Across the country, wages aren’t keeping pace with rent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average rent has increased 66 percent since 2000, while wages have only increased 34 percent.  The implications for poor and middle-class families are clear. In an environment where rent alone can account for 30-50 percent of incomes, evictions are becoming almost commonplace.According to a new report from the national real estate brokerage Redfin, 2.7 million Americans were evicted last year.The findings add color to the national debate on poverty, which typically focuses on income and wages. In reality however, housing may be the bigger concern.[[{"fid":"306884","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_description[und][0][value]":"","field_description[und][0][format]":"full_html","field_byline_text[und][0][value]":"","field_migration_notes[und][0][value]":""},"type":"media","attributes":{"height":960,"width":960,"class":"media-element file-default"}}]]About six blocks from the White House, the 14th Street corridor, in the Logan Circle neighborhood, is the heart of one of Washington, D.C.’s oldest African-American neighborhoods.“We’re also standing in front of one of the fastest gentrifying miles in the United States,” Silvia Salazar said.Salazar lived in Logan Circle for the past 15 years. That was before the condo boom of the mid-2000’s sent rents skyrocketing.“Yeah, people easily spend more than 50 percent of what they make in rent,” she said.  “Because you want to be in an accessible neighborhood where you can walk to work, people are willing to sacrifice.”Many of these jobs Salazar is talking about are in the service industry, cleaning, serving food. Oftentimes they don’t pay enough to cover costs — particularly for families.“You know, it’s been a lot of times when we didn’t eat,” 19-year-old Tamie Small said. “It was more like—  are we going to ea...

In many parts of the country the cost of rent is increasing faster than wages.Couple that with a lack of affordable housing and what you have is a growing problem in the rental market—evictions.Yet relatively little is known about the actual rate of evictions.Which is why national real-estate company Redfin decided to do some digging. The findings of their report detail an environment that is increasingly stacked against renters.According to Redfin, half of all renters in the U.S. are “cost burdened” —  paying at least 30 percent of income on rent. But one in four are spending more than 50 percent. [[{"fid":"306900","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_description[und][0][value]":"","field_description[und][0][format]":"full_html","field_byline_text[und][0][value]":"Redfin","field_migration_notes[und][0][value]":""},"type":"media","attributes":{"height":584,"width":884,"style":"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]“We estimate that last year three million families were kicked out of their homes, just based on the court system," Nela Richardson said.Richardson is chief economist at Redfin, as well as an occasional contributor to Marketplace. She said the only way evictions can be tracked is through eviction court records. Which is what Redfin did, pulling court records from 19 states.“But the actual number is far greater, maybe even double that number,” she said.That’s because many evictions never make it all the way to court. People leave on their own, or maybe the landlord pressures them out.  For those that do go to court, the renter often ends up meeting a guy like Donald Rheubottom, a sheriff in the Baltimore City Sheriff’s department.  One cold fall morning  I accompanied him in his squad car across a series of Southwest Baltimore neighborhoods. He had a list of twenty evictions to carry ...

Even as the economy has been front and center, poverty didn't get a lot of air time during the election. And while a majority of low-income people voted for Hillary Clinton, low-income Americans were also less likely to vote overall.

Poverty has been gradually going down nationally: in 2015 the percent of residents living below the federal poverty line was 13.5 percent, after a peak above 15 percent during the fallout from the Great Recession. But Dayton, Ohio, is one of the places that has seen little of the improvement in incomes: poverty has climbed to 35 percent, more than twice the statewide rate.

In general, President-elect Donald Trump’s ideas about poverty haven’t been clear. Broadly speaking, he’s suggested he thinks programs like food stamps, Obamacare and disability aren’t working, and that cutting business taxes will trickle down and create more jobs.

Behind a Catholic Church in east Dayton in an early-morning food pantry line, I meet two Trump supporters, Susan and Dennis.

“We’re standing in this line because our tax dollars are failing to suit us anywhere else,” Susan said. Dennis said he’d voted Democratic in the past, but shifted to a Trump vote in hopes of something different: “I think he’s gonna change some things around and be for the good, for the people.”

But a woman named Sydney Michelle, who’s also in line, chimes in to say she thought Trump ran a hate campaign.

“I definitely voted Clinton,” she said, saying she wants to see peace and healing in the country after a divisive election. “I don’t see that with Trump being in office.”

“Most of the people we serve work,” said Sunnie Lain, who coordinates the food pantries for St. Vincent De Paul in Dayton. She said she’s worried Trump has offered false hope. “Many of them work full time, and many of them work more than one job. So the issue isn’t work, it’s work that pays at a level that’s sustaining. But there doesn’t seem to be a clear plan about training or about education, or about how these ...

