Millennials and the Affordability Crisis: A Review of Generation Priced Out
As tenant struggles become a bigger focus of activist recruitment, Randy Shaw’s new book, Generation Priced Out, is an essential organizing guide.
These States Are Trying to Level the Field for Disadvantaged Students
How would the trajectories of children’s lives change if they knew that their state, their community and their parents were investing in their future success for as long as they could remember?
Scoring Homeownership: Looking at the Long Game
Today’s economic climate offers little hope to many struggling families. Family incomes still lag in comparison, for example, to rising housing costs in many markets.
Keeping Everyone Afloat: Is Universal Basic Income the Answer?
Advocates and organizers who deal with the needs of the poor often say it's not really a housing/food/training issue, it's an income issue. So what would happen if we just addressed income?
When a Person’s Character Trumps Their Credit Score
Some CDFIs approve loans based on a person’s character instead of their credit score. But they only recommend
doing so when you know the applicant.
In Which a Skeptic Is Won Over to Child Savings Accounts
While I am a firm believer in equal access to higher education for all, it’s over-emphasized in our individualistic culture as a solution to society’s woes.
Data Drives the Movement for Economic Justice
A government report concludes that residents of low- and moderate-income Census tracts have as much access to bank branches as residents in middle- and upper-income tracts in rural areas and large metropolitan areas. Yet access to bank services for low- and moderate-income consumers is still being lost. Why is that?
Why Financial Education Should Get Political
Financial curricula for low-income households often focus on personal choices about budgeting and saving, but if they don't also address systemic problems, exploitation, and discrimination, they aren't speaking to their audience's reality.
A Low-Cost Ownership Oasis in a Desert of Apartment Unaffordability
When this limited-equity cooperative in California began more than 30 years ago, it wasn’t the most affordable place to live. But now the co-op’s monthly costs are 50 percent lower than the average market-rate apartment.
Food Banks: Another Crisis Casualty?
Last week, when a prominent and long-standing central New Jersey soup kitchen went to the newspapers as a last resort to inform the public...
Almost Home
Shortly after her 18th birthday, Cindy (not her real name) left her group home in the Bronx to live with her mother. Although under...
Well Worth the Read
Reading What It’s Worth was like walking through one of the glorious Asset Learning Conferences that CFED organizes, equipped with a magical Harry Potter wand that allows me to stop and re-work time so I can peer into each workshop at my leisure.
Keeping Justice in Mind as We Talk Asset-Building
I attended my first ever Assets Learning Conference, put on by CFED last week, and I have to say it was mighty impressive. And I was particularly pleased to see that economic justice and things like reforming the tax code to be less regressive and reward savings by low- and middle-income Americans, rather than mostly […]
Flooded: How Natural Disasters Lead to Predatory Lending in the Rio Grande Valley
The devastation that communities in the Rio Grande Valley experience is twofold: the initial destruction of the floods and the cycle of debt and poverty as a result of predatory loans.
Reflecting and Planning Using a Community Wealth Building Lens
Over an organization’s 25 years in existence, how do staff and volunteers measure impact and build off of lessons learned to guide their next steps forward?
Is Financial Unsteadiness the New Normal?
A yearlong analysis of 200-plus households suggests that we should add a third leg to the financial security stool along with income and assets: cash flow.
Despite Progress, States Have Work to do to Ensure Access to Affordable Rental Housing...
If expanding access to homeownership can reverse the trends of growing racial wealth inequality, why are we seeing so many states roll back the supports that make homeownership possible?
Discouraging the Voter
We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again, but, in Michigan—which is shaping up to be a crucial swing state in the presidential...
Millennial Women and Retirement Savings: Start Where You Are
Today, most women have the autonomy and ability to take charge of our finances, but we don’t all do it.
Unstacking the Deck for African-American Entrepreneurs
The truth is most entrepreneurs’ firms don’t grow quickly, employ people, or earn much money. And, more importantly, entrepreneurial success has far less to do with exceptional skill than with one’s ability to weather repeated failure and financial loss.