Topics such as reducing class size, reducing use of standardized testing and expanding or reducing charter schools and school vouchers drew less support in the survey.
The funding issue comes at a time when state lawmakers have raised K-12 education funding to record levels and sharply raised teacher pay, especially for beginning teachers. But critics say education funding hasn’t risen enough and, when adjusted for inflation, is actually less than what it was before the recession in the late 2000s.
Around 19,000 teachers marched in downtown Raleigh in May to demand that state lawmakers do more to support public education.
“At all governmental levels we must adequately fund K-12 education,” said Webb Hubbell of Charlotte, an author and former Clinton Administration member. “Today’s society asks so much more from our schools and educators, and their importance needs to be reflected in the allocation of our resources.”
But not all Influencers agreed that lack of money is the problem for the state’s K-12 schools.
“Regardless of the party in control of the General Assembly, the default solution for schools has been to throw money at the problem,” said Paul Valone of Catawba, president of Grass Roots North Carolina. “Even under Republican control, pressure from the NCAE, the media, and ostensibly ‘progressive’ activists has led Republicans, who fear public pressure, to relent to essentially left-of-center solutions.”
Closing the racial achievement gap was rated as very important by more than three-quarters of the survey respondents. For decades, public schools have tried to address why African American and Hispanic students perform lower on exams, on average, than white and Asian classmates.
“Eliminating the achievement gap is critical to providing the superior workforce needed to compete in the world economy,” said former Gov. Mike Easley. “Addressing the gap will entail more Pre-K, teacher pay, and funding for the rural divide.”
Virginia Hardy, vice chancellor of student affairs at East Carolina University, said that while there’s been some improvement in closing the racial achievement gap, much work still needs to be done.
“The longstanding educational inequalities continue to adversely impact black students’ performance today,” Hardy said. “If we are to break the cycle of poverty, illiteracy, and social injustices, then we must level the educational playing field.”
The Influencers were asked to give their opinion about the overall direction of K-12 education in North Carolina over the past decade. Responses ran across the spectrum, with many citing how the legislature expanded the number of charter schools and provided taxpayer money to help families attend private K-12 schools.
“Over the past decade, the North Carolina General Assembly has made education one of its top priorities, ensuring every student has an opportunity to succeed,” said Madison Shook of Raleigh, a GOP fundraiser. “It’s passed policies — paving the way for more charter schools and opportunity scholarships, to name a just a couple — that increase choice and flexibility for parents and children and prioritize the instruction of students based on their individual needs.”
But that expansion of alternatives to traditional public schools worries some Influencers.
“As a product of the public school system, our state commitment to public education has been really important to me,” said Ashley Christensen of Raleigh, a chef, restaurateur, food activist and philanthropist. “And I fear that many of the new systems like vouchers and lifting the cap on charter schools have been to the detriment of our public school system as a whole.
“I am open minded to the idea of new platforms and systems for giving parents and children more choice over their education, but not at the expense of the system overall.”
In a reader-submitted question, Influencers were asked what policymakers should do to ensure that all students have access to quality schools that prepare them for well-paying 21st century jobs.
“Continue to treat public education as our number one priority, as it is the ‘great equalizer’ for most of our children, whose futures are dependent upon how well our public schools prepare them,” answered former Charlotte mayor Richard Vinroot.
This is the second in a series of surveys The News & Observer, The Charlotte Observer and The Herald-Sun will conduct with the Influencers through the November elections to help focus media and candidate discussion around the policy issues of most importance to North Carolinians. Look for the next report in two weeks.
News researcher David Raynor contributed.
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Miami resident Danielle Rivera is 36-years-old and mother to a 7-year-old son, Emmett. She has a disability and cannot work a job outside her home. Her husband, Jonathan, age 35, recently lost his work as a chef at a restaurant due to the economic fallout caused by the outbreak of the coronavirus. She is worried about making ends meet. Her biggest fear: impending homelessness.
Jonathan has already filed for unemployment benefits but his account is yet to be authenticated by Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity despite sending in his identifying documents and repeatedly calling and emailing the office.
The Miami Herald has previously reported on the state’s understaffed, underfunded and now over-burdened unemployment benefits system, where the chief obstacle is calling in to get a PIN to complete the process. The number rings busy around the clock, with only about 2 percent of calls getting through, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
But that’s only one factor working against the newly unemployed. The plight of recently laid off and furloughed Floridians is particularly bleak compared to other states, compounded by the fact that the state has among the most miserly unemployment-benefit caps in the country — a maximum of $275 a week, or $1,100 a month.
The $275-a-week cap hasn’t increased in more than 20 years. The same cannot be said of the cost-of-living of the newly unemployed, a group that disproportionately includes those who worked in lower-income jobs.
A comparison of unemployment benefits for each state shows Florida fifth from last, tied with Tennessee, barely edging out Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arizona, places where the cost of living is significantly lower than, say, Miami Beach.
When it comes to the number of weeks an eligible person can receive the benefits, Florida is dead last, weighing in at 12.
Florida is not the most expensive of states, but it is far from the least expensive. According to a Miami Herald analysis of data on cost of living, Florida ranks 28th in the United States. Among the 67 counties in Florida, Collier, Monroe and Martin counties are the three most expensive to live in. Miami-Dade ranks 13th.
The data is compiled by the Council for Community and Economic Research and relies on information from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. To calculate a cost of living index and compare between states, it takes into account factors like population, population density, income per capita, growth rates for both population and income per capita, government cost, and unemployment rate. The Miami Herald analyzed the 2019 version of the data — the most recent figures available.
The people most directly impacted by the economic shutdown, those working in retail and hospitality, often don’t have much of a cushion to fall back on.
When he had his job, Jonathan Rivera earned around $1,700 a month, Danielle said. Their total household expenses including rent for their one-bedroom condo and utilities is roughly $1,300.
Danielle has herniated discs in her neck, nerve damage and rheumatoid arthritis and requires the use of mobility aids to walk any significant distance, she said. She works from home through Mechanical Turk, an Amazon-operated crowdsourcing website for businesses to hire people for work like data entry, writing product descriptions or identifying content in videos.
“We’ve managed to pay our bills for April, but have no clue what we’ll do in the future,” she said.
In Florida, the lowly compensation for those who have lost their jobs is a feature not a bug.
The system is designed not so much as a safety net to cushion the blow but as a tool to supply businesses with people to fill often low-paying jobs — and grow the economy.
Normally to qualify for continuing benefits, an applicant must show he or she has applied for five jobs in the previous week.
It’s one reason Florida calls its unemployment office the office of Reemployment Assistance. The system worked as intended over the past decade as the economy prospered and employment increased.
The model breaks down when there are few jobs to apply for, as is currently the case, and the website for applying for benefits undergoes a meltdown.
Mark Wilson, president of the Florida Chamber of Commerce said “no unemployment system in the United States was built for a global pandemic” and in ordinary circumstances the system works because Florida typically has more jobs than people looking for them.
“Florida’s system is built for people who want to work,” he said. “Sixty days ago it was the best system in the country and a year from now after we’re on the other side of COVID, it’ll be the best system in the country again.”
The federal government is supplementing state-level unemployment payments with $600 per applicant per week. The hitch is that the money will be funneled through the individual states’ unemployment infrastructure. That’s a challenge for many states, but especially Florida, with its presently overwhelmed application process. No one knows when the financial relief — state or federal — might flow properly.
According to a public statement by the Department of Economic Opportunity, the state is updating its online unemployment benefits application system, accepting paper applications and also waiving the “waiting week”, so individuals can claim their first week of Reemployment Assistance. The requirement that applicants demonstrate they have applied for five jobs has been put on hold.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator estimates that single adults with no children need to earn roughly $26,000 to live in relative comfort in Florida, a number that many in South Florida, with its spiraling rents, would dispute. MIT also estimates that food preparation and service-related workers earn only around $21,500 annually. People working in sales earn roughly $26,500, maintenance and sanitation workers make $24,500 and healthcare support workers earn $29,000.
During the Great Recession of 2007-08, laid-off workers could get benefits for up to 26 weeks. But in 2011, as the economy was coming back to life, then-Gov. Rick Scott and the Republican-dominated Legislature opted to cut taxes on companies and reduce that safety net to 12 weeks.
“For many, many years there has been the goal of saving the state money, lowering employer taxes and lowering benefits ,” said Arthur Rosenberg, a former lawyer at Florida Legal Services who lobbied against the 2011 changes.
Now the state’s junior senator, Scott, whose net worth is at least $166 million, recently argued in favor of reduced unemployment benefits in the $2 trillion federal stimulus package, saying that such benefits would discourage people from trying to get a job.
State Sen. Joe Gruters of Sarasota, who now heads the Florida Republican Party, declined to comment for this story.
The low cap on benefits, shorter-than-normal eligibility span and bollixed-up process for applying digitally are putting laid-off and furloughed workers in a precarious position. Many worry they will be financially ruined.
Among them is Carmen Cordoba, a 53-year-old who until recently worked at a Macy’s in Fort Myers. She is now furloughed indefinitely. Her husband, Peter Becker, is 10 years older and is a sales employee at a cigar store. Since the store he works at is now closed, he too is out of a job.
“We don’t have any other income or another job,” said Cordoba. “We don’t have anything anymore.”
Lee ranks 17th out of Florida’s 67 counties when it comes to cost of living, Miami Herald’s analysis of the cost of living data found.
The couple live in an apartment and have two pets — a cat and a dog. They also have some outstanding loans and credit cards to pay off. Cordoba said that their monthly expenses come to nearly $2,000 a month.
Cordoba said she has applied for other work online but has received no response yet. The high cost of living coupled with uncertainty regarding when they will receive their unemployment benefits and how much is now her biggest concern about the near future.
“I don’t know how we’ll pay the rent or buy food for ourselves or our pets,” she said.
Maria Leticia Gonzalez Moreno, one of Cordoba’s former co-workers at Macy’s, is in a similar fix. She too was furloughed last week. She had been working at Macy’s for 13 years.
“The unemployment benefit was something that was supposed to be faster but I don’t know how long the money that I have is going to last,” she said. “We don’t know what is going to happen.”
Moreno’s husband, 68, is retired. Normally she earns around $600 a month. After deducting costs for health insurance, she gets to take home around $400 to $450, she said. Her monthly expenses — a mortgage for her home and utilities — come to around $850.
The recent stimulus bill, the CARES Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump on Mar. 27, is what provides the $600 per week supplement until July 31, 2020. It also mandates that the Internal Revenue Service send a one-time payment of up to $1,200 to American taxpayers with a Social Security number. The payment is reduced — on a sliding, based on income, down to zero — for Americans making more than $75,000.
“Benefits will be paid from the date they became eligible under the CARES Act,” the Department of Economic Opportunity said in a public statement. “At this time, individuals who apply for Reemployment Assistance whose employment was negatively impacted as a result of COVID-19 will follow the same application, review and payment process as all applicants for Reemployment Assistance in Florida.”
“I don’t know when that money is going to come, but I have to pay the bills,” said Moreno. “I am scared because I don’t know when I’m going to go back to work.”
Anti-poverty advocates, including Carolina Fernandez-Mazzoni of Catalyst Miami, an advocacy group working on issues affecting low-wealth families, say a change is needed. Given that “Florida has become a low-wage, high-cost state, especially in its urban areas, and many workers are employed by industries that are effectively closed for business right now or have dramatically reduced operations”, the state should raise the amount and duration of unemployment benefits, she said.
“These workers not only make low wages, they are unlikely to have paid leave and very likely to have little-to-no financial cushion to sustain them through an economic downturn,” she added.
“We need to ensure [these] families are not feeling the long-term effects of this pandemic.”
The economic downturn has led some to look for alternative sources of income. For people like Rivera, the Miami resident, the usual work opportunities through Mechanical Turk are drying up.
“There’s so many people now, there’s a lot more competition,” she said. “Jobs I could grab before, people are snapping ‘em up.”
Rivera and her husband worry about not having enough money to pay for rent and being left out on the street with their 7-year-old.
“Our landlord’s small. He’s not a big corporation, she said. “They need to pay their bills, too.”
”Right now they have the moratorium [on evictions] in place but once that’s lifted, if we don’t have the money, our landlord’s gonna evict us.”
McClatchy data reporter Ben Wieder contributed to this report. The Miami Herald’s congressional correspondent Alex Daugherty also contributed.
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Fifty-three days after Congress passed the CARES Act, Floridian Tim Young still waits on jobless benefits. He fits in a particularly uncomfortable niche: people who had exhausted their annual state benefits before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the nation.
Federal emergency funds were set aside to fill this gap, but Florida has yet to put in place a mechanism for Young and others to receive it.
A 49-year-old single father of two teens, Young saw his IT management job outsourced abroad in December. The Tampa resident tried desperately to find work even as the nation was caught in the throes of COVID-19 economic chaos. His 12 weeks of unemployment benefits ran out in early March, and on March 27 Congress passed the CARES Act, which included the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program for those like him who had already exhausted benefits when the economy shut down.
“I am beyond desperate,” Young said, describing real-world consequences of Florida’s inaction. He has burned through his retirement savings and his daughter’s college fund and is now turning to charities for help with rental assistance.
Young wouldn’t be in this desperate position if Florida had simply done what the CARES Act allows. The U.S. Labor Department has sent out numerous guidance reports to states on how to set up to receive PEUC money as envisioned, since all such money is funneled through state unemployment offices. All 50 states have signed up, but only 26 are now distributing the federal money. Florida, because it has yet to set up a means to apply, is not one of them.
When you go to the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity website, it actually touts the PEUC and directs visitors to the site www.floridajobs.org. There, a separate section details who qualifies for the PEUC and for the past month has teased those in need.
“More information on how to apply is coming soon,” the website informs visitors who have been directed there.
Dina Fisher began filing for unemployment benefits in late March, only to find she was ineligible because she’d exceeded her 12 weeks of benefits for the year. Her employer, a South Florida retailer, routinely lays off workers for three months over the hot summer months and she had exhausted her benefits. Six weeks later, she is still waiting on benefits.
