- Philly unveils plan to reduce high poverty rate, By Kathy Matheson (AP), July 11, 2013, Philadelphia Inquirer: “Officials unveiled a comprehensive plan Thursday to reduce Philadelphia’s extremely high 28 percent poverty rate, which they depicted as a persistent and intergenerational problem with impacts far beyond the neighborhoods where it is most concentrated. The initiative, called Shared Prosperity Philadelphia, sets several goals for the city, such as increasing the number of jobs by 25,000 in the next two years; providing 25 percent more children with pre-literacy skills before kindergarten; and raising the number of residents with bank accounts…”
- A plan to address city’s ‘staggering’ poverty, By Alfred Lubrano, July 11, 2013, Philadelphia Inquirer: “In an unusually frank document, the city has laid out stark statistical descriptions of poverty in Philadelphia, accompanied by a plan to try to deal with the problem. The Shared Prosperity Philadelphia plan, presented Thursday at the Central Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia, states that at a ‘staggering 28 percent,’ the poverty rate here is the highest among the nation’s 10 largest cities. More than 430,000 of the city’s 1,547,600 residents live below the federal poverty line, the report points out. The poverty line ranges from $11,490 for a single person to $23,550 for a family of four…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty