By Alexandra Metz
Access to Opportunity researchers are engaging with families that take part in specialized programs for the recently homeless, and families taking part in a new cohort program designed specifically for single mothers, called the Power of One program.
By Emily Lieb
ARCH’s “sphere of influence” sits across Lake Washington from Seattle, one of the fastest growing (and most expensive) cities in the country. In many ways, its member cities are stereotypical American suburbs: they’ve got quiet streets lined with single-family homes; well-funded, highly regarded schools; and commuter-clogged interstate highways.
By Dr. Lisa K. Bates
Joining the Access to Opportunity team is bringing me into dialogue with amazing scholars and practitioners with deep understanding of policy systems, focusing on an under-studied context of west coast cities. I am looking forward to sharing the research from Portland as we complete this initial round of work. We are looking at Humboldt Gardens, a development of Home Forward (the Housing Authority of Portland), as a site for understanding low-income parents’ (mostly parents of color) strategies for accessing ‘opportunity’.
Dr. Shawn Flanigan, San Diego State University, shares the next installment of our blog on the Access to Opportunity Project. San Diego is consistently ranked among the least affordable housing markets in the United States, topping that list in 2015! Coming in at number two on the list in 2016. Rather than looking exclusively at housing costs, assessments of housing affordability consider housing costs in relation to how many residents of a community could afford to purchase a home at the median price. In 2015, real estate industry research showed that less than half of households could qualify to buy a median priced home in 93.3 percent of San Diego zip codes. This was the highest ratio of any city in the study.
USC Price School of Public Policy Professor David Sloane provided the closing keynote for the 2017 Hollywood Economic Development Summit, hosted June 22 by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce at ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood.
The theme of the summit was building a more livable Hollywood, and Sloane noted the unique challenges Hollywood faces in planning for a city that is both a global brand and a Los Angeles community.
Read Raphael Bostic’s last post in our partnership with Home Matters.
We have a long history of mobility. It’s one of the advances that set the New World apartfrom the Old. Our founders wanted us to move. They didn’t want us confined to the class we were born into or the name we were given or the land our parents could bestow on us. They wanted us to set out across this vast continent, and they didn’t want us to settle until we found a home we could call our own.
In our last post, which also happened to be our first post, we introduced the Access to Opportunity project, including the first set of studies that will be undertaken as part of our larger research goals. Though we didn’t state it, the choice of those projects was driven by a conceptual policy framework that evolved as we conducted our initial site visits in San Diego, Portland and Seattle.
by Dr. Raphael Bostic, President & Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Professor, University of Southern California, Price School of Public Policy and Sheryl Whitney, Partner, Whitney Jennings
by Dr. Raphael Bostic and Sheryl Whitney
Opportunity. It has become the buzz word for policymakers across the political spectrum. From Paul Ryan to Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, everyone seems to trumpet the importance of Americans having access to good jobs, quality housing, strong education, healthy food, safe streets, clean air and water. But the more fundamental question is this: What can communities actually do to increase the likelihood that Americans have real access to opportunity?
In our previous post on community engagement, we talked a lot about innovation and how to make citizen engagement more attractive for community members. Additionally, during our first LA Civics Initiative workshop, we talked about the barriers that prevent people from becoming civically engaged in LA. One of the barriers that our attendees pointed to was a certain disconnect or feeling of apathy from Angelenos towards government or other formal institutions. Could online engagement and social media be the keys to making communities feel more interested and connected to local governance and decision-making?
One of the barriers discouraging civic involvement identified in our LA Civics Initiative kick-off workshop last year was “baseline knowledge”—the idea that people need to be informed and educated in certain issues and processes in order for them to fully engage and participate. It is no surprise that Sherry Arnstein writing on citizen participation in…