Washington already has the nation's highest state minimum wage at $9.19 an hour. Now, there's a push in Seattle, at least, to make it $15. That would mean fast food workers, retail clerks, baristas and other minimum wage workers would get what protesters demanded when they shut down a handful of city restaurants in May [...]
Progressive Women of Napa Valley is sponsoring a forum to start a community conversation about the economic impact of a local increase in the minimum wage. The organization reports that while Napa County has over 3 million visitors a year who spend $1.4 billion dollars, more than 24 percent of local residents live below 200 [...]
The Bay Area's affordable housing crisis will be solved only through policies and practices that result in the construction of new affordable units. These units will protect against gentrification and displacement, keep families in their homes and bring unexpected environmental benefits. This issue has most recently attracted attention in San Francisco, where earlier this month [...]
According to Chris Benner, professor of community and regional development and a supporter of the campaign, raising the minimum wage wouldn’t have a significant impact on the consumer. “The estimates for $15 of minimum wage are that it would be a 10 percent increase in restaurant prices and a four percent increase in retail,” Benner [...]
The signs of the gap—really, a chasm—between the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss in Silicon Valley. On a bustling morning in downtown Palo Alto, the center of today’s technology boom, apparently homeless people and their meager belongings occupy almost every available public bench. Twenty minutes away in San Jose, the largest city [...]
Many of us want to believe Grand Rapids, or any city we call home, is a just and equitable place. The only way to prove such a theory is to dive head first into research. Grand Rapids may soon have the answer. Chris Benner, an associate professor in Human and Community Development at the University [...]
Social equity should be something to work toward for its own sake, but in case public officials needed extra motivation, it's also been tied to prolonged economic growth. A recent report by the International Monetary Fund found that more equitable countries tended to have longer national economic growth spells. Now a new study of U.S. [...]
