s structures of social and economic opportunity. In my book Inside Game/Outside Game, I described three domains of work …
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Presented November 21, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
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Presented November 21, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
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Presented November 21, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
Read MorePresented November 7, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
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