Fisher was featured by the Herald in one of its first stories, on April 1, on the state unemployment system called CONNECT. The system crashed under the crush of applicants, putting Florida’s unemployed through weeks-long ordeals as they fruitlessly tried to submit claims through a frozen website or call a state phone number that was perpetually busy to obtain a PIN. Although she was eventually able to get the PIN needed to apply for federal benefits, she was resigned to wait for Florida to begin offering the PEUC funds.
Then, suddenly, on May 5 she received two $600 checks, covering two weeks of unemployment, from another federal program — the one approved by Congress to supplement state unemployment allotments for those who had not exhausted their state benefits. That’s particularly valuable to Floridians who must make do with the state’s miserly $275 maximum on weekly state jobless benefits.
(This means she likely would not qualify for the PEUC payments, which are also $600.)
The state still hasn’t paid her anything, however, and she been told when it does she will receive only $125 a week, not $275. No explanation for that.
“I still haven’t gotten any [state] benefits, everything is pending, pending, pending,” she said, noting she is trying to remain in good spirits in the face of the seemingly endless hurdles.
Another Florida resident reached out to the Herald on April 2 seeking help in getting answers about the PEUC funds. In recent days he has finally given up and left the state.
“I had hoped for some temporary help through PEUC. I guess that’s not going to happen. I suppose I’ll scrape by somehow,” said the middle-aged man, who insisted that he not be identified in the story because he is actively seeking employment in other states.
The man tried for more than a month to get basic answers from state officials.
“There is nothing else on the Florida online website to explain whether or not the benefits will be extended for individuals in my circumstance. Absolutely nothing,” he complained in the original April 2 email. “I’ve sent an email to the Florida Department of Reemployment, and that department’s auto-responder has sent me a message indicating that my question will be “answered as soon as possible.” But I’ve been waiting for days now and I have received no information about what I need to do or if I am even eligible to obtain extended unemployment benefits.”
The Herald reached out to Tiffany Vause, the chief spokesperson for the Department of Economic Opportunity, but she did not return a call and email requesting comment about the PEUC. Similarly, Helen Aguirre Ferré, spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s unclear how many Floridians have exhausted their 12 weeks of jobless benefits before or after stay-at-home orders spread and mass layoffs began. More than 1.4 million workers in Florida filed new unemployment claims in the weeks between March 15 and May 12, but state websites offer no statistics on average duration of unemployment now, or in recent years.
“You can’t get numbers out of the department. It is an unknown that is troubling,” said Cindy Huddleston, an attorney and senior policy director for the Florida Policy Institute, a center-left research group that advocates for more focused state spending. “I wish I could tell you I had numbers. I am also curious.”
Huddleston called problems with the euphemistically named Reemployment Assistance program a “poorly kept secret. “
“It’s been something we’ve been living with for the past decade,” she said. “It’s been keeping legitimate claimants out of the system for no reason. So it was no surprise. ... Everyone knew it was a problem. There was no will on the part of the agency to fix the system.”
One possible explanation is that Florida’s unemployment rate has been low for years, so there was no urgency to address problems. Days before last Christmas, Gov. DeSantis announced that November’s jobless rate in Florida was 3.1 percent, tying the state’s lowest rate in 40 years.
“Moving forward, I will continue to prioritize investments in Florida’s workforce and infrastructure to provide continued opportunities for our communities to be resilient and prepared for the future,” DeSantis said in a Dec. 20 statement, just months before the collapse of the CONNECT website that the unemployed must use to get their benefits.
","kicker":"","text_alignment":"Left","href":"/web/v1/content/242826221","allow_ads":true,"allow_stn_player":true,"byline":"\n
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Florida saw a record number of unemployment claims filed last week in the wake of coronavirus restrictions on businesses and activities across the state.
A total of 74,021 people filed for unemployment through Saturday, March 21, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor. Nationally, nearly 3.3 million people filed unemployment claims last week.
That dwarfs the 40,403 unemployment claims filed in Florida during the great recession in the week ending January 17, 2009, the most claims filed in at least three decades, according to data from the federal Labor Department going back to 1987. And nationally it represents the most new claims filed in at least more than five decades.
Last week’s Florida numbers were more than 10 times higher than the 6,463 claims filed the previous week, the biggest one-week increase in the Labor Department data.
And economists say they expect next week’s numbers to be even worse.
“This is one big week that’s going to be followed by at least one more,” said Jerry Parrish, chief economist for the Florida Chamber Foundation.
And Florida’s record numbers could be missing thousands more unemployed workers who have struggled to file claims with the state’s overwhelmed unemployment system.
Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity has struggled to keep up with the sharp uptick in claims, with newly unemployed workers across the state encountering massive wait times on the phone and technical glitches with the state’s online system.
The department has said it will add 100 additional workers to help process unemployment seekers over the phone and authorize its staff to work overtime, but those changes haven’t yet alleviated the strain.
For many workers, the application is a hurdle in its own right.
One issue complicating matters for many in Miami looking to file is lack of computer literacy or English fluency. According to Leonie Leonie Hermantin, director of development at the Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center in North Miami, certain filers don’t have Internet at home, or their phones cannot connect to Wifi.
“That’s one hurdle, but it’s almost meaningless, because even if they had access to the Internet, because of a language issue, or sometimes because of a literacy issue, the application itself becomes daunting.”
She said it can take up to two hours to complete a new application.
Hermantin declined to estimate how many in the community Sant La serves are going to be without a job, but said nearly 200 had already come by the center in the past week.
“I know it’s significant—we’ve seen it with all the economic downturns,” shes said. “Our community is negatively impacted when the service sector is hurting.”
Across the state, the leisure and hospitality industries accounted for roughly one in seven jobs according to Florida’s most recent jobs numbers, industries which have been hard hit by mandated closures of bars and nightclubs across the state and restrictions on restaurants and tourism-related businesses in some parts of the state.
“The pain of shutting down such a large and central sector of the economy is not going to be insignificant,” said Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Forecasting.
He said the state’s economic recovery will largely depend on how long businesses remain closed as states and cities across the country use mandated business and workplace closures and social distancing techniques to try to slow the spread of the virus.
“Every month of this economic lockdown carries with it a huge price tag,” Snaith said.
As of last night, there were more than 65,000 confirmed coronavirus cases across the country and nearly 2,000 confirmed cases in Florida. The virus has already cost more than 900 people their lives across the country and resulted in 23 deaths in Florida.
President Donald Trump has said that he would like to see many businesses reopen as early as Easter, which is April 12, though many cities and states have indicated they would extend closures and restrictions beyond that.
The uncertainty about the timeline for combating the virus has economists divided on what an economic recovery might look like.
Snaith is optimistic that the economy will bounce back soon after restrictions are lifted and said the health of the economy before the spread of the virus could result in a faster recovery than after the 2008 recession. The state’s unemployment rate has remained below 4 percent since the beginning of 2018.
“The economic body was very healthy before this virus downturn was introduced and so our ability to bounce back from it is enhanced by that,” he said.
But Scott Brown, the chief economist at Florida investment firm Raymond James, said that the possibility of multiple waves of the virus, which could necessitate additional rounds of restrictions down the road, could make for a longer recovery.
“I think ultimately the economy will recover, but it’s probably going to be a pretty gradual process,” he said.
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California’s middle-class families are facing a rising rent crisis, a reality that prompted a flurry of new state laws to make housing more affordable.
But that problem isn’t nearly as pervasive in the state as the challenges low-income families face in finding housing, according to a new study published Wednesday.
The study’s authors argue most median rents in the state are affordable on a median salary, but low-income households need more help from Gov. Gavin Newsom to make ends meet.
Only 4 percent of median income families in the state are “severely” burdened by housing costs, meaning they spend more than half of their income on housing costs, the study says.
Meanwhile, 76 percent of low-income households are strained by housing costs. The study defines those households as ones whose income is 30 percent or less of their community’s median income. In Sacramento, that’s $22,600.
Matt Schwartz, president and CEO of the California Housing Partnership, an advocacy group for affordable housing, said the data conflicts with a common perception that middle class Californians cannot afford to live in the state.
“There is some need for missing middle help, but it’s geographically isolated and small,” Schwartz said. “It’s not as bad as the need to help people who are one bad break away from homelessness.”
Median rent was calculated based on Craigslist listings in late 2018, while median income in each county was based on calculations from California Tax Credit Allocation Committee.
The report’s authors assumed housing costs should only comprise 30 percent of income to be considered affordable.
In Sacramento, the report showed the median income per household was $75,300, and residents needed to make 77 percent of that — about $58,000 — to comfortably afford rent on a two-bedroom apartment.
In Fresno, median income was $58,400 and households needed about $46,000 to comfortably afford a two-bedroom apartment.
But those living on significantly less than median income struggle to afford rent, Schwartz and other authors argue.
“While there are middle- and moderate-income households who struggle to afford typical rents in some higher cost, coastal counties, the needs of these households pale in comparison with the affordability challenges facing the lowest income households in every part of the State,” the study says.
Extremely low-income households earning less than a third of their community’s median income can’t afford median rent in any part of California, according to the study. Those earning half of median income or less can only afford housing in one California county: Modoc in the northeastern corner.
Those earning less than 60 percent of median income can afford median rent in 11 counties in the state.
In more than half the state, people need to make at least 80 percent of their community’s median income to afford median rent, according to the study.
Schwartz said the findings reinforce a need for state subsidies for both building and preserving more low-income housing. The study argues that state rental subsidies are not a cost-effective way of dealing with the problem.
“The state is best suited to invest in the out front investment in bricks and mortar, which has a greater return on investment for everyone,” Schwartz said. “The $500 million in new state tax credits is a good step, but we need to multiply it by five or 10 to make good progress here.”
The study acknowledges that middle income families struggle to afford median rents in parts of several coastal counties, including Los Angeles, Monterey, Napa, San Francisco and Santa Cruz. Median income households in inland San Bernardino County also can struggle to afford median rent in their community.
Newsom this year signed a number of laws intended to protect to advance affordable housing options and protections for Californians.
He signed one of the nation’s strongest rent cap and “just-cause” eviction laws earlier this month, which prohibits landlords from raising rents beyond 5 percent plus inflation on older homes and restricts evictions in certain cases. Proponents of the measure said it would ensure Californians who are “one rent increase away” from homelessness remain sheltered.
Legislators also wrote a law to block cities from imposing additional building standards that drive up construction costs and made it easier to build so-called “granny flats.”
“This is a crisis in the state of California, the crisis of affordability,” Newsom said when signing bills on Oct. 9. “This issue of affordability must be addressed head on and we need to call local government out for not building enough housing.”
Newsom also signed an executive order in January to create an inventory of state lands that could be used for development. Construction for a Sacramento affordable housing complex is scheduled to begin in December 2020 as one of the first projects.
The state’s budget also includes half a billion dollars to expand loan opportunities for mixed-income developments, and allocates another half a billion to expand the state tax credit for affordable housing projects.
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MIREBALAIS, Haiti (En français | En español) — Cervical cancer is a disease that Haiti cannot afford. And in most cases, it’s a disease the country’s broken healthcare system cannot treat.
There is just one MRI scanner in the entire country of 11 million people. Radiation treatment does not exist — for any kind of cancer — because there are no machines. Cancer screenings and early detection programs are limited, and so is access to lifesaving care.
In a country already struggling to manage maternal deaths and childhood diseases that have been largely controlled in other parts of the world, cervical cancer is nearly always a death sentence. Haitians who can afford to travel abroad for treatment are the few who have a fighting chance against advanced forms of the disease.
But cancer experts say it doesn’t have to be that way. Though cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths for women in Haiti, it is both preventable and treatable.
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by cervical cancer in Haiti vary widely, in part because people often die with no record of the cause. But healthcare providers in Haiti such as Partners in Health, a Boston-based nonprofit, put the number at 1,500 or more a year, basing their estimates on 10 years of data. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, the World Health Organization’s cancer arm, is far more conservative, saying an estimated 563 women will die from the disease in Haiti this year.
Even at the lower number, the mortality rate in Haiti is six times that of the United States.
Most of those deaths, researchers say, can be linked to poverty. In a country like Haiti, where most people live on less than $2 a day and many poor women often work as street vendors to keep families afloat, the deaths also have a ripple effect, sending more children to orphanages and accelerating the downward spiral of the already poor.
“These are unnecessary deaths that have great impact on individual families and the economy of our country,” said Didi Bertrand-Farmer, a Haitian healthcare advocate who is emerging as a leading voice in a campaign to reverse the deadly trend.
Bertrand-Farmer knows the disease well. At 14, she lost her mother to cervical cancer in Haiti, and later, as a community organizer in the African nation of Rwanda, she worked to help reduce the disease. The wife of acclaimed Partners In Health physician Paul Farmer, she is now part of a cervical cancer consortium formed by a group of U.S.-based doctors, called Haiti sans Cervical Cancer, to build a national prevention program.
“It is no longer acceptable for women in this country to keep dying from cervical cancer,” Bertrand-Farmer said. “My biggest concern is: How are we protecting the lives of the new generation of girls?”
In Haiti, women carry the financial burden for their families. Called the poto mitan — the backbone of the society — they are wives and mothers but also ti-machanns, or street merchants, who scratch out a living in the country’s informal economy.
When Paula Paul, 44, one of those street merchants, learned in April that she had cervical cancer, she had never been screened for the disease. She hadn’t heard of it and certainly wasn’t familiar with its cause, which is usually the human papillomavirus (HPV), a common sexually transmitted infection. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends getting two doses of the HPV vaccine as early as age 11.
The disease had advanced beyond the early stages. Had it been detected early, a hysterectomy or more minor surgery could have stopped the spread of the disease and most likely cured her.
But Paul had probably been living with cancer for at least five years. She had assumed the frequent, irregular vaginal bleeding, which started when her daughter, now 6, was a year old, was a side effect of her birth-control implant.
“I don’t know where it came from. I thought it was due to my family, but my family line doesn’t have it,” Paul said. “I don’t have anyone who has this disease.”
