By Hope Yen

Washington (AP) — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."

"I think it’s going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

"If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government’s poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.

The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.

"It’s time that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama’s election, while struggling whites do not.

"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.

___

Nationwide, the count of America’s poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.

More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation’s destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America’s heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.

Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation’s most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.

More than 90 percent of Buchanan County’s inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.

Salyers’ daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend’s disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn’t even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.

Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to "buy the kids everything they need."

"It’s pretty hard," she said. "Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name."

___

Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they’re only a temporary snapshot that doesn’t capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.

In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person’s lifetime risk, a much higher number — 4 in 10 adults — falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.

The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.

Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.

By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.

By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.

"Poverty is no longer an issue of ‘them’, it’s an issue of ‘us’," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need."

The numbers come from Rank’s analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.

Among the findings:

—For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.

—Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.

—The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods — those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more — has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.

The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.

—Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.

___

Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.

The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.

Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites — defined as those lacking a college degree — remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.

Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.

Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. "In 2016 GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for ‘the middle class’ and ‘average Americans,’" Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.

"They don’t trust big government, but it doesn’t mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.

"They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them," Goeas said.

___

AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius and AP writer Debra McCown in Buchanan County, Va., contributed to this report.

___

Online:

Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov

Science Daily, Aug. 11, 2013

Smart people are just as racist as their less intelligent peers — they’re just better at concealing their prejudice, according to a University of Michigan study.

"High-ability whites are less likely to report prejudiced attitudes and more likely to say they support racial integration in principle," said Geoffrey Wodtke, a doctoral candidate in sociology. "But they are no more likely than lower-ability whites to support open housing laws and are less likely to support school busing and affirmative action programs."

Wodtke will present his findings at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. The National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health, supported his research.

He analyzed data on the racial attitudes of more than 20,000 white respondents from the nationally representative General Social Survey. He examined how their cognitive ability, as measured by a widely used test of verbal intelligence, was linked with their attitudes about African-Americans, and about different policies designed to redress racial segregation and discrimination.

Respondents were about 47 years old at the time of the interview, on average, and had completed 12.9 years of education. They correctly answered an average of about six of the 10 cognitive ability test questions.

Among Wodtke’s findings:

Win a Lottery Jackpot? Not Much Chance of That

N.Y. Times, Aug. 9, 2013

By Tara Siegel Bernard

When those exceedingly lucky people come forward to claim this week’s Powerball lottery jackpot, which swelled to $448 million on Wednesday, it’s hard not to think: Somebody is winning these things, right? It could be me.

This is exactly the sort of logic that, over the last year, led millions of people to spend $5.9 billion of their hard-earned dollars on Powerball alone. They spent nearly $69 billion on all lottery games in 2012, according to two lottery trade groups.

It is also precisely the kind of mental trap the Powerball people want you to fall in; they tweaked the game rules last year, doubling the price of tickets to $2 to raise more revenue and create more eye-catching jackpots.

And the state agencies running the games advertise heavily that it could be you making off with millions of dollars.

The odds of winning, however, remain infinitesimal: Powerball players, for instance, have a 1 in 175 million chance of winning. You have roughly the same chance of getting hit by lightning on your birthday.

Even though some people may be able to intellectually grasp what that means, the Multi-State Lottery Association can predict with clocklike certainty that on Saturday night, with a jackpot worth about $40 million, 13 million to 15 million people will buy tickets. Those ticket buyers are all thinking they have a shot of defying the odds.

That is why the lottery is called a tax on people who don’t understand math. Lower-income individuals who play but don’t win are hurt the most because they’re wasting a greater share of their income on the games. That’s also why the lottery is often called a regressive tax on the poor.

Sure, last year the games returned $19.41 billion to the states that sponsored them, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, which represents 52 lottery groups. But that’s not why anyone plays them.

What’s the big motivation to volunteer to pay this tax? Psychologists say it has more to do with our all-too-human propensity to run with the dreamlike possibilities it creates in our minds.

“For emotionally significant events, the size of the probability simply doesn’t matter,” said Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-prize winning psychologist. “What matters is the possibility of winning. People are excited by the image in their mind. The excitement grows with the size of the prize, but it doesn’t diminish with the size of the probability.”

So ticket buyers allow themselves some momentary escapism since it costs only $2, thinking about what they would do with all that money. And they’ll ignore all of the well-known horrors and pitfalls that many lottery winners encounter, whether it’s a severe depression or blowing through all of the money in a form of self-sabotage that ends with them living in a trailer down by the river. This phenomenon of feeling anxious and undeserving, among other things, is what some experts call “sudden wealth syndrome.” It may afflict people who benefit from all sorts of success or windfalls, whether from the sale of a valuable business, signing an N.F.L. contract or inheriting a huge sum from a maiden aunt.

“Money that is much more than you’re used to sounds unlimited,” said Susan Bradley, a financial planner and founder of the Sudden Money Institute, who has worked with several lottery winners. “If you don’t have someone to help you, yes, you can go through extraordinarily large amounts of money, and, even worse, you can be in debt. It can really happen.”

Plugging some numbers into this dream provides some perspective. Winners wanting to be able to safely spend $1 million a year for 55 years (adjusted for inflation) would need about $36 million, after taxes, to invest, according to calculations by Northern Trust. (Those numbers also factor in annual taxes and investment expenses.) They would need to set aside nearly $15 million in high-quality bonds to know they would always have 15 years of spending in stable investments. To cover the remaining 40 years, they would need to put another $21 million in a diversified stock portfolio.

So in thinking about it, it’s not even worth playing unless the jackpot is more than $75 million, because the state and federal government take about half in taxes.

Part of that fantasy is that winners would start buying fast cars and big homes, not to mention stuff for all of your family members along with their children’s education. It’s easy to see how they could run through the money, as hard as that may seem to believe with $36 million in hand. Of course, if you want to live even larger — more homes, more cars, more ex-spouses, servants, accountants, lawyers, other lawyers to watch the lawyers — you’ll need far more. Probably more like $100 million, after taxes.

“If they make it to the fifth year with enough money to securely handle their life going forward and all of their relationships are intact, they are probably going to make it long term,” Ms. Bradley said.

So let’s get back to the probability of all of this ever even happening.

Buying more tickets improves your odds, but not by much. So if you want the fantasy, just buy one. Buying more doesn’t make the fantasy any richer.

It would take centuries of ticket buying before you even make a dent. If you purchased roughly 126,000 tickets a month for the next 80 years, for example, you could improve your odds to 50 percent, explained Gary A. Lorden, emeritus professor of math at California Institute of Technology (who, for the record, has bought a single ticket three times over the last decade; he split the last one with his grandson).

“The difference is like moving from a big house to a small house to make it less likely a meteor will strike your roof,” he said.

Good luck with that.

© 2013 New York Times

N.Y. Times, Aug. 9, 2013

By David Firestone

Earlier this year, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, announced plans to rebrand the Republican Party, improving “health, happiness and prosperity for more Americans and their families.” In case you took any of that seriously, take a good look at the food stamp proposal Mr. Cantor unveiled a few days ago, one of the more brutal actions Republicans have taken against the poor since they took over the House in 2011.

In June, the Republican plan to cut food stamps by $2 billion a year led to the failure of the farm bill — because House conservatives wanted even bigger cuts. House leaders then revived the bill to provide $196 billion to big agriculture, dropping the food stamp program entirely and promising to bring it back “later.”

Later has arrived, and the plan is worse than ever. Mr. Cantor wants to cut $4 billion a year, double the earlier cut, by removing up to 4 million people from the food stamp program. His method of kicking all those people off is particularly diabolical, considering the Republican refusal to stimulate the economy: he wants to punish those unable to find a job. Anyone who is unemployed and not raising children will be limited to three months of food stamps every three years.

This requirement has been on the books since 1996, but it was routinely waived by most states during and after the recession, as high unemployment caused widespread suffering. Mr. Cantor wants to eliminate those waivers, with no exceptions. Under Mr. Cantor’s plan, it won’t matter how hard people are looking for work, or how high unemployment might be in their state.

Mr. Cantor’s plan would slash benefits for many of the poorest people in the United States, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Their average annual income is $2,500; many are desperate for work but cannot find any. Joblessness may have been reduced in the last two years but it is still far too high, particularly among those with the least skills.

“As a result of the proposed cuts, many of these individuals would fall deeper into destitution,” according to an analysis by the center issued on Wednesday. “Some would likely experience hunger as well as homelessness; money spent on food isn’t available to pay the rent, and with income this low, it can be very difficult to do both.”

As David Rogers explained in Politico this morning, the 1996 proposal to take away food stamps from the jobless assumed that most states would offer workfare programs in exchange for the benefits. But Washington never provided enough money to allow states to create those programs. Only five states offered workfare or job training programs last year.

The House Republicans’ pointless and heartless demands for more austerity are holding back economic growth. Now they want to strip government relief for those who are left behind.

N.Y. Times, Aug. 9, 2013

By Andrew Rosenthal

Despite all the politicians who call themselves straight talkers, there is little that makes official Washington queasier than straight talk. And so it was today when Senator Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, dared to suggest that there might just be a racial tinge to the Republicans’ wild-eyed outrage over just about everything President Obama says and their implacable opposition to just about everything he does or wants to do.

“It’s been obvious that they’re doing everything they can to make him fail,” Mr. Reid said in an interview on KNPR Radio. “And I hope, I hope — and I say this seriously — I hope that’s based on substance and not the fact that he’s African American.”

The Nevada senator recalled: “My counterpart, Mitch McConnell, said at the beginning of the presidency of Barack Obama that he had one goal — and that is to defeat Obama and make sure he wasn’t re-elected. And that’s how they legislate in the Senate. It was really bad. And we’re now seven months into this second term of the president’s and they haven’t changed much.”

