Pittsburgh City Council members Ricky Burgess and Daniel Lavelle on Tuesday introduced a package of legislation aimed at addressing racial and housing inequities, including hiring a full-time policy analyst to work in conjunction with the mayor’s office.
Densely populated cities—many of which already face displacement pressures and offer limited opportunities for low-income communities—are bracing themselves. An estimated $7 trillion in investments are anticipated to flow to low-income census tracts through Opportunity Zone tax incentives.
You can see it in the Red for Ed teachers’ mobilizations and the recent strikes to defend public education, in Black Lives Matter, in the Women’s March, in the thousands of Indivisible groups built since 2016, among the Parkland students and their March for Our Lives organizing. This spring, I am working as an Innovation Fellow with PolicyLink to help think through how to stop the Koch juggernaut and fix the chronic problems of our democracy that enabled it to get this far so that we can finally achieve racial and economic equity and environmental and social sustainability.
Most people don’t understand that 70% of outstanding child support debt in California is owed to the government—not to children. And that low-income parents in California make hundreds of millions of dollars in child support payments each year that never go to their children. That’s because we require low-income parents to pay back the cost of public assistance used by low-income mothers and children. This inequitable system takes money away from children in poverty, sets low-income parents up to fail and discourages parents from making payments at all.
“Projects supported by the latest round of grants include A Thousand Ships, a new play by Oakland-native Marcus Gardley that tells the story of women who came to the Bay Area to work in the shipyards during World War II (California Shakespeare Theater); J-Town, Chinatown, Our Town, a multidisciplinary work rooted in Brenda Wong Aoki's family's 121-year history in San Francisco (