She said she has accepted that the illness will take her life: “I already know that I am going to die — what else is there for me to do?”
And yet it’s clear she hasn’t given up hope. After starting chemotherapy in May, she said, she expected to die quickly. Instead, she feels better. And even though the doctor said she shouldn’t exert herself, there are days when she feels up to lifting a bucket of water or hand-washing clothes.
“I’m not saying that I am cured but I used to bleed a lot before the medication and now I don’t bleed anymore,” she said. “When I go get my chemotherapy, the [doctors] say they are very happy and I should pray for all of my lab results to be the same way.”
Even more than about her health, though, she agonizes about what will happen to her children, especially her youngest, 6-year-old Marie Stacey.
Her family — a sister and a sick aunt live nearby, and her elderly mother is in Port-au-Prince — is too poor to care for her daughter after she dies, she has concluded. She’s considered handing the girl over to an orphanage to ensure Marie Stacey gets an education. Too sick to work and earn money for school fees, she was forced to pull the child from kindergarten, and has been unable to send her back to school.
During a trip in June to the University Hospital of Mirebalais in central Haiti, where she goes every 15 days for palliative care to ease the pelvic pain, Paul was blunt: “I’m by myself. I have nobody to help me.”
She’s mostly stoic, showing emotion only when she talks about her daughter. Even when chemotherapy quickly took her hair, she shrugged off any attempt at sympathy: “You can’t cry about hair.”
About three months into her treatment, her doctor prescribed pain pills to take three times a day — with food. But even that isn’t easy. She doesn’t have much money for food. The meager amount she had saved before the cancer is all gone, used to pay for transportation to the Mirebalais hospital, two hours away.
Before cancer, Paul supported herself and her children by selling dry goods in the Pond Sonde market near her two-room house in Bellanger, a rural community in Haiti’s Lower Artibonite Valley. She’d buy rice and spices in bulk, then sell individual portions at the market.
Now, just getting to the hospital for treatment can seem like an insurmountable obstacle. In August, five days before her upcoming chemotherapy appointment, she sat on her front porch and assessed the bleak situation. She had no money for the two-hour trek by bus or on the back of a motorcycle. She’d last eaten the day before, a plate of grits. And she didn’t have the $28 for three tests required before each chemo session, she said, pulling a piece of paper with the tests written on it from the pages of her Bible.
Normally, the tests are free at the Mirebalais hospital, a $16 million facility built by Partners In Health that provides free healthcare to more than 1,000 patients a day.. But this time, the CT scanner was broken when Paul needed a scan to see how the treatment was working. Patients had to go to a private lab and pay for exams.
Or, as in Paul’s case, skip a treatment.
“I don’t have any money,” she said. “Everything I had to sell, I sold.”
As she discussed the treatment she couldn’t afford, Paul could hear the sounds of life going on around her. Music blared occasionally from down the street, drowning out boisterous laughter from a group of young men playing dominoes just beyond her front gate. Her yard was mostly dirt with a lone mango tree, long since stripped of its fruit.
Her daughter, who had been playing with a neighbor’s son, ran through the gate and flashed a shy grin. Seeing Marie Stacey, Paul tried to focus on the words of a private doctor who told her the cancer was operable and the Mirebalais physician who said the cancer had not yet entered her bloodstream.
“I’m thinking,” Paul said, almost to herself, “how did I discover a disease early and yet I can’t get treated for it?”
In Haiti, as in most poor countries, cancer is such a neglected health problem that the government doesn’t even know how many cancer patients there are, much less the number of new diagnoses.
But Robert Auguste, a gynecologist and former health minister, is trying to change that.
For the past five years, Auguste — who heads the government’s National Cancer Registry — has traveled the country three times a year in a beat-up 2006 Nissan Patrol to personally collect reports on all cancers because regional health ministers sometimes “don’t even respond” to his requests for monthly numbers.
“They don’t understand the importance,” he said.
Auguste does. He served as Haiti’s health minister in 2006 and advocated for construction of Haiti’s first center for radiotherapy, chemotherapy and nuclear medicine.
The government only got as far as approving a $10 million budget item and laying an official cornerstone in Port-au-Prince across the street from the State University of Haiti Hospital, also known as the General Hospital, before the idea was abandoned in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. Today, even the stone has disappeared under a pile of rocks and garbage.
Today, there are just three places in Haiti where middle-class and poor people have any hope of getting cancer care they can afford: the General Hospital, the Partners in Health hospital in Mirebalais or the treatment center run by the nonprofit Innovating Health International. None have radiation treatment.
That leaves most cancer patients with few options. “Everybody can’t go to Cuba. Everybody can’t go to the Dominican Republic. Everybody can’t go to the United States,” Auguste said.
It wasn’t always like this. During the nearly 30-year-long Duvalier family dictatorship, Haiti had radiation, also known as radiotherapy. But when the dictatorship fell in 1986, radiation therapy, like many services, disappeared due to lack of money. Today, those who study the incidence of cancer are certain that Haiti’s inability to offer such treatment for cervical cancer has greatly increased deaths of women, many of whom are young, with small children.
“The key for treating cervical cancer is discovering it as quickly as possible,” said Dr. Joseph Bernard Jr., the lead physician at Innovating Health International in Tabarre in metropolitan Port-au-Prince. The cancer treatment center provides low-cost chemotherapy to about 220 cancer patients a month.
“Patients come late,” he said, “not because they haven’t seen a doctor, but because doctors are not able to diagnose cancer on time.”
Pelvic pain and bleeding were the symptoms that initially forced Paul to seek medical treatment earlier this year. After 12 days in a hospital near her home without a diagnosis, she went to Mirebalais. The lab tests, at $466, were unaffordable.
She sought out a private doctor in Port-au-Prince, who ordered up less expensive tests and told her the bad news: “I had cancer.”
He offered surgery. He did not offer radiation therapy, which is key to curing or controlling cervical cancer not treated by surgery. A treatment for more than 50 percent of cancers, radiation can kill off the bad cells and stop the disease’s spread.
But even surgery alone was more than she could afford, at about $1,500.
“I didn’t have it. I ran back to Mirebalais,” she said.
A doctor there told her that the cancer, though advanced, had not yet reached a non-treatable stage. A combination of chemotherapy and radiation, the doctor said, would give her the best chance at a longer life by shrinking the tumor and controlling the disease. But for radiation, Paul would have to go to the neighboring Dominican Republic, and it would cost $10,000 to $15,000.
“I told them I wasn’t going to the Dominican Republic because I don’t have money,” she said.
Her only option was comfort care, called palliative chemotherapy. “They said they will give me medication to ease my pain,” she said.
Dr. Ruth Damuse, the oncology program director at the Mirebalais hospital, said it’s not easy putting patients in palliative care when you know there is a treatment that could save them — but that treatment, radiation, is not in Haiti.
“They could be cured and they are not. It’s very difficult for me as a physician, and as a woman, and as a person in general,” she said.
In August, three days before her next scheduled session of palliative care, Paul scraped together the money. Her sister gave her $1.70, enough for a one-way motorcycle taxi ride to Mirebalais, and she figured she would plead her case to the hospital’s social worker, Oldine Deshommes, for help returning home and paying the $28 for her labs. She would have to sleep in the yard on a piece of cardboard for several nights during the tests and treatment.
At the hospital, Paul found dozens of other patients too poor to pay for lodging all gathered in a covered breezeway — including her friend, Feonia Licin, 51, who’d lost her left breast in December to cancer. Licin was on her 24th day sleeping on the hospital grounds, stringing two chemo sessions together because she couldn’t afford the trip back and forth to her home 12 hours away.
On Paul’s third night, as a rainstorm pounded and water poured off the edges of the roof, she spied two wooden benches. She picked her way through the curled-up figures spread on the ground, and pulled the benches together to make a bed.
Though her own stomach ached with hunger, she was thinking of her children, Marie Stacey and her 21-year-old son, Kajilly, still at home. She had decided not to give up Marie Stacey to an orphanage, she said, even though she still didn’t have school fees.
Cancer had already stolen her role as the provider. She feared it would steal her daughter’s future, too.
“Every time she sees children going to school, she cries,” Paul said, tears welling. “I can’t let her not go to school again.”
The morning of her chemotherapy, Paul waited to turn in her test results to doctors who would decide if she could withstand the treatment. She was anxious, sitting one minute and standing the next, outside the Roselène Jean Bosquet Cancer Center, which opened in February. It’s named after the first patient that Partners In Health treated for cancer in Haiti — but even she had to go to the Dominican Republic for radiation.
And that free radiation program has ended now, due to lack of money.
When her name was finally called at 9:33 a.m., Paul jumped up. Wearing a scarf on her head and a pink top with the words “That’s Life” scrawled across it in French, she walked into the crowded treatment room. A strike by the hospital’s support staff over raises had shut down the facility for two days. With 28 patients to treat, extra chairs were pulled in as saline bags were checked and chemotherapy prepared.
Just after 11 a.m., Paul finally sat down in a treatment recliner, with Licin in the chair next to her. She extended her left arm and covered her face with her hand. Three hours later, she took a bus back home to Bellanger, unsure whether she’d be able to return to the hospital for her next treatment.
When Guerda Janvier was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2015, she had a not-so-secret weapon — financial help from a network of friends and family.
“If I didn’t have money, I would have died already,” she said.
Initially, the cosmetologist, 46, was told by a doctor at the General Hospital that her cancer was operable, so she believed a cure was in the offing.
But surgery never came. Instead, a public health crisis paralyzed the hospital in 2016. Medical residents, upset over low pay and poor working conditions, went on a months-long strike.
Unable to get her surgery, Janvier traveled two hours by bus to Mirebalais, she said, where she was almost certain doctors at the modern facility, with its six operating rooms, would be able to help. The prognosis was not what she expected.
“The doctor looked at all of my exams, and said, ‘Madam, I can’t do anything for you. You might as well await your death,’ ” Janvier recalled.
She was devastated. “I started crying. I cried a lot,” she said.
Then she fought back, telling the doctor: “You don’t have a right to tell me to go take pills and await my death. You are not God. Only God can decide when I’m going to die.”
She found a different doctor, one who would operate. He even offered to charge half his normal fee of $1,400 by performing the surgery at another public hospital — once the strike ended.
So again, she waited. In the meantime, another tragedy struck. Her 21-year-old son was killed by a stray bullet on May 29 — Mother’s Day in Haiti. Janvier fell into a deep depression, unable to think about her own health for months. Eventually, with the help of a psychologist friend, she returned to the search for a doctor to operate.
That was two years ago. Now it’s been been three years since her diagnosis, and Janvier has seen so many doctors she’s lost count.
“I am seeing doctors. I am spending money. I am buying medications. The medications are wasting. They aren’t doing anything for me,” she said describing her fruitless search for a cure. “And yet a doctor said I was operable.”
In June, still looking, she ended up at Innovating Health International, the nonprofit in Port-au-Prince.
To pay for chemotherapy there — and for the doctors she has consulted — Janvier has relied on the generosity of friends and her husband’s elderly mother, who lives in Boston. She’s been too ill to continue working, so they’ve helped her come up with the 25,000 gourdes — about $358 — that Innovating Health International charges her for treatment that the doctors say could possibly shrink her tumor, making it possible to operate.
In neoadjuvant chemotherapy, as it’s called, chemo shrinks the tumor in preparation for surgery. Some studies have shown that when radiation treatment isn’t available, patients’ survival rates could be increased by the therapy.
Bernard, the physician treating Janvier, told her she may be able to get surgery, depending on how much the tumor shrinks. But the advanced stage of the cancer and issues with her kidneys raise questions about whether she is an ideal candidate for the operation.
Janvier has pinned her hopes on it anyway. “The way I used to care for my children, I can’t do it the same anymore,” she said, days later at her home in La Plaine, on the outskirts of the capital. “Once someone told me I could be operated on, it made me happy, because [before that] I didn’t have any hope of having surgery.”
In the United States, cervical cancer rates have declined over the past 30 years because gynecologists have been able to identify and treat precancerous lesions — largely through Pap smears — before they develop into cancer. The HPV vaccine, given to girls and boys before they become sexually active to prevent cancer-causing infections, has also been available since 2006.
But in Haiti, those prevention measures are only just now gaining ground. And that means that “Haiti is among the countries with high incidence and mortality by cervical cancer,” said Laia Bruni, an epidemiologist and director of the Spain-based HPV Information Center of the Catalan Institute of Oncology, which serves as a clearinghouse for cervical cancer data.
Almost everyone who is sexually active will be exposed to HPV in their lifetime. In many cases, the body clears up the infection in one or two years. Although most cervical cancers are caused by HPV, most people who have contracted the virus do not develop cervical cancer. Men with the infection can develop head and neck cancers.
Left untreated, a precancerous lesion can take up to 10 years to become cancerous — if it ever does.
“It is a preventable epidemic,” emphasized Dr. David Walmer, an associate global health professor at Duke Global Health Institute, which has partnered with the Family Health Ministries medical nonprofit that he started to combat cervical cancer in Haiti. “Honestly, nobody should die of this disease.”
Walmer has been researching cervical cancer in Haiti for 25 years. Since 2014, his group has screened more than 23,000 women between Port-au-Prince and Leogane for HPV. Testing for the presence of HPV, he believes, is much more accurate than a Pap smear or visual inspection of the cervix.
Walmer says Haiti’s high cervical cancer rates have two primary causes: the country’s poor healthcare system and its culture.
“There isn’t an organized national healthcare effort to identify and treat precancer lesions,” he said. “Cervical cancer is also a little higher in Haiti because it is culturally acceptable for a man to not be monogamous after marriage, which increases the likelihood that he will spread HPV from one woman to another.”
Haitian women also are at risk due to poor nutrition and multiple pregnancies, other doctors assert, and gynecological visits are not part of many Haitian women’s medical routine. Pap smears are expensive, $25 or $30, and are available only in the country’s two largest cities, Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien.
