Nation's Mayors Put Spotlight on Poverty
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who leads a city where thousands of working families live in poverty, believes he can help the poor by building affordable housing, strengthening job training and reforming the much-maligned public schools -- ideas that have been tried elsewhere with limited success.
Today, his steps and those advanced in other cities will be on the table when mayors from across the nation converge on Los Angeles to strategize about a pernicious problem that defies a quick fix.
Although local government leaders say they can't do much about the underlying causes of poverty -- such as job cuts and soaring home prices -- economists, labor organizers, affordable-housing advocates and others say cities have a number of tools that can help.
At the very least, the gathering of mayors can cast national attention on a problem that, by many measures, is growing worse.
As head of a poverty task force for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Villaraigosa scheduled today's session to highlight what researchers see as a widening gap between rich and poor -- one that is pronounced in places populated by vast numbers of immigrants with limited education and minimal job skills.
"Our goal as mayors is to raise this issue around urban poverty to create a national debate about what we need to do," Villaraigosa said. "We've got to strengthen and grow the middle class."
Los Angeles epitomizes a kind of urban poverty in which the poor -- day laborers, hotel workers, taxi drivers and convenience store clerks, among others -- work two or three jobs and still confront agonizing daily choices about whether to put food on the table, have warm clothing or get decent medical care.
By one estimate, 1.4 million of Los Angeles' 3.8 million residents are "working poor," a category that would include a family of two adults and two children earning $38,000 a year or less.
Experts who study poverty recommend a range of solutions, some of them controversial.
Some cities, for example, require developers to set aside a portion of their projects for affordable housing or contribute to a housing trust fund. At least 400 U.S. cities have so-called inclusionary zoning laws, but developers have successfully resisted the idea in Los Angeles.
Also, municipal leaders can coordinate workforce training programs with growing industries, as Villaraigosa hopes to do with jobs in healthcare and construction.
