Cash

To Help Poor Neighborhoods, Urban Planners Have to Do More Than Urban Planning

They can't just improve the physical environment if they want to revitalize poverty-stricken areas.

by William Fulton | October 2015

 

William is a Governing columnist, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University and former mayor of Ventura, CA.

              

In San Diego, half the neighborhoods are inhabited by mostly poor residents. During my recent stint as director of planning and economic development there, residents would often ask me how I planned to revitalize those neighborhoods. I tended to give an alarmingly honest answer: I wasn’t sure.

Read the interesting conclusion here.

When work doesn't pay

So much for the myth that hard work pays off in "moving on up" options.

It’s Getting Harder To Move Beyond A Minimum-Wage Job
By Ben Casselman

Minimum-wage jobs are meant to be the first rung on a career ladder, a chance for entry-level workers to prove themselves before earning a promotion or moving on to other, better-paying jobs. But a growing number of Americans are getting stuck on that first rung for years, if they ever move up at all.

Anthony Kemp is one of them. In 2006, he took a job as a cook at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Oak Park, Illinois. The job paid the state minimum wage, $6.50 an hour at the time, but Kemp figured he could work his way up. “Normally, a good cook would make $14, $15, $17 an hour,” Kemp said. “I thought that of course I’d make a better wage.”

Continue reading here.

Wage justice

Years ago, I taped a Pogo cartoon strip on my office door. 

One cute character said to another, "The solution to poverty is monies." 

Surely a true statement. 

Poor people need money.  They need money from the jobs at which they work hard. 

They need money for work gloves.

City leaders remain reluctant to impose a living wage (of sorts) on contractors who provide services such as garbage collection and landscaping.

When I heard the news that the Dallas City Council wasn't going to push forward improvements in the wage situation of hard working sanitation workers, among others, I began to calculate what my own out-of-pocket costs would be weekly to my trash team.  I know one thing, I couldn't do without them. 

I do know that a concern of some city council members and our mayor has to do with verifying that the increase wages would actually go to those who do the work and not to the contracting companies.

But, there are ways to ensure integrity, like "certified payroll" processes that all federal grant recipients have learned to deal with .  Or, possibly we could create an office of labor credit that rewarded workers who produced proof of having worked for companies contracting with the city. 

I know it's complicated.  And, I trust our leaders.

But, the fact remains. 

People need monies to live and to thrive. 

Monies invested in people is always best. 

Bravo, Judge Jenkins!

I love our County Judge, Clay Jenkins! 

Take a quick look!

A Seattle Model on Wages

[The story of how Seattle put in place a plan to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour provides much to consider.  What follows is a good report from Think Progress.  Reactions invited!]

How A Millionaire, A Socialist, And Some Taco Bell Workers Brought A Living Wage To Seattle

By Alan Pyke   

When Mayor Ed Murray (D) signed a bill that gradually raises Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 an hour on Tuesday, his choice of location seemed to reflect the complex and cooperative process that produced the document he was signing.

Rather than City Hall, Murray chose to hold the signing ceremony in Cal Anderson Park, which was the starting point for some of the many rallies that activists from groups, like 15 Now, organized over the past year. A ballplayer with a good arm would have no trouble throwing a rock from the park’s northwest corner into Dick’s Drive-In, a local Seattle burger chain. The south end of the park looks onto a multi-block stretch of bars and restaurants that has exploded with development and commerce in the past few years. Business interests like these played an essential role in crafting the aggressive-but-thoughtful law that Murray signed in that park on Tuesday.

And just a couple hundred feet west of the park sits Seattle Central Community College, a hub of Occupy Seattle activity and the trampoline from which Socialist Kshama Sawant launched her successful city council campaign.

It took a year of activist pressure, a worker-dominated election cycle that put a socialist on the city council, and several months of hard negotiating across ideological lines, but the new law will raise Seattle workers’ standard of living dramatically over the coming years. Some things about that process may be unique to Seattle, and replicating the exact recipe the city’s labor, business, and political communities used might be impossible. But interviews with some of the most prominent participants reveal that the key ingredients for a $15 minimum wage are completely portable, and could soon come to a city near you.

