April 3, 2025
The dangerous myth that poverty is the cause of child abuse
Why does child abuse happen? A new public service announcement says most people think it’s a “bad parent problem,” but the ad suggests “the root causes may be different than you think.” This message from Prevent Child Abuse America goes on to explain that child abuse is the result of families’ lack of financial resources — a…
March 28, 2025
Unfreezing New York’s Projects
The imposing brick blocks covering much of the territory from West 16th to 27th Streets, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, superficially have much in common with the rest of the city’s sprawling, dilapidated public housing system. From July 2023 to July 2024, the 2,070 apartments making up the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea…
February 25, 2025
We Replaced Families with Uncle Sam. DOGE Must Make the Right Choices When Cutting
If we want a smaller government, we need stronger families. President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the size and scope of government through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has the potential to change the trajectory of the nation. But Trump can’t deliver this promise only by cutting wasteful spending. American taxpayers have been forced to fund…
August 26, 2024
Vouching for Self-Sufficiency
It’s hard to sympathize with the Parkoff Organization, the New York real estate firm that owns some 4,000 apartments across the city. According to a new lawsuit, housing “testers” caught the group discriminating against potential tenants whose rent would have been subsidized by housing vouchers. The Fair Housing Justice Center (FHJC), which brought the suit, claims that Parkoff…
August 24, 2024
Harris’s Child Tax Credit Proposal Could Backfire, Perpetuating Poverty
A centerpiece of Vice President Harris’ newly released economic plan is a revamped Child Tax Credit, which would send families $6,000 for each newborn and up to $3,600 for older children, up from the existing $2,000 per child credit. Her proposal follows Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s recent call to increase the credit to $5,000…
August 23, 2024
Can Kamala Harris Learn the Housing Lessons from Her Own History?
In a biographical aside in her Thursday night nomination-acceptance speech, Kamala Harris spoke eloquently, and perhaps inadvertently, about “affordable housing” policy. She recalled the neighborhood in the East Bay where her mother rented an apartment: In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We lived in the flats — A beautiful, working-class neighborhood…
August 18, 2024
Why NYC’s Most Affordable Housing May Already Be Available
Mayor Adams’ ambitious rezoning proposal he calls the “City of Yes” — aimed at encouraging new housing construction throughout the five boroughs — is filled with commonsense ideas such as permitting apartments to be built above storefronts and relaxing the expensive requirements for new parking. Adams, in many ways, is harkening back to the golden…
August 16, 2024
The Harris Campaign’s Foolish Down-Payment-Assistance Scheme
On the surface, Kamala Harris’s proposal to provide $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers looks to be an incentive for upward mobility. Historically, homeownership has been the foundation for wealth creation for those of modest means. On closer inspection, however, down-payment assistance sends the wrong message — not only because already high home prices are likely to…
June 18, 2024
Economic Opportunity and Social Mobility
Years ago, I worked at the Pew Charitable Trusts on something called the Economic Mobility Project. In 2009, we commissioned a survey covering opportunity, mobility, and the American Dream. One revealing question we asked was the following: The term American Dream means different things to different people. Here are some ways some people have described…
May 24, 2024
The First National Calculation of Mortality of the US Homeless Population
It is well established that those with lower incomes tend to have worse health outcomes. But whether this relationship extends to the most disadvantaged in society – people experiencing homelessness – has rarely been examined. This column explores the relationship between homelessness and health outcomes in the US. It finds that after accounting for demographic…