Improving wealth inequality and social mobility news

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

I think you've been creating too many new threads lately. Do we really need this one?

You're often the only one posting in them.

Also, your titles are becoming way too long, such as this one. Please keep them more succinct. For instance, not every thread has to have "news and discussion" tacked on the end. And "Helping and improving the lives of" could have been shortened to just "Helping".

Or just call it something like "Wealth inequality and social mobility".

[weatheriscool]

I wanted to make a thread for good news as nearly everything else is bad or messed up. I'll stop making threads for a few months.

[weatheriscool]

How Blue Houston Decreased Their Homelessness By 60%
This editorial outlining how Democratic-led Houston, despite a red state government, decreased their homeless population by 60%, should be a model for the nation:

Opinion: How Houston’s homelessness breakthrough could be a national game-changer

We should note that homelessness got worse here before it got better. In 2011, the Houston area had one of the largest homeless populations in the country. With the threat of homelessness only increasing, and dismay over decades of substantial investments without results, our community was propelled into action.
...
This became particularly critical during Covid-19, when homelessness became a present danger to many people who were already living on the brink. As challenging as it was, we reframed this crisis as an opportunity to do more to assist them. The city of Houston and Harris County strategically invested federal pandemic aid, alongside contributions from private philanthropy, allowing our system to house, or offer homelessness diversion services to, more than 12,000 people during the pandemic. We housed the most vulnerable people first. When the average person sees someone experiencing homelessness and struggling with mental illness, they assume that individual is dangerous or needs hospitalization. Our experience is that most of these folks stabilize in housing with the appropriate level of services. We have also found that housing with supportive services is the solution to encampments — sites where unhoused people set up groups of tents. We have holistically decommissioned dozens of encampments by placing close to 400 people on the path to housing.
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We are doing this difficult work not just because it is the moral thing to do, but also because it is the fiscally responsible thing to do. It is less expensive to house an individual and provide services (we estimate about $18,000 per year) than the multiple of costs of putting people in jail or allowing them to suffer on the streets and being forced to make regular use of our emergency rooms (which national estimates range from $30,000 to $50,000 and up).
..
Since 2012, more than 28,000 people who have experienced homelessness in the greater Houston area have been housed. This has resulted in a more than a 60% decrease in overall homelessness in just over a decade.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/opinions ... index.html

[weatheriscool]

Putting this piece of good news here too!

[weatheriscool]

Rent is falling in America for the first time in years

By Alicia Wallace, CNN
Published 6:35 AM EDT, Mon June 26, 2023

Minneapolis (CNN) — Some welcome news for renters: The US median rent in May fell from May 2022, the first annual rent decline in at least three years, according to a Realtor.com report released Monday.

In May, the national median asking rent was $1,739, which was up a skosh ($3) from April but down 0.5% from May 2022. It’s the first decline since Realtor.com started tracking the year-over-year data in March 2020.

“This is yet another sign that rental-driven inflation is likely behind us, even though we may not see this trend in official measures until next year,” Danielle Hale, Realtor.com’s chief economist, said in a statement. “Although still modest, a decline in rents combined with cooling inflation and a still-strong job market is definitely welcome news for households.”

{snip}

— CNN’s Anna Bahney contributed to this report

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/26/economy/ ... index.html