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 childcare, food security, housing and foreclosures, and financial products.
Childcare and Education
The Urban Institute has a series this week on their blog about childcare. The first part looks at the challenge of finding quality, affordable care, particularly for immigrant parents who face additional barriers when locating services. The second part looks at raising awareness of different local options and the third focuses on the supply and demand dynamics for childcare. Also check out this new video from Half in Ten that features interviews with Head Start families and teachers discussing how important the program is to low-income families and young children. A new report shows a widening achievement gap among high and low-income students. Finally, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a set of infographics that illustrate education-based health disparities. For example, they find that college graduates can expect to live a full five years longer than people who do not finish high school.
Food Security
A new study shows that food insecurity (the inability to access enough food for a healthy life) compounds the problems people living with AIDS already face. The San Francisco Chronicle also notes that only a fifth of study participants received federal food assistance, such as SNAP (food stamps), which suggests increasing participation may be a potential avenue for improving the situation. Grist looks at recent Gallup data on food hardship and notices something interesting: many of the states with high rates of people unable to afford food historically vote Republican. A new report from the U.S. Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund shows that 24.8 million Americans live in areas with limited supermarket access. The Huffington Post looks at the issue of senior poverty, profiling a 74-year-old woman who relies on $140 every month in food stamps after losing her retirement savings when the stock market crashed.
Housing, Poverty, and Foreclosures
Hurricane Isaac’s trajectory across the Southeastern U.S. prompted stories about ongoing economic difficulties in New Orleans. The Seattle Times reports that seven years post-Katrina, the number of homeless people there has doubled and describes ongoing outreach efforts to connect the homeless population with resources and housing. Meanwhile, with the Republican National Convention underway in Florida, both Al Jazeera and CBS News covered the high level of homelessness in Tampa. The New York Daily News and Buzzfeed both have pieces critiquing the utter silence from politicians on the issue of poverty during this campaign. As John Stanton writes, “The talk in Tampa will be entirely of the middle class, but I wonder whether at least some of those in the middle class might want to hear politicians’ plans to help the poor.”
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has released new guidance for housing authorities on how to manage waiting lists for public housing and voucher programs. Voter outreach organizations are finding that the foreclosure crisis is making their work more difficult, as addresses change and houses are left uninhabited. NPR reports that according to the Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight, Bank of America has not modified any loans following the 2011 agreement with the federal government to do so. The New York Times reports that GFI Mortgage Bankers has “agreed to pay more than $3.5 million to settle allegations by federal prosecutors that it charged higher interest rates and fees on mortgages to nonwhite borrowers than to whites with similar financial backgrounds.” The money will go to “600 black and Hispanic borrowers who federal authorities said paid unfairly high rates from 2005 through 2009.”
Financial Products
From cradle to grave, Americans have little in the way of savings: TIME Moneyland reports that very few children are saving any of their allowance money and Marketwatch writes that roughly half of Americans die with almost nothing left in the bank. On a somewhat cheerier note, Bank On Greater Cincinnati is reporting on its first year of success: helping over 1,000 previously unbanked residents access bank accounts. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal takes a look at Bank of America’s adoption of easy to understand fee disclosures, which are designed to help consumers better understand their account terms.
Quick Hits
A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research looks at the issue of small dollar lending and credit products.
Maine is imposing a 60-month time limit for people receiving TANF benefits. The change in policy is causing many people to turn to help from town-level general assistance funds, putting a strain on local resources.
Bryce Covert with The Nation looks at the data behind the latest jobs numbers and finds that discrimination may be driving hiring trends in the retail sector.
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