REAL LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVES want to remind folks the last change in SECTION 8 was 1970s when the Federal program changed to vouchers started moving our 99% of WE THE LOW INCOME citizens INTO US cities just before REAGAN came to office to start ROBBER BARON sacking and looting, raping and pillaging-----taking US CITIES to FAILED STATE. Moving the poor INTO the US cities made way for a PLANNED decay. This movement started in early 1980s-------did indeed push middle-income white citizens out of US cities. The poverty which followed was not brought by POOR people----it was the start of ROBBER BARON frauds and corruption as US manufacturing was sent overseas----knowingly creating high-employment. Bringing our US 99% of poor TO US CITIES at the same time global banking 1% had a MASTER PLAN to make unemployment SOAR.
THE ARRIVAL OF OUR SECTION 8 AND PUBLIC HOUSING POOR CITIZENS DID NOT MAKE DANGEROUS GHETTOS OF OUR US CITIES----IT WAS THE 'MASTER PLAN' OF GLOBAL BANKING.
So, REAGAN as that NEO-LIBERAL REPUBLICAN tag team CLINTON that NEO-LIBERAL DEMOCRAT prepared to use those POOR citizens and those social benefits.
This was the period when all US FEDERAL FUNDING AGENCIES for safety net programs were outsourced, privatized, and filled with criminal frauds and corruption.
This smiling lady didn't bring the downfall of our US cities---it was global banking 1% ROBBER BARON --CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
As subsidized housing spreads, suburbs face rising number of poor
By Chris Fusco, Tim Novak, Mick Dumke, and Brett Chase Jun 29, 2016, 6:06pm CDT
Decades ago, Yolanda Crawford had a chance to leave the Chicago Housing Authority’s Dearborn Homes in Bronzeville and move to Naperville.
She turned it down. That’s a decision she regrets.
Now, from the front porch of a small three-bedroom home in Burnham that she leases using a Section 8 “housing choice” voucher, the retired postal worker has some advice for other mothers raising children in Chicago’s crime-ridden neighborhoods.
“I advise any mother: Move to your suburban areas,” she says. “Not taking anything from the city, [but] there’s too much going on. Take your Section 8 voucher. Take it and go to Atlanta. Take it and go to Los Angeles.”
Crawford, a 58-year-old grandmother, took her voucher and headed to Burnham, just a few blocks south of the city limits. She leases her home from a retired teacher who moved to Wisconsin. The voucher covers all of her rent: $1,200 a month.
Burnham is among several south suburbs — also including Park Forest, Calumet City, Dolton, Lansing, University Park, Country Club Hills and South Holland — that have seen some of the six-county region’s biggest gains in subsidized housing since the CHA began demolishing the city’s high-rise housing projects 16 years ago under its “Plan for Transformation.”
During that time, 13 suburban housing authorities and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development also changed their policies, issuing more Section 8 vouchers to low-income families throughout the region.
As a result, the number of subsidized households in the suburbs — from suburban Cook County to the surrounding counties of DuPage, Lake, Kane, McHenry and Will — has risen 28 percent, from 32,292 in 2000 to 41,493 last year, according to HUD data and U.S. Census Bureau figures analyzed by the Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association.
Altogether, the suburbs had more than 84,000 residents using housing choice vouchers or some other form of taxpayer-funded housing assistance in 2015, the HUD data show.
The migration has come as the suburbs, in general, have grown more diverse and less affluent. Between 1999 and 2014, the number of suburban families living in poverty rose from about 53,000 to 104,000, rising from 4 percent of the population to 7 percent, according to census data.
_________________________________________
Flash forward to today again a SECTION 8 REFORM -------this time the goal is to get those poor out of those US URBAN ghettos----forcing movement into suburbs because of housing policy keeping them from getting housing in urban areas as this article says. The city councils and mayors unlike the 1970s when mostly WHITE politicians filled city agencies have been mostly black politicians. These black politicians are passing laws, policies et al to do the same marginalization in suburbs -------these UPLIFTING THE POOR movement to suburbs comes with the rebuilding of urban areas for the RICH-----while the suburbs are turned into global corporate factory campuses----industrial infrastructure bringing TOXIC ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE. It will take a few decades for this to occur-----as too happened in 1980s as US cities were made FAILED STATES.
WHO IS MAKING SECTION 8 HOUSING HARD TO FIND IN US CITIES? THAT WOULD CLINTON/OBAMA 5% FREEMASON/GREEK PLAYER/POLS.
Keep in mind---what looks to be a minority in suburbs of poor/people of color---will soar to a super-majority as decay and industrialization soar.
THIS IS WHAT WE CALL----REDLINING.
We don't have to wait 30 years to say---this is REDLINING---sending the poor to areas known to become industrial and toxic.
Section 8 Vouchers Help The Poor — But Only If Housing Is Available
May 10, 20174:35 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Farryn Giles and her 6-year-old son Isaiah have been living in a crumbling apartment building with her ex-husband, who's letting her stay for a couple months. Pigeons have infested the walls of the courtyard. Before she lived here, she was sleeping on and off in her car.
PBS Frontline YouTube But Giles, 26, says she recently felt like she hit the jackpot. She was awarded a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher, which will pay the difference between her rent and what she can afford.
But there's a catch: She has to find a landlord willing to take it before it expires in 90 days. Nationally, most voucher holders are able to use them, but in hot rental markets like Dallas, it's not always easy.
"It took me six years to get my voucher but I got it," she says. "You can best believe I'm going to utilize it."
More than 2 million families now use vouchers to keep from becoming homeless. It's the government's largest program to help low-income families pay their rent. Usually, the tenant pays up to 30 percent of their income in rent and a local public housing agency makes up the difference.
But Congress had bigger plans when it created the nearly $20 billion program in the 1970s. The voucher was designed to be a ticket out of poverty– allowing families to use it wherever they want. With a portable voucher, families can move to places with jobs, good schools and low crime.
So far, however, the program has not always lived up to that promise, especially when it comes to women with children. Among voucher holders, a 2016 government study found fewer than 13 percent of female-headed households with children were able to move to areas with higher opportunity.
Giles is trying to beat those odds. She found a new online customer service job paying $11.50 an hour. It's a big break for her. But it's an hour and a half bus ride away. She says she hoped the voucher would help her and her son find a place near the job in one of Dallas' northern and wealthier suburbs.
"Hello, goals, ambition," she says, excited about the idea of finding a quiet place to raise her son.
C'Artis Harris, 34, another voucher holder searching for a place in Dallas, also sees her voucher as a chance to make a new life.
"I can get a house or an apartment and it will be affordable for me and my children," she says. "I don't have to depend on people. I don't have to go into abusive relationships. I don't have to sleep in my van. I don't have to have my kids going from school to school. They can know this is ours. We don't have to keep moving."
A few months into her search, Giles had called hundreds of apartment complexes, many of them near her new job in the northern suburbs.
"I've been to Oak Cliff, I've been to south Dallas, I've been to Pleasant Grove," she says. "I've been way down south. Nobody wants my voucher."
Giles and Harris are not alone in their struggle. In Dallas, about 60 percent of people who get vouchers are unable to use them, according to MaryAnn Russ, the former CEO of the Dallas Housing Authority. While Dallas' rate is worse than most, the challenge is similar in other cities where rents are high and the market is tight: Sometimes vouchers don't cover the rent or landlords prefer tenants without them.
Nationwide, upscale suburbs – like McKinney and Frisco, just north of Dallas – have not always welcomed voucher holders.
Developer Terri Anderson says she ran into problems in McKinney and Frisco when trying to build an apartment complex, with 13 units set aside specifically for voucher holders, on the line between McKinney and Frisco.
"The city actually called a public hearing for our property and about 250 angry residents showed up," she says. "Our superintendent has been threatened, issued a criminal trespass warning. Police officers blocked our entrance."
Anderson says she believes she knows why: "It's a concerted effort to shut down development of a property they do not want in their neighborhood."
Frisco city officials say they support affordable housing and her project. They also say Anderson has not followed the city's building requirements. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is now investigating whether McKinney and Frisco violated the federal fair housing law.
Nicole Humphrey, who lives a couple miles away from Anderson's development, says she's opposed to the project.
She and other neighbors have said they worry about traffic and school overcrowding. But Humphrey says she has other concerns.
"In this neighborhood, most of us are stay-at-home moms with young kids," she says. "The lifestyle that goes with Section 8 is usually working, single moms or people who are struggling to keep their heads above water."