Bernard, the Innovating Health physician who became involved in cancer care three years ago, calls the frequency of cervical cancer in Haiti and its high death rate “a failure of our health system.”
But there seems to be little political will, which he and others say is needed, to invest in the healthcare system in Haiti.
A 2015 World Bank report found that while Haiti has more hospitals per capita than some poor African countries, it spends less on healthcare per capita than its closest neighbors. The Dominican Republic spends $180; Cuba, $781; and the region of Latin America and Caribbean as a whole, $336. Haiti spends a rock-bottom $13.
A recent analysis of the country’s budgets over the past eight years by a Port-au-Prince economic think tank, Group Croissance, shows that the Haitian government spends more on its parliament and servicing its public debt, owed mostly to Venezuela, than on health. The debt service is more than twice the healthcare budget.
That doesn’t seem likely to change. In September, after committing to spend more on healthcare in the 2018-2019 budget year, parliament agreed to slash the health budget by more than half to just $86.2 million.
That means at the public General Hospital, where there are only four beds for chemo, patients have to pay for their own drugs to fight cancer.
It also means that with no financial assistance from the Haitian government for the poor streaming through their doors, nonprofits, their donors and doctors find themselves rationing healthcare: Which patients do you accept, and which do you turn away? Do you spend on rare lung cancers or save the money for more frequently seen cervical and breast cancers?
“You have to be very careful. You have to prioritize how you use your limited resources,” said Lori Buswell, executive director of the Center for Global Cancer Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, which provides almost $200,000 a year to Partners In Health for its cancer program in Haiti.
“With what you would spend to treat a single patient, you could potentially treat dozens of patients with what is available,” Buswell explained. “We need to focus on curing whatever patients we can and then looking at innovative ways to deliver care that wouldn’t necessarily be the same type that we would be able to deliver in a high-income country but do the best we can, given the resources.”
But there is progress. Initiatives are under way to reverse Haiti’s deadly cervical cancer rates and create a national cancer screening program and a registry for tracking cancer.
“At the end of the day, if you’re able to see and treat more women, screen better, provide HPV testing and HPV vaccines, we will be able to say cervical cancer is part of the past and not the future of Haiti,” said Elizabeth Campa, senior health and policy adviser for Zanmi Lasante, which is Partners In Health’s sister organization in Haiti. “This is the new battle.”
Prevention, though, will come too late for Janvier, the woman who was told her cancer was probably operable. More than anything, she wants surgery so she can reclaim her life.
“Every time I think about it, I have palpitations,” she said. “I am always thinking. Some nights I don’t sleep because I have this sickness inside me.”
On her fourth visit to the clinic at Innovating Health International, where there are more patients than available recliners, Janvier tries to be upbeat. She has lost a lot of weight but jokes about it, calling her newly thin frame “sexy.” All of her hair is gone, and she, like Paul, thinks a lot about her youngest children, 11 year-old fraternal twin girls, Briana and Brithney.
“I love them a lot,” she said, her face lighting up for a moment. “I’m always saying, ‘God, I wouldn’t like to die and leave them’ because when I see how sick I am, it looks like I’m going to die.”
She’s impatient — and then worried.
“I would like to be done with the chemotherapy so I could have surgery,” Janvier said.. “Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Are they really going to operate on me? You think the hospital is really going to let me have the surgery?’ ”
Damuse, the Mirebalais physician who started a yearlong oncology fellowship at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center in October, said doctors have to be careful not to oversell hope. She said there is no evidence that chemotherapy would help enough to allow a patient at Janvier’s advanced stage to get surgery as a treatment.
“To give [chemotherapy], we have to be sure that at the end, the patient will have surgery,” Damuse said.
As she holds out hope that surgery will end her cancer, Javier has struggled to answer one question — how she got this brutal disease in the first place.
“I asked myself, ‘Did I get it from some meat I ate? Or did I get it from having sexual relations with my husband?’ ” she said.
Not long ago, she confronted him. “I asked him, ‘Are you the one who gave me this cancer? Because they tell me if you had an outside woman, you could give it to me.’ ”
Her husband, Janvier said, told her that people who haven’t had sex yet still get cancer, so the disease wasn’t necessarily his fault. Unconvinced, she says she has refused to have sex with him until he seeks treatment.
But even though she now understands the cancer was caused by a virus, she still reverted to old-style Haitian mysticism while seeking a cure.
Janvier, who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism after she got sick, said relatives convinced her to take a six-hour bus trip to bring coffee and moonshine to the graves of dead family members as an offering. She got lost, she said, and never made it there.
Today, her faith is in God — and the possibility of surgery. That’s given her a new determination to beat cancer and prove wrong the doctor who told her to prepare for death.
After her August appointment, she missed two more chemotherapy appointments, though, because of poor kidney function. Her doctor, Bernard, says she may need to begin palliative care soon.
Janvier is undaunted.
“I am praying, I am asking God if he can help me find the money to operate,” she said.
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President Donald Trump is likely to run into stiff resistance if he pitches federal intervention to solve California’s rising homelessness crisis, absent buy-in from the state.
Experts say there are steps the federal government can take to help California and other states get people off the streets, but they would require local cooperation. Any effort to “crack down” on homeless encampments in California, as the Washington Post reported the White House was considering, would face immediate legal challenges and local opposition.
“Unless the administration is going to try to invoke some emergency powers as it has done to build its wall, there is no authority for the federal government to relocate people that I can think of,” affordable housing attorney Adam Norlander told McClatchy, via email.
White House officials denied that they have firm plans in the works, emphasizing that the administration is still researching options. But they made clear that the president blames California’s Democratic leaders for the surging number of homeless people across the state, in yet another broadside in Trump’s long-running feud with the state.
“Like many Americans, the president has taken notice of the homelessness crisis, particularly in cities and states where the liberal policies of overregulation, excessive taxation, and poor public service delivery are combining to dramatically increase poverty and public health risks,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman.
Trump in June appointed a council to investigate barriers to affordable housing and to recommend solutions. Since then, Deer said, “President Trump has directed his team to go further and develop a range of policy options for consideration to deal with this tragedy.”
White House officials have recently held high-level meetings on the issue. One of the things they have zeroed in on is the high price of housing in California, according to one senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
An administration team was on the ground in California late last week, continuing its research, an official confirmed. The Washington Post first reported that Trump aides had visited a former Federal Aviation Administration facility in the Los Angeles area earlier in the week as part of a search for sites to relocate homeless people.
Under a 1987 law, the federal government can transfer or lease vacant federal properties to cities, states or local nonprofit organizations to help provide housing for the homeless.
“There are some good things that can be done with vacant federal properties,” said Tristia Bauman, a senior attorney with the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. “That is a program that is very underutilized,” Bauman said.
She pointed out, however, that any move to repurpose federal buildings as homeless shelters or low-income housing would require “some level of participation and cooperation” by a city, county or nonprofit organization. Under the federal program, the local partner would be responsible for running the shelter.
The federal government also funds a number of programs to address homelessness, including HUD’s Continuum of Care program to rehouse homeless families and individuals, noted Norlander, who worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) before joining the law firm Klein Hornig in Washington, D.C. “But these programs are run at the local level by state and local governments and nonprofits.”
Additional resources for such programs “would go a long way to addressing homelessness,” he said.
But “the idea of forcing homeless people into federal facilities through some kind federally led, law enforcement/military style effort is also inhumane and grotesque, and does not appear to have been thought out so hopefully that is not actually the strategy.”
Both Bauman and Norlander said that such an effort would likely violate homeless people’s constitutional rights, including the right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures.
A federal court also ruled last year that cities cannot punish homeless people who sleep in public spaces if they can’t provide sufficient, accessible shelter space for their homeless population. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision in April. The city of Boise, where the case originated, has appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, which has yet to decide if it will consider the case.
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, the recently appointed chair of the state’s homelessness commission, told the Sacramento Bee earlier this week that he was “wary” of the administration’s offer to help address the state’s homelessness crisis.
“And yet, if the federal government wants to offer resources to help bring people indoors and to offer federal facilities to shelter and house people, we should readily listen,” he said. “We cannot afford to politicize an issue which needs real thought and real commitment.”
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Will tonight’s debate in Houston be the first time affordable housing makes it to the presidential debate stage?
The 2020 election marks a turning point for affordable housing as a major presidential campaign issue, said Samuel Gunter, executive director for the North Carolina Housing Coalition, but the topic hasn’t been featured in earlier debates.
“It’s a problem across the country, but it’s not a problem that really gets talked about on the national stage,” he said. A social media campaign led by the National Low Income Housing Coalition encourages moderators from ABC News and Univision to ask candidates about housing.
Still, Gunter called the increased focus on housing “a sea change” from 2016, with a couple theories why.
Rents and home prices continue to climb, making it a kitchen table issue for more Americans, he said, and many Democratic candidates have dealt directly with housing issues in their previous local government or policy roles.
About one-third of American households are cost-burdened — paying more than 30% of their income on housing — according to a Harvard University analysis published in December.
“Housing policy impacts everyone. Land use, lending regulations and the cost of housing (affects) the extremely low-income to the other end of the market,” Gunter said of the importance of debating the issue. “To not have that be featured for the prospective leaders of our county? It’s critical for that to be part of the conversation.”
Several 2020 candidates already have housing platforms or have discussed the topic in interviews and public appearances. Below are some proposals for the 10 candidates who qualified for Thursday’s debate:
Sen. Cory Booker proposes a refundable tax credit for renters paying more than 30% of their gross income. The credit would cover the gap between 30% of their income and rent. He’s also proposed the idea of “Baby Bonds:” federally funded savings accounts of at least $1,000 for all children given at birth, with more money going to low-income families. Accounts could grow to nearly $50,000 by age 18 for low-income households and could be used for, as Booker puts it, “the kind of things that create wealth and change life trajectories, including putting a down payment on a home.”
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, proposes a public trust to purchase abandoned properties and give them through forgivable liens to residents who meet income requirements and have a local residency history or live in former red-lined areas.
Julian Castro’s “people first housing” plan includes expanding the federal low-income housing voucher program, known as Section 8. The former HUD secretary supports creating a refundable tax credit for a portion of rental expenses and support new affordable housing construction with “at least $45 billion per year” for the national Housing Trust Fund and Capital Management Fund.
Sen. Kamala Harris has introduced the “Rent Relief Act” in the Senate, a refundable tax credit for families paying more than 30% of gross income on rent and utilities. In her presidential platform she proposes a $100 billion plan for black home ownership with down payment and closing cost assistance from HUD up to $25,000 for people in historically red-lined communities.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s plans include investment in rural communities, specifically increasing rental assistance programs and attracting private investment to rural areas. She also outlines plans for portable savings accounts for emergency rental relief and to help seniors stay in their homes.
Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman, doesn’t have a specific housing plan in his platform, but was quoted at a New Hampshire event supporting “direct federal government intervention in housing, including incentivizing the creation of millions of additional housing units in this country, preferably closer to where people actually work” to promote mixed-income communities.
Sen. Bernie Sanders called rent control “crucial“ to his family’s economic stability when he was young in an op-ed earlier this year. He supports expanding the national housing trust fund to build more than 7 million housing units for low-income, elderly, and disabled Americans.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s housing platform centers on the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act, which she introduced in the Senate. It calls for $500 billion over 10 years “to build, preserve, and rehab units that will be affordable to lower-income families.” Her plan also toughens housing discrimination laws and creates a down payment assistance program for people living in former red-lined communities, aimed at closing the gap between rates of white and black home ownership.
Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, has proposed “relaxing” zoning ordinances to increase affordable housing “encourage the building of new innovative housing options like micro-apartments and communal living for people in high-density urban areas.”
This work was made possible in part by grant funding from Report for America/GroundTruth Project and the Foundation For The Carolinas.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture is proposing that families who receive temporary government benefits should no longer be automatically eligible for food assistance, a change that could restrict access to free school lunches for 265,000 children.
In California, about 3.2 million children use free school lunches, according to the California Department of Education. It is unclear how many children would no longer be eligible if this rule went into effect.
Under the proposal, about 3.1 million people would lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides money for food to low-income Americans and is commonly called food stamps.
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue framed it as a necessary change to cut down on abuse of the system. But the move was met with widespread disdain among Democrats, who called it “cruel” and “harmful.”
“It is outrageous, cruel and galling that after giving trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthy and big corporations, the Trump administration, under the guise of fiscal austerity, is attempting to take nutrition assistance away from millions of Americans on the verge of hunger — including school children and people with disabilities,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York.
A similar policy was proposed in a House Republican version of the farm bill in the last Congress, which was rejected. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that provision in the Republican bill would have saved the federal government $5 billion over a 10-year period and withheld SNAP benefits from about 400,000 households.
The USDA estimated its newly proposed rule would save $2.5 billion per year and strip benefits from 3.1 million people — both significantly higher numbers.
Currently, 43 U.S. states allow residents to automatically become eligible for food stamps if they receive benefits from another federal program known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.
Families with income at maximum 200 percent over the poverty level are eligible for TANF, while families can only make 130 percent of the poverty level or below to be eligible for SNAP on its own.
The USDA wants to change that by requiring those who receive TANF benefits to pass a review of their income and assets to determine whether they are also eligible for free food from SNAP.
“For too long, this loophole has been used to effectively bypass important eligibility guidelines,” Perdue said. “Too often, states have misused this flexibility without restraint.”
Rep. Josh Harder, D-Turlock, called the proposal — which will have a 60-day comment period before the USDA decides to enact it — “a complete disaster.” About 63 percent of children in Harder’s district around Modesto use free or reduced school lunches.
“I don’t know what genius came up with the idea to take school lunches away from our kids, but we can’t let this happen,” Harder said. “Literally thousands of children in the Central Valley rely on the school lunch program just to get something to eat — this garbage proposal would rob them of the nutrition they need to stay healthy and get a good education.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Twitter also criticized the proposal. “This rule would take food away from working families. Prevent kids from getting school meals. And make it MORE difficult for states to help. Doesn’t the @GOP call themselves the party of ‘family values?’ he wrote.
