Every year around the holidays, nonprofits’ phones light up with people wanting to donate a turkey. The impulse is a nice one. In this season of giving, people consider their good fortune and want to share. It feels good to give a turkey, or toy, or to participate in a food drive. Those of us working in charities welcome these gifts because the families we serve appreciate the help in creating a more festive holiday.

Tiny houses have emerged in the past decade as a promising way to house more homeless people for less money. Now the idea has gained a powerful proponent in the billionaire California real estate developer John Sobrato, who unveiled a proposal this month to build 200 micro-apartments for homeless and low-income renters in Santa Clara.

For the last three years, Erica Semrau has lived in and out of tent encampments around Seattle, often finding shelter underneath I-90 just east of the city. But her makeshift home has increasingly come under threat. Driven by concerns over unsanitary conditions and crime in Seattle’s homeless encampments—including two homicides this year in one called the Jungle—officials have targeted these tent cities by confiscating residents’ belongings and sometimes bringing in bulldozers to clear away anything that’s left.

Is there nothing to be done about galloping inequality? Last year the typical American family experienced the fastest income gains since the government started measuring them in the 1960s. But the top 1 percent did even better, raising their share of income higher than it was when President Obama took office. Mr. Obama has led the most progressive administration since Lyndon B. Johnson’s half a century ago, raising taxes on the rich to expand the safety net for the less fortunate.

It felt like they had chased the dream forever: to keep the homeless man in the red sneakers off the streets. Everyone in the Dorchester courtroom this September day knew David: the judge; the defense attorneys and the prosecutors; the caseworker from the state mental health department. For months, for years — even for decades — he had been a familiar figure here, arrested a staggering 150 times, usually on drug charges or for breaking and entering.

In a rare tuneup to the $74 billion food-stamp program, U.S. regulators deemed potato chips and ice cream too unhealthy to count as staple foods. The U.S. Department of Agriculture made other changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program this week that fell short of recommendations from many public-health advocates.

Del Seymour lived on the streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district for 18 years, hustling for his next fix. For San Franciscans, this gritty neighborhood is synonymous with homelessness, drugs and destitution. It’s also home to 17 tech companies — including Twitter, Dolby Laboratories, Spotify and Zendesk — attracted in part by tax breaks and other incentives from the city. This makes the Tenderloin and its neighboring Mid-Market area a weird study in contrasts, as thousands of young tech professionals step around the area’s poor and homeless on their way to work.

Fifteen years ago, Dr. Megan Tschudy didn’t want to know whether her patients had enough food. It’s not that she didn’t care: As a pediatrician working at a health clinic in East Baltimore, a part of town battered by decades of poverty and crime, she knew that undernourishment was probably connected to a whole host of health problems in the kids she was seeing. But as a pediatrician, she also knew there was nothing she could do about it. The problem might lie with school lunches, or neglect at home, or even an unpaid gas bill – all of which were miles from anything a doctor could treat.

U.S. employers hired at a steady clip in November while the jobless rate fell to its lowest level in nine years, a broadly upbeat performance that could mask underlying soft spots in the labor market. The U.S. has added more than 15 million jobs since the labor market bottomed out in early 2010. But those gains have been uneven across the nation and across business sectors, pushing swaths of people to the sidelines and by many measures leaving the economy short of prerecession norms.

The SF Homeless Project, a media consortium dedicated to focusing attention on the issue of homelessness in San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area, will present its second day of widespread coverage Wednesday. This pioneering collaboration, spearheaded by The San Francisco Chronicle this year, grew to include more than 80 media outlets. A voluntary effort by Bay Area media companies, it seeks to increase public understanding of homelessness and explore potential solutions.