"I feel so bad saying that," she adds. "It's just not people who are the same class as us."
When asked if others who did not have the same opportunities as her could live in her neighborhood, she says: "The problem with that is I hear a lot of the unfair of: 'Oh we haven't been given this or that, or we haven't been afforded things you have been afforded.' I don't look at multi-millionaires and think, 'Why don't I have a yacht?'"
Humphrey says the issue for her is not about race. She says her neighborhood – with rows of tidy new houses and with well-cut lawns — is diverse. The real concern, she says, is that the voucher holders won't fit in or they won't understand her life.
"People see that I'm upper middle class, that I'm a woman who stays at home, who is kept by her husband, and instantly there's no clout. My opinion doesn't matter," she says. "They look at me and think, 'She has never experienced a problem we're having.'"
Humphrey acknowledges that as much as she fears voucher holders will stereotype her, she says she knows she is also stereotyping them.
"I don't know that we will ever come to a solution as a culture in America in general," she says. "There's always going to be someone with less, because the fair world doesn't exist and where does that line lie?"
Giles knows exactly where the line lies. It's between north and south Dallas.
Sitting on a bench on a 15-minute break from her customer service job, Giles says she thinks she knows how some people up north see her.
"I think that they think we are lazy, and worthless and getting over," she says. "Even though we're financially less capable, we still love our children the same. We still work just as hard, if not harder."
Giles says after three months of trying, she was unable to get anyone to take her voucher. She turned it back in and recently moved with her son out of the apartment where she was staying with her ex-husband and into a public housing complex in Dallas. She has since left her job in the northern suburb.
"Section 8 is not any type of simplification for our lives," she says, crying. "It's not easier. Society hasn't really grown the way people think that it has. And that's how I feel about that. It can't all have a happy ending I suppose."
Harris, who is still looking for a place to use her voucher, has been staying with a friend.
"Maybe it's meant for me to live in the 'hood," Harris says. "But I don't want to."
________________________________________
ROBBER BARON few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA slowly came to an end after 2008 economic crash-----and OBAMA era turn and indeed, MOVING FORWARD brought goals of building GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUSES. What was lost during the WHITE FLIGHT out of US cities in 1980s----2010 was all our PUBLIC AGENCIES and institutions----investment by last century.
What we will lose TODAY in WHITE FLIGHT from suburbs---is the same------all our PUBLIC AGENCIES and institutions gone into decay-------making way for global corporate industrialization.
These REDLINING development goals of moving POOR into concentrated communities in suburbs hit black, brown, and white LOW-INCOME AND POOR---not only 99% of black citizens
Today, white middle-class and merely rich settled in suburbs are again going to lose that equity in building community----but, it is not those 99% of WE THE LOW-INCOME citizens bringing those losses----it is MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE----slated to make global corporate industrialized toxic communities. THE RIGHT WING can yell at those POOR and THOSE HOUSING POLICIES----but the MASTER PLAN in 1990s----was just this----killing suburbs while building massive CHINESE-STYLE FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----filled with global corporate factories.
So. our 99% of WE THE POOR PEOPLE often DEMOCRAT want to yell at those 99% of RIGHT WING REPUBLICANS for HATING or RACISM-----when both should be
SHAKING THEIR TAIL FEATHERS AGAINST MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES
The End of White Flight
For the First Time in Decades, Cities' Black Populations Lose Ground, Stirring Clashes Over Class, Culture and Even Ice Cream
By
Conor Dougherty
Updated July 19, 2008 11:59 pm ET
Decades of white flight transformed America's cities. That era is drawing to a close.
In Washington, a historically black church is trying to attract white members to survive. Atlanta's next mayoral race is expected to feature the first competitive white candidate since the 1980s. San Francisco has lost so many African-Americans that Mayor Gavin Newsom created an "African-American Out-Migration Task Force and Advisory Committee" to help retain black residents.
"The city is experiencing growth, yet we're losing African-American families disproportionately," Mr. Newsom says. When that happens, "we lose part of our soul."
Ben's Chili Bowl in Washington has become a melting pot as the area's racial mix changes. From the Collection of the Ali family For much of the 20th century, the proportion of whites shrank in most U.S. cities. In recent years the decline has slowed considerably -- and in some significant cases has reversed. Between 2000 and 2006, eight of the 50 largest cities, including Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, saw the proportion of whites increase, according to Census figures. The previous decade, only three cities saw increases.
The changing racial mix is stirring up quarrels over class and culture. Beloved institutions in traditionally black communities -- minority-owned restaurants, book stores -- are losing the customers who supported them for decades. As neighborhoods grow more multicultural, conflicts over home prices, taxes and education are opening a new chapter in American race relations.
Part of the demographic shift is simple math: So many whites had abandoned cities over the past half-century, there weren't as many left to lose. Whites make up 66% of the general U.S. population, but only about 40% of large cities. Sooner or later, the pendulum was bound to swing back, and that appears to be starting.
Ben's exterior in 1958 From the Collection of the Ali family The Census data "suggests that white flight from large cities may have bottomed out in the 1990s," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
For instance, while most of the 50 largest cities continue to see declines in the share of whites, it is at much-reduced rates. In Los Angeles the share of the white population declined only about a half a percentage point between 2000 and 2006, compared to a 7.5-point decline the previous decade. Cities including New York, Fort Worth and Chicago show a similar pattern.
'Natural Decrease'
Demographic readjustments can take decades to play out. But if current trends continue, Washington and Atlanta (both with black majorities) will in the next decade see African-Americans fall below 50% for the first time in about a half-century.
Meantime, in San Francisco, African-American deaths now outnumber births. Once a "natural decrease" such as this begins, it's tough for the population to bounce back, since there are fewer residents left to produce the next generation. "The cycle tends to be self-perpetuating," says Kenneth M. Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.
Ramin Rahimian/WpN for The Wall Street Journal
San Francisco's Fillmore (top) is losing black businesses; the same corner in the mid-1940s (bottom). San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, from the book "Harlem of the West" by Elizabeth Pepin & Lewis Watts, Chronicle Books There are myriad factors driving the change. In recent years, minority middle-class families, particularly African-Americans, have been moving to the suburbs in greater numbers. At the same time, Hispanic immigrants (who poured into cities from the 1970s through the 1990s) are now increasingly bypassing cities for suburbs and rural areas, seeking jobs on farms and in meat-packing plants.
Cities have spent a decade tidying up parks and converting decaying factories into retail and living space. That has attracted young professionals and empty-nesters, many of them white.
The shift has put the future at odds with the past. New York City's borough of Brooklyn has seen its proportion of whites grow to 36.1% in 2006 from 35.9% in 2000 -- the first increase in white share in about a century.
Hoarding Computers
While the root of neighborhood conflicts is often money or class differences between white-collar and blue-collar workers, it often unfolds along racial lines. About two years ago Public School 84, in a largely Hispanic section of Brooklyn, meetings of the Parent Teacher Association started drawing a more professional, wealthier and whiter group of parents.
Soon, disagreements spilled into the open. Arguments concerned everything from how PTA money was spent, to accusations that some white parents were hoarding computers for their kids.
Even ice cream became a point of contention: In the past year, a group of mostly white parents took issue with a school tradition of selling ice cream to raise money. They felt the school shouldn't be serving sugary foods to kids, but the break with tradition angered many minority parents who felt the sales were an important source of money and that ice cream is a harmless treat.
"It was a gigantic fight," says Brooke Parker, who is white and whose daughter attended the school last year. "If the school is saying 'It's OK to give out ice cream' while at the same time they're holding workshops on how to deal with your kid's Type 2 diabetes, maybe we should rethink the message we're sending."
Relations got testy enough that about 20 kids, most of whom were white, transferred to private schools or other public schools. "I don't think the battleground against gentrification should take place in the schools," says Ms. Parker, who withdrew her own daughter from P.S. 84 as tensions built. "It seemed nothing could get accomplished," she said.
Cries of 'Segregation'
The Rev. John Blanchard (right) at his Washington church, which plans to woo whites. Patrice Gilbert for The Wall Street Journal A few months later, a small group of families, most of them white, proposed establishing a new public school, to be located inside the existing P.S. 84. Hundreds of minority parents reacted by putting out a press release calling it de facto segregation. The proposal is "clearly discriminatory," the release said. "Children will suffer the effects of negative stigma as a result of this segregation which will send our City back 120 years!"