A Confluence Of Pressure

On the evening of May 29, 2013, Taco Bell and Burger King night shift workers walked off the job, forcing a pair of stores to close. They were joined the next morning by dozens more workers from other chain restaurants in other neighborhoods around the city, who planned to converge in the late morning — near Cal Anderson Park, of course — and march together a little more than a mile west to Denny Park for an afternoon rally. A local progressive activist called it “a powerful kickoff” for a movement that didn’t yet know what shape it would take.

Read the entire article here.

 

Workers lagging behind. . .millions can't "make ends meet"

Low wage workers and raising the minimum wage

In 2013, CitySquare worked alongside over 50,000 different individuals.  The vast majority of these neighbors, who worked, earned less that the amount needed to make life work--or as we say, "make ends meet."

A large part of the challenge relates to wage levels.  Unskilled workers must settle for minimum wage pay ($7.25 an hour).  That's just not enough.

Currently, a national discussion is underway again about the pros and cons of raising the national minimum wage to $10.15 an hour.  That would help lift a large number of "sinking ships."

Of course, whenever the issue of increasing the minimum wage standard comes up, critics emerge warning that raising the wage level would force people out of employment, curtail job creation and hurt business, especially small businesses.  In spite of the fact that every serious study over the years debunks and discredits these notions, the argument persists.

The experience of Washington State and of Seattle provides a refreshing backdrop for understanding the economic impact associated with raising the minimum wage.

Check this out!

Reactions encouraged.

Who benefits from minimum wage increase?

Interesting article from The Wall Street Journal on the benefit distribution of an increase in the minimum wage.

Adjusting the effective minimum wage that YOU pay. . .

I've tried to imagine what it would be like to attempt to build a life on the earnings of the current, national minimum wage which is $7.25 an hour.  No matter how you slice the challenge, providing the necessary support for a family or even for an individual while earning at the minimum is impossible.

Every few years we debate the issue in an attempt to adjust the baseline upward.  The debate is so predictable that I'm not going to outline it here again.

I've got a better idea.  Let's have the debate.  Let's raise the minimum to a more appropriate level (Australia's minimum wage is $15.96).

But let's do something today about the low reward for labor among the poorest of our friends.

Here's my suggestion:  wherever possible, when you purchase goods and services, calculate the value of the labor expended to bring you what you value enough to purchase.  Once you've thought through this value proposition, pay off the unrewarded "value wage" of your transaction.  In many retail settings this won't be possible or even necessary.  But in many situations your "wage supplement," some will call it a "tip," can be determined and passed along with gratitude and affirmation of the worker who meets your needs.  We say that we value labor.  We want people to work, right?  But how much do we really value labor?

For example, waiters usually earn minimum wage or less and count on gratuities to fill the wage gap.  But there are many other places where I can adjust the minimum wage that I am willing to pay based on what the goods or services mean to me.  How much do I value what is delivered to me?

Earlier this week I took my car to the tire shop for the repair of what was becoming a flat tire.  In East Dallas at Carroll and I-30 you can get your tire repaired for $10.  The afternoon was blazing hot.  The young man who repaired my tire worked hard at the task at hand.  He took pains to remove what appeared to be a fiberglass chard from the tire, allowing me to inspect the reason my tire was on the way down.

As he worked, I began to calculate the cost of his labor to his employer.  With a unit of service in my case  costing $10, I thought of the value that I placed on the service and the delivered product.  I came up with a number well above the set price.

My equation was simple:  set unit value + time required to deliver service + quality of service delivered + overall satisfaction with the service + what the service meant to me in terms of my need = value added gratuity or "wage adjustment."

Bottom line:  I adjusted this young man's wage for my transaction.

While this doesn't solve the problem or move forward a solution to scale, it does provide me a meaningful way to do my part in engaging my economy for the sake of fairness and equity.  By treating a worker at a time with fairness and equity, I proactively recognize the value provided by the working people who meet my many needs.

You can adjust the minimum wage paid laboring people today.  Give it a try.  I can tell you it definitely builds community and inspires working people.

Out of poverty via hard work? Not so fast, buddy!

