Money for Illinois child care subsidies is running dry, By Nancy Cambria, February 25, 2015, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “For more than two decades, the Leslie Bates Davis Neighborhood House’s early childhood center has beat back the effects of poverty on young children in this ailing city. The center operates in a once abandoned grocery store amid boarded-up businesses and crumbling sidewalks with the promise of the Gateway Arch in view from its parking lot. With the help of federal and state funds as well as fundraising, it has grown in size, quality and staffing to host a Head Start program and earn national accreditation. It serves nearly 150 children from some of the nation’s poorest households — with parents who count on the center to provide more than mere baby-sitting. ‘They know how important it is their children get early education so they are ready for school,’ said Stephanie Rhodes, a vice president with Leslie Bates Davis in charge of child care. As of this month, however, all of the progress made by the center and many others in Illinois is at risk…”
Month: February 2015
Section 8 Housing – St. Louis, MO
St. Louis passes bills to reduce Section 8 concentration in poor neighborhoods, By Walker Moskop, February 26, 2015, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “The Section 8 housing voucher program is designed to avoid the challenges of concentrated poverty typically associated with traditional public housing. Tenants receive rent subsidy vouchers from a local housing authority and can redeem them anywhere landlords accept them, so long as properties meet certain standards. In the end, though, most voucher recipients in St. Louis still end up clustered in lower-income communities. In an attempt to alleviate that concentration, St. Louis passed two measures last week aimed at making it easier for landlords to participate in the program while also banning the practice of rejecting tenants because they have vouchers…”
Suburban Poverty
Cities are becoming more affluent while poverty is rising in inner suburbs — and that has implications for schools, By Emma Brown and T. Rees Shapiro, February 26, 2015, Washington Post: “City centers around the country are becoming younger, more affluent and more educated, while inner suburbs are seeing poverty rates rise, according to a new study from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. The new study is based on an analysis of demographic changes in 66 cities between 1990 and 2012. It comes just months after a surge of headlines about suburban poverty following a Brookings Institution study that found that more Americans are now living in poverty in the suburbs than in rural or urban areas…”