"I honestly felt like they didn't want to mix our children with their children," says Virginia Reyes, vice president of the PTA at P.S. 84 who has two foster children at the school. "It upset me a lot."
A spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education says, "We obviously would not and could not open segregated schools." The department says the new school didn't get the go-ahead because it didn't have broad enough community support.
Backers of the new school couldn't be reached.
Elsewhere in Brooklyn, in a majority African-American section of the borough, Councilwoman Letitia James says a handful of predominantly white parents last year asked her if some of their local tax money could be steered to schools in a nearby neighborhood. The parents wanted their kids in schools with a more diverse racial mix, Ms. James says, rather than the majority-black schools in her district.
The parents felt "tax dollars should follow the children, and not the school," Ms. James says. She denied their request.
______________________________________________
So, this is what today's SECTION 8 HOUSING VOUCHERS has in store for those POOR/LOW-INCOME being moved to the SUBURBS for a better life. This is what is in store for any right wing white citizen in suburbs if they try to salvage their wealth investments in those same suburbs.
Neither those white right wing middle-class citizens nor those POOR people of color will have created this MESS------FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES always look like this.
SECTION 8 HOUSING VOUCHERS WILL NOW GO TO GLOBAL CORPORATIONS BUILDING WORKER DORMS JUST AS IN CHINA. WORKER DORMS LOOK NOTHING LIKE THOSE US HOUSES AND APARTMENTS THAT ONCE WERE SECTION 8 HOUSING.
Oh, look----there is GWYNN FALLS---or is that LAKE ROLAND?
China deluged by toxic sludge
China’s sewage-treatment industry generates 22 million tonnes of sludge every year. What happens to it?
To dispose of 500 tonnes of toxic sludge in the south China city of Guangzhou, all you need is a hired boat and a little money for petrol. Within a couple of hours, you can discharge your load – containing heavy metals, pathogens and bacteria – into the river without the authorities being any the wiser, and turn a tidy profit of 80,000 yuan (US$12,600).
It isn’t only Guangzhou. In Beijing, a group of citizens concerned about the sludge siege has created a map of “sludge piles”. If the coordinates of the 30 or so landfill sites around Beijing’s suburbs are plotted and linked up, a “Great Wall” of toxic sludge can be seen encircling the city.
And in Shenzhen, another metropolis in the south, the substance has already caused havoc: huge quantities of buried sludge at Xiaping solid-waste landfill put so much pressure on the groundwater table that, in 2009, the sludge came bursting up from underground, flowing into a nearby river and, at its deepest, reaching waist-level.
Cities and provinces including Guangdong, Zhejiang, Beijing, Shanghai, Guizhou, Ningxia and Chongqing, and stretching as far west as Urumqi, have all, to varying degrees, been troubled by toxic sludge.
High profits, weak regulation
China’s sewage-treatment sector is increasingly bogged down by this embarrassing problem. Where does it come from?
A market report on the “treatment and disposal of toxic sludge”, published on the website chinawater.net, explains that by late 2010 China’s urban sewage-treatment capacity had reached 34.3 billion cubic metres, equivalent to the volume of the Three Gorges Reservoir. The dewatered muck spat out by this “reservoir” each year is close to 22 million tonnes – of which 80% is untreated toxic sludge. Such a large amount of sludge poses an even greater threat to China than the rubbish dumps rapidly surrounding its cities.
That isn't even the full picture. “The 22 million tonnes only refers to the amount of toxic sludge left over from the treatment of urban household sewage,” explained Wang Hongchen, professor at Renmin University’s Environmental Sciences Department. “It doesn’t include most sludge from the industrial wastewater produced by China’s thousands of economic and industrial development zones. And the situation there is hardly cause for cheer.” Among the industries operating in these zones are petrochemical, smelting, tanning and dyeing factories, all of which use dangerous substances that contribute to the harm.
“Profits to be made through unauthorised discharge of toxic sludge are too high, while penalties for breaking the law are too low,” said Xu Qing, a longtime employee of the state water authority. Xu believes that, with large profit margins and weak regulation, there will always be people willing to take the risk and break the rules.
Toxic sludge is a concentrate of pollutants from the sewage treatment process. If dumped untreated – or only lightly treated – there is a relatively high risk of secondary pollution to the soil, atmosphere and local water resources. Heavy metals from the sludge can seep into groundwater, and from there become part of the food chain, making their way to the kitchen table. Unless this is dealt with in a scientific manner, the damage will be irreparable, and affect generations to come.
_______________________________________
US CITIES AS FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES will not be a battle of WHITE VS BLACK -----white middle-class vs low-income poor ----it will be totally different. It will be extreme poverty with super-majority of immigrants and extreme wealth with a global 2% filling global corporate headquarters.
Meanwhile, out in those suburbs will be that nasty toxic waste region where both our US RIGHT WING REPUBLICAN 99% and those DEMOCRATIC POOR BLACK CITIZENS are fighting over SECTION 8 HOUSING VOUCHERS.
Why does this article say it may take two centuries to address disparities? Well, building US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE global corporate campuses and factories will see the same DECAY---DECLINE in infrastructure and disparity ---which took a century to occur with our 20th century US CITIES.
DISSIPATE? Well, with jobs becoming robotic, artificial intelligence and de-population we can assume two centuries will eliminate all those HUMANS which create all that messy socioeconomic intrigue. In two centuries US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES as FATAL SHORES DARK CONTINENT SLAVE LABOR will have made the NORTH AMERICAN continent inhabitable.
REMEMBER, IT ONLY TOOK 60 YEARS TO MAKE ASIAN FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES UNINHABITABLE.
What the Racial Wealth Gap Means for U.S. Cities
Kelsey E. Thomas August 10, 2016
White families tend to earn more than black or Latino families, but a new report released Monday says wealth inequality may be an even greater concern than income inequality.
The racial wealth gap, which looks at a person’s total net worth, is much wider than the gap between annual incomes, and it has gotten even wider since the Great Recession, when people of color were hit the hardest. This gap will likely have lasting ramifications. If current public policies stay the same, the report’s authors calculate, it will take a staggering 228 years for black families to accumulate the same amount of wealth that white families have today. For the average Latino family, it will take 84 years.
In many majority-minority cities, such as Baltimore, Detroit and Chicago, overcoming challenges around housing, education and employment opportunities could help residents get ahead, start businesses, provide for their children and thrive, rather than just survive. As Next City equitable cities fellow Oscar Perry Abello has reported, wealth inequality, “besides fewer sources of capital from friends and family … means fewer assets to use as collateral for business loans from banks and other institutions.”
The report, “The Ever-Growing Gap: Without Change, African-American and Latino Families Won’t Match White Wealth for Centuries,” examined the accumulation of wealth over the past 30 years and how wealth-building policies have given white Americans a leg up. Over the past three decades, the average wealth of white families has grown by 84 percent, three times as fast as the rate for African-American families and 1.2 the growth rate for Latino families, according to the research from the Corporation for Enterprise Development and the Institute for Policy Studies.
By 2043, when people of color overtake whites as the majority in the U.S. population, the wealth divide between white families and Latino and black families will have doubled, on average, from about $500,000 in 2013 to more than $1 million.
Homeownership strongly correlates with wealth, and decades of discriminatory housing policies and market practices, such as redlining and disparate local implementation of Federal Housing Administration loans and G.I. Bill benefits, have prohibited many people of color from purchasing a home. While 71 percent of white families are homeowners, only 41 percent of black families and 45 percent of Hispanic families are homeowners.
Other studies on the racial wealth gap in several cities have also arrived at troubling conclusions.
“There’s this gulf between whites and minorities of color across all types of assets,” Ana Patricia Munoz, a co-author of by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, told the Boston Globe last year. “The way we usually measure inequality is by income, but those differences aren’t as high as the differences in wealth. This tells you what they have to invest for future generations.”
The Federal Reserve Bank report found that the median white household in Greater Boston has $256,500 in net assets, such as retirement savings, stocks or a checking account, while none of minority groups studied had net assets over $18,000. Similar surveys from Miami, Tulsa and Washington, D.C., also found vast disparities.
An early 2016 report out of Los Angeles, another majority-minority city, found that wealth differentials across racial groups are far more pronounced than income differentials, leaving communities of color particularly vulnerable in the case of emergencies, unemployment or other unexpected costs.