California generally represents roughly 10 percent of the national SNAP caseload, but it is not clear at this point if Californians would represent 10 percent of the individuals affected by the proposal.
Sara Kimberlin, a senior policy analyst at the California Budget and Policy Center, said the proposal would “increase food insecurity among children growing up in low-income families, especially because those children would also lose eligibility for school meals.”
Limiting food stamps “would increase economic hardship among families with low incomes who are already struggling to make ends meet in California, where the cost of basic needs like housing and child care, in particular, is very high in many areas,” said Kimberlin, whose organization tends to advocate for social services.
Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, gave a tentative statement of support for the administration after reviewing the rule.
“(SNAP) ‘categorical eligibility’ was established to simplify the application process for folks already eligible for benefits from similar assistance programs. Over time, changes have been made administratively to broaden categorical eligibility,” Roberts said. “Given the breadth of these changes, this proposed rule allows USDA to use existing authority to review these regulations and consider comments to ensure states are using this tool as it was intended — for program simplification.”
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More than 610 drinking water sources in 43 states contain potentially unsafe levels of chemical compounds that have been linked to birth defects, cancers, infertility, and reduced immune responses in children, according to a new database compiled by the Environmental Working Group and Northeastern University.
Using Pentagon data released last year and recently obtained public water utility reports, the researchers now estimate that more than 19 million people are exposed to water contaminated with per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS.
The new research shows the broad extent of the problem, that the harmful chemical compounds found concentrated in military water sources across the United States have also been reported hundreds more public drinking water systems than was previously known.
“This is a national crisis and it requires a national response,” said Bill Walker, vice president of the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit organization focused on health and the environment.
While PFAS are found in everyday items such as teflon and fast-food wrappers, the chemicals are concentrated in the fire-fighting foam that military bases, ships and commercial airports have used for decades.
Military bases and the communities surrounding them report some of the highest levels of contamination -- much higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2016 recommendation of a maximum exposure level of 70 parts per trillion.
Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in the state of Washington reports some water sources have levels as high as 58,000 parts per trillion and forner Myrtle Beach Air Force Base in South Carolina reports some water sources contain as much as 264,000 parts per trillion of the compounds. Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California reports one of the highest levels across the military, at 8 million parts per trillion.
The contamination was not just discovered on military bases. The Pentagon tested off-base wells and public water sources near each facility. In cases where the water source reported PFAS levels higher than 70 parts per trillion, the Pentagon provided filters or alternate drinking water supplies.
The new data shows a broader picture that includes non-military base communities. For example it includes data from Miami Dade Water and Sewer Authority, finding that Miami has previously reported up to 43 parts per trillion of PFAS in its water samples.
“We believe that is way too high,” Walker said. The EWG has argued that exposure levels as low as 1 part per trillion could lead to adverse health effects, and would like to see a national standard set lower than 70 parts per trillion.
For now, without an enforceable standard, there is no requirement for the military to clean up the groundwater or wells to the EPA standard or any other. The Pentagon estimates cleanup at the known contaminated sites could cost more than $2 billion.
And Miami’s data, although only recently obtained, dates back to 2015 and doesn’t give residents the tools they need to know if their water supply now is safe, the researchers said.
“Because there is no legal requirement to continue monitoring for these chemicals, the residents of Miami don’t know if the PFAS contamination has remained the same, gotten better or gotten worse over the last three years,” said Alexis Temkin, an EWG toxicologist.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation in late April that would require the EPA to set an enforceable standard, known as a minimum contaminant level, for PFAS within the next two years.
Chairman of the House Oversight subcommittee on the environment, Rep. Harley Rouda, D-California, held the first congressional hearing on the issue earlier this year and said additional legislation is possible.
“All options for future oversight action remain on the table,” Rouda said.
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Jim Clyburn has the “10-20-30” plan. Tim Scott has “Opportunity Zones.”
For years, these two South Carolina members of Congress — Clyburn a House Democrat, Scott a Senate Republican, both African American — have promoted their own anti-poverty proposals in parallel lanes, talking past each other rather than working together.
Clyburn, the U.S. House Majority Whip, has even publicly expressed deep skepticism about the integrity of Scott’s approach to helping the nation’s poor, suggesting it picks “winners and losers.”
Now, however, Clyburn appears to be softening his rhetoric, and there is a chance his and Scott’s proposals can intersect — if partisan politics don’t get in the way.
On Wednesday, Clyburn introduced a new version of his “10-20-30” plan, which requires that 10 percent of funding for certain federal programs go to “persistent poverty” counties, defined as places where 20 percent of the population has lived under the poverty line for 30 years or more.
The revised legislation would expand the formula to even more federal programs and, in a twist, would additionally require applicable federal programs to invest in census tracts with poverty rates of more than 20 percent.
Census tracts — geographic areas smaller than counties — are the entities eligible for designation as “Opportunity Zones.”
The Opportunity Zone program, which Scott secured as part of the 2017 Republican tax law, would provide tax incentives to businesses making long-term investments in economically distressed communities. The zones are selected by governors from eligible census tracts.
Between 2009 and 2017, Clyburn was able to work with Democrats and Republicans to implement the 10-20-30 formula across nearly three dozen federal departments. The Opportunity Zone program is still getting off the ground, but there is tremendous enthusiasm for the initiative among elected officials and community leaders in both parties, as well as with investors.
In an interview with McClatchy on Tuesday, Clyburn explained how applying the 10-20-30 formula to census tracts would allow poor communities to qualify for grants even if their counties don’t meet the 10-20-30 threshold.
“Richland County (in South Carolina), I don’t think it’s a 10-20-30 county. But Eastover, Hopkins and other communities around Columbia are,” Clyburn said.
He also described, for perhaps the first time, how his proposal could work alongside Scott’s. He gave as an example an Opportunity Zone in Charleston, where a real estate developer could receive tax breaks for building new housing. At the same time, 10-20-30 funding could establish the infrastructure for internet access near that development.
“It’s a great deal for Tim Scott,” Clyburn said of his 10-20-30 plan. “To be doing what he is with Opportunity Zones, and for me to be who I am and what I am with 10-20-30, we complement each other.”
In a statement to McClatchy, Scott’s press secretary, Ken Farnaso, said the senator “continues to believe that Opportunity Zones are the strongest tool to fight poverty in our nation.
“We are pleased to hear Congressman Clyburn shares support for Opportunity Zones,” Farnaso continued, “and welcome further conversations on ideas that will help the 52 million Americans living in distressed communities.”
Clyburn said the two South Carolinians largely communicate through their “mutual friend” Cory Booker, the junior U.S. senator from New Jersey and a 2020 Democratic presidential contender.
Booker — one of three black U.S. senators along with Scott and fellow Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris of California — is a co-sponsor of both 10-20-30 and Opportunity Zones legislation. His allegiance to both policies signals potential for Clyburn and Scott to ultimately find common ground.
On Wednesday, following a joint press conference with Clyburn to roll out what the two lawmakers called “10-20-30 2.0,” Booker also suggested he played a role in Clyburn having “warmed” to the concept of Opportunity Zones.
“I’ve had a lot of conversations, as have our teams, and (Clyburn) understands the way we’ve written (the two bills), they’re really getting at the same issues ... these two bills are very complementary,” Booker told McClatchy. “I’ve definitely spent a lot of time talking to him and helped him understand our bill better.”
But while Clyburn’s staff has contacted Scott’s office to discuss the 10-20-30 legislation, so far the lawmakers have not spoken directly to each other about their proposals.
Those conversations could be critical. Though Clyburn’s bill is likely to gain traction in the Democratic-controlled House, he might need a Republican champion in the GOP-controlled Senate. Scott has some influence in the Senate when it comes to convincing colleagues it behooves his party to embrace policies that help disadvantaged Americans.
Republicans might also be eager to pass new legislation that can be touted as enhancing Opportunity Zones, touted as a crowning achievement of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Clyburn didn’t suggest on Tuesday he was eager to talk to Scott, but made it clear he thought previous reports about his opposition to Opportunity Zones were inaccurate.
“I’m against governors leaving out impoverished communities,” Clyburn said. “I’m not against Opportunity Zones.”
Farnaso, in his statement for Scott, did not present the senator’s specific views on 10-20-30.
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Congress is considering giving a $750 million bump in help to comprehensive programs to help the homeless, with agreement from both Democrats and Republicans that it’s an innovative approach to a persistent issue.
The bill, introduced last week by California Democrats Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Ted Lieu, would give the grant money to localities, such as local governments and nonprofits, who could then dole the money out to programs that provided housing, mental health services, substance abuse services, case managers and more to the homeless. Its goal: To comprehensively address the issues that contribute to chronic homelessness.
“The bill emphasizes the services as well as the housing, which makes it stand out from other bills we’ve seen,” said Robert Friant, spokesman for the Corporation for Supportive Housing, a vocal supporter of the bill.
By doing that, Friant said they hope it will cut down on the amount of homeless in the long run, which in turn reduces strains on hospitals, shelters, social services and the criminal justice system.
The $750 million pot isn’t nearly enough to address the nationwide issue — in California alone, Gov. Gavin Newsom slated $500 million to addressing homelessness in his budget and mayors still told him it wasn’t enough — but advocates say it’s a good start.
“Most federal funding comes in the form of demonstration projects or small and targeted research,” said Zach Tilly, policy associate at the Children’s Defense Fund, another advocate for the bill. “This is a major pot of money for supportive housing.”
Since the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment to prosecute people for sleeping on public property if there are not enough shelter beds or other alternatives, cities in California have been looking for alternatives to house the significant homeless population.
In Sacramento, the mayor issued a public apology and city officials changed a local law after public outcry on officers telling the homeless to move from the grounds surrounding Sacramento City Hall. The homeless are now permitted to sleep there at night, but not during the day.
In Modesto, officials have turned parks and areas under bridges as secure areas for the homeless to go and live in tents. There are 1,356 homeless people in Modesto’s county, Stanislaus.
“Hundreds of our neighbors in the Central Valley spend their nights outside in homeless camps or on the street,” said Rep. Josh Harder, D-Modesto, who is co-sponsoring the House bill. “It’s just not right and we have to do something about it.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who is co-sponsoring the bill, said she hasn’t yet spoken on the issue to Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, who chairs the Senate committee the bill was referred to last week. Alexander’s office declined to comment on the record, citing that the bill was just referred to the committee. There is no official text yet.
“The homeless issue is growing, whether you’re in cities or rural areas “ Murkowski said. “I don’t know (what the bill’s chances are), but I know it’s an issue that is in every part of the country and I think we’ll get some good feedback and support for it.”
But even a bill to try to get the homeless off the streets might get lost in the partisan climate of Washington.
There’s hope that the $750 million figure, while not enough to fully address the issue, hits the right mark on significant enough to help but not so high the bill is railroaded before it begins.
“It’s not nearly enough to fully deal with the problem, that would be in the tens of billions of dollars,” Tilly said. “In short: It’s a lot of money — it’s not enough.”
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South Carolina’s public education system would lose close to $246 million in federal grant money, if President Donald Trump’s proposed federal budget was signed into law.
More than 14,000 local students would not be able to attend after-school programs. The cuts could bring to an end a new partnership between the S.C. Department of Education and the University of South Carolina to promote family engagement in rural schools. And the evaporation of a $28 million grant would be deeply felt in some of the poorest classrooms around the state.
“While the funded amounts may seem insignificant, it is important to remember that a little bit goes a long way in many of our rural areas,” said Ryan Brown, the S.C. Department of Education’s chief spokesman.
The administration’s fiscal year 2020 spending request to Congress, submitted earlier this week, proposes eliminating 29 programs intended to bolster public education around the country.
The president’s budget request “supports the (Trump) Administration’s commitment to eliminating funding for programs that have achieved their original purpose, duplicate other programs, are narrowly focused, or are unable to demonstrate effectiveness,” reads the official budget blueprint submitted by the U.S. Department of Education.
Cutting these programs would achieve “annual savings of $6.7 billion,” the federal agency says.
There’s little chance the administration will succeed in seeing these programs scrapped. Congress decides which parts of the Trump administration’s budget request to enact into law, and it’s not likely the Democrat-controlled U.S. House will agree to make any of these cuts.
However, the president’s budget — influenced in part by former S.C. legislator and congressman Mick Mulvaney who was Trump’s budget director before being tapped as acting White House chief of staff — gives insight into Trump’s vision for public schools and their students, including in South Carolina.
U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the third ranking House Democrat, indicated he would use his clout to fight these proposed cuts, saying many of the education programs targeted for elimination are those currently being taken advantage of by his constituents.
Federal funding for public education “plays a very important role” in South Carolina, Clyburn said, adding that “those people who argue for maintaining education as a state issue” are in effect also argu(ing) in favor of minimally adequate education in South Carolina.”
Many Republicans could also balk at requests to cut funding for initiatives that benefit their poorest constituents. And in a clear sign that the president’s budget is “dead on arrival” on Capitol Hill, many GOP lawmakers conceded they had not familiarized themselves with the blueprint’s details.
“I have not actually read that part of the budget, so I can’t really comment on it,” U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said Tuesday. “I can say that there are ways for us to improve the quality of education and we should focus on those ways.”
The S.C. Department of Education strongly disagrees with the administration’s assertion that certain federal education grant programs are unnecessary, painting a stark picture of what schools in the state could have to contend with if the Trump administration’s vision became a reality.
South Carolina currently receives $18.3 million through 21st Century Community Learning Centers grants, which fund educational programs outside regular school hours. Programming through these grants are taking place in 190 schools in 50 districts around the state.
The Trump administration says the Learning Centers program “lacks strong evidence of meeting its objectives, such as improving student achievement.” But Brown, with the Department of Education, said the program serves as important purpose.
“Some of the after-school and summer programs that this federal money funds are the only engaging activities that many of these students have,” Brown said.
According to April 2018 statistics from the After School Alliance, a national advocacy organization, for every South Carolina student in an after school program, three more would like to participate if such a program were available.
