LAT: Nation's Mayors Put Spotlight on Poverty

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-poverty30mar30,1,4508268.story?coll=la-headlines-california

From the Los Angeles Times

Nation's Mayors Put Spotlight on Poverty

City leaders from across the country are meeting in L.A. this week to brainstorm about ways to help the poor.
By Duke Helfand and Nancy Cleeland
Times Staff Writers

March 30, 2006

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who leads a city where thousands of working families live in poverty, believes he can help the poor by building affordable housing, strengthening job training and reforming the much-maligned public schools — ideas that have been tried elsewhere with limited success.

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Although local government leaders say they can't do much about the underlying causes of poverty — such as job cuts and soaring home prices — economists, labor organizers, affordable-housing advocates and others say cities have a number of tools that can help. At the very least, the gathering of mayors can cast national attention on a problem that, by many measures, is growing worse.

As head of a poverty task force for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Villaraigosa scheduled today's session to highlight what researchers see as a widening gap between rich and poor — one that is pronounced in places populated by vast numbers of immigrants with limited education and minimal job skills... Los Angeles epitomizes a kind of urban poverty in which the poor — day laborers, hotel workers, taxi drivers and convenience store clerks, among others — work two or three jobs and still confront agonizing daily choices about whether to put food on the table, have warm clothing or get decent medical care.

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Some cities, for example, require developers to set aside a portion of their projects for affordable housing or contribute to a housing trust fund. At least 400 U.S. cities have so-called inclusionary zoning laws, but developers have successfully resisted the idea in Los Angeles. Also, municipal leaders can coordinate workforce training programs with growing industries, as Villaraigosa hopes to do with jobs in healthcare and construction. Some cities have also used their regulatory powers to require that developers pay higher wages, as Los Angeles has done on a few large projects, including Staples Center. Transportation systems could be updated to give workers greater access to jobs. In Los Angeles, that would mean linking neighborhoods in the southeast corners of the city with employment growth occurring in the northwest.

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