January 5, 2012, 12:05 AM
If New Year’s resolutions could apply to places, perhaps no place is as worthy of concerted change as the San Joaquin Valley. Home to nearly 4 million people, the nation’s breadbasket is described as “a patchwork pattern of separate and unequal places” in a report by the UC...
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November 28, 2011, 12:05 AM
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...
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October 27, 2011, 12:05 AM
Every morning in Sarah McKerr's third-grade class at Foster Elementary School in Compton, students turn in their homework and file back to their seats with something in hand: a free breakfast. Over the past year, the Compton Unified School District has moved breakfast out of the...
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October 12, 2011, 12:05 AM
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...
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October 4, 2011, 12:05 AM
A family of four in California would need an average of more than $63,000 a year – nearly triple the federal poverty level – to cover its basic needs, according to an analysis of the state's cost of living to be released today. The 2011 Self-Sufficiency Standard, ...
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July 28, 2011, 12:05 AM
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...
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June 30, 2011, 12:05 AM
The number of U.S. children living with at least one grandparent in their homes increased 64 percent between 1991 and 2009, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released yesterday. There were 7.8 million children living with at least one grandparent in 2009, up from 4.7 million...
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May 18, 2011, 12:05 AM
Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled budget proposals Monday that were relatively mild compared to cuts suggested and enacted in recent years, buoyed by an unexpected windfall from the state’s wealthiest taxpayers. But even as some advocates for the poor and disabled can breathe a sigh of...
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March 4, 2011, 12:05 AM
More than 3.4 million students were eligible for free or reduced-price meals at California public schools last year – a 9 percent increase from two years earlier – indicating the number of families whose incomes have been hit hard by the recession. Nearly every county in the state...
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February 15, 2011, 12:05 AM
Food stamp use in California has long been among the lowest in the nation, but a new report shows that participation varies widely among the state's counties. The report, released Friday by California Food Policy Advocates, estimates that Fresno County ranks first in CalFresh participation...
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December 17, 2010, 12:05 AM
Asthma is on the rise in California, and the low-income tend to bear the greatest burden from the condition, according to a report by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. Since 2001, the percent of Californians diagnosed with asthma has increased from 11.3 percent to 13 percent, the...
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November 16, 2010, 12:05 AM
More than 14 percent of California households struggled to afford enough food during the economic downturn, according to a federal report released yesterday. The U.S. Department of Agriculture found that nearly 17.4 million households nationwide – nearly 15 percent of the population...
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October 19, 2010, 12:05 AM
Going beyond anecdotes, a "distress index" developed by New America Media and the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality for the first time provides a measure of the impact of the Great Recession on individuals most deeply affected. In its first application, the...
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October 7, 2010, 12:25 AM
The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education approved a landmark agreement Tuesday that could spare up to 45 schools in high-poverty areas from teacher layoffs and possibly fuel efforts elsewhere to protect vulnerable students from budget-related personnel cuts. According to the...
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September 17, 2010, 12:05 AM
More than 5.6 million Californians – 15.3 percent of the state – lived in poverty last year, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Nationwide, 43.6 million Americans were in poverty in 2009 – the highest number since the bureau began its...
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