A federal grant to help states establish “Statewide Family Engagement Centers” to promote parental engagement in the educational lives of their children also is on the chopping block.
Brown said the S.C. Department of Education recently received a grant to partner with the University of South Carolina to form such a center to help engage parents in the state’s rural communities. The partnership is expecting a total of $4.7 million from the federal government over the course of five years.
Trump’s budget also would cut:
▪ A little more than $17 million in grants through a program aimed at promoting the use of technology and “digital literacy” in the classrooms;
▪ $300,000 to help individuals with disabilities receive job training; and
▪ More than $28 million in grants aimed at high-poverty schools to help pay for teacher salaries, professional development and school supplies. These grants, the largest the state receives through the U.S. Department of Education, are also known as “Title II, Part A” funding, and are distributed to all school districts based on enrollment and poverty.
“The loss of these funds would impact ALL S.C. students and teachers, but particularly those in poverty whose schools receive more funding than those who do not,” ” Brown said of the Title II, Part A grants.
The Trump budget calls these grants “largely duplicative.”
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\n","template_type":"","story_teaser":"What vision does President Trump have for S.C. public schools? His budget would take millions from them","lead_media":{"id":"226581034","url":"https://www.thestate.com/latest-news/h1b73d/picture226581034","asset_type":"picture","state":"published","title":"SCdevosVisit022200174","publication":"thestate","layout_option":"","home":"/web/v1/sections/7051","modified_date":1550780099,"allow_comments":false,"allow_index":false,"allow_follow":false,"published_date":1550780099,"thumbnail":"https://www.thestate.com/latest-news/h1b73d/picture226581034/alternates/FREE_1140/SCdevosVisit022200174","href":"/web/v1/content/226581034","access_tags":["matbasic"],"credit":"online@thestate.com","dateline":"","caption":"U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos greets students in the lunch room at Timmonsville Middle School on Feb. 21, 2019, in Timmonsville, S.C. Devos joined Deputy Secretary of Education Mitchell Zais, Rep.Tom Rice (R-S.C.), and South Carolina Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman during a trip to observe classroom instruction.","photographer":"Sean Rayford","is_mugshot":false,"text_alignment":"Default","summary":"","byline":"","kicker":""},"owner":"DCBureau","allow_comments":true,"topic_tags":[],"image":"https://www.thestate.com/latest-news/h1b73d/picture226581034/alternates/LANDSCAPE_768/SCdevosVisit022200174"},{"id":"227151309","url":"https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article227151309.html","asset_type":"story","state":"published","title":"Fort Worth mayor leverages White House access","publication":"star-telegram","layout_option":"","home":"/web/v1/sections/3188","home_section":{"name":"White House","url":"https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/"},"modified_date":1551831308,"allow_index":true,"allow_follow":true,"meta_title":"Fort Worth Betsy Price bets big on Trump’s White House","originating_url":"https://www.star-telegram.com/latest-news/article227151309.html","meta_description":"Betsy Price, one of the nation’s few Republican mayors, has found eager partners in a White House that sees Fort Worth as fertile ground for its approach to economic revival.","published_date":1551830520,"thumbnail":"https://www.star-telegram.com/latest-news/xktm4x/picture225090285/alternates/LANDSCAPE_768/Betsy%20Price%20White%20House","authors":[{"name":"Andrea Drusch","email":"adrusch@mcclatchydc.com"}],"keywords":"betsy price, fort worth, white house, ben carson, beth van duyne, trump administration, public-private partnerships, housing and urban development, envision centers","access_tags":["matbasic"],"additional_sections":["23238","21306","80000","23151"],"credit":"","dateline":"WASHINGTON","summary":"Betsy Price, one of the nation’s few Republican mayors, has found eager partners in a White House that sees Fort Worth as fertile ground for its approach to economic revival.","content":"
The Trump Administration wants allies for its ideas to address poverty in urban centers. Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price wants federal money for renovations to her city.
Together they’ve turned Fort Worth into a Republican case study of public-private partnership for urban renewal — and built a relationship that’s earned Price unusual access for a mayor to a White House.
Price, a Republican, has visited the White House five times in the past two years. Interviews with administration officials and people familiar with the meetings describe her work on the trips as a savvy effort to leverage connections to help Fort Worth with projects the White House supports, and ones that still kindle skepticism among administration staff.
“She has not been shy at all about asking for what her community needs,” said Beth Van Duyne, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s regional director for Fort Worth. “She comes in and she is very organized, she knows exactly what’s she’s asking for, she tells us how to get there.”
Price is well-known for seizing her opportunities.
When Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings invited her to greet the Obama family on the tarmac after a 2016 Dallas police shooting, Price used the occasion to chat with then First Lady Michelle Obama about her city’s fitness initiatives.
In the White House meetings under the Obama administration, “she had a mission in mind, she knew who she needed to talk to,” said Van Duyne, who attended those gatherings as the mayor of Irving. “She threw out her Fort Worth, Texas, hand, ‘Howdy,’ and got those meetings set.”
Now under an administration that’s regularly singled out Price, one of the nation’s few big city Republican mayors, she’s been given increasing access to an audience of eager partners.
“The White House is obviously focusing on their high-growth cities,” said Price, who noted that Trump prefers smaller, more intimate meetings that have allowed her more access than previous administrations. “My theory is you’ve got to be at the table.”
At a White House visit as part of the United States Conference of Mayors in January 2017, Price was one of a handful of mayors who was asked to sit at the table with the president; President Donald Trump referred to Price at the time as a “fantastic friend.” Price was invited back weeks later for the rollout of Trump’s plans for infrastructure.
During that infrastructure event, Price requested a separate meeting with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson to discuss her own plans to address housing shortages in Fort Worth, and to request one of the agency’s EnVision Centers, which aims to connect low-income people with government help for housing, education and health care.
“Mayor Price personally put her application for her city’s EnVision Center in the secretary’s hand,” said Van Duyne, whose agency awarded Fort Worth one of 17 centers nationwide. “Nobody wants to be the one to say no to Mayor Price.”
Price’s approach has opened plenty of doors in Trump’s White House, which views Fort Worth was as fertile ground for its approach to economic revival.
Ivanka Trump, who helps run the White House Office of American Innovation, has taken a particular interest in Price’s plans for early childhood education.
And in addition to the EnVision Center, the city is home to three Opportunity Zones — a key piece of GOP’s plans to address poverty by offering tax incentives for businesses that come into low-income areas. The zones have come under criticism from some Democrats who say they’re thinly-veiled corporate handouts.
The city has also taken advantage of programs that incentivize investors to overhaul outdated low-income housing units, which Price got special permission from Carson to expand in Fort Worth.
Price launched a challenge to find private partners for that initiative to find housing for 100 homeless veterans in 100 days at the end of last year, and blew through that goal with 181 units due to an excess of eager partners.
On Wednesday, Price will host Carson in Fort Worth on Wednesday to see the results.
The HUD secretary’s visit comes after Price’s most recent White House trek in January, where she spoke to Carson, Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar about her city’s success with their public-private match programs. Carson now holds up Fort Worth as a model for best practices for some of those programs, and Price has been asked to speak about them at conferences with other mayors.
“Dallas Fort Worth has thrived under the leadership of Mayor Price thanks in large part to her focus on economic and workforce development, which are shared priorities between the Trump Administration and many other local officials across the country,” said White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere. “The President appreciates the leadership of the mayor and looks forward to continuing to work with her.”
So far the Trump administration’s investments in Fort Worth have yet to yield much attention for the president, who lost the city of Fort Worth by three percentage points to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“If the EnVision center does what it’s expected to do, it would do great things... right now it’s in its infant stage,” said Rev. Bruce Datcher, pastor at Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Southeast Fort Worth.
“It’s her job to look out for the welfare of this city, and if White House and the administration is where resources are, to bring back and help this city, then I think that’s her responsibility,” Datcher said of Price.
Price has used her access to push for projects the White House is less fond of as well, such as the $1.16 billion Panther Island project, which was skipped over for federal funding by the Trump administration in June 2018.
Though the project has received federal funding in the past, Trump’s budget office says it doesn’t consider the project to be a high priority for federal funding because it lacks an analysis proving that its economic benefits would outweigh its costs.
In September, Price was invited to the White House to attend an economic summit hosted by the Office of American Innovation, which is run by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and aimed at applying solutions from corporate America to solve the nation’s biggest problems. Price sat through the summit, moderated in part by Ivanka Trump. After the meeting ended, Price darted out of the West Wing conference room in hopes of catching then-White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, who attended part of the summit, to lobby on behalf of Panther Island.
Price didn’t get to talk to Mulvaney, but used the visit to meet with another budget office official, Jim Hertz, to discuss Panther Island, according to her office. After that meeting she called for an audit of the project, aimed at re-gaining the confidence of a skeptical White House.
Back home a growing band of critics has become increasingly vocal in opposing their city’s GOP leadership since Trump’s election. But Price’s internal polling, conducted at the end of February by the GOP firm Ragnar Research and shared with the Star-Telegram, showed her approval at 71 percent.
Price is seeking re-election to a fifth two-year term this May, and faces three challengers. That’s after running unopposed in 2013 and 2015, and winning reelection against a single challenger with 70 percent of the vote in 2017.
Still, many Democrats say they don’t fault her for leveraging her White House access.
“Truth of the matter is Texas, and Fort Worth in particular, don’t get much out of their U.S. senators, so that increases temptation for other people to reach out on behalf of the city,” said Matt Angle, a Texas Democratic strategist and director of the Lone Star Project, a political action committee trying to elect Democrats in north Texas.
Agreed, said Rawlings, another Democrat: “Your first commitment as mayor is the citizens of your city and you have to do everything in your power to make sure your city’s in a better place. If it means visiting the White House when the White House is unpopular, you do it.”
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\n","template_type":"","story_teaser":"","lead_media":{"id":"225090285","url":"https://www.star-telegram.com/latest-news/xktm4x/picture225090285","asset_type":"picture","state":"published","title":"Betsy Price White House","publication":"star-telegram","layout_option":"","home":"/web/v1/sections/3188","modified_date":1551833442,"allow_comments":false,"allow_index":false,"allow_follow":false,"published_date":1548446236,"thumbnail":"https://www.star-telegram.com/latest-news/xktm4x/picture225090285/alternates/FREE_1140/Betsy%20Price%20White%20House","href":"/web/v1/content/225090285","access_tags":["matbasic"],"additional_sections":["21306"],"credit":"Fort Worth Star-Telegram","dateline":"","caption":"Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price is shown at the White House Rose Garden ahead of President Donald Trump’s announcement on re-opening the government, January 25, 2019.","photographer":"Andrea Drusch","is_mugshot":false,"text_alignment":"Default","summary":"","byline":"","kicker":""},"owner":"FortWorth","allow_comments":true,"topic_tags":[],"image":"https://www.star-telegram.com/latest-news/xktm4x/picture225090285/alternates/LANDSCAPE_768/Betsy%20Price%20White%20House"},{"id":"220555620","url":"https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/policy/poverty/article220555620.html","asset_type":"story","state":"published","title":"Slice of Mississippi population that lacks a bank account is growing","publication":"mcclatchydc","layout_option":"","home":"/web/v1/sections/80000","home_section":{"name":"Poverty","url":"https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/policy/poverty/"},"modified_date":1540440011,"allow_index":true,"allow_follow":true,"meta_title":"FDIC sees ‘unbanked’ households rise in Mississippi","originating_url":"https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/policy/poverty/article220555620.html","meta_description":"Even as national trends improved, the portion of households in Mississippi classified as ‘unbanked’ — those without a bank account — rose last year. The state, however, did notch improvement in the percentage of ‘underbanked’ — people who used payday loans and similar high-interest instruments.","published_date":1540440000,"thumbnail":"https://cf-images.us-east-1.prod.boltdns.net/v1/static/5615998037001/85d8be6d-d286-4f10-8f23-0dc4a0421bd6/6a3aa7c5-59a9-46cd-83e3-6fb9e6bd2c76/480x270/match/image.jpg","authors":[{"name":"Kevin G. Hall","email":"khall@mcclatchydc.com"}],"keywords":"unbanked, underbanked, consumer finance, debt, payday loans, title loans, predatory lending, Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, FDIC, check cashing, informal economy, poverty, loans","access_tags":["matbasic"],"additional_sections":["80000","21309"],"credit":"","dateline":"WASHINGTON","summary":"Even as national trends improved, the portion of households in Mississippi classified as ‘unbanked’ — those without a bank account — rose last year. The state, however, did notch improvement in the percentage of ‘underbanked’ — people who used payday loans and similar high-interest instruments.","content":"
The percentage of Mississippi households without a bank account — the so-called “unbanked” — rose sharply in 2017 even as the national percentage fell last year.
A full 15.8 percent of households in Mississippi were unbanked, borrowing money or cashing checks outside the banking system, according to an every-other-year survey released Tuesday by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a major bank regulator.
The survey, which has been done since 2009, showed that on a national level the number of unbanked households fell to 6.5 percent, down from 7 percent in 2015 and 7.7 percent in 2013.
That makes Mississippi’s rising percentage, more than double the national average, all the more remarkable. The state’s 15.8 percent rate was up from 12.6 percent in 2015 and 14.5 percent in 2013.
Mississippi also ranked poorly, relative to the rest of the nation, in the measurement of the underbanked — households where a member of the family has an account at an insured financial institution but has obtained financial services or credit outside of the banking system. Neighboring Southern states also fared poorly.
“In a lot of the Southern states, they have the unfortunate convergence of both a lot of families who are struggling to make ends meet and government officials that turn a blind eye to the pernicious practices that exploit those families,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the advocacy group National Consumer Law Center.
In a sign that the Mississippi economy is improving, however, the percentage of area households classified as underbanked was 22.5 percent, well above the national average of 18.7 percent but a drop of three percentage points from the rate in 2015.
Underbanked households are also characterized as ones that over the past 12 months went outside the banking system for a money order, to cash a check or send money abroad, taken out a loan in advance of a paycheck, borrowed against their car title or from a pawn shop, used a rent-to-own service or borrowed against an expected tax refund.
