Kids who grow up poor have a better chance of one day not being poor if they grow up neighborhoods where everyone isn’t poor. But in some cities, affordable housing crises are making that impossible. It’s a quandary.

Without meaning to, the CEO of a restaurant corporation that is busily trying to automate employees out of existence is becoming one of the best spokesmen for the idea of providing all Americans with a universal basic income.

In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, housing is expensive and in short supply. All throughout the Bay Area, cities are discussing where the hell all their schoolteachers are supposed to live.

For the “It’s Expensive to Be Poor” file: The poorest people in the world pay more of their income to get clean water than anyone else.

The New York City municipal government would like for the city’s hordes of can collectors to stop collecting cans from curbside garbage. Hey: just let them collect the damn cans.

New data from Seattle, Los Angeles, and other cities that raised their minimum wage recently show little to no negative effects on hiring after those wages went up. Don’t believe the hype.

“Adjunct professors” are the McDonald’s workers of academia: poorly paid and highly disposable. Is raising their pay to (barely) middle class levels really too expensive? It’s all a matter of priorities.

Canada’s relatively radical fight against economic inequality is hobbled by “the government’s insistence that the chief beneficiary of that fight will be the middle class — as opposed to the poor... living up to it appears to have produced policy designs that wouldn’t otherwise make much sense.”

When someone like Bernie Sanders rails against a “rigged” economy that is fueling inequality, some believe that he is espousing a radical view. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the White House knows the economy is rigged.

At the end of March, 22 states will begin imposing work requirements on people who want food stamps. Hundreds of thousands of people will likely lose their food aid.

If you look very closely at America, you can see the poor physically growing apart from the rich, like a polar bear drifting out to sea on a broken chunk of ice.

Creating enough affordable housing is one of the hardest political and economic challenges in the world. (If you think you know an easy answer, you’re wrong!) Here is a new piece of data that could “add to our understanding,” and make everyone mad.

Wanna pawn some shit? Shop around.

Our nation has problems, and your nation has problems, but be thankful you don’t live in Venezuela, which is truly one of the most fucked places on earth.

The Koch brothers are launching an anti-poverty group called Stand Together which “aims to raise $15 million this year”—a year in which the Kochs plan to spend close to $900 million to elect a president who is hostile to government anti-poverty measures.

Racial inequality and economic inequality are not synonyms, but they are as closely linked as it is possible for two things to be. They are the bread and butter of American problems.

What makes this year more special than any other? This is the year that the very worst class war rhetoric becomes the reality.

Discussions of raising our nation’s poverty-level federal minimum wage are often met with the objection that paying workers more would kill the profitability of businesses like restaurants. Not so, says a new study.

On the first day, God created the line.

Aldo Chang, once an official photographer for Fidel Castro in Cuba, looks at his old photos from his home in a Havana housing project: “When I show these to my grandson, he says, ‘What good did it do? Look at you now. You’ve got nothing.’”