Gen Fujioka, a well-respected housing attorney in San Francisco, wrote the following for today's Beyond Chron.

With the California primary elections less than two months away, what are the positions of the leading Democratic candidates with respect to housing and low income communities? While few of us concerned about housing look to either party for salvation, at minimum some of us hope that the Democratic candidates will bring some attention to deepening housing crisis that impacts millions of low income Americans.

To assess the campaign season's attention to housing issues, I looked at what was posted on the official websites of Clinton, Edwards, and Obama. This may be an imperfect gauge for what the campaigns' positions are. Talk is (relatively) cheap. There are no guarantees any policy proposal offered during a campaign will ever be pursued. But the issue statements on websites do set forth at least the highest aspirations of the candidates and their advisors. We rarely get more than what they promised during campaigns--we probably will get less. Websites and policy statements also tell us who candidates are trying to mobilize and with whom they are seeking to build a base.

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[To read the entire series go to educationaction.org]

Why churches? Because across the nation, especially in the impoverished areas of our central cities, old forms of "community" have increasingly broken down. The old ethnic and neighborhood organizations of the early part of the 20th Century have disintegrated as a result of concentrated poverty, the invasion of the justice system, and generalized fear. The organizations that remain mostly provide services, usually directed by members of the upper-middle-class with few real connections to the inner city. More broadly, while a range of scholars have shown that Putnam's well-known arguments in "Bowling Alone," were overblown, the vibrant forms of "community" that critics often point to, like 12-step groups and volunteer organizations, are quite different from earlier ones. Perhaps most importantly, they tend not to develop long-term bonds of mutual support and trust or a durable sense of belonging.

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Courtesy of Matt Yglesias:
In a recent post on the Democratic Strategist, Ed Kilgore gives his own take on the Washington Post comparison of Obama and Edwards. Commentators are starting to make interesting connections to 1968 and the race between McCarthy and Kennedy, as well as to the respective backgrounds of Edwards and Obama.

This is the one of the more interesting comparisons that I've seen so far of the urban policy agendas (which I think is turning out to be the most interesting substantive and progressive discussions we've had so far this cycle).

A very unexpected thing has happened this week in the Democratic presidential nominating contest: something of a debate broke out between John Edwards and Barack Obama on the subject of how to deal with entrenched inner-city poverty.

Edwards was concluding his eight-state "poverty tour," an emulation of a similar effort by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, while unveiling his comprehensive anti-poverty agenda.

Obama delivered a speech in the hyper-poor Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, DC (picking up an endorsement by Mayor Adrian Fenty), and offered his own prescription for reducing inner-city poverty.

As an excellent analysis by the Washington Post's Alec MacGillis explains, Edwards and Obama are offering sharply different approaches to what might be called the geography of inner-city poverty, with the former arguing that some poor and isolated urban neighborhoods need to be broken up, and the latter arguing that they can be revitalized.

This difference is most dramatically reflected in Edwards' proposal for dispersed low-income housing through rental vouchers, and Obama's proposal for a new inner-city housing Trust Fund. On a more personal note, Edwards is touting his long-standing work on poverty issues, dating back to the 2004 campaign, while Obama's speech is full of references to his own work as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago.

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