The G.O.P.’s reaction was predictably furious. Brad Dayspring, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, said on Twitter that Mr. Reid’s comments were “offensive and insane.”

But Mr. Reid was just putting into words what many, many people have felt. Including me.

Note to Twitter: I am not saying every Republican is a racist. That would be flat wrong, just as it would be wrong to say that no Democrats are racists. Opposing Mr. Obama’s policies does not automatically make anyone racist.

What I am saying is that I suspect — apparently along with Mr. Reid — that a white president with the exact same plans and ideas would not have encountered the same kind of fierce opposition.

Certainly a white president wouldn’t have had to deal with the “birther” movement. And while that conspiracy theory didn’t originate in the House or the Senate, Republican lawmakers have fanned the flames. Many have refused to denounce it. Others have actually encouraged it. I wrote a few days ago about Rep. Ted Yoho, Republican of Florida, who said he’d consider supporting an investigation into the validity of the president’s birth certificate.

There is no way other than racism to explain “birtherism.” The whole point is to make Mr. Obama the menacing “other,” to remind everyone that he is African American.

Nor is it “insane” to detect a racial undercurrent to the incredible disrespect that’s been shown to this president over the years. Remember when the president addressed Congress in 2009, and Rep. Joe Wilson yelled “you lie!” Then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said “I have never in my 29 years heard an outburst of that nature with reference to a president of the United States, speaking as a guest of the House and Senate.” Would that have happened to a white president?

There is no doubt that Mr. Reid is going to get hammered for this remark. It did not fit into the usual definition of a “gaffe,” but it certainly fit the spirit of what the political journalist Michael Kinsley had in mind when he said “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.”

© 2013 New York Times

ClimateProgress, July 29, 2013
By Marina Fang
A growing number of polls and research suggests that minorities are ahead of the curve when it comes to supporting serious climate policy.
For Asian-Americans, the fastest-growing minority group in the U.S., climate change looms large among issues of concern. As Grist noted, “most Asian Americans hold particularly strong green values,” citing a 2012 survey of Asian-American political attitudes in the leadup to the presidential election, which found that 70 percent of Asian-Americans consider themselves environmentalist, compared to 41 percent of Americans overall, and 60 percent of Asian-American prioritize environmental protection over economic growth, compared to 41 percent overall.
African-Americans are similarly worried about climate change. A 2010 study from the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that “in many cases, minorities are equally as supportive, and often more supportive of national climate and energy policies, than white Americans.” In particular, 89 percent of blacks supported the regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, compared to 78 percent of whites.
What accounts for strong minority support of climate change policy?
Political affiliation: Minorities overwhelmingly voted Democratic in the 2012 election, so it makes sense that they would express progressive views on environmental issues. A recent poll found strong bipartisan support for climate change policy. The fact that minorities are adding their voices provides a stark contrast to the climate change deniers continually obstructing efforts to combat climate change, most recently in their quest to challenge President Obama’s climate agenda.
Environmental justice: Growing evidence suggests that minorities are disproportionately affected by the negative consequences of climate change. For instance, the NAACP found that of the six million Americans who live in close proximity to a coal plant, 39 percent of them are people of color. Additionally, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that African-Americans visit the emergency room for asthma at nearly 350 percent the average rate of whites, and thus air quality regulations are particularly important to them.
Global effects: Finally, many minorities have immigrated from countries acutely affected by climate change. Last year, more than 32 million people were displaced by climate-related disasters, most of whom lived in Asia and Africa. The Japan earthquake and subsequent nuclear disaster rattled people all over East Asia, and extreme monsoons in India, caused by melting glaciers, have increased in recent years. Firsthand experience with the impact of climate change has made minorities firm believers in climate science.
Interestingly, Hispanics are less likely to express concern regarding climate change than blacks and Asians, but in many polls, they are still ahead of Caucasians. In a 2012 MPO Research Groups survey, 60.3 percent of Hispanics believed that humans contribute to climate change, compared to 67.3 percent of African Americans, 69.2 percent of Asian Americans, and only 56.7 percent of Caucasians. A 2012 survey conducted by the National Council of La Raza and the Sierra Club found that 77 percent of Latinos believe climate change is already happening, compared with only 52 percent of overall respondents. And in the Yale/George Mason study, 82 percent of Hispanics supported regulating carbon dioxide.
Marina Fang is an intern for ThinkProgress.

