(October 10) – “Millions in U.S. Climb out of Poverty,” read a recent New York Times headline in praise of President Obama for U.S. Census data showing the poverty rate in the United States fell by 1.2 percent in 2015, bringing roughly 3.5 million people above the poverty line. The poverty rate is now at 13.5%, according to the data, which is still higher than it was in 2008 at 13.2 percent in the midst of an economic recession when President Obama took office. While poverty decreased, what the New York Times conveniently omitted is that income inequality continued its trend of increasing in the United States.

(October 10) – Jeff Johnson served in the military for six years and then moved to Washington, D.C., where he found work in the construction industry. After suffering serious injuries in a robbery, however, he lost his job and became homeless. Johnson applied for many entry-level positions without success, and he now suspects why: There was a telltale black mark on his paperwork. “If employers saw the address of a [homeless] shelter, they would say I am on drugs or have a mental illness,” he said. “A lot of people look down at people like myself. So I gave up hope.”

(October 7) – U.S. companies maintained their steady pace of hiring in September, helping the economy add 156,000 new jobs, new government data showed Friday. The unemployment rate ticked up from 4.9 percent to 5 percent, largely because the labor force swelled with scores of new would-be workers — a sign that Americans are growing confident enough to come in from the sidelines.

(October 7) – Poverty: a simple measurement that leads down an economic rabbit hole. The Texas Tribune reported this week that although poverty rates dropped in Texas, numbers from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, haven’t reflected those changes. In theory, only households considered under the federal poverty guideline should qualify for SNAP. In reality, only about half of Texas households using SNAP were under the poverty line in 2015.

(October 7) – Skepticism about capitalism and free markets is rising. A survey by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that a majority of 18-to-29-year-old Americans do not believe in modern capitalism at all. The persistence of deep poverty in an affluent nation may be one reason for this. It’s easy to doubt the wisdom of markets when 12.7 percent of American households lived without enough food last year.

(October 6) – For America’s minorities — African Americans, Latinos and others — statistics show they’ve become much more integrated into communities in the last 50 years. Even surburbia, once the refuge of white flight but considered unreachable by many inner-city residents, is no longer an exclusively white domain. “Segregation [of blacks and whites] has decreased steadily since 1970,” said Alan Berube, a deputy director at the Brookings Institute in a report for the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.

(October 3) – Los Angeles has a new strategy for policing the homeless: one guided by compassion. It’s rolling out a new team of officers dedicated to “helping” rather than “dealing with” homeless people. They’re acting more like social workers than cops.

(October 3) – Like most Seattleites, I am alternately frustrated, incredulous and dismayed by the number of homeless individuals I encounter every day while walking, driving or just living my life in Seattle. I find it hard to comprehend that we can’t do a better job of finding housing for these individuals and families than we have done so far.

(October 3) – We’ve known for a while that black Americans aren’t making economic progress. A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, shows that the black-white wage gap is now the widest it has been since 1979. What’s more interesting, though, is how inequality has been increasing, and for whom.

(September 28) – If a city full of liberal technocrats can’t make affordable housing happen locally, what hope is there for the federal government to achieve that nationally? Well, Washington’s failures have not deterred the White House from dreaming. Its proposals are eminently sensible: streamline permitting processes, zone for larger dwellings, and most importantly, allow developers to build “of right,” which is to say, if they’ve met the zoning requirements, they should be able to put up the building without further interference from the local community.