That study, “The Color of Wealth in Los Angeles,” also found a disconcerting hurdle to families of color building wealth. “Because communities of color often have higher-cost debt and higher debt-to-income ratios, they are more likely to be denied credit and their ability to build assets is limited,” it says. “Although, research has shown that when blacks have similar credit scores as whites, they are still more likely to be denied credit. This contributes to lower asset ownership and lower asset values when compared with white households.”
There are no easy fixes for closing the gap, and ongoing discriminatory practices make it even harder. Even for black or Hispanic students who get a four-year degree, their wealth returns on that degree will typically be much lower than for white students. The reports do offer a number of suggestions, including expanding eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit and other tax policies that help families of color build wealth, ensuring every child has a Children’s Savings Account, creating an annual net worth tax on high-wealth individuals, removing barriers to retirement savings, and making sure that policies aimed at bridging the wealth gap consider the wide diversity among nonwhite populations and are targeted or adapted accordingly.
Many of these ideas also appear in the Movement for Black Lives’ new policy agenda, which outlines what the U.S. should do to address the disparities faced by black communities in health, employment, education, criminal justice and housing. To put cities with large low-income communities on a path out of poverty, the platform suggests, federal and local governments should focus on services for the black communities. Creating job training programs and opportunities for black youth in Detroit or Chicago, for example, would boost the economy of the city as a whole.
Failing to address the growing problem, the “Ever-Growing Gap” report says, will “severely impact the economic opportunity of communities of color,” and will have ramifications for the economic well-being of the country as a whole. The authors write:
When wealth and opportunity are more evenly distributed, financially vulnerable families are better able to get ahead, rather than just scrape by. Imagine that instead of low-wealth black and Latino families finding themselves unable to deal with fluctuating incomes or how they’re going to make it through an unexpected financial emergency, they have the freedom to invest in their children’s future aspirations. Or, instead of resorting to selling loose cigarettes or CDs to earn a little more money for their families, blacks and Latinos have the opportunity to build long-term wealth by owning their own businesses. These are just some of the opportunities lost because of the growing racial and economic inequality we face.
______________________________________________
This is global corporate MARXISM--------worker dorms where workers live in institutional poverty. SECTION 8 HOUSING FUNDS today are going to global property management corporations called AFFORDABLE HOUSING JUSTICE organizations partnered with those global factories to be built just outside city limits.
We show photos often discussing the difference between HOUSING JUSTICE in third world ---and what our US 99% WE THE LOW-INCOME HOUSING citizens experienced when they used SECTION 8 back in FDR era----even when they used SECTION 8 in NIXON/REAGAN era. It will be brutal as is totalitarian global corporate MARXISM---EXTREME WEALTH EXTREME POVERTY.
These condition in Chinese worker dorms took 40 years to become UNINHABITABLE.
We are sure that when these CHINESE FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES were built 40-50 years there were RIGHT WING MIDDLE-CLASS CHINESE fighting with LOW INCOME 99% OF CITIZENS both of which were MOVED OUT.
Life for China's migrant workers: dorm that looks like prison
A rare look inside a recently abandoned factory dormitory in Shanghai, and interviews with workers, reveals something of the living conditions endured by migrants toiling in China to produce goods mainly for export, writes George Knowles
George Knowles
Published: 12:30pm, 27 May, 2016
Updated: 5:11pm, 13 Jun, 2016
A canteen in the now abandoned Pegatron dormitory complex in Shanghai. Photos: George Knowles; Bloomberg
Share:
The deserted four-storey block is bleak and austere. Beyond electronic security checkpoints are dank corridors with peeling paintwork, pools of fetid green water and stark dormitory rooms filled with cold steel bunk beds and metal lockers.
At the end of each long corridor of about 50 rooms are communal showers, where 20 people at a time would queue to wash side by side, using foot pedals to pump water, and rows of squatting toilets set above open drains running the length of the space.
It could be mistaken for a prison or a labour camp, but this Shanghai block was not home to criminals or political dissidents. Rather, it contained dormitories used by migrant workers at Pegatron, a company that makes a significant proportion of the world's iPhones.
A deserted men's room.
Share:
This and three other dormitory blocks on the site, which once housed up to 6,000 employees of the Taiwanese company, were vacated three months ago as a result, workers tell us, of declining orders from the key client, Apple.
Until February, the complex on Kangqiao Road East was one of the largest of about 10 off-site dormitory blocks that, along with six on-site, housed the 50,000-plus workers at the company's vast Shanghai factory. Numbers had dwindled to about 1,000 at the time of its closure. The abandoning of the dormitory blocks allowed us rare access and an insight into the living conditions of migrant workers who leave their homes to make the world's most sought-after electronic gadget.
Paid basic salaries of 2,350 yuan (HK$2,785) for six-day weeks, which they can double by working daily overtime, Pegatron's workers are drawn from China's poorest provinces, many living year-round in dormitories provided by the company.
A 20-minute shuttle-bus ride from the factory, the Kangqiao Road East complex was patrolled by teams of security guards and strictly off-limits to outsiders. Today, however, just a handful of guards remain to watch over the largely deserted buildings.
Earlier this month, we inspected one of the dormitory blocks, floor by floor, and found living conditions that Apple is investigating and Pegatron has admitted were "unacceptable".
We find rooms containing up to 12 bunk beds - Apple rules state that no more than eight workers should share a room - for which the occupants would each have been charged 160 yuan a month, deducted from their pay packets. Even when stripped of personal belongings, there is barely space for anything in the rooms other than the beds and the workers' metal lockers.
In the corner of some toilet blocks and corridors are pools of filthy green water. Throughout the block, walls are moulding, the paint peeling heavily in places, with hand-written signs posted at regular intervals spelling out rules for workers.
The men's and women's sections are segregated, with a padlocked high fence separating the drying areas for laundry on the rooftop. Throughout the building we find mementos of the young lives lived here: above one bed in a women's dorm is a strip of photo-booth shots of a boyfriend holding a flower. On a stairwell, there are discarded plastic Christmas trees and a jumble of mattresses.
On the ground floor are workers' cafés, food stalls, a grocery shop with stock still on the shelves and, ironically, one selling Apple products, all of which are padlocked, left as if the complex had been evacuated at short notice. Electronic swipe-card checkpoints identical to the ones used by workers to clock in and out of the Pegatron factory remain lit up but redundant at the block entrance.
The closure of the dormitory blocks - a converted factory complex used for years by Pegatron - saw hundreds of workers sent home and told not to return, according to one of the remaining security guards.
"There were 6,000 workers here at its peak but orders from Apple have been getting less and less in the past two years, so the company decided to close the whole dormitory complex here," he says. "It all happened very quickly as the New Year holiday came around and they seemed to have made their minds up that there wasn't enough work to keep the dorms going."
Some workers have their salaries stolen the day they’re paid and then … have to pick leftovers out of the rubbish bins to live A Pegatron worker
Last month, Apple announced it had sold 16 per cent fewer iPhones than in the same period in 2015 and made 18 per cent less money from them. The iconic smartphones account for nearly two-thirds of Apple's overall revenue. A month earlier, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported that Pegatron - which shares iPhone production with another Taiwan electronics giant, Foxconn - had imposed a hiring freeze because of disappointing iPhone 6 sales, which, it said, "waned considerably", particularly in the huge China market.
LIVING CONDITIONS AT THE Kangqiao Road East dormitory complex were experienced first-hand by an undercover investigator for the pressure group China Labor Watch, who got a job making motherboards on an Apple production line last year.
"The dormitories were terrible," says the 28-year-old investigator, who spent 10 days living in the complex in September. "There were 12 workers in each small room with no toilet and no washing facilities. There were hundreds of workers on each floor but only one toilet block and one shower room for each floor. In the morning, or at the end of a working day, workers had to line up to use the toilets and line up to wash and take showers.
"The toilets were dirty and the showers were shared, with no way to give you any privacy. There was no way to relax after a hard day of work and you were given no dignity as a human being.
"Every day, many workers quit their jobs. They felt it was too hard to carry on working there. I found that most of the workers who left did so not because of the low wages but because of the harsh working conditions and the bad living conditions in the dormitories."
The investigator calculates each storey could accommodate 602 people but there were only 30 toilets, 30 showers and 50 wash basins on each floor. About half of the toilets would be out of order at any given time, he says, leaving just one toilet for every 40 workers.
"Many of the workers have red spots all over their bodies due to bug bites," wrote the investigator in his report for New York-based China Labor Watch.
