Poverty

Seattle Mayor and Council Think $1,115 a Month for Rent is Affordable Housing

Posted by Jeff from Seattle Times

While the abundance of cranes on the Seattle skyline seems to indicate there remains some profitability in development, the Seattle City Council hesitated Tuesday to actually put some teeth behind infrastructure taxes on this period of growth: To some low-income-housing advocates, spending $1,115 a month to rent a studio apartment in Seattle does not sound affordable. Mayor Greg Nickels and the Seattle City Council say it is. The city defines an affordable place as costing no more than 30 percent of a household's income. Separately, the city now spends $40 million a year in voter-approved levy funds on low-income housing targeted at people who make below 50 percent of median income.

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YouTube - Social crisis in Detroit

Posted by Sandyenglish from You Tube

The World Socialist Web Site interviewed workers and professionals in Detroit about the worsening social conditions as gas prices and food prices soar through the roof. In this clip, our reporters spoke with Jada Browning a young mother of three who recently lost her job.

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Vancouver's Bed Bug Plague

Posted by Shemuses from The Tyee

At least once a week in Vancouver, bug exterminator Mark Amery enters a private home, lifts a mattress and watches the box spring move with blood-sucking vermin. It's an optical illusion caused by up to a thousand twitching bed bugs, each no larger than a lentil, which are infesting more houses, rental apartments and hotel rooms in Vancouver today than at any point in the city's modern history.

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America is rotting from the inside

Posted by VincebusEruptum from Scholarsandrogues

Politicians are failing to comprehend the breadth of the US infrastructure crisis. Only disasters move our representatives to act - and in an election year, even those actions seem spotty at best and disingenuous at worst. The United States has much more than failing bridges to find, fund and fix. A comprehensive report by Dr. Denny Wilkins.

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Local Retired carpenter offers hot soup, warm smile to homeless on Seattle's Capitol Hill

Posted by Jeff from Seattle Times

Bill Pond parks his pickup twice a week on Broadway Avenue East near a boarded-up Jack in the Box. There, he offers chicken soup, egg-salad sandwiches and juice to the homeless. The retired carpenter pays for it out of his own pocket, collecting and recycling aluminum cans to help offset some of the cost.

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Poverty Built into BC's System

Posted by Shemuses from The Tyee

Two-year study looks at welfare policies' effects on people.

The report calls her Lorraine. After being cut off welfare for a reason she said was unfair, she had no income. She lost her home, started skipping more meals to save money and returned to prostitution. In hopes of leaving the sex trade, she went back to an abusive ex-partner who assaulted her badly enough to break some of her bones.

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A neighbourhood speaks - and hears its own voice

Posted by Shemuses from Globe and Mail

'I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them," photographer Diane Arbus once wrote. It's a comment that came repeatedly to mind reading Hope in Shadows, a collection of photographs taken and stories told by residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The book, which comes out next month, grew from a popular program run over the past five years by the Pivot Legal Society, a non-profit legal advocacy organization based in the neighbourhood. Since 2003, Pivot has been handing out cameras to residents and assembling pictures in a calendar. If you live or work in the downtown area, Gastown or Yaletown in particular, you've likely bought one of these from a street vendor at some point.

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