Use of these kinds of products in Mississippi actually fell slightly along with the underbanked number. About 11.4 percent of Mississippi households took out alternative-loan products from non-bank lenders in 2016 or 2017, a reduction of half a percentage point from 2014-2015 survey.
A recent Sun Herald investigation revealed that federal bankruptcy data shows Mississippi trails only neighboring Georgia in the number of bankruptcy filings in which the nation’s three largest car title lenders are listed as creditors.
Mississippi in 2016 expanded the range of high-cost loans that could be offered in the state, over the opposition of major religious groups. The latest FDIC survey included questions about small-dollar installment loans that are now offered in the state thanks to the new Credit Availability Act.
“They did so despite opposition from faith groups, civil rights organizations, consumer groups and many others who do not want to see Mississippians be exploited by these predatory practices,” said Diane Standaert, director of state policy for the advocacy group Center for Responsible Lending.
The survey’s appendices contain data down to the level of what are called Metropolitan Statistical Areas, which usually cover a large city and surrounding cities. For the FDIC survey, only the Jackson area was big enough to garner attention. The results showed that 5.4 percent of households in the Jackson area used alternative loan products in the time period of the 2017 survey, compared to 9.6 percent of in the prior survey.
Although that number reflects improvement, the portion of households in the Jackson area classified as unbanked rose to 17.2 percent in the 2017 survey, from 12.5 percent in the 2015 survey. Underbanked households in the Jackson area fell in the 2017 survey to 17.8 percent from 25.4 percent in 2015. This universe of Mississippians is larger because it includes people who used alternative sources for transactions such as check cashing businesses and places that wire money abroad.
The falling numbers of underbanked households may help explain why non-bank lenders are lobbying Congress and the Trump administration to relax rules designed to protect members of the armed services and the working poor from high-cost loans. The administration has signaled it plans to relax enforcement of rules that restrict to 36 percent the maximum annual interest rate for non-bank loans to active duty service members.
And, a coalition of non-bank lenders has brought a federal lawsuit seeking to thwart implementation of rules that would require them to measure a borrower’s ability to repay a loan.
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced a settlement Wednesday with non-bank lender Cash Express, LLC, which operates in Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and is headquartered in Tennessee. The bureau fined the company $200,000 for what it said was routinely issuing deceptive collection letters to borrowers, and for “abusively withholding funds during check-cashing transactions to satisfy outstanding amounts on prior loans, without disclosing this practice” to borrowers.
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Decades of progress in the global war against poverty could stall as population growth surges in some of the world’s poorest regions, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation warns in a new report that calls for boosting investments in health and education in Africa.
The annual Goalkeepers Data Report tracks progress across the globe on 18 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, including child and maternal deaths, access to contraceptives, malaria rates and sanitation.
Timed for release as world leaders convene at the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, the report also is released as First Lady Melania Trump prepares for her first trip to Africa next month. Her visit could be a valuable assist, Bill Gates told reporters on a conference call.
“It’s fantastic when we can get as many of the people who are thinking about these issues, who can bring visibility to these issues, to visit Africa,” said Gates, who noted that the first lady’s visit comes on the heels of recent tours by German chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron.
“Whenever these trips are taking place we do our best to make sure that some of the challenges and some of the progress gets highlighted,” Gates said.
The foundation report argues that gains in lifting millions out of persistent poverty in China and India could be eclipsed by burgeoning birth rates in the poorest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
“The world’s priority for the next three decades should be a third wave of poverty reduction in Africa,” Bill and Melinda Gates write in the report. “To continue improving the human condition, our task now is to help create opportunities in Africa’s fastest-growing, poorest countries.”
According to the report, the continent’s population is projected to nearly double in size by 2050. More than 40 percent of the extremely poor will live in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.
Trump’s Africa visit will be her first solo international trip. The White House has not yet announced her itinerary, but Trump said in a written statement that she’s interested in learning about the issues that confront children living on the continent. She said she also looks forward to highlighting successful humanitarian work and development programs.
The first lady, who has sought to highlight the well-being of children, plans to travel without President Donald Trump, who was roundly criticized for using the word “shithole” to refer to several countries, including some in Africa.
SInce its launch in 2000, the foundation established by the Microsoft founder and his wife has invested more than $15 billion in projects relevant to Africa. The foundation has also been active in Central and South America and the Caribbean, including supporting efforts in Haiti to combat tropical diseases such as lymphatic filariasis, commonly known as elephantiasis.
Gates said he is optimistic that the world can continue to make gains, despite dire warnings in the report.
One billion people have escaped poverty in the last 20 years, Gates said, much of that thanks to the so-called Green Revolution, which sparked an increase in the production of high-yielding wheat and rice that allowed many developing countries to stave off hunger and poverty.
“You need the equivalent of the Green Revolution so that Africa can feed itself and improve its nutrition, and the economic effect with that extra production will allow labor to move into other sectors,” Gates said. “The basic approach that worked in other places, with appropriate local modifications, is why I’m hopeful about the challenges.”
The report is not sparing in describing the challenges. It notes that poverty in the African countries is “rooted in violence, political instability, gender inequality, severe climate change, and other deep-seated crises” and is tied to other problems, including high rates of child mortality and malnutrition.
“As a result, today’s poorest people have significantly fewer opportunities than most of the billion people who escaped poverty during the first two waves,” the report says.
But it notes bright spots in many African countries. Ethiopia, “once the global poster child for famine,” is projected to almost eliminate extreme poverty by 2050. Rwanda, once ravaged by genocide, has built an effective health system, resulting in what the report says is the “steepest drop in child mortality ever recorded.”
Gates said the report, which was produced in partnership with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, is aimed at making the case for investment in Africa to world leaders.
“The particular challenge of the population growth in Africa leads to a simple idea that the world should help Africa invest in its human capital, and that means both the health and the education of this young generation,” Gates said.
He said the effort would pay for itself with young people able to create economic growth and slow the continent’s birth rate. The report, which includes case studies of various approaches in health and education, estimates that investments in health and education, or “human capital,” in sub-Saharan Africa could increase the gross domestic product in the region by more than 90 percent by 2050.
“If those investments are made, you get two kinds of amazing effects,” Gates said, noting that lifting health and education standards would also lead to a drop in population growth “just like it has in so many other countries.”
Population growth has been a controversial topic because some countries tried to control growth with “abusive, coercive policies, including forced sterilization,” Alex Ezeh, a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development writes in the report. But he says it should be considered with the goal of empowering women so that they can choose when, if and how many children they will have.
The foundation, along with the U.S. government, is one of the biggest investors in global health and education efforts, said Sara Allinder, deputy director and senior fellow in the global health policy center at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The foundation’s focus on the burgeoning youth population in Africa and on improving health and education could be critical, she said.
“We know there’s going to be a doubling of the youth population (in Africa) and there is an opportunity now to get ahead of that surge and capture the demographic dividend, as opposed to not paying attention” and ending up with further instability, Allinder said.
The report, issued for the first time in 2017, charts progress made on a host of fronts, but also projects what could happen if the U.S. and other countries were to scale back foreign aid. Last year’s report was issued as the Trump administration recommended slashing foreign aid and Gates said he was relieved that Congress refused to go along and kept funding levels stable.
“One of most strategic things there is, is to try and help Africa make this transition to middle income status,” Gates said. “The big question is will this generation have the investments made in them?”
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Rent was due soon but Brian McGhee could not afford to pay it. Like many Georgians under financial duress, the barber handed over the title to his automobile and borrowed money against it.
McGhee, 36, went to a title-pawn company, one of many dotting the landscape along thoroughfares in Middle Georgia.
The stores are located in almost every small town between Macon and Columbus. Along with check-cashing stores and small loan companies, they’re almost as pervasive as fast-food joints.
By capping the interest rates that can be charged to members of the armed forces, federal law effectively puts them off-limits to title-pawn companies.
Everyone else, though, is fair game.
“In the end, you actually see what’s going on,” said McGhee, who came to the cold realization that none of his four payments reduced the principal amount he owed. “I was just quick to get the dough at the time.”
With rollbacks of consumer protections being talked about in Washington, the working poor could become a softer target.
Title-pawn shops are highly concentrated in the poorer neighborhoods near Robins Air Force Base and near Fort Benning.
“It’s an abundance of them over here,” said Alice Womack, a thrift-store clerk in Warner Robins, who added that, thanks to “being raised right by my mama,” she knew not to borrow against her car.
Still, Womack was surprised to find, upon the death of her husband in 2012, that he’d borrowed against his car without telling her. On top of being a grieving widow, she was faced with having to buy back the car from a title-pawn company.
In 2004, Georgia, banned so-called payday loans, where lenders offer high-cost, short-term loans in exchange for getting dibs on a borrower’s next paycheck.
Yet it is one of 22 states to allow title-pawn operations with triple-digit annual interest rates. Three of the top national title-pawn companies are headquartered in Georgia — TMX Finance, Select Management Resources and Community Loans of America.
An analysis of federal court records by McClatchy and The Telegraph finds that over the past decade Georgia leads all states in which these big three title-pawn companies are listed as creditors in bankruptcy filings. Georgia is number one, both in raw numbers and per 100,000 residents.
What makes the title-pawn industry in Georgia unique is its lack of meaningful oversight, both on the state and federal level. And while borrowers think they are getting “loans,” the word is nowhere to be found in a contract that includes terms like finance charges and annual percentage rates.
The Georgia Department of Banking and Finance has a web page devoted to title-pawn companies, stressing in capital letters that it “does NOT” have jurisdiction over them.
“In most cases, the municipal authority responsible for licensing and monitoring pawnshops will be the local police department or sheriff’s office,” the web page advises.
That means if a customer has a problem, they must call local police, who often are quick to note it is a civil matter.
In the summer of 2017, Willie Pearl Gary called police in Columbus when she had a dispute with a title-pawn employee over a payment.
“They really acted like they didn’t really care what I was saying,” Gary said of the officers.
Gary, in her early sixties, lives across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus in Phenix City, Alabama. She went to TitleMax in Columbus in December 2015 and secured more than $4,000 against a 2010 Toyota Camry. She stopped paying it off in 2017, arguing she was being fleeced, and continues fighting efforts to take her car.
Receipts provided by Gary show how these financial instruments can become debt traps. A payment she made to TitleMax on Feb. 5, 2016, is illustrative. For the $440 she paid that month, only $3.64 actually went to knocking down her outstanding principal of about $4,300.
An inventory specialist for W.C. Bradley Co., which manufactures Char-Broil grills, Gary made three more payments that spring, but her monthly interest payment was still nearly $400 and her principal had only dipped to $3,921.57.
“The loan would never go out — it just kept getting more and more,” she said of the fees and interest that grew every month despite her payments. “And I stopped paying in 2017.”
Calls and emails by McClatchy and The Telegraph to TitleMax, Select Management Resources and Community Loans of America went unanswered. Representatives of trade associations for the broad non-bank lending sector declined to comment, as did the chief lobbyist for the sector.
The closest explanation of how the industry sees itself and its role in communities comes from the website of TMX Finance, which operates TitleMax, TitleBucks and other brands.
“Many of our customers have nowhere else to turn when they suffer short-term financial setbacks like medical emergencies or home repairs, so it is our mission to remain a reliable source of credit and offer customers hope and opportunity,” the company said in the “What We Do” section.
And in Macon-Bibb County, where Census Bureau data shows extreme poverty is on the uptick, there is no shortage of people who banks don’t consider creditworthy but who need quick cash.
Immediate relief to pay rent or an electric bill, warn consumer advocates, often comes with such steep interest rates that the climb out from debt is progressively harder.
What little is known about the size of this largely unregulated lending sector comes from an April 2009 bankruptcy affidavit filed by TitleMax Holdings, which was seeking to restructure itself under Chapter 11. The company said it was generating revenues in excess of $220 million, because borrowers on average extended their payback period at least eight times, resulting in huge interest earnings for TitleMax.
It’s why consumer advocates such as the North Carolina-based Center for Responsible Lending label TitleMax and its competitors “usurious,” meaning they charge an exorbitant rate for the use of money.
“State-level usury laws are the strongest protections against the harm of these predatory loans. Thankfully Georgia has those protections in place for payday loans, but not for these car-title loans,” said Diane Standaert, the group’s executive vice president and director, of state policy.
Usury is a concept as old as the Bible. Although it is frowned upon in multiple books of the Old Testament, there is no universally recognized definition of interest that constitutes usury.
Ghost companiesGeorgia keeps virtually no data on the title-pawn industry. Regulators and consumer advocates acknowledge they cannot say how many individual companies operate here. A report earlier this year by the advocacy group Georgia Watch and Georgia State University’s Student Innovation Fellowship found that as of January there were at least 755 title-pawn locations statewide.
State officials confirmed they don’t track auto repossessions. And the Georgia Department of Revenue’s motor vehicle division does not keep statistics on the transfer of titles from individuals to title-pawn companies. It also can’t say how much money these companies lend against titles.
“This is an industry that’s really preying on a community, really preying on young people who may not have had a bank account before or a financial product,” said Beth Stephens, senior director for public policy at Georgia Watch in Atlanta.
Borrowers like McGhee and Gary are drawn by the promise of quick cash and few questions asked.
“It seems like you are never through paying the loan,” grumbled McGhee, who works a few blocks from Robins Air Force Base and was surprised when told it wasn’t really a loan he took out.
“It’s really an option contract to buy back their car,” explained Clifford Carlson, a Macon-area bankruptcy attorney who has battled title-pawn firms in court.
More than two years after taking out a title “loan,” McGhee settled it by giving the 1999 Crown Victoria to a friend in exchange for the friend paying off what he owed. He was out of debt, but also out of a car.
The lending practices of chartered banks are subject to federal oversight and in some cases regulation by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance.
Similarly, non-bank companies that offer small installment loans, sometimes called industrial loans, are regulated by Georgia’s Office of Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, which said there are 71 of these companies operating in 900-plus locations statewide.
