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On October 16, Congress ended the government shutdown, bringing to a close a two-week distraction from critical issues facing the country. During this period of partisan politicking, some may have forgotten about the House Republicans’ plan to gut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often referred to as food stamps, by $39 million over the next 10 years. The four million Americans who are set to lose their benefits certainly didn’t forget and neither should we. On top of congressional…

Suburbia beckons many poor and working-class families with the promise of better schools, access to non-dead-end jobs and sanctuary from the looming threat of urban violence. But many suburbanites balk at the prospect of affordable housing in their midst. They fear that when poor people move next door crime, drugs, blight, bad public schools and higher taxes inevitably follow. They worry that the value of their homes will fall and the image of their town will suffer. It does not…

The Goldman School of Public Policy and Students of Color in Public Policy (SCIPP) are dedicated to increasing diversity within the program. As part of our mission, a group of graduate students in SCIPP is offering assistance to all prospective students in the application process. 

You co-founded Transform in 1997. What was your initial vision for starting the organization? As a cyclist, I had come to understand how 60 years of subdivisions, strip malls and highway-exit corporate parks were devastating our country. Planning for all this sprawl meant public transportation was being bled dry while highway projects got the green light. Huge numbers of people — especially low-income families, youth and many seniors — were cut off from opportunity. I’d always wanted to reverse these…

  Washington has been the incubator of bad practices lately, from gridlock to shutdown to utter inaction on the country's crucial needs. The most pressing of those needs is a strategy to create good-paying middle class jobs in America - when we are competing for those jobs globally. We need to be creative and daring. And we need to think less top-down and more bottom-up.  We need a jobs moon shot - a Jobs Race to the Top.…

Start by asking yourself a question: would you have a cell phone if you had to buy 20 years’ worth of minutes up front? The answer for most people is no. Similarly, we should not be surprised that it has been difficult to convince homeowners to make extensive energy efficiency home improvements.The energy and financial savings may be real, but such improvements require a lot of money up front — and…

The real crisis is hunger, not government spending. The House voted last week to cut $39 billion over 10 years on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, also called both SNAP and "Food Stamps," and now the bill moves to the Senate. It has become a controversial funding issue. Despite the fact that the program lifts 2.1 million children out of poverty annually, and has been shown to be an effective counter-cyclical stabilizer, some are calling for major changes to the program in the…

    Our drone-filled future?     Image created by Victoria Veluz Drones deliver your tacos! Drones walk your kid to school! Behind the headline-grabbing news, a complex ecosystem of industry, legislation, community groups, and research powers the exponential growth in drones. In order to better understand all of this interconnected activity, Deloitte GovLab, where we work as consultants, decided to conduct a “drone census.” We gathered data on stakeholders driving the drone movement, including:…

As temperatures rise, tempers flare. Anyone who has experienced the hostility of a swelteringly hot summer day in the city can attest to that. But researchers are now quantifying the causal relationship between extreme climate and human conflict. Whether their focus is on small-scale interpersonal aggression or large-scale political instability, low-income or high-income societies, the year 10,000 B.C. or the present day, the overall conclusion is the same: episodes of extreme climate make people more violent toward one another. In…

Fifty years after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the spirit of that moment and movement lives on in the fast-food workers who, since beginning in New York in November, have held rolling one-day strikes at big-name chains in different cities to call for better wages and conditions. The restaurant industry employs more than 4 million fast-food workers in the United States today — or more people than live in Los Angeles — many of them earning as little…