[We've always thought that the way out of poverty is hard work.  Not so fast there.  The way out of poverty is hard work at a living wage job.  Those jobs aren't nearly as available as many of us surmise.  In fact, more and more people are working hard and slipping deeper into poverty.  It's more accurate to say that the way out of poverty is two, full-time jobs!  Read the following report.  You'll see what I mean. LJ]

McDonald's Can't Figure Out How Its Workers Survive on Minimum Wage
JORDAN WEISSMANNJUL

In a financial planning guide for its workers, the company accidentally illustrates precisely how impossible it is to scrape by on a fast food paycheck.

 Well this is both embarrassing and deeply telling. In what appears to have been a gesture of goodwill gone haywire, McDonald's recently teamed up with Visa to create a financial planning site for its low-pay workforce. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the thing seems to have been literally incapable of imagining of how a fast food employee could survive on a minimum wage income.

As ThinkProgress and other outlets have reported, the site includes a sample budget that, among other laughable assumptions, presumes that workers will have a second job.

Read the entire report here. 

Cash First!

Randy Mayeux sent an interesting essay from Slate.com my way recently.  In it Matthew Yglesias argues that  the best way to really assist the world's poor is to provide direct cash transfers to them.

I find Yglesias' analysis fascinating and, in may ways, counter intuitive to much thinking in the nation today.

In much the same way that "housing first" provides a super-charged solution to homelessness, the idea of "cash first" offers up life, incentive and initiative for recipients.  Take a look at the article here.

Wages, families, neighborhoods and the economy

At the beginning of this school year, students from the Honors College at Abilene Christian University began their very special three year course of study that will see them focus as a group on poverty in inner city Dallas.

Already my young friends have turned up ugly evidence of what affects our economy so adversely.  These bright students discovered that in several South Dallas zip codes the average household income hovers around $10,000 annually.  Hard to imagine isn't it?

If you and/or your family had to make do with $10,000 a year, what sorts of things would impinge on your life, your decisions, your attitudes and your expectations?  Hard, but very good and fair questions for those of us who are doing so much better to ask and answer honestly.

The Dallas Morning News published a story last Sunday (9/23/2012, 4B) on a group of Wal-Mart workers who have organized against the pay practices and scale of the company's wages.  The group, Organization United for Respect at Walmart, demonstrated in Dallas' Uptown neighborhood the day before the report hit the paper.  Protesters claimed that Wal-Mart didn't pay them enough to purchase the health care plan offered by the company or to participate in the 401 (k) benefit plan.

According to Wal-Mart, the average pay to its employees in Texas is $12.31 an hour.  According to the union, the company's average hourly wage for the nation stands at $8.81.

If the company is correct about its Texas employees, a person working a full-time, 40-hour-a-week job and paid for 52 weeks (both unlikely assumptions) will earn $25,605 annually.

If the union is correct and making the same assumptions, a Wal-Mart employee will earn $18,325 annually.

What is life like for households living on wages at this level?  

How do marriages fair?

What health issues do these families face?

How is the psychological health of these wage earners?

What are neighborhoods like for communities who earn wages at this level?  

How do wages affect housing stock?

Public schools?

Code enforcement and neighborhood amenities?

What  impact do wages at this level have on local economies and on economic development?

What factors are at work here to encourage or discourage the development of retail outlets?

How is job growth in these areas?  

The realities of capitalism force on us tough questions about how we might make changes to help our working poor neighbors  These realities make a strong case for the expansion of public efforts such as the Earned Income Tax Credit program.  They also argue persuasively for increased investment in public education, early childhood programs and workforce training initiatives to enhance and diversify the skills of our labor force.

Things will not improve unless we get involved and begin to insist on the needed changes.

Dandy news for Lone Star State! (No, not an April Fool's joke)

Below you'll find  just dandy news about workers in Texas.  What's that old saying about thanking God for Mississippi?  Now those folks are thanking the good Lord for Texas! 

States with the highest percentage of workers earning at or below minimum wage:


Texas: 9.5 percent, 550,000 workers

Mississippi: 9.5 percent, 63,000

Alabama: 9.3 percent, 106,000

West Virginia: 9.3 percent, 40,000

Louisiana: 8.9 percent, 87,000

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

[Reported by the Houston Chronicle]

Read more here.