NJ Spotlight, July 1, 2013
By Colleen O’Dea
In 1975, Mount Laurel was the first ruling in the country to prohibit communities from enacting "exclusionary zoning" practices.
Named after a South Jersey township, the Mount Laurel decisions are New Jersey Supreme Court rulings that have defined the responsibility communities have to provide a certain amount, known as their “fair share,” of affordable housing to people with low or moderate incomes.
What it means
Every New Jersey municipality must provide its share of affordable housing. The first Mount Laurel decision, in 1975, was the first of its kind in the nation, prohibiting municipalities from “exclusionary zoning” practices, so towns cannot enact land-use rules that make it impossible for affordable housing to be built. The second decision, in 1983, went further and ordered communities to provide housing for those with low or moderate incomes. In response, the state Legislature passed theFair Housing Act that created the Council on Affordable Housing to determine municipal housing needs and approve plans to meet those needs.
History
In the 1960s, then-rural Mount Laurel began developing housing and commercial units designed to attract tax ratables and middle- and upper-middle-class families. At the same time, the township was condemning substandard homes – some wereconverted chicken coops — of mostly poor blacks, who worked on the farms. They could not afford the new single-family homes. A nonprofit group sought approval to build 36 garden apartments for displaced residents and the township turned them down, with the mayor saying that anyone who couldn’t afford to live there should leave town. So a group of citizens led by Ethel R. Lawrence, who has been called the Rosa Parks of affordable housing, and the NAACPs of Southern Burlington and Camden filed a class-action lawsuit against Mount Laurel.
The case ultimately made it to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which in March 1975 issued what would become an oft-cited decision barring the practice of exclusionary zoning. The court ruled that all municipalities, through zoning, had to allow enough housing for people of all classes, including the low- and moderate-income, to meet its share of the need in its region. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge.
Mount Laurel II
But many municipalities refused to follow the decision. Mount Laurel itself rezoned three tracts of land that were less than ideal – one site was in an industrial park and another was wetlands. The plaintiffs went back to court, saying the township had not met the Supreme Court mandate. They lost in Superior Court and appealed, prompting the state Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel II ruling.
In that decision, the court said that every municipality must provide its “fair share” of the regional need and set up some requirements for doing so. Towns have to provide realistic zoning opportunities for the housing and show how their zoning and other actions would lead to the actual construction of affordable housing. It also established the “builder’s remedy,” allowing a developer willing to make 20 percentof a development low- and moderate-income housing to sue for a zoning change.
Fair Housing Act of 1985
In response, the Legislature passed the Fair Housing Act of 1985, creating theCouncil on Affordable Housing, which oversaw municipal efforts at providing housing for the low- and moderate-income. COAH was charged with devising municipal housing quotas every six years. Voluntary participation in the council would protect a municipality from builder’s remedy lawsuits.
Some towns have complied and others have not, choosing to try their luck in the courts instead. The Mount Laurel decisions have led to the construction of about40,000 affordable units throughout the state. But some municipal officials continue to balk at providing any such housing.
Legal Challenges
The system is currently in a state of uncertainty. The third set of quotas issued by COAH cut housing obligations and exempted municipalities that choose not to grow from having to provide any additional affordable units. They also allow communities to transfer half of their obligation to another municipality and fulfill up to half their units with senior-citizen housing. The Appellate Division of Superior Court ruled in January 2007 that those rules violated the earlier Mount Laurel decisions and the FHA and ordered COAH to issue new regulations. It did so in October 2008 and those are the subject of a current legal challenge.
The COAH Conundrum
In the meantime, Gov. Chris Christie tried to abolish COAH twice and ultimately was told by the courts that he did not have the authority to do so. Legislators have sought to do the same, but have not been able to agree with Christie on a new mechanism to replace the COAH process. The council has met only once since the court ordered its reinstatement and that was primarily to start the process of taking money meant to help build affordable housing from municipalities and giving it to the state. That action, too, has been the subject of court action. And while COAH has not been functioning, little affordable housing has been built.

NRDC Switchboard, Aug, 1, 2013
By Melissa Lin Perrella
Yesterday afternoon [July 31, 2013], NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council] filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Coast Guard and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The lawsuit challenges the Coast Guard’s decision to authorize the raising of the Bayonne Bridge without sufficiently evaluating the very real public health and environmental risks the current project poses to neighboring communities. NRDC brings this lawsuit with the Coalition for Healthy Ports, North Shore Waterfront Conservancy of Staten Island, Elm Park Civic Association, and Eastern Environmental Law Center.
The current project will increase the risk of heart disease, lung cancer, asthma, other respiratory illness and premature death in Newark, Staten Island, Bayonne and other communities near the port. That’s because the project will increase cargo volumes handled at the port, which will mean more harmful, diesel-polluting trucks, trains and ship traffic through these neighborhoods.
Construction of the project also risks exposing residents in Staten Island and Bayonne to arsenic, lead, asbestos and PCBs. This is particularly troubling because Staten Island children have a long history of being exposed to lead. In fact, the EPA designated the North Shore of Staten Island an “Environmental Justice Showcase Community” because of the number of children in that community with elevated levels of lead in their blood due to former industrial uses in the area.
Our lawsuit alleges that the Coast Guard violated the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) by failing to thoroughly evaluate these public health and environmental risks before authorizing the Port Authority to raise the Bridge. Our lawsuit does not seek to kill the project. In fact, we are in favor of renovating the Bridge. Rather, our lawsuit calls on the authorities to disclose how the project may harm local communities and identify measures that can mitigate this harm. This is what NEPA requires. We are suing the Coast Guard and Port Authority to ensure they comply with the law.
The Bayonne Bridge crosses the Kill Van Kull, which is the primary shipping channel between the New York Harbor and several major cargo terminals. More than 2,000 vessels passed beneath the Bayonne Bridge en route to and from these cargo terminals in 2010. Shipping companies are increasingly using larger vessels (taller, wider, deeper draft) to transport cargo between foreign ports and the U.S. The existing height of the Bridge, however, restricts the port’s ability to service the influx of these larger vessels. As a result, the Port Authority sought authorization from the Coast Guard to raise the roadway of the Bridge so that larger ships can pass under it and access the port’s terminals. Before the Coast Guard could authorize the Port Authority to raise the Bridge, however, it was supposed to comply with NEPA.
But instead of taking a hard look at how the project could harm public health and the environment, the Coast Guard and Port Authority attempted to pull the wool over the public’s eyes, in an attempt to skirt the law and avoid addressing these harms.
For example, the Coast Guard denies that raising the Bridge will enable the port to handle increased cargo volumes even though the Port Authority has represented to the Department of Transportation in a funding application for millions of dollars that the purpose of the Bridge project is to enable the Port Authority to remain competitive and handle increased trade in the future. The Port Authority made similar statements to President Obama when it asked that the Bridge project be “fast tracked.” The Port Authority’s clients, the business community, and EPA, among others, have also linked the Bridge project to increased cargo volumes at the port.
As stated, greater cargo volumes at the port means more diesel trucks and other vehicles and equipment operating around the clock to move cargo in and out of the port and through neighborhoods in Newark and Staten Island. The Coast Guard concedes that Newark and Staten Island are environmental justice communities. Moreover, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and EPA have already found cancer risks from air pollution in both communities that far exceed what EPA deems acceptable. Despite this, the Coast Guard refuses to provide an honest assessment of how the project may exacerbate pollution levels in these communities.
To make matters worse, the Coast Guard’s environmental analysis for the project was based on an allegedly proprietary model that the agency refused to release to the public for comment and review. By refusing to release the basis for its conclusions, the Coast Guard insulated itself from public scrutiny, essentially thumbing its nose to NEPA’s purpose, which is to foster public input and informed government decision-making.
The Coast’s Guard’s NEPA violations do not end there. The soil, structures, and groundwater where construction will occur contain pollutants such as lead, PCBs, arsenic and asbestos. The Coast Guard and Port Authority admit this but refuse to disclose what the potential harm to local residents will be when construction activities in Staten Island and Bayonne disturb and release these contaminants. This is the case despite the North Shore of Staten Island’s past exposure to lead.
Instead, the Coast Guard takes an “act now study later approach” in violation of NEPA. The Coast Guard green-lit construction with a promise to study the extent of the harm later, and with a vague commitment to deal with any problems by abiding by existing law. The Coast Guard’s promises are hardly reassuring to local families, and don’t come close to complying with NEPA.
The “construction zone” includes dense residential areas, at least seven schools, multiple churches, at least five parks, and a number of businesses that may be affected by these activities. Approximately 10,000 Staten Island residents and approximately 7,000 Bayonne residents live within this area. These individuals have a right to know how the project will affect their health.
We want the port to thrive economically so that good jobs can be brought to the region. But we also want to make sure that the risks that accompany the benefits of the Bridge project are disclosed and dealt with. We can raise the Bayonne Bridge and protect the health of surrounding communities at the same time—but the Port Authority and Coast Guard must stop cutting corners. By taking the time to properly evaluate the risks and identifying how to protect against them, we can capture the economic promise of a renovated Bridge without sacrificing the health of its neighbors. That’s not asking for much and it’s what the law requires.

