Registration is still open for “Moving to Higher Opportunity Summit: Exploring Options and Opportunities for Housing Mobility,” a HUD sponsored northeast regional conference on Thursday, January 9 (just outside Philadelphia). The conference will explore the benefits and challenges of promoting housing mobility in highly segregated metropolitan areas – and will also highlight a new mobility program developed by HUD and four public housing agencies in the Philadelphia region (with support from PRRAC and Building One Pennsylvania). Here are links to conference registration, and to see the full conference agenda.
Good news in Hartford: The two-way voluntary school integration program continues to grow in the greater Hartford region, with a new agreement aiming to place more than 40% of Hartford school children in integrated schools by the next school year. We work with a regional parent and community coalition in Hartford that supports the growth of these programs. For more information on the coalition and the recent settlement, see www.sheffmovement.org.
Resources
Unequal rent burdens: a new report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University finds that a “significant erosion in renter incomes over the past decade has pushed the number of households paying excessive shares of income for housing to record levels,” with a particularly harsh impact on non-white renters. See this quick summary table from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The Joint Center report confirms in more detail our analysis from earlier this year.
New from the Century Foundation: “Concentration of Poverty in the New Millennium: Changes in the Prevalence, Composition, and Location of High-Poverty Neighborhoods,” by Paul Jargowsky (“The increase in concentrated poverty was highest in the Midwest, which experienced a 132 percent increase in the number of people living in high poverty neighborhoods, to 2.7 million; followed by the South, which suffered a 66 percent increase to 4.6 million.”). Download the report here.
