Poverty

Though the Assets Learning Conference is now more than a week past, one session that has stuck with me dealt with The Great Recession and its Impact on Wealth in Low-Income Communities and Communities of Color. Through deftly interwoven presentations from the Urban Institute, Woodstock Institute, and Ohio State University (moderated by the U.S.

On September 20th, Rachel Black discussed the impact of recent reforms to state asset limit policies at the Assets Learning Conference. You can find her presentation here.

I spent last Thursday and Friday attending my very first Assets Learning Conference here in D.C. With over 1,200 asset building policymakers and practitioners in attendance from 49 states (Wyoming was sadly absent), ALC 2012 was a productive and energetic meeting of incredibly smart and engaged members of the field. The Asset Building Program will be posting a series of blog entries covering some of the sessions we most enjoyed over the next week or so. Be sure to check out CFED's blog for more thorough coverage (and well done, CFED, on a great conference!) My colleague Justin King started us off on Monday by reflecting here on his favorite session: the rousing plenary speech Newark Mayor Cory Booker gave that successfully framed financial empowerment and economic opportunity as key issues of our time.

Our friends at Half in Ten are taking the lead on a Twitter campaign to get the moderators of the upcoming presidential candidate debates to ask a question about poverty (specifically child poverty). As recently released Census figures show, over one in five American children live in poverty, a rate that has changed very little over recent years. This Twitter campaign is an effort to elevate the seriousness of child poverty to the forefront and get the media and ultimately President Obama and candidate Romney talking specifically about what they would do to address this widespread problem. Half in Ten has a page set up with all the details about when the debates are, how to structure your tweets, and who to target.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the latest on poverty data, health and financial security.

Editor's Note: This edition of Asset Building News Week was authored by our new fall intern, Elliot Schreur. Elliot is a Master's of Public Policy student at the George Washington University here in D.C. Please join us in welcoming Elliot!

The U.S. Census Bureau released 2011 estimates from the Current Population Survey today that show the national poverty rate remains the same as 2010. The new report shows that that more than one out of every seven Americans lived in poverty during 2011. As the Census press release notes, "after three consecutive years of increases, neither the poverty rate nor the number of people in poverty were statistically different from the 2010 estimates." While poverty remained roughly the same, incomes were down in 2011, compared to previous years. "Real median earnings of both men and women who worked full time, year-round declined by 2.5 percent between 2010 and 2011," the press release notes. The poverty threshold for a family with two adults and two children in 2011 was $22,811, while median household income was at $50,054. That means half of American households are getting by on less than $50,000 annually, and over 46 million are surviving on less than half of that.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the state of the middle class, food security, and financial products.

According to newly released data on food insecurity, a full 14.9% of American households did not have access to enough food for an active, healthy life at some point during 2011. This finding comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture,which puts out an annual report every September that calculates the prevalence of food insecurity, identifies the demographic characteristics and life circumstances of food insecure households, and analyzes food expenditures and participation in nutrition assistance programs.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the declining middle class, housing, the perils of lending, and connections between health and wealth.

A series of recent articles from the St. Louis Dispatch has been documenting a disturbing trend in Missouri: the return of the debtors’ prison. Debtors’ prisons are technically illegal in all states, and largely regarded as a relic of the past. Still, Missouri and other states are increasingly jailing people for failure to pay private debts by relying on a technicality that permits incarceration when the debtor misses a court date. The Dispatch’s most recent installment focuses on the role of payday lenders in enforcing debts through the courts, resulting in additional fees and deep humiliation for customers who end up spending time behind bars. Payday lenders, however, are not alone in enforcing such serious penalties for an inability to repay a debt; moreover, this trend can be understood as but one facet of the larger criminalization of poverty.