This report by Children’s HealthWatch highlights the implications of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on very young children. The report details research indicating that WIC improves children’s health as well as reduces the risk of developmental delays.

Historically, residential segregation constrained where minorities could live, contributing to disparities in education, employment, and wealth. Researchers interested in the well-being and future prospects of low-income working families have not yet explored how their residential patterns may vary across racial and ethnic lines or considered the implications of these patterns. Therefore, this paper explores differences in neighborhood characteristics among white, black, and Hispanic low-income working families. The findings suggest that policies aimed at reducing the persistent disadvantages facing minority low-income working families need to address the ways the neighborhoods in which minorities live may be compounding these disadvantages.

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we consider how parental education relates to four outcomes in the children's generation: education, lifetime earnings, health, and wealth. By focusing on parents' and children's ranks, we characterize relative mobility in terms of distributions of outcomes and can see patterns that even a relatively disaggregated analysis, like a quintile-based transition matrix, can obscure. Our results show relatively high intergenerational mobility except at extremes, where very low-ranked parents are much more likely to have very low-ranked children and very high-ranked parents are much more likely to have very high-ranked children.

Recent data has found that denying LGBT people equal access to the institution of marriage, protection from employment discrimination, and other civil rights and family benefits may be contributing to higher poverty rates in the LGBT community than in the general population overall. This issue brief examines the latest data on poverty in the LGBT community and outlines how the continued expansion of civil rights will help to reduce it.

The federal minimum wage rose by 70 cents to $7.25 an hour on July 24, 2009. It will raise the pay of the lowest-paid workers and boost the economy. According to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, the modest 70-cent increase will generate $5.5 billion in consumer spending over the next year - providing a boost to the economy without any increase in government spending.

On July 14, 2009, HUD Secretary Shaun Donavon outlined the administration's plans to reform the Hope VI program and the goals for the new Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. The initiative aims to include private and nonprofit partners in local projects to extend neighborhood transformation efforts beyond public housing and link housing developments more closely with school reform and early childhood innovation.

Representative Barney Frank recently released a discussion draft of comprehensive legislation to preserve affordable housing. The legislative proposal aims to prevent displacement of low-income, elderly, and disabled tenants. It will focus equally on both rural and urban housing needs. Rep. Frank stated that these policies will move in conjunction with other efforts to promote the Affordable Housing Trust Fund and voucher program.

New York City faces a civic crisis of “disconnected” youth and young adults. There are over 163,000 young people ages 16 to 24 who are neither in school nor in the labor force. When we add the number of “unemployed” young adults, who are actively seeking work but unable to find it, we have more than 220,000 young people who are not in school nor working—nearly one in five of the total age group. These young people—largely youth of color from poor communities—are at high risk of becoming permanently disengaged from the labor market, threatening their ability to break out of the cycle of poverty and contribute to our economy and community. Their idleness represents a great waste of resources and human potential. The Community Service Society of New York looks offers recommendations.

New Yorkers are living with the effects of poverty in every part of New York City, but the
experience of poverty remains closely tied to place. Half of the city’s 1.4 million poor
people live in neighborhoods where the poverty rate is at least 24.8 percent (compared
to a citywide rate of 19.2 percent), and one-quarter live in neighborhoods where the rate
is at least 34.1 percent. The maps reveal that there is more to the geography of poverty in New York
City than is revealed by a glance. Poverty interacts in important ways with other factors,
such as immigration, which are distributed in a different way than poverty itself. And
the effects of poverty can be modified or mitigated by resources, such as subsidized
housing, that also have their own geographic patterns.

More than 20,000 public housing residents are seeking jobs in New York City’s
recession economy. The city and the Housing Authority have every reason to
connect them to opportunities.