Dallas Faces Massive Uphill Climb to Reduce Poverty
A little more than four years ago, in February 2014, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings launched the Mayor's Task Force on Poverty, telling a United Way lunch crowd that he'd been preaching too much and doing to little to change the economic inequality in the city he's led since 2011.
On Monday, that task force issued its latest reports, and while Dallas has seen significant changes in its priorities since Rawlings decided to attack the issue, poverty remains as intractable in the city as ever. It was clear, however, that some of the city's newest leaders are thinking about the issue in more progressive ways.
According to the task force, Dallas continues to lag behind other cities in North Texas and around the United States when it comes to income level. Almost 23 percent of Dallas residents have incomes below the federal poverty level — $24,300 for a family of four in 2016, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available — a higher number than in Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Austin. Dallas has the second-highest child-poverty level in the United States, with 35.6 percent of kids in the city living below the poverty line.
One of the reasons Dallas' numbers are worse, according to Theresa O'Donnell, the city's chief resiliency officer and a member of the task force, is because the city has essentially lost its middle class over the last couple of decades. While other cities like San Antonio and Houston have annexed communities on their borders, Dallas is ringed by independent suburbs that attract North Texans who would otherwise be the buffer between the city's working poor and its wealthy.
Read more: http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/what-should-dallas-do-about-its-working-poor-10665500
