MORE ON: poverty

For Larry Sly, executive director of the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano, the good news is that the number of people the food bank serves has leveled off over the past couple of years. The bad news: The food bank still feeds 132,000 people every month. The food bank today serves 46... + read more

Roughly three million poor and disabled Californians had their coverage for dental services cut three years ago, and community dental clinics have struggled to cover preventative services ever since. “It was not something we wanted to do,” says Robert Isman, a consultant with the... + read more

Fewer California children are living in very poor communities than there were in 2000, according to an analysis released yesterday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. But while the analysis [PDF] shows California has seen a decrease, there’s been a 25 percent growth nationwide, to a... + read more

On a recent November afternoon, Hermelinda Hernandez, who had spent 27 years packing cauliflower and cantaloupes from the farms of the Imperial Valley, found herself fourth in line for the monthly distribution of emergency food at the New Life Assembly Church in Calexico. Hundreds of... + read more

Since the recession began, times have been tough in California – everybody knows it. The economy is in a protracted stall. But it took economists at California Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting to describe, in hyperbolic language, the depth of the... + read more

Ethel Gist bought her dream house and planned to retire to Antioch in the Bay Area. Instead, the 70-year-old lost the house during the height of the foreclosure crisis, and now rents a place with her daughter and two grandchildren. After he lost his three-bedroom home in East Los Angeles, Rene... + read more