As tired workers poured out of the factory gates at the end of their overtime shifts on a Saturday night earlier this month, some met us in surrounding cafés and teashops out of sight of factory security staff to tell us about the conditions.
They can't make enough money to feed their families working in the factory so they have to work as prostitutes Zhou Zinyi, taxi driver
SOUNDS LIKE NOSY NEIGHBORS AND THE GANG illegal surbveillance video PORN and the SEX TRADE network goals----ruin families
THE ARRIVAL OF OUR SECTION 8 AND PUBLIC HOUSING POOR CITIZENS DID NOT MAKE DANGEROUS GHETTOS OF OUR US CITIES----IT WAS THE 'MASTER PLAN' OF GLOBAL BANKING.
So, REAGAN as that NEO-LIBERAL REPUBLICAN tag team CLINTON that NEO-LIBERAL DEMOCRAT prepared to use those POOR citizens and those social benefits.
This was the period when all US FEDERAL FUNDING AGENCIES for safety net programs were outsourced, privatized, and filled with criminal frauds and corruption.
This smiling lady didn't bring the downfall of our US cities---it was global banking 1% ROBBER BARON --CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
As subsidized housing spreads, suburbs face rising number of poor
By Chris Fusco, Tim Novak, Mick Dumke, and Brett Chase Jun 29, 2016, 6:06pm CDT
Decades ago, Yolanda Crawford had a chance to leave the Chicago Housing Authority’s Dearborn Homes in Bronzeville and move to Naperville.
She turned it down. That’s a decision she regrets.
Now, from the front porch of a small three-bedroom home in Burnham that she leases using a Section 8 “housing choice” voucher, the retired postal worker has some advice for other mothers raising children in Chicago’s crime-ridden neighborhoods.
“I advise any mother: Move to your suburban areas,” she says. “Not taking anything from the city, [but] there’s too much going on. Take your Section 8 voucher. Take it and go to Atlanta. Take it and go to Los Angeles.”
Crawford, a 58-year-old grandmother, took her voucher and headed to Burnham, just a few blocks south of the city limits. She leases her home from a retired teacher who moved to Wisconsin. The voucher covers all of her rent: $1,200 a month.
Burnham is among several south suburbs — also including Park Forest, Calumet City, Dolton, Lansing, University Park, Country Club Hills and South Holland — that have seen some of the six-county region’s biggest gains in subsidized housing since the CHA began demolishing the city’s high-rise housing projects 16 years ago under its “Plan for Transformation.”
During that time, 13 suburban housing authorities and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development also changed their policies, issuing more Section 8 vouchers to low-income families throughout the region.
As a result, the number of subsidized households in the suburbs — from suburban Cook County to the surrounding counties of DuPage, Lake, Kane, McHenry and Will — has risen 28 percent, from 32,292 in 2000 to 41,493 last year, according to HUD data and U.S. Census Bureau figures analyzed by the Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association.
Altogether, the suburbs had more than 84,000 residents using housing choice vouchers or some other form of taxpayer-funded housing assistance in 2015, the HUD data show.
The migration has come as the suburbs, in general, have grown more diverse and less affluent. Between 1999 and 2014, the number of suburban families living in poverty rose from about 53,000 to 104,000, rising from 4 percent of the population to 7 percent, according to census data.
_________________________________________
Flash forward to today again a SECTION 8 REFORM -------this time the goal is to get those poor out of those US URBAN ghettos----forcing movement into suburbs because of housing policy keeping them from getting housing in urban areas as this article says. The city councils and mayors unlike the 1970s when mostly WHITE politicians filled city agencies have been mostly black politicians. These black politicians are passing laws, policies et al to do the same marginalization in suburbs -------these UPLIFTING THE POOR movement to suburbs comes with the rebuilding of urban areas for the RICH-----while the suburbs are turned into global corporate factory campuses----industrial infrastructure bringing TOXIC ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE. It will take a few decades for this to occur-----as too happened in 1980s as US cities were made FAILED STATES.
WHO IS MAKING SECTION 8 HOUSING HARD TO FIND IN US CITIES? THAT WOULD CLINTON/OBAMA 5% FREEMASON/GREEK PLAYER/POLS.
Keep in mind---what looks to be a minority in suburbs of poor/people of color---will soar to a super-majority as decay and industrialization soar.
THIS IS WHAT WE CALL----REDLINING.
We don't have to wait 30 years to say---this is REDLINING---sending the poor to areas known to become industrial and toxic.
Section 8 Vouchers Help The Poor — But Only If Housing Is Available
May 10, 20174:35 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Farryn Giles and her 6-year-old son Isaiah have been living in a crumbling apartment building with her ex-husband, who's letting her stay for a couple months. Pigeons have infested the walls of the courtyard. Before she lived here, she was sleeping on and off in her car.
PBS Frontline YouTube But Giles, 26, says she recently felt like she hit the jackpot. She was awarded a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher, which will pay the difference between her rent and what she can afford.
But there's a catch: She has to find a landlord willing to take it before it expires in 90 days. Nationally, most voucher holders are able to use them, but in hot rental markets like Dallas, it's not always easy.
"It took me six years to get my voucher but I got it," she says. "You can best believe I'm going to utilize it."
More than 2 million families now use vouchers to keep from becoming homeless. It's the government's largest program to help low-income families pay their rent. Usually, the tenant pays up to 30 percent of their income in rent and a local public housing agency makes up the difference.
But Congress had bigger plans when it created the nearly $20 billion program in the 1970s. The voucher was designed to be a ticket out of poverty– allowing families to use it wherever they want. With a portable voucher, families can move to places with jobs, good schools and low crime.
So far, however, the program has not always lived up to that promise, especially when it comes to women with children. Among voucher holders, a 2016 government study found fewer than 13 percent of female-headed households with children were able to move to areas with higher opportunity.
Giles is trying to beat those odds. She found a new online customer service job paying $11.50 an hour. It's a big break for her. But it's an hour and a half bus ride away. She says she hoped the voucher would help her and her son find a place near the job in one of Dallas' northern and wealthier suburbs.
"Hello, goals, ambition," she says, excited about the idea of finding a quiet place to raise her son.
C'Artis Harris, 34, another voucher holder searching for a place in Dallas, also sees her voucher as a chance to make a new life.
"I can get a house or an apartment and it will be affordable for me and my children," she says. "I don't have to depend on people. I don't have to go into abusive relationships. I don't have to sleep in my van. I don't have to have my kids going from school to school. They can know this is ours. We don't have to keep moving."
A few months into her search, Giles had called hundreds of apartment complexes, many of them near her new job in the northern suburbs.
"I've been to Oak Cliff, I've been to south Dallas, I've been to Pleasant Grove," she says. "I've been way down south. Nobody wants my voucher."
Giles and Harris are not alone in their struggle. In Dallas, about 60 percent of people who get vouchers are unable to use them, according to MaryAnn Russ, the former CEO of the Dallas Housing Authority. While Dallas' rate is worse than most, the challenge is similar in other cities where rents are high and the market is tight: Sometimes vouchers don't cover the rent or landlords prefer tenants without them.
Nationwide, upscale suburbs – like McKinney and Frisco, just north of Dallas – have not always welcomed voucher holders.
Developer Terri Anderson says she ran into problems in McKinney and Frisco when trying to build an apartment complex, with 13 units set aside specifically for voucher holders, on the line between McKinney and Frisco.
"The city actually called a public hearing for our property and about 250 angry residents showed up," she says. "Our superintendent has been threatened, issued a criminal trespass warning. Police officers blocked our entrance."
Anderson says she believes she knows why: "It's a concerted effort to shut down development of a property they do not want in their neighborhood."
Frisco city officials say they support affordable housing and her project. They also say Anderson has not followed the city's building requirements. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is now investigating whether McKinney and Frisco violated the federal fair housing law.
Nicole Humphrey, who lives a couple miles away from Anderson's development, says she's opposed to the project.
She and other neighbors have said they worry about traffic and school overcrowding. But Humphrey says she has other concerns.
"In this neighborhood, most of us are stay-at-home moms with young kids," she says. "The lifestyle that goes with Section 8 is usually working, single moms or people who are struggling to keep their heads above water."
"I feel so bad saying that," she adds. "It's just not people who are the same class as us."
When asked if others who did not have the same opportunities as her could live in her neighborhood, she says: "The problem with that is I hear a lot of the unfair of: 'Oh we haven't been given this or that, or we haven't been afforded things you have been afforded.' I don't look at multi-millionaires and think, 'Why don't I have a yacht?'"
