Bob Collins
Charles Gladden is 63. He makes $11 an hour keeping the marble of the Capitol clean, and he takes home about $360 a week. And by ‘home’ he means the subway station. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Tag: Poverty
Allan Law, of Minneapolis, tells KARE 11’s Boyd Huppert he’ll be on the streets for the rest of his life. It’s because a lot of other people will be, too.
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Joan Cheever has a non-profit food truck and every Tuesday for about a year, she feeds the homeless near a park in San Antonio.
Last week she got a ticket because it’s against city law. Read more →
In the wake of its story yesterday about resistance to affordable housing in the suburbs, the Star Tribune rightly editorializes today for affordable housing that’s not concentrated in existing areas of poverty.
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There were great hopes that the opening of the Green Line would provide a big boost for the Daily Diner on University Avenue in Saint Paul. But it has now closed. Read more →
In San Jose, Calif., today, authorities went ahead with their plan to clear what they say is the largest homeless camp in the United States. Read more →
Not surprisingly, Steve Hartmann provided another dose of decency over the weekend with his On the Road profile of former NFL player Jason Brown, who walked away from the game (after he was released by the St. Louis Rams) to become a farmer and feed hungry people, even though he didn’t know anything about farming. Read more →
Arnold Abbott might go to jail for making sure the hungry and homeless have something to eat in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Read more →
In a growing number of American cities, giving food to a homeless person is a crime. Read more →
George Verley, 80, the former head of Union Gospel Mission, died Friday of liver cancer.
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Homelessness as an issue has been increasing since the ’80s. Millions of stories have been produced and yet it’s the one issue that people walk away from without any sense of obligation. If anything, we’ve become desensitized to the problem. Read more →
In the “two Americas,” the nation gets behind a kid who can play baseball, especially if the team is credited with “uplifting America” but tends to look the other way when a kid is homeless. Read more →
Something different accompanies the start of the school year this year. For the first time in modern U.S. history, whites will be the minority. Non-Hispanic white students are still expected to be the largest racial group in the public schools this year at 49.8 percent, CBS News reports. But the National Center for Education Statistics Read more →
NPR reports today on a study in Baltimore that appears to destroy the notion that education is the great equalizer. Instead, the study says, it’s family and money. You either have it or you don’t. End of story. Sort of. Read more →
Poverty, quite obviously, is still a bigger problem in the city than the suburbs, but a new report from Brookings says the rate of poverty is increasing in suburbs more than cities. The number of “distressed” neighborhoods has grown by 78 percent in the 2000’s, with much of that increase coming in the suburbs. Of Read more →