‘We Need to Start Calling These Folks Out by Name’
“It was a strangely rosy portrayal of a city that is home to the worst income inequality in the nation, where the average wealth of white households is 81 times the average wealth of black households. Fourteen percent of children in the district live in extreme poverty—a tie with Louisiana for the highest rate in the nation—and the overall child-poverty rate is nearly 26 percent; only three states are doing worse. When it comes to shelter, 27,000 low-income renters spend at least half of their income on housing and, according to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, the city has ‘only funded about 3,000 new rentals for these residents since 2015.’ The most recent data indicate that 75,000 households needed food assistance (SNAP) in fiscal year 2016 and 22,000 of those households had no cash income. As Business Insider recently reported, ‘When it comes to the overall share of homeless residents, no state can compare to Washington, DC.’”