Humphrey says the issue for her is not about race. She says her neighborhood – with rows of tidy new houses and with well-cut lawns — is diverse. The real concern, she says, is that the voucher holders won't fit in or they won't understand her life.
"People see that I'm upper middle class, that I'm a woman who stays at home, who is kept by her husband, and instantly there's no clout. My opinion doesn't matter," she says. "They look at me and think, 'She has never experienced a problem we're having.'"
Humphrey acknowledges that as much as she fears voucher holders will stereotype her, she says she knows she is also stereotyping them.
"I don't know that we will ever come to a solution as a culture in America in general," she says. "There's always going to be someone with less, because the fair world doesn't exist and where does that line lie?"
Giles knows exactly where the line lies. It's between north and south Dallas.
Sitting on a bench on a 15-minute break from her customer service job, Giles says she thinks she knows how some people up north see her.
"I think that they think we are lazy, and worthless and getting over," she says. "Even though we're financially less capable, we still love our children the same. We still work just as hard, if not harder."
Giles says after three months of trying, she was unable to get anyone to take her voucher. She turned it back in and recently moved with her son out of the apartment where she was staying with her ex-husband and into a public housing complex in Dallas. She has since left her job in the northern suburb.
"Section 8 is not any type of simplification for our lives," she says, crying. "It's not easier. Society hasn't really grown the way people think that it has. And that's how I feel about that. It can't all have a happy ending I suppose."
Harris, who is still looking for a place to use her voucher, has been staying with a friend.
"Maybe it's meant for me to live in the 'hood," Harris says. "But I don't want to."
________________________________________
ROBBER BARON few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA slowly came to an end after 2008 economic crash-----and OBAMA era turn and indeed, MOVING FORWARD brought goals of building GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUSES. What was lost during the WHITE FLIGHT out of US cities in 1980s----2010 was all our PUBLIC AGENCIES and institutions----investment by last century.
What we will lose TODAY in WHITE FLIGHT from suburbs---is the same------all our PUBLIC AGENCIES and institutions gone into decay-------making way for global corporate industrialization.
These REDLINING development goals of moving POOR into concentrated communities in suburbs hit black, brown, and white LOW-INCOME AND POOR---not only 99% of black citizens
Today, white middle-class and merely rich settled in suburbs are again going to lose that equity in building community----but, it is not those 99% of WE THE LOW-INCOME citizens bringing those losses----it is MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE----slated to make global corporate industrialized toxic communities. THE RIGHT WING can yell at those POOR and THOSE HOUSING POLICIES----but the MASTER PLAN in 1990s----was just this----killing suburbs while building massive CHINESE-STYLE FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----filled with global corporate factories.
So. our 99% of WE THE POOR PEOPLE often DEMOCRAT want to yell at those 99% of RIGHT WING REPUBLICANS for HATING or RACISM-----when both should be
SHAKING THEIR TAIL FEATHERS AGAINST MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES
The End of White Flight
For the First Time in Decades, Cities' Black Populations Lose Ground, Stirring Clashes Over Class, Culture and Even Ice Cream
By
Conor Dougherty
Updated July 19, 2008 11:59 pm ET
Decades of white flight transformed America's cities. That era is drawing to a close.
In Washington, a historically black church is trying to attract white members to survive. Atlanta's next mayoral race is expected to feature the first competitive white candidate since the 1980s. San Francisco has lost so many African-Americans that Mayor Gavin Newsom created an "African-American Out-Migration Task Force and Advisory Committee" to help retain black residents.
"The city is experiencing growth, yet we're losing African-American families disproportionately," Mr. Newsom says. When that happens, "we lose part of our soul."
Ben's Chili Bowl in Washington has become a melting pot as the area's racial mix changes. From the Collection of the Ali family For much of the 20th century, the proportion of whites shrank in most U.S. cities. In recent years the decline has slowed considerably -- and in some significant cases has reversed. Between 2000 and 2006, eight of the 50 largest cities, including Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, saw the proportion of whites increase, according to Census figures. The previous decade, only three cities saw increases.
The changing racial mix is stirring up quarrels over class and culture. Beloved institutions in traditionally black communities -- minority-owned restaurants, book stores -- are losing the customers who supported them for decades. As neighborhoods grow more multicultural, conflicts over home prices, taxes and education are opening a new chapter in American race relations.
Part of the demographic shift is simple math: So many whites had abandoned cities over the past half-century, there weren't as many left to lose. Whites make up 66% of the general U.S. population, but only about 40% of large cities. Sooner or later, the pendulum was bound to swing back, and that appears to be starting.
Ben's exterior in 1958 From the Collection of the Ali family The Census data "suggests that white flight from large cities may have bottomed out in the 1990s," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
For instance, while most of the 50 largest cities continue to see declines in the share of whites, it is at much-reduced rates. In Los Angeles the share of the white population declined only about a half a percentage point between 2000 and 2006, compared to a 7.5-point decline the previous decade. Cities including New York, Fort Worth and Chicago show a similar pattern.
'Natural Decrease'
Demographic readjustments can take decades to play out. But if current trends continue, Washington and Atlanta (both with black majorities) will in the next decade see African-Americans fall below 50% for the first time in about a half-century.
Meantime, in San Francisco, African-American deaths now outnumber births. Once a "natural decrease" such as this begins, it's tough for the population to bounce back, since there are fewer residents left to produce the next generation. "The cycle tends to be self-perpetuating," says Kenneth M. Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.
Ramin Rahimian/WpN for The Wall Street Journal
San Francisco's Fillmore (top) is losing black businesses; the same corner in the mid-1940s (bottom). San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, from the book "Harlem of the West" by Elizabeth Pepin & Lewis Watts, Chronicle Books There are myriad factors driving the change. In recent years, minority middle-class families, particularly African-Americans, have been moving to the suburbs in greater numbers. At the same time, Hispanic immigrants (who poured into cities from the 1970s through the 1990s) are now increasingly bypassing cities for suburbs and rural areas, seeking jobs on farms and in meat-packing plants.
Cities have spent a decade tidying up parks and converting decaying factories into retail and living space. That has attracted young professionals and empty-nesters, many of them white.
The shift has put the future at odds with the past. New York City's borough of Brooklyn has seen its proportion of whites grow to 36.1% in 2006 from 35.9% in 2000 -- the first increase in white share in about a century.
Hoarding Computers
While the root of neighborhood conflicts is often money or class differences between white-collar and blue-collar workers, it often unfolds along racial lines. About two years ago Public School 84, in a largely Hispanic section of Brooklyn, meetings of the Parent Teacher Association started drawing a more professional, wealthier and whiter group of parents.
Soon, disagreements spilled into the open. Arguments concerned everything from how PTA money was spent, to accusations that some white parents were hoarding computers for their kids.
Even ice cream became a point of contention: In the past year, a group of mostly white parents took issue with a school tradition of selling ice cream to raise money. They felt the school shouldn't be serving sugary foods to kids, but the break with tradition angered many minority parents who felt the sales were an important source of money and that ice cream is a harmless treat.
"It was a gigantic fight," says Brooke Parker, who is white and whose daughter attended the school last year. "If the school is saying 'It's OK to give out ice cream' while at the same time they're holding workshops on how to deal with your kid's Type 2 diabetes, maybe we should rethink the message we're sending."
Relations got testy enough that about 20 kids, most of whom were white, transferred to private schools or other public schools. "I don't think the battleground against gentrification should take place in the schools," says Ms. Parker, who withdrew her own daughter from P.S. 84 as tensions built. "It seemed nothing could get accomplished," she said.
Cries of 'Segregation'
The Rev. John Blanchard (right) at his Washington church, which plans to woo whites. Patrice Gilbert for The Wall Street Journal A few months later, a small group of families, most of them white, proposed establishing a new public school, to be located inside the existing P.S. 84. Hundreds of minority parents reacted by putting out a press release calling it de facto segregation. The proposal is "clearly discriminatory," the release said. "Children will suffer the effects of negative stigma as a result of this segregation which will send our City back 120 years!"
"I honestly felt like they didn't want to mix our children with their children," says Virginia Reyes, vice president of the PTA at P.S. 84 who has two foster children at the school. "It upset me a lot."
A spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education says, "We obviously would not and could not open segregated schools." The department says the new school didn't get the go-ahead because it didn't have broad enough community support.
Backers of the new school couldn't be reached.