Most of us take free public education for granted, at least through high school. But the idea of free college really gained traction during the election season.For Mike Essl, not paying for college was life-changing. He's a 1996 graduate of the Cooper Union in New York City, which — until a couple of years ago — charged no tuition. He's now acting dean of the art school.“When you mix up a class of everybody who's going for free, and they have diverse economic backgrounds and come from diverse places in the United States, there's a citizenship in the class that I have never seen at another school,” he said. “It was great because we were all there for free, not because I was there for free.”Unburdened by student loan debt when he graduated, Essl and some friends from Cooper Union founded a graphic design firm.“We were able to grow that company to a 20-person firm that was billing between $2 and 3 million a year,” he said.Essl was part of a group that sued Cooper Union after it began charging tuition in 2014, following a financial crisis. Under a legal settlement, the college is working on a plan to once again offer a tuition-free college education for all its students.“To be honest I'm still shocked and appalled that we are charging tuition,” he said. “I think it's a complete violation of the founder's intent, and I think we should be free or die trying."

When minors face criminal charges, their parents often face financial ones. That’s true throughout the country.In some California Counties for instance, it can cost as much as $30 per-day for room and board for parents whose children are locked up inside juvenile hall. The bills don’t stop there. When kids are strapped with ankle monitors or assigned a probation officer, parents are often charged for that as well.Youth Radio first reported on the issue of juvenile fees back in 2014 for Marketplace, and reported the story of  Zoe Mathews. Her son had died, but she was still paying bills for the time he spent in juvenile hall. Mathews’ son was locked up for 208 days at a cost of almost $30 per day. Ultimately, she was charged more than $7,000.“It’s a constant reminder that, no, he’s not here anymore,” said Mathews. “By being incarcerated, you’re paying your debt back to society. So then they’re going to charge you an additional per-night stay as if there were some options? The bills are additional stress to already a very painful situation that I will be dealing with for the rest of my life.”Attorney Kate Weisburd of The East Bay Community Law Center, said, “It almost felt like you were at the checkout line at Target. And you were getting this receipt for how much money you owed.”Weisburd, who primarily represents young people in Alameda County, Calif., said teens and their families would end up with piles of bills they didn’t expect, and since the majority of her clients are low income, the impact was huge.[[{"fid":"305598","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_description[und][0][value]":"Attorney%20Kate%20Weisburd%20pushed%20Alameda%20County%2C%20Calif.%20to%20reconsider%20the%20policy%20of%20charging%20juvenile%20justice%20related%20fees%20parents.%26nbsp%3B","field_description[und][0][format]":"full_html","field_byline_text[und][0][value]":"Myles B...

In the back room of an office supply store in Grand Junction, Colorado, six guys who call themselves Soul Habit practice for a holiday tree lighting concert. Tim Breckon, 29, is on the trombone putting his education to work. He also wrote the music.Breckon has a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in trombone performance, and about $78,000 in student loans.“This month I'll make my tenth or eleventh successful zero-dollar payment, which is what I can afford,” he said.Related

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He can pay nothing because he's in an income-based repayment plan and has never earned much above the poverty line. His music gigs don't pay much. In the summer, he loads fire retardant onto planes that fight wildfires. The rest of the year, he waits tables at a steakhouse.“I don't think I really understood how much income I would probably be making and what I would be doing, getting music degrees,” he said.Like most borrowers Breckon had to go through entrance counseling before getting that first loan check. It was online, and laid out the terms of the loan, his estimated future payments and what would happen if he defaulted.“I guess the numbers were all pretty clear on paper, but who knows what an 18-year-old really knows about that sort of thing?” he said. “I just took it because it seemed like no one who had that much money would give it away without me being able to pay it back easily, you know?”Now you might be wondering, why didn't someone pull that 18-year-old aside and say, “are you sure you want to take on this much debt for degrees in trombone performance?”“The law is clear that colleges can't discourage students from getting the loans that they're entitled to,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell.That's right. Except in rare instances, colleges are not allowed to limit borrowing, Mitchell sai...

In most of the country, if you're arrested for something there's a chance you'll be asked to pay money bail to get out of jail until your court date. Estimates vary, but tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people end up staying in jail only because they can't afford bail.But not everywhere."Here in DC, we do not use money in setting conditions of release," said Ciff Keenan, head of the Washington DC Pretrial Services Agency. He says nobody who's in jail in Washington DC is there because they can't afford bail. "Income has nothing to do with it. We have a scientifically-validated risk assessment instruments. It reflects a risk score."When someone is arrested, they're given a score of how likely they are to show up to their court date, and how likely they are to get in trouble again if they're released.Keenan says around 90 percent of people end up being released, often with some kind of supervision.But the algorithms are one place where this approach gets criticized. "The risk is that the algorithms often incorporate data that may perpetuate racial biases in the criminal justice system," said Joshua Norkin, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of New York.No state has fully adopted DC's cashless bail system, but there is a growing unease with money bail in many jurisdictions Kentucky, Colorado, and New Jersey discourage the use of cash bail for low-risk defendants. And many more states are still grappling with the issue ultimately at the bottom of this - what to do about low income people stuck in jail because they're poor.