Alternet, July 25, 2013; Reprinted from Washington Monthly
By Richard D. Kahlenberg [2]
The following is a book review of David Kirp’s Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools. [3]
If you believe that education can only be reformed by center-right business notions — that privately run nonunion charters will outperform public schools; that teachers need to be goaded into doing a good job — David Kirp is here to tell you that absolutely the opposite is true. Generous funding, tied to a rigorous and rich curriculum, with testing as a diagnostic tool, can produce extraordinary results. Kirp, a professor at the University of California Berkeley who has written extensively about education for decades, is most recently the author of Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools, a beautifully rendered account of the schools of Union City, New Jersey. Kirp spent the entire 2010-2011 academic year visiting classrooms in Union City, a low-income, mostly Latino school district of 12,000 students, located five minutes from the gleaming towers of Manhattan. His story is written with the empathy that characterizes Jonathan Kozol’s books on urban education, but with a far more hopeful message.
Kirp quickly falls in love with the children he studies, a group that includes many undocumented students who face difficult home lives. “Be my father!” one boy, Joaquin, cries out one day, a reminder that Joaquin’s father has been gone for two years. Another boy, Andres, calls out, “Be my father.” Writes Kirp, “That’s harder for me to hear because Andres is in fact living with his father.” And when Kirp goes to Paris for Thanksgiving, a boy named TomÃis asks, “Can you return? Do you have papers?”—an indication of the fragile lives these children are living.
Nationally, high-poverty schools are twenty-two times less likely to be high achieving than middle-class schools. That was generally the case with the Union City school district, which ranked next to last in the state in 1989, Kirp notes, sparking the mordant response, “Thank God for Camden!”
But today the situation could hardly be more different. Union City students, overwhelmingly low income and Latino, score at roughly the New Jersey average in reading and math from third grade through high school—this in a state where scores are consistently among the very best in the nation. The graduation rate is 89.4 percent, compared with about 70 percent nationally. Union City High School, according to the American Institutes for Research, ranks among the top 12 percent nationally, and sends students to top colleges.
What happened to turn around an entire high-poverty district like Union City? Generous funding, for one thing. Union City is the beneficiary of a series of New Jersey Supreme Court rulings, including one in 2011 that decreed that the state would have to rescind budget cuts and spend an extra $500 million in impoverished school districts. Among the extras this money bought was a high-quality preschool program. Beginning at age three, students in New Jersey’s high-poverty school districts are entitled to receive free preschool, six hours a day and 245 days a year, taught by teachers with college degrees in small classes. Although the program is not compulsory, about 90 percent of Union City children participate.
Many high-poverty New Jersey districts got this extra funding but continue to fail, while Union City students have flourished. Trenton, for example, embraced what Kirp calls “the Great Leader Theory,” hoping that superstar principals would jump-start individual schools, but has had little success. Union City, instead, pursued system-wide reform, with a number of key elements. The district adopted a consistent curriculum across classrooms, with a relentless focus on early reading and expanding the vocabulary of students. Tests are used as diagnostic tools, rather than to punish, and every new teacher gets a mentor.
In a district where students come from a number of foreign countries, the Union City schools also do the important work of instilling a strong sense of American identity. At an end-of-year school ceremony, children hoist flags from more than fifty countries, says Kirp. A roar goes up for the Dominican Republic flag, but the “longest, loudest cheer is heard when the flag of the United States, their new homeland, is unfurled.”
Kirp is emphatic in noting that Union City achieved its success by hewing to fundamentals. There are no charter schools in Union City. And while teacher’s unions have come under fire for much of what ails public education, Kirp says, Union City’s teachers are part of a strong union, as are other teachers in New Jersey’s highly ranked schools.
Of course, Union City schools are not immune from national education policy. Kirp is concerned that the No Child Left Behind Act causes teachers to skip interesting lessons like plant experiments because science is not among the tested subjects in elementary school. He also worries when teachers provide extra learning sessions only for the “cusp” kids—those just within reach of passing the tests.
To his credit, Kirp does not join the militant anti-testing crowd. “High-stakes exams contributed to making Union City’s schools better,” he writes; if used properly, to identify areas for student improvement, “testing can be a force for good, especially for the have-less kids on whom schools have too often given up.” Unlike many state tests, New Jersey’s assessments measure students’ critical thinking skills rather than just their ability to memorize material. “Teaching to this kind of test means readying students to become problem-solvers,” notes Kirp.
Skeptics will likely ask whether Union City’s success can be replicated in high-poverty districts elsewhere, given the district’s relatively small size. Likewise, as Kirp points out, sociologist Anthony Bryk has found that Latino schools are often an exception to the “straight-line connection between poor neighborhoods and failing schools.” Trust levels are higher in Latino schools, Bryk found, and “Latino neighborhoods tend to have significantly more social capital and neighborhood organizations” than other poor neighborhoods. Would Union City’s programs work with African American students, who continue to bear the legacy of the nation’s most egregious forms of discrimination?
Yes, says Kirp, in places like Montgomery County, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C., for example, which educates ten times as many students as Union City. Montgomery County, which includes wealthy white areas alongside more diverse and low-income communities, has devoted extra funds to lower-income “red zone” schools than to the wealthier “green zone” schools—for such interventions as reduced class size and extended learning time. The approach has worked. Kirp writes, “In 2003, only half the district’s black and Hispanic fifth graders passed the state’s reading test; by 2011, 90% did.”
Significant as Montgomery County’s “red zone” approach has been, Kirp fails to discuss a far more effective educational strategy employed by the county. Under an inclusionary zoning initiative, public housing units are made available to low-income families throughout Montgomery County, in the affluent green zone as well as the working-class red zone. An important 2010 Century Foundation report by RAND Corporation’s Heather Schwartz found that low-income elementary school students whose families were randomly assigned to housing units in the green zone and attended green zone schools had far more significant achievement gains than those assigned to red zone neighborhoods and schools—even though students in the latter group were showered with extra financial resources and did pretty well.
The omission of integration strategies is surprising, because in other contexts Kirp has written powerfully about the benefits of housing and school integration. In a 2012 New York Times article, for example, Kirp wrote, “The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children—and in the lives of their children as well.” Given legal constraints on using race in student assignment imposed by the Supreme Court, more than eighty school districts now pursue integration by socioeconomic status, an approach that not only raises student achievement but also allows low-income students access to the kind of middle-class social networks that are powerful determinants of employment.
Despite this lapse, Kirp is to be credited with providing critical balance to our education debates. While much ink has appropriately been spilled on the success of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, Union City has done something in many ways even more impressive: taking low-income children who happen to live in a jurisdiction and helping them make dramatic achievement gains. (The one time KIPP tried to take over a regular public school population, in Denver, Colorado, it failed.)
Like the KIPP approach, the Union City strategy involves large amounts of money, which makes it less attractive to policymakers than getting tough with teachers and their elected union representatives. But as Improbable Scholars makes clear, the success in Union City suggests that money spent on effective educational strategies is likely to pay substantial dividends for years to come.
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/education/how-union-city-njs-school-district-achieved-huge-gains
Links:
[1] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-d-kahlenberg
[3] http://global.oup.com/academic/product/improbable-scholars-9780199987498;jsessionid=80FB9E4B6028F4956E54F082699396C1?cc=us&lang=en&
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/union-city
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/new-jersey
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/david-kirp
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/improbable-scholars
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/corporate-school-reform
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/teachers-unions
[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Truthout, July 25, 2013