Elsewhere in Brooklyn, in a majority African-American section of the borough, Councilwoman Letitia James says a handful of predominantly white parents last year asked her if some of their local tax money could be steered to schools in a nearby neighborhood. The parents wanted their kids in schools with a more diverse racial mix, Ms. James says, rather than the majority-black schools in her district.
The parents felt "tax dollars should follow the children, and not the school," Ms. James says. She denied their request.
______________________________________________
So, this is what today's SECTION 8 HOUSING VOUCHERS has in store for those POOR/LOW-INCOME being moved to the SUBURBS for a better life. This is what is in store for any right wing white citizen in suburbs if they try to salvage their wealth investments in those same suburbs.
Neither those white right wing middle-class citizens nor those POOR people of color will have created this MESS------FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES always look like this.
SECTION 8 HOUSING VOUCHERS WILL NOW GO TO GLOBAL CORPORATIONS BUILDING WORKER DORMS JUST AS IN CHINA. WORKER DORMS LOOK NOTHING LIKE THOSE US HOUSES AND APARTMENTS THAT ONCE WERE SECTION 8 HOUSING.
Oh, look----there is GWYNN FALLS---or is that LAKE ROLAND?
China deluged by toxic sludge
China’s sewage-treatment industry generates 22 million tonnes of sludge every year. What happens to it?
To dispose of 500 tonnes of toxic sludge in the south China city of Guangzhou, all you need is a hired boat and a little money for petrol. Within a couple of hours, you can discharge your load – containing heavy metals, pathogens and bacteria – into the river without the authorities being any the wiser, and turn a tidy profit of 80,000 yuan (US$12,600).
It isn’t only Guangzhou. In Beijing, a group of citizens concerned about the sludge siege has created a map of “sludge piles”. If the coordinates of the 30 or so landfill sites around Beijing’s suburbs are plotted and linked up, a “Great Wall” of toxic sludge can be seen encircling the city.
And in Shenzhen, another metropolis in the south, the substance has already caused havoc: huge quantities of buried sludge at Xiaping solid-waste landfill put so much pressure on the groundwater table that, in 2009, the sludge came bursting up from underground, flowing into a nearby river and, at its deepest, reaching waist-level.
Cities and provinces including Guangdong, Zhejiang, Beijing, Shanghai, Guizhou, Ningxia and Chongqing, and stretching as far west as Urumqi, have all, to varying degrees, been troubled by toxic sludge.
High profits, weak regulation
China’s sewage-treatment sector is increasingly bogged down by this embarrassing problem. Where does it come from?
A market report on the “treatment and disposal of toxic sludge”, published on the website chinawater.net, explains that by late 2010 China’s urban sewage-treatment capacity had reached 34.3 billion cubic metres, equivalent to the volume of the Three Gorges Reservoir. The dewatered muck spat out by this “reservoir” each year is close to 22 million tonnes – of which 80% is untreated toxic sludge. Such a large amount of sludge poses an even greater threat to China than the rubbish dumps rapidly surrounding its cities.
That isn't even the full picture. “The 22 million tonnes only refers to the amount of toxic sludge left over from the treatment of urban household sewage,” explained Wang Hongchen, professor at Renmin University’s Environmental Sciences Department. “It doesn’t include most sludge from the industrial wastewater produced by China’s thousands of economic and industrial development zones. And the situation there is hardly cause for cheer.” Among the industries operating in these zones are petrochemical, smelting, tanning and dyeing factories, all of which use dangerous substances that contribute to the harm.
“Profits to be made through unauthorised discharge of toxic sludge are too high, while penalties for breaking the law are too low,” said Xu Qing, a longtime employee of the state water authority. Xu believes that, with large profit margins and weak regulation, there will always be people willing to take the risk and break the rules.
Toxic sludge is a concentrate of pollutants from the sewage treatment process. If dumped untreated – or only lightly treated – there is a relatively high risk of secondary pollution to the soil, atmosphere and local water resources. Heavy metals from the sludge can seep into groundwater, and from there become part of the food chain, making their way to the kitchen table. Unless this is dealt with in a scientific manner, the damage will be irreparable, and affect generations to come.
_______________________________________
US CITIES AS FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES will not be a battle of WHITE VS BLACK -----white middle-class vs low-income poor ----it will be totally different. It will be extreme poverty with super-majority of immigrants and extreme wealth with a global 2% filling global corporate headquarters.
Meanwhile, out in those suburbs will be that nasty toxic waste region where both our US RIGHT WING REPUBLICAN 99% and those DEMOCRATIC POOR BLACK CITIZENS are fighting over SECTION 8 HOUSING VOUCHERS.
Why does this article say it may take two centuries to address disparities? Well, building US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE global corporate campuses and factories will see the same DECAY---DECLINE in infrastructure and disparity ---which took a century to occur with our 20th century US CITIES.
DISSIPATE? Well, with jobs becoming robotic, artificial intelligence and de-population we can assume two centuries will eliminate all those HUMANS which create all that messy socioeconomic intrigue. In two centuries US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES as FATAL SHORES DARK CONTINENT SLAVE LABOR will have made the NORTH AMERICAN continent inhabitable.
REMEMBER, IT ONLY TOOK 60 YEARS TO MAKE ASIAN FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES UNINHABITABLE.
What the Racial Wealth Gap Means for U.S. Cities
Kelsey E. Thomas August 10, 2016
White families tend to earn more than black or Latino families, but a new report released Monday says wealth inequality may be an even greater concern than income inequality.
The racial wealth gap, which looks at a person’s total net worth, is much wider than the gap between annual incomes, and it has gotten even wider since the Great Recession, when people of color were hit the hardest. This gap will likely have lasting ramifications. If current public policies stay the same, the report’s authors calculate, it will take a staggering 228 years for black families to accumulate the same amount of wealth that white families have today. For the average Latino family, it will take 84 years.
In many majority-minority cities, such as Baltimore, Detroit and Chicago, overcoming challenges around housing, education and employment opportunities could help residents get ahead, start businesses, provide for their children and thrive, rather than just survive. As Next City equitable cities fellow Oscar Perry Abello has reported, wealth inequality, “besides fewer sources of capital from friends and family … means fewer assets to use as collateral for business loans from banks and other institutions.”
The report, “The Ever-Growing Gap: Without Change, African-American and Latino Families Won’t Match White Wealth for Centuries,” examined the accumulation of wealth over the past 30 years and how wealth-building policies have given white Americans a leg up. Over the past three decades, the average wealth of white families has grown by 84 percent, three times as fast as the rate for African-American families and 1.2 the growth rate for Latino families, according to the research from the Corporation for Enterprise Development and the Institute for Policy Studies.
By 2043, when people of color overtake whites as the majority in the U.S. population, the wealth divide between white families and Latino and black families will have doubled, on average, from about $500,000 in 2013 to more than $1 million.
Homeownership strongly correlates with wealth, and decades of discriminatory housing policies and market practices, such as redlining and disparate local implementation of Federal Housing Administration loans and G.I. Bill benefits, have prohibited many people of color from purchasing a home. While 71 percent of white families are homeowners, only 41 percent of black families and 45 percent of Hispanic families are homeowners.
Other studies on the racial wealth gap in several cities have also arrived at troubling conclusions.
“There’s this gulf between whites and minorities of color across all types of assets,” Ana Patricia Munoz, a co-author of by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, told the Boston Globe last year. “The way we usually measure inequality is by income, but those differences aren’t as high as the differences in wealth. This tells you what they have to invest for future generations.”
The Federal Reserve Bank report found that the median white household in Greater Boston has $256,500 in net assets, such as retirement savings, stocks or a checking account, while none of minority groups studied had net assets over $18,000. Similar surveys from Miami, Tulsa and Washington, D.C., also found vast disparities.
An early 2016 report out of Los Angeles, another majority-minority city, found that wealth differentials across racial groups are far more pronounced than income differentials, leaving communities of color particularly vulnerable in the case of emergencies, unemployment or other unexpected costs.
That study, “The Color of Wealth in Los Angeles,” also found a disconcerting hurdle to families of color building wealth. “Because communities of color often have higher-cost debt and higher debt-to-income ratios, they are more likely to be denied credit and their ability to build assets is limited,” it says. “Although, research has shown that when blacks have similar credit scores as whites, they are still more likely to be denied credit. This contributes to lower asset ownership and lower asset values when compared with white households.”
