Hank Kalet

I have a story at NJ Spotlight today on the plight faced by renters displaced by Hurricane Sandy.

Steven Zitz moved to Sayreville when he was in high school and had lived in the Sayreville-South River area for the past 20 years. He had his own business as a house painter and had been working regularly despite the stagnant economy.

Superstorm Sandy changed all that.

His aunt’s house, where he was renting a room, was badly damaged. He lost his work van and has been staying with an uncle in Brooklyn since the storm, unable to work and unable to qualify for government assistance.

“I’m in a very tough spot,” he said. “My back is not only to the wall, it’s through the wall.”

Zitz is one of the thousands of renters who still find themselves scrambling to rebuild their lives. While state and federal agencies have assisted 21,000 renters, several thousand more have likely fallen through the cracks, though the number is difficult to pin down, advocates for low-income residents say. Unlike property records, such as deeds and mortgages, the state does not require that lease agreements be filed with the counties. And many landlord-tenant arrangements are informal, operating on a month-to-month basis.

State officials say they are doing what they can for renters and that the state’s recovery plan includes what the administration calls “a range of rental housing activities designed to replenish rental housing stock lost to Sandy, rehabilitate affordable rental units left uninhabitable by Sandy, and provide affordable housing for special needs populations.”

For more, read here.

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The U.S. Supreme Court today overturned a key component of the Voting Rights Act, calling a section that helped determine which states and jurisdictions were subject to the 49-year-old law’s “preclearance requirement.” The decision — when coupled with a conservative Congress — effectively overturns the law.

held that the coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, originally passed in 1965 and most recently updated by Congress in 1975, was unconstitutional. The section determines which states must receive preclearance from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington before they make minor changes to voting procedures, like relocating a polling place, or major ones, like redrawing electoral districts.

The current coverage scheme, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, is “based on 40-year-old facts having no relationship to the present day.”

“Congress — if it is to divide the states — must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions,” he wrote. “It cannot simply rely on the past.”

But Section 4 — and the entire law — was reauthorized in 2006 by large majorities in both houses and signed by President George W. Bush. Congress, the body charged with fact-finding as part of its law-drafting responsibilities, apparently found the 1975 schema to be valid. The court, in overruling Congress and the president, has done what conservatives have criticized prior courts of doing — writing law. This is, to use the conservative phrase, a case of judicial activism.

As The New York Times writes in an editorial, it also is a “damaging and intellectually dishonest ruling.” The court, it writes, “eviscerated enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, in which Congress kept the Constitution’s promise of a vote for every citizen,” without bothering to “rule on the constitutional validity of the idea that some places have such strong records of discrimination that they must seek federal approval before they may change their voting rules.”

Instead, the 5-4 ruling usurped Congress’s power and struck down the formula that Congress has repeatedly reauthorized to determine which states fall into that category.

This is not going to happen — as the court well know — because Congress “refused to expand the coverage formula in 2006,” when it was in Democratic hands, and it “is extremely unlikely to take up the offer now,” given that it is controlled by conservative Republicans.

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From the New Jersey Poverty and Economic Reporting Project blog:

This story from The Times of Trenton today is not about parenting, though that is the frame in which it is being reported. The story is about the difficult and dangerous decisions poor parents are forced to make everyday and the consequences they often face.

At issue is whether a mother’s decision to move with her two children into a storage locker amounts to neglect, or whether it was a somewhat logical if misguided response to her situation. I would argue that, while the woman made a bad decision, we as a society helped to create the conditions within which she was forced to choose from a list of bad options — storage locker, the streets or homeless shelter.

For the full post, read here.

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I just posted an update on the minimum wage referendum at The N.J. Poverty and Economic Reporting Project blog:

An NJ.com story on today’s official kick-off of Raise the Wage’s official campaign to pass a state referendum that would increase the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $8.25 and index it for inflation shows the shortcomings of this kind of approach. While Raise the Wage — a coalition of unions and other organizations — intends to focus on grassroots organizing, its kick-off press conference featured the biggest names in New Jersey Democratic politics, which meant that the coverage was going to focus on, well, politics.
Here is the lede:

Two Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate, the party’s nominee for governor and top union leaders this morning kicked off a campaign to raise state’s minimum wage.

What follows, interspersed with some quotations about the need for a higher wage, is essentially more of the same — which unfortunately implies that the campaign is less about the wage-hike than about Democratic politics.

Read the rest here.

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