The Atlantic reports on the rising cost of living and what author Annie Lowrey terms the “Great Affordability Crisis.” “This crisis involved not just what families earned but the other half of the ledger, too—how they spent their earnings. In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible. Viewing the economy through a cost-of-living paradigm helps explain why roughly two in five American adults would struggle to come up with $400 in an emergency so many years after the Great Recession ended. It helps explain whyone in five adults is unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. It demonstrates why a surprise furnace-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many American families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. Fully one in three households is classified as “financially fragile.” Along with the rise of inequality, the slowdown in productivity growth, and the shrinking of the middle class, the spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life.”
CityLab reports on the unequal distribution of lead in US cities and ongoing remediation efforts: “About 38 million U.S. homes built before 1977 hide lead paint, the most common source of lead exposure for American kids. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that 62,000 public housing units require lead abatement. And millions of underground lead pipes remain, still delivering drinking water in cities large and small. While the burden of lead is shared by many American cities, its health impacts aren’t. Trace the instances of lead exposure in countless locations across the U.S., and you’ll find the same pattern: It’s predominantly an issue in lower-income, minority communities.”
Tracie Hall, the first African-American woman to lead the American Library Association, shares her idea of the role of libraries in society: “I've learned to believe that having and using a library card is a revolutionary act. It is something that cannot only open up pathways for the user, but it also invites a user into a larger civic conversation that is really hard, maybe, to even talk about or explain. But I think that if you are a library user, and I love people who use libraries all the time because they talk about how they could not imagine not having access to a library and how many books they have and what they've read, the programs that they've attended, I think that the fact that in this country, at your school, at your university, you know, public libraries, etc., that anybody, regardless of their walk of life, can have access to the same information. That's rare today. And that's something that I think is really important. And when it comes to vulnerable populations, we have to fight for that. I mean, I see my role Day One as really being one of the chief advocates for library access.’
New research published in JAMA Pediatrics finds homicide is a leading cause of death among pregnant women and women in the first year after giving birth, according to Louisiana death records from 2016 and 2017. “The authors wrote that they undertook their analysis because few studies have looked at non-obstetric causes of death during pregnancy and the year after birth. They analyzed maternal death data from the Louisiana Department of Health and homicide data for women and girls of reproductive age from a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention database. Of the 119 pregnancy-associated deaths for 2016 and 2017 in the state, 13.4% (16) were homicides. They estimated that, for every 100,000 women who were pregnant or postpartum, there were 12.9 homicide deaths, which outnumbered deaths from any single obstetric cause, including hypertensive disorders (3.2) and amniotic fluid entering the bloodstream (4.8). The risk of homicide death was twice as high for women and girls during pregnancy and the postpartum period, compared to women and girls who were not pregnant. Pregnancy and postpartum deaths were highest for women and girls ages 10 to 29. The authors said that women’s increased contact with the health care system during pregnancy provides clinicians with an opportunity to offer violence prevention services and interventions. They do not know whether the high maternal homicide rate they found—among the highest reported, compared to other jurisdictions—is a function of better reporting or reflects an actual spike of maternal homicides in Louisiana.”
The Oakland City Council unanimously passed an ordinance this January prohibiting criminal background checks on potential renters in Oakland in public and private housing. Just Cities, which advocated for the ordinance, writes: “While there are similar measures in the Bay Area, this is the first in the state of California preventing criminal background checks on private housing. As Margaretta Lin, Executive Director of Just Cities, explains, this ordinance will “remove structural and racialized barriers to all forms of housing for people with criminal records.” Margaretta continues, “when formerly incarcerated people “return home, they are being denied the ability to live with family members or access private rental housing, public housing, and affordable rental housing because of their prior criminal records. That’s a major reason why we have the explosion of homelessness in our cities.”
A new report on Educational Redlining finds that some lenders may be discriminating based against loan applicants who attend historically black or majority Latino colleges. “A lot of this comes down to whether lenders, when they look at education-related data, are truly looking at the individual and not just lumping that person into a group in an unfair way, he said. "For instance, whether or not you worked through college might be indicative of your ability to handle various financial responsibilities, life responsibilities and make you a more creditworthy individual," Odinet said. But he said that's different than lumping everybody who, say, went to Howard University, into one group. And he worries that when it comes to considering where you went to school, "the use of education-based data in loan underwriting is inevitably going to cause a discriminatory effect." Advocates are increasingly worried that casting such a wide net for data to make decisions introduces biases in new and different ways. Welbeck said her group is pushing for better oversight and more transparency from fintech companies.”’