US offers mortgage aid to the jobless, By Jenifer B. McKim, October 6, 2010, Boston Globe: “Unemployed homeowners may be able to borrow up to $50,000 to help them make monthly mortgage payments – and in some cases not have to pay the money back – under a federal program unveiled yesterday that allocates $61 million to Massachusetts. The zero-interest loan program will benefit several thousand homeowners in the state who are facing foreclosure because they lost their jobs and have depleted their savings. Nationwide, about $1 billion is being allocated to assist 50,000 homeowners struggling to keep up with their mortgages, said Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development…”
Tag: Foreclosure
US Census Releases: Recession, Income, and Marriage
- Census Bureau to release flood of numbers in coming weeks, By Ed O’Keefe, September 29, 2010, Washington Post: “In the coming weeks, Americans will be swimming in statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Remember, the Census Bureau doesn’t just tabulate the nation’s population every decade; it also compiles important economic, employment, educational and demographic statistics that are used for determining such things as the allocation of federal funding, where to build new roads and how to market new products…”
- Census finds record gap between rich and poor, By Hope Yen (AP), September 28, 2010, Detroit Free Press: “The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record as young adults and children in particular struggled to stay afloat in the recession. The top-earning 20% of Americans – those making more than $100,000 each year – received 49.4% of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4% earned by those below the poverty line, according to newly released census figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968. A different measure, the international Gini index, found U.S. income inequality at its highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking household income in 1967. The U.S. also has the greatest disparity among Western industrialized nations. At the top, the wealthiest 5% of Americans, who earn more than $180,000, added slightly to their annual incomes last year, census data show. Families at the $50,000 median level slipped lower. ‘Income inequality is rising, and if we took into account tax data, it would be even more,’ said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specializes in poverty. ‘More than other countries, we have a very unequal income distribution where compensation goes to the top in a winner-takes-all economy…'”
- Census: Recession affects all aspects of American life, By Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, September 28, 2010, USA Today: “The nation’s financial crisis is altering Americans’ way of life from the home and the workplace to the highway and the altar, according to the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey out Tuesday. Median household income fell 2.9% from $51,726 in 2008 to $50,221 last year. It dropped in 34 states and increased in only one -North Dakota…”
- For many adults, marriage can wait, census shows, By Conor Dougherty, September 28, 2010, Wall Street Journal: “Marriage is so over. For the first time in at least a century, the proportion of U.S. adults between 25 and 34 who have never been married last year exceeded those who are married, marking a reversal that follows years of decline in marriage rates, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau. Marriage rates among young adults have been dropping for decades, a decline that accelerated during the 2007-2009 recession that was the longest and deepest since the Great Depression. With stagnant paychecks and a 9.6% unemployment rate, many young adults are delaying marriage until they are better set financially, or forgoing matrimony altogether…”
- Cohabitation numbers jump 13%, linked to job losses, By Sharon Jayson, September 24, 2010, USA Today: “Cohabitation in the USA is at an all-time high, with the number of opposite-sex couples living together rising 13% in a year’s time, from 6.7 million in 2009 to 7.5 million this year. And, it’s likely because of the recession, according to a U.S. Census study out Thursday. It found a direct connection between living together and the cohabiting partners’ employment status…”
Homeless Families in Shelters
Number of families in shelters rises, By Michael Luo, September 11, 2010, New York Times: “For a few hours at the mall here this month, Nick Griffith, his wife, Lacey Lennon, and their two young children got to feel like a regular family again. Never mind that they were just killing time away from the homeless shelter where they are staying, or that they had to take two city buses to get to the shopping center because they pawned one car earlier this year and had another repossessed, or that the debit card Ms. Lennon inserted into the A.T.M. was courtesy of the state’s welfare program. They ate lunch at the food court, browsed for clothes and just strolled, blending in with everyone else out on a scorching hot summer day. ‘It’s exactly why we come here,’ Ms. Lennon said. ‘It reminds us of our old life.’ For millions who have lost jobs or faced eviction in the economic downturn, homelessness is perhaps the darkest fear of all. In the end, though, for all the devastation wrought by the recession, a vast majority of people who have faced the possibility have somehow managed to avoid it. Nevertheless, from 2007 through 2009, the number of families in homeless shelters – households with at least one adult and one minor child – leapt to 170,000 from 131,000, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development…”