By Ira Chernus
All right, I confess: I have a dream. I bet you do, too. I bet yours, like mine, is of a far, far better world not only for yourself and your loved ones, but for everyone on this beleaguered planet of ours.

And I bet you, like me, rarely talk to anyone about your dreams, even if you spend nearly all your time among politically active people working to improve the planet. Perhaps these days it feels somehow just too naïve, too unrealistic, too embarrassing. So instead, you focus your energy on the nuts and bolts of what’s wrong with the world, what has to be fixed immediately.
I’m thinking that it’s time to try a different approach — to keep feeling and voicing what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the fierce urgency of now,” but balance it with a dose of another political lesson he taught us: the irresistible power of dreaming.

I started reflecting on this when I returned from a long trip and found my email inbox crammed with hundreds of urgent messages from progressive groups and news sources, all sounding the alarm about the latest outrages, horrors, and disgraces, punctuated by an occasional call for a new policy to right at least one of the horrendous wrongs described and denounced.
Suddenly, I found myself thinking: Same old same old. The particular words keep changing, but the basic message and the music of our song of frustrated lament remain the same. We give the people the shocking facts and call them to action. And we wonder: Why don’t they listen?

Then I looked at the calendar and noticed that the end of the summer would bring the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s greatest speech — and I realized what was missing from virtually all those email messages: Where was the dream? Where was the debate about what the world we seek would look like?

In most of them I could dimly sense that the writer might indeed have a vision of a better world. But it was always hidden somewhere between the lines, as if in the century when capitalism had “triumphed” and nowhere on Earth did there seem to be an alternative, the writer was ashamed to speak such things aloud.

Occupied Dreams

It wasn’t always so. I remember how incensed I used to get in the 1960s when hearing the charge from the right: “Those hippie radicals. They don’t know what they’re for, only what they’re against.” “Those hippie radicals” knew what they were for: concrete changes in political policies that would turn their dreams into reality. And they talked constantly about the dreams as well as the policies.

It was Dr. King, above all, who inspired them. If, on that hot summer day in 1963, he had only denounced the evils of racism and proposed policy remedies, we would scarcely recall his speech half a century later. It holds a special place in our public memory only because he concluded by confessing his dream. Daring to be a public dreamer propelled him to greatness.

Now, I fear, we mostly talk only about what we’re against. The just-give-‘em-the-facts approach, so tilted toward denunciation (however well deserved), scarcely leaves room for any other impression.

There are still a few dreamers. You can find them among environmental activists, who give us science fiction-like descriptions of technology that can create a clean, sustainable environment for the whole biosphere. Except that isn’t simply a fantasy: much of the technology already exists.

You can also find dreamers in religious communities, sharing the words of holy scriptures informed by eschatological visions of a better future. Occasionally, even a hard-boiled devotee of the facts like Noam Chomsky gives us a peek into his dream: a world without borders.

Not long ago, you could find dreamers occupying parks and public spaces across the country, short-lived as their moment was mainly because of an onslaught of police violence. For that brief season, they showed us that our dreams had been occupied and needed to be freed. In the past, though, movements have persisted much longer, even in the face of massive state violence.

The Occupy movement, however, emerged in a distinctly twenty-first-century world in which activists have long become accustomed to hiding their dreams. Without such shared dreams, political activism can easily feel like nothing more than an endless struggle against insurmountable odds — like being part of a small band of good guys besieged on every side. Who can blame them for feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and hopeless?

Once most Occupiers were forced to retreat from public spaces, I suspect they, too, felt tired, cramped, hemmed in. Occupy could flourish only in the open, where people could share their dreams and imagine that all the boundaries that limit us might, in that open-air spirit, dissolve.

Realism and Dreams

Boundaries and limitations dissolving: that’s not merely Chomsky’s dream, it’s the essence of all dreaming — to transcend the barriers that separate one person from another, one group or nation from another, and all humanity from its natural environment.

Dreaming is the realm of pure freedom. In dreams, we can see, do, or be anything. When our dreams are political, they help us sense what it might be like to escape the limits imposed by corporations, the state, the media, the advertisers, powerful forces of every kind. They help us imagine in new ways what is possible. In our dreams, none of the powers that be can touch us.

Freud said that every dream is the fulfillment of a wish, but political dreams aren’t about our private desires. They are visions of the public realm being freed from the artificial divisions and constraints of the present. There, as in our nighttime dreaming, we experience whole new worlds, constantly changing, often in remarkable detail. Dreaming is the realm of permanent revolution that the great political visionaries from Thomas Jefferson to Che Guevara spoke of.
Constant change, pure freedom, the sense that anything is possible: combined, they can give us the daytime energy we need to work for change despite the obstacles and failures we inevitably face. When political life is infused with a dream, traveling without a map can feel exhilarating. In politics as in physiology, we must dream on a regular basis to restore our energy.
But a political dream is quite different from the dreaming of sleep because it happens while we are wide-awake. It may even make us feel more awake, allowing us to pierce the pre-packaged version of reality handed to us by the rich and powerful, who demand that we take their distorted version of how this place, this country, this planet works as “realism” itself.

When we see by the light of imagined futures, the present and its real possibilities come into clearer view, offering us a broader framework into which we can fit the chaotic pieces of current reality and the specific changes we are working for.

We don’t have to wait for some distant future to see our dreams realized. The essence of the nonviolent action that Dr. King preached is to pierce the lies and distortions in the here and now by acting out, with our bodies, the authentic reality we have seen — to persist in what is really real (which is the best translation I know of Gandhi’s term satyagraha).

So we should never let anyone dismiss our political dreams as “unrealistic.” The world as we wish it to be is no mere fantasy. It is often our most reliable guide to knowing the truth.

Never Stop Dreaming

Whether they know it or not, everyone has their own dream of the world as it should be, and every dream is open to endless interpretation. Dr. King had his. I’ve got my interpretation of his. I’ve got my own, too. And you’ve got yours. The point is not to argue about who has the one “correct” dream, but to bring all of our dreams out of the closet and voice them openly, share our interpretations of each other’s dreams, and start a conversation about the politics of dreaming.

When that kind of dream-sharing becomes part of political life, it begins to create myths. By “myth” I don’t mean a lie. I mean a story that a community tells itself to interpret its life, to express the fundamentals of its worldview and values, to give meaning and hope to events great and small.

A myth, it is often said, is a collective dream. In myths, as in dreams, anything can happen. And once new myths start circulating, anything can indeed happen. There is a real chance that one myth (or several with much in common) will — by some mysterious, unpredictable process — grab hold of a big enough part of the body politic to stir it to action. The U.S saw that process at work in the 1770s (the dream of a republic), the 1860s (the dream of abolishing slavery), and the mid-1930s (the dream of basic economic security for all).

In the late 1960s, the dream of radical democracy and equality for all took hold in millions of American minds. It happened surprisingly fast. In 1963, when Dr. King gave the nation permission to share our dreams, few could have imagined how radically the political and cultural landscape would be reshaped by new myths within just a few years.

Of course, we should never confuse our dreams and myths with specific policy proposals. That would endanger the chances of achieving policies that could bring us a few steps closer to realizing those dreams. Policies, after all, are always political artifacts, produced by compromises between our dreams and the hard facts of the present.

The coming commemoration of the “dream” speech should remind us of Dr. King’s recipe for meaningful political change: take one part facts to reveal the world’s evils, one part policy proposals to remove those evils, one part shrewd political strategy, and one part dreams — shared aloud — and stir artfully into a political movement.
So don’t stop shouting from the rooftops about everything that’s outrageously wrong. Don’t stop the grinding political work of changing specific policies. But take the time to show how your outrage, policies, and politics are propelled by your dreams. Share those dreams: talk or write or draw or sing or dance them. Describe the kind of world you are working for and show how it could be linked to policies and politics. And don’t let anyone dismiss you as an “unrealistic dreamer.”

Yes, it’s true, the world will never look exactly like our mythic dreams. But we can’t get to any better future unless we first imagine that future, together. A political dream is a magnet that pulls us toward our goals. It may also be an asymptote — a promised land that we can never reach. Yet even if we never get there, every dream takes us closer to a transformed reality.

Copyright 2013 Ira Chernus

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Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado and author of MythicAmerica: Essays. He blogs at mythicamerica.us, hosted by History News Network.

© 2013 Truthout