Installment loans, capped at $3,000, can span no longer than three years, lenders are audited annually and a $500 six-month loan can carry an annual percentage rate as high as 61 percent.
Title-pawn companies, however, face few restrictions in Georgia and nobody looks over their shoulder. Contracts stipulate that disputes cannot be resolved in court, closing down another avenue to trapped borrowers.
For most types of loans, “typically as part of the licensure requirement there is some data that is provided to the state agency. There is at least something,” said John Rao, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group. But, he added, for title-pawn loans “none of that is happening.”
And so, Georgia’s Office of Insurance feels the need to warn borrowers about products it does not regulate. Consumers are “much better off going to small industrial loan lenders if they have needs for money than if they are going through a deregulated industry such as the title-pawns,” Chris Stephens, the office’s director of the Industrial Loan Division, warned in an interview.
The Georgia Department of Law’s Consumer Protection Unit, which handles consumer complaints, offers a warning on its web page.
“Look for the lowest interest rate from a bank or credit union. Consider a loan from family or friends,” advises one of its web pages, referring to title-pawn companies and installment loan providers as “fringe banking.”
Near downtown Macon, beside Mercer University, Centenary United Methodist Church gets a dozen people or so every week who come in seeking financial guidance.
“They typically have a title-pawn and are paying on it,” said Pastor Eric Mayle, adding that most don’t have a bank account and are left with an option “intended to keep poor people poor.”
A necessary but unaffordable car repair or outstanding utility bills are chief reasons they turned to title-pawn stores for cash, he said.
Title-pawn companies often locate where people need quick cash.
Complete Cash Discount Title Pawn on Watson Boulevard in Warner Robins is located right next to Pro Automotive, a car repair shop.
“They send a bunch of people over to us,” a Pro Automotive mechanic confirms of his neighbor, whose window boasts “Money in Minutes!”
Complete Cash made headlines in August when Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr announced a settlement and fines because the company, rather than seize a customer’s car, improperly tried to sue.
Because there is so little public data about the title-pawn sector, one important proxy is federal bankruptcy filings.
McClatchy and The Telegraph reviewed federal bankruptcy records from 2008 to June 2018, and found that the big three title companies show up more in bankruptcy filings in Georgia than any other state, both in total numbers and on a per-resident basis.
The bankruptcy filings weren’t necessarily caused by a title-pawn company, but they underscore how most borrowers turn to them in desperation.
The presence of a TitleMax in a filing is mostly symbolic because technically they are not a creditor to the borrower. There was no actual “loan” from the title-pawn company, which also already has the car title in hand.
“There’s no credit report involved and past history doesn’t mean anything,” said A.G. Knowles, a bankruptcy attorney in Macon, describing as “legal” but “horrendous.” the title-pawn terms. “People get in these traps and cannot get out,” he said.
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been working on a new rule since 2016 that would force title-pawn companies to adopt an “ability to pay” measurement that could prevent many Georgians from falling into a debt trap. The payday loan industry, also affected by the change, brought suit earlier to block the measure. The Trump administration has said it might grant waivers to get around the rule if lenders lose their court fight.
For the past two years, debt traps have not been an issue for service members at Fort Benning, Robins Air Force Base and other military installations across Georgia and the nation. Thanks to protections afforded under the Military Lending Act, which has been fully in force only since 2016, lenders can’t charge active duty personnel an annual percentage rate higher than 36 percent, nor can they offer them any title-pawn products.
However, as part of its deregulation push, the Trump administration has signaled it won’t do spot auditing of compliance with the military lending rule. It did indicate it won’t seek to roll back the rule.
Reporters called numerous title-pawn companies in Middle Georgia seeking an interview and were ignored. The team from McClatchy and The Telegraph then went, for a week in July, to title-pawn locations across Middle Georgia asking, as a customer would, about terms and conditions.
Most of these operations declined to share the kind of term sheet or promotional material commonly offered by banks. When asked if the title-pawn company offered military discounts, all but one of dozens of establishments told reporters that they were prohibited from lending to service members.
Clerks shrugged when asked why there is differential treatment, although one manager offered that regulators “are trying to protect the military from lenders like us.”
For Georgians not on active military duty, title-pawn companies can charge, for the first three months, up to 25 percent interest monthly. After three months, the rate falls to 12.5 percent monthly. The complex math adds up to a total maximum yearly interest rate of 187.5 percent. For a loan of $2,000 a title pawn company could charge $3,750 in interest and fees, and a borrower would have to pay $5,750 to get his or her car title back.
“If they are acknowledged to be dangerous at anything above 36 percent APR [for military personnel], why doesn’t the same logic apply to other Georgians, particularly lower income people?” said Stephens, of Georgia Watch.
In Warner Robins, three national banks — Bank of America, Wells Fargo and BB&T — can be found along bustling Watson Boulevard, the main thoroughfare that leads to Robins Air Force Base. But these banks are located near Interstate 75, by shopping malls with national retailers.
Get a few miles off the interstate, and for miles leading up to the military base, there are few banks, just a smattering of ATMs and lots of title-pawn lenders and installment-loan companies. There are many causes, including the growth in online banking, but it is also a reflection of the large segment of society that remains outside the conventional banking system. They are known as the unbanked.
“The banks want people with lots of money, and if you don’t have a lot of money they don’t give a hoot about you,” said Wayne Gilleland, a bankruptcy attorney in Macon.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation tries to gauge the size of the U.S. population without a bank account. Its most recent biennial survey covered 2015 and found that nine million households were outside the banking system. Another 24.5 million — or just under 20 percent of all U.S. households — had a checking or savings account but obtained financial products and services outside the banking system.
It’s a safe bet many are in Macon-Bibb County. Overall, nearly 28 percent of the county’s residents live in poverty, twice the national average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Fact Finder website. In Houston County, home of Robins Air Force Base, 15 percent live in poverty.
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Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion could become a major election issue again this year - at least in four states where supporters want to enact or continue the policy through ballot initiatives in the 2018 mid-term elections.
Organizers in Montana and Nebraska are collecting thousands of signatures to get the issue on the November ballot, while supporters in Utah and Idaho are awaiting final word from state officials who must validate and tally their petition signatures.
Expanding coverage under Medicaid, the national health plan for low-income and disabled Americans, was a key component of the Affordable Care Act. The 2010 law originally required state Medicaid programs to extend coverage to all non-elderly people who earn up to 138% of the federal poverty limit beginning in 2014. States that didn’t comply would lose their federal Medicaid funding.
In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the ACA’s Medicaid coverage requirement was unduly coercive and gave states the option to not participate in the coverage expansion. Since then, 32 states and Washington, DC have expanded their Medicaid coverage under the ACA while 18 others have not.
Montana approved Medicaid expansion in 2015, but the policy expires in 2019 unless the legislature reauthorizes it. The ballot initiative would make the expansion permanent and raise taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products to help pay for it. Montana organizers need signatures from 5 percent of registered voters by June 22 for their proposal to make the ballot.
Nationwide, 24 states and the District of Columbia allow voters to pursue statewide legislation - either by statute or constitutional amendment - through the initiative petition process.
But with the exception of Florida and Mississippi, the option is unavailable in the South where poorer states have high uninsured rates and a less-healthy population. It’s also where opposition to Medicaid expansion is strongest.
In the 2017 America’s Health Ranking, a state-by-state analysis of residents’ health based on 35 measures, the 10 lowest-scoring states are all in the South. Mississippi finished dead last.
“There’s never been anything that makes more sense for the most impoverished, worst-health outcome state in the nation than Medicaid expansion,” said Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland, a Tupelo Democrat who has long advocated for the policy. “We haven’t done anything with (a petition initiative for Medicaid expansion) yet. But I’d love to see it done because I’m fully convinced it would pass by a pretty good margin.”
But Republican state Rep. Joel Bomgar, vice chairman of the Mississippi House Medicaid Committee, said it makes no sense to expand Medicaid because the program is economically unsustainable - both for the federal government and states. The expansion would add add an estimated 300,000 people to the program in Mississippi.
“Eventually it breaks the back of the American economy. A program has to be working and it has to be sustainable to be expanded. Medicaid is not sustainable on its current footing,” he said.
The renewed activism on Medicaid began in Maine, where the state legislature voted five times to expand Medicaid coverage, only to have Republican Gov. Paul LePage veto the measure each time. Maine voters passed the Medicaid expansion by ballot initiative in 2017.
And even though LePage was sued in April for once again refusing to implement the policy, Maine’s ballot campaign victory prompted Medicaid supporters in the other four states to pursue similar efforts.
If those ballot initiatives are successful, even more states could see Medicaid ballot initiatives in 2020, a presidential election year when voter turnout typically spikes.
“Initiatives are very susceptible to trends,” said Josh Altic, who directs the ballot initiatives project at Ballotpedia. “When you succeed in one state with a policy that’s applicable across lots of states, it becomes a lot more attractive to try that through the initiative process.”
Of the 18 states that haven’t expanded eligibility for Medicaid, 10 are in the South.
Recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed 54 percent of Republicans in non-expansion states want to keep Medicaid as it is, while 75 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents in those states want to expand the program.
Next to education, Medicaid is the largest expenditure for most states. And many Republicans, already wary of growing entitlement programs, fear that an expanded Medicaid base would limit spending for other vital services. In addition, the Medicaid expansion would provide coverage to childless adults at at time when Republicans want the program to serve mainly vulnerable populations like children, pregnant women and those with disabilities.
As Medicaid rolls grow under expansion, states will spend more for coverage. But the higher state spending would be partially offset by savings on hospital indigent care. In addition, the federal government has promised to pay 90 percent of medical costs for newly eligible enrollees under the expansion.
But Bomgar said he doesn’t trust that promise. “In its current form, there is no plan to pay for that 90 percent without borrowing the money,” he said.
For a constitutional amendment on Medicaid to reach the ballot in Mississippi, it would require petition signatures equal to 12 percent of the votes cast for governor in the last election. And in order for the measure to pass, the winning votes must tally at least 40 percent of votes cast in the most recent election.
After the signatures are in, but before the proposed amendment is placed on the ballot, however, Mississippi law allows the legislature to “hold hearings and propose alternatives to the citizen initiative,” according to a state handbook. “The legislature cannot veto or amend the original citizen initiative, but it can pass an alternative that will appear on the ballot alongside the original initiative.”
That’s what happened in 2015, when initiative sponsors tried to pass Initiative 42, a constitutional amendment on school funding. The measure was defeated, supporters said, partly due to the ballot’s competing proposal – Initiative 42A.
Mississippi House Speaker Phillip Gunn did not respond to questions about how Republicans might respond to a similar petition drive on Medicaid expansion.
In order to get a constitutional amendment for Medicaid expansion on the ballot in Florida, supporters would have to collect signatures totaling 8 percent of the votes cast in the most recent presidential election. And for the measure to pass, it must garner a 60-percent supermajority of votes.
In late 2017, Florida state Sen. Annette Taddeo, D-Miami, and state Rep. Lori Berman, D-Boynton Beach, tried to get state lawmakers to approve a constitutional amendment for Medicaid expansion. But they couldn’t get a vote on the measure.
“It never got heard in committee and it was very, very frustrating,” Taddeo said. If Democrats win more seats in the Florida legislature in November, Taddeo said she’ll try again in 2019.
But if that effort fails again, Taddeo said she’d work with stakeholders to get a citizen-led constitutional amendment in 2020.
Tony Pugh: 202-383-6013, @TonyPughDC
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Speaking to a national hospital group Monday, a Trump administration official said her agency will reject Kansas’ request to limit some people to three years of Medicaid coverage in a lifetime.
Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told the American Hospital Association that her agency is open to many new ideas about reforming Medicaid but is determined to make sure it “remains a safety net for those that need it most.”
“To this end, we have determined that we will not approve Kansas’ recent request to place a lifetime limit on Medicaid benefits for some beneficiaries,” Verma said. “We seek to create a pathway out of poverty, but we also understand that people’s circumstances change, and we must ensure that our programs are sustainable and available to them when they need and qualify for them.”
After President Donald Trump took office, he and his appointees signaled a willingness to give states more flexibility in how they run their Medicaid programs, which are funded through a combination of state and federal dollars. The Kansas proposal is the first the administration has rejected.
Kansas was one of five states that requested lifetime limits. The otherswere Maine, Arizona, Utah and Wisconsin — all also led by Republican governors.
Democrats opposed the idea, and some said they doubted it was legal.
The Kansas proposal would have imposed the three-year limit only on Medicaid recipients deemed able to work. It would have applied to about 12,000 extremely low-income parents who make up a small fraction of the 400,000-plus total Kansans who receive Medicaid.
In Kansas, Medicaid is a managed care program called KanCare with strict income limits to qualify. Almost all the beneficiaries are children, the elderly, pregnant women or people with disabilities.
Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer released a statement Monday saying his office had received a letter from Verma rejecting the Kansas proposal, but he said the administration had already announced during an April 23 legislative hearing that it was withdrawing the proposal.
He said his administration decided to drop the request for lifetime limits after officials in Verma’s agency “indicated they would be unable to approve the measure.”
Colyer said he’s pleased the Trump administration is still allowing the state to go forward with a proposal to impose a work requirement on the 12,000 Medicaid recipients in question.
“This important provision will help improve outcomes and ensure that Kansans are empowered to achieved self-sufficiency,” Colyer said in a statement.
Before adjourning for the session last week, the Kansas Legislature passed a budget that prevents the governor from implementing a Medicaid work requirement without legislative approval.
Sheldon Weisgrau, interim executive director of the Alliance for Healthy Kansans, said the Trump administration was right to reject lifetime limits on Medicaid coverage. The alliance is a group of health care providers and disability organizations lobbying for expanding Medicaid eligibility to more low-income Kansans.
“Patients can now be assured that an arbitrary, bureaucratic time limit would not end their health care coverage in the middle of a critical course of treatment,” Weisgrau said in a statement. “Patients’ needs change throughout their lives and the programs they depend on should have the flexibility to meet these changing needs.”
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