There are no easy fixes for closing the gap, and ongoing discriminatory practices make it even harder. Even for black or Hispanic students who get a four-year degree, their wealth returns on that degree will typically be much lower than for white students. The reports do offer a number of suggestions, including expanding eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit and other tax policies that help families of color build wealth, ensuring every child has a Children’s Savings Account, creating an annual net worth tax on high-wealth individuals, removing barriers to retirement savings, and making sure that policies aimed at bridging the wealth gap consider the wide diversity among nonwhite populations and are targeted or adapted accordingly.
Many of these ideas also appear in the Movement for Black Lives’ new policy agenda, which outlines what the U.S. should do to address the disparities faced by black communities in health, employment, education, criminal justice and housing. To put cities with large low-income communities on a path out of poverty, the platform suggests, federal and local governments should focus on services for the black communities. Creating job training programs and opportunities for black youth in Detroit or Chicago, for example, would boost the economy of the city as a whole.
Failing to address the growing problem, the “Ever-Growing Gap” report says, will “severely impact the economic opportunity of communities of color,” and will have ramifications for the economic well-being of the country as a whole. The authors write:
When wealth and opportunity are more evenly distributed, financially vulnerable families are better able to get ahead, rather than just scrape by. Imagine that instead of low-wealth black and Latino families finding themselves unable to deal with fluctuating incomes or how they’re going to make it through an unexpected financial emergency, they have the freedom to invest in their children’s future aspirations. Or, instead of resorting to selling loose cigarettes or CDs to earn a little more money for their families, blacks and Latinos have the opportunity to build long-term wealth by owning their own businesses. These are just some of the opportunities lost because of the growing racial and economic inequality we face.
______________________________________________
This is global corporate MARXISM--------worker dorms where workers live in institutional poverty. SECTION 8 HOUSING FUNDS today are going to global property management corporations called AFFORDABLE HOUSING JUSTICE organizations partnered with those global factories to be built just outside city limits.
We show photos often discussing the difference between HOUSING JUSTICE in third world ---and what our US 99% WE THE LOW-INCOME HOUSING citizens experienced when they used SECTION 8 back in FDR era----even when they used SECTION 8 in NIXON/REAGAN era. It will be brutal as is totalitarian global corporate MARXISM---EXTREME WEALTH EXTREME POVERTY.
These condition in Chinese worker dorms took 40 years to become UNINHABITABLE.
We are sure that when these CHINESE FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES were built 40-50 years there were RIGHT WING MIDDLE-CLASS CHINESE fighting with LOW INCOME 99% OF CITIZENS both of which were MOVED OUT.
Life for China's migrant workers: dorm that looks like prison
A rare look inside a recently abandoned factory dormitory in Shanghai, and interviews with workers, reveals something of the living conditions endured by migrants toiling in China to produce goods mainly for export, writes George Knowles
George Knowles
Published: 12:30pm, 27 May, 2016
Updated: 5:11pm, 13 Jun, 2016
A canteen in the now abandoned Pegatron dormitory complex in Shanghai. Photos: George Knowles; Bloomberg
Share:
The deserted four-storey block is bleak and austere. Beyond electronic security checkpoints are dank corridors with peeling paintwork, pools of fetid green water and stark dormitory rooms filled with cold steel bunk beds and metal lockers.
At the end of each long corridor of about 50 rooms are communal showers, where 20 people at a time would queue to wash side by side, using foot pedals to pump water, and rows of squatting toilets set above open drains running the length of the space.
It could be mistaken for a prison or a labour camp, but this Shanghai block was not home to criminals or political dissidents. Rather, it contained dormitories used by migrant workers at Pegatron, a company that makes a significant proportion of the world's iPhones.
A deserted men's room.
Share:
This and three other dormitory blocks on the site, which once housed up to 6,000 employees of the Taiwanese company, were vacated three months ago as a result, workers tell us, of declining orders from the key client, Apple.
Until February, the complex on Kangqiao Road East was one of the largest of about 10 off-site dormitory blocks that, along with six on-site, housed the 50,000-plus workers at the company's vast Shanghai factory. Numbers had dwindled to about 1,000 at the time of its closure. The abandoning of the dormitory blocks allowed us rare access and an insight into the living conditions of migrant workers who leave their homes to make the world's most sought-after electronic gadget.
Paid basic salaries of 2,350 yuan (HK$2,785) for six-day weeks, which they can double by working daily overtime, Pegatron's workers are drawn from China's poorest provinces, many living year-round in dormitories provided by the company.
A 20-minute shuttle-bus ride from the factory, the Kangqiao Road East complex was patrolled by teams of security guards and strictly off-limits to outsiders. Today, however, just a handful of guards remain to watch over the largely deserted buildings.
Earlier this month, we inspected one of the dormitory blocks, floor by floor, and found living conditions that Apple is investigating and Pegatron has admitted were "unacceptable".
We find rooms containing up to 12 bunk beds - Apple rules state that no more than eight workers should share a room - for which the occupants would each have been charged 160 yuan a month, deducted from their pay packets. Even when stripped of personal belongings, there is barely space for anything in the rooms other than the beds and the workers' metal lockers.
In the corner of some toilet blocks and corridors are pools of filthy green water. Throughout the block, walls are moulding, the paint peeling heavily in places, with hand-written signs posted at regular intervals spelling out rules for workers.
The men's and women's sections are segregated, with a padlocked high fence separating the drying areas for laundry on the rooftop. Throughout the building we find mementos of the young lives lived here: above one bed in a women's dorm is a strip of photo-booth shots of a boyfriend holding a flower. On a stairwell, there are discarded plastic Christmas trees and a jumble of mattresses.
On the ground floor are workers' cafés, food stalls, a grocery shop with stock still on the shelves and, ironically, one selling Apple products, all of which are padlocked, left as if the complex had been evacuated at short notice. Electronic swipe-card checkpoints identical to the ones used by workers to clock in and out of the Pegatron factory remain lit up but redundant at the block entrance.
The closure of the dormitory blocks - a converted factory complex used for years by Pegatron - saw hundreds of workers sent home and told not to return, according to one of the remaining security guards.
"There were 6,000 workers here at its peak but orders from Apple have been getting less and less in the past two years, so the company decided to close the whole dormitory complex here," he says. "It all happened very quickly as the New Year holiday came around and they seemed to have made their minds up that there wasn't enough work to keep the dorms going."
Some workers have their salaries stolen the day they’re paid and then … have to pick leftovers out of the rubbish bins to live A Pegatron worker
Last month, Apple announced it had sold 16 per cent fewer iPhones than in the same period in 2015 and made 18 per cent less money from them. The iconic smartphones account for nearly two-thirds of Apple's overall revenue. A month earlier, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported that Pegatron - which shares iPhone production with another Taiwan electronics giant, Foxconn - had imposed a hiring freeze because of disappointing iPhone 6 sales, which, it said, "waned considerably", particularly in the huge China market.
LIVING CONDITIONS AT THE Kangqiao Road East dormitory complex were experienced first-hand by an undercover investigator for the pressure group China Labor Watch, who got a job making motherboards on an Apple production line last year.
"The dormitories were terrible," says the 28-year-old investigator, who spent 10 days living in the complex in September. "There were 12 workers in each small room with no toilet and no washing facilities. There were hundreds of workers on each floor but only one toilet block and one shower room for each floor. In the morning, or at the end of a working day, workers had to line up to use the toilets and line up to wash and take showers.
"The toilets were dirty and the showers were shared, with no way to give you any privacy. There was no way to relax after a hard day of work and you were given no dignity as a human being.
"Every day, many workers quit their jobs. They felt it was too hard to carry on working there. I found that most of the workers who left did so not because of the low wages but because of the harsh working conditions and the bad living conditions in the dormitories."
The investigator calculates each storey could accommodate 602 people but there were only 30 toilets, 30 showers and 50 wash basins on each floor. About half of the toilets would be out of order at any given time, he says, leaving just one toilet for every 40 workers.
"Many of the workers have red spots all over their bodies due to bug bites," wrote the investigator in his report for New York-based China Labor Watch.
As tired workers poured out of the factory gates at the end of their overtime shifts on a Saturday night earlier this month, some met us in surrounding cafés and teashops out of sight of factory security staff to tell us about the conditions.
They can't make enough money to feed their families working in the factory so they have to work as prostitutes Zhou Zinyi, taxi driver
SOUNDS LIKE NOSY NEIGHBORS AND THE GANG illegal surbveillance video PORN and the SEX TRADE network goals----ruin families
RSS Feed