Does bail discriminate?There are around 450,000 Americans in jail who haven't been convicted of a crime. How many of them are there because they are poor is hotly contested and varies from place to place. Data from Los Angeles suggest it's 14 percent there. A New Jersey study from 2013 put the number at 39 percent, advocates say it's higher. By any measure it's tens of thousands of people on any given day.Bail's effect on poor people is a problem that charities and several state governments have increasingly tried to grapple with in recent years. At least ten class action lawsuits have challenged the practice in the past two years. And the U.S. Department of Justice has argued that fixed money bail for poor people violates their 14th amendment constitutional right to equal protection under the law."There are thousands of people sitting in jail on minor offenses, essentially because they are poor. And because they are poor, they cannot afford the bail," said David Feige,  chairman of the board of the Bronx Freedom Fund. The funds posts bail for low-income people.Not everyone agrees."Bail is being unfairly painted as a debtor's prison issue," said Jeff Clayton, policy director of the American Bail Coalition, a trade association. He says the number of people in jail because they can't afford bail is overstated, and believes bail is ultimately fair. "Bail is a liberty promotion institution as old as this nation."Click the audio player above to listen to the tale of one New York man whose arrest and inability to pay bail created all kinds of problems.

It’s been more than 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ended state-sponsored racial segregation in schools and helped launch the modern Civil Rights movement. But segregation — by race and class — is on the rise again in public schools. A new report from the Century Foundation, a think tank that advocates for socioeconomic diversity, found that more districts are taking steps to address the growing concentration of poverty in schools.When the Century Foundation started tracking socioeconomic diversity efforts 20 years ago, researchers found just two examples of school districts with explicit policies, said Halley Potter, a fellow with the foundation.“We have now found 100 districts and charter schools or networks that have policies that explicitly look at students’ socioeconomic status and factor that into their enrollment,” she said.While the number is still small, those schools educate more than 4 million students, she said.The growth, in part, reflects increasing legal restrictions that prevent schools from considering race in school enrollment, Potter said. Income can be a useful proxy for some districts trying to promote diversity. The number of schools with high concentrations of black and Latino students as well as poverty more than doubled between 2001 and 2014, according to a recent GAO report.Meanwhile, research has shown that low-income kids of all races do better in mixed-income schools, Potter said. Those schools tend to have better resources and more experienced teachers, she said, and students can benefit from exposure to peers from more advantaged backgrounds.“We now know that the size of the achievement gap based on income between the poorest students and the richest students is twice the size of the black-white achievement gap,” Potter said.That’s one reason the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina is developing a policy that will consider family income when assigning students to some schoo...

This is the first in a three-part series on the Detroit housing market. Read part two, on why mortgages have all but disappeared from the city, and part three, on the riskier alternative for people who want to buy without a mortgage.

The median price for an existing home in the United States right now is around $240,000 and rising. But there are some markets, like Detroit, where it’s still far below that — in the city of Detroit the median value is below $40,000.

The prospect of buying low and selling it at a decent profit or renting it to tenants has drawn a lot of international investors to Detroit. But that can create problems.

“There are a lot of people competing for these houses,” said Rob Funk, a realtor who says his business is hot right now. On a way to a house on Detroit’s east side, which he’d shown earlier in the day to a German investor, he said he sees more and more people from overseas: the U.K., China, Indonesia. The one he showed to the German guy is two stories, solid brick, with a lot of detail work inside.

“I personally love this house,” he said. But like a lot of homes that have sat vacant for years in the city, it’s missing a furnace, and needs a new roof — the repairs could add up to tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, he’s marketing the house at for just $9,900.

A buyer might fix it up and flip it, but local investors also buy up homes in foreclosure auctions and resell them to overseas investors as rental properties. Websites advertise a return on investment of up to 20 percent.

“That seems like a very attractive return when government bonds give you 1.5 percent,” said Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate finance at New York University’s Stern School. He says investors are drawn to the U.S. because of its relatively stable economy and to Detroit for its rock-bottom real-estate prices.

Still, it’s no secret that this is all speculation on the likelihood that home prices will continue to rise in the city. Also, ca...