Legal Services of Northern California Advocate Feed

Bewildered by the arcane rules for applying gross-income rules to food stamp households with “elderly or disabled” members? Well, there’s help available with David Super’s handy chart explaining how the rules apply to all sorts of different situations. (And you can always find the chart at the elderly/disabled gross income page of the California Food Stamp Guide.)

Visualize (and click on) this: The New York Times 2008 Election Results.

It being Halloween and all, we thought our faithful law-trained readers would relish a devilish flashback to that 3-year pedagogical nightmare known as “law school,” with a link to The Art of Written Persuasion: From IRAC to FAILSAFE: A Compilation of Legal Problem-Solving Models. (But, seriously, this is but the latest in an ongoing “persuasion” series at LLRX.com that includes The Rise of Written Persuasion and The Problem with the Case Method and the Case for the Problem Method. Really?)

Courtesy of the Brookings Institution and its partnership with, of all people, the “Federal Reserve System and its 12 member banks,” The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America, was published last week, a 233-page report “detailing 16 high-poverty communities across the United States, investigating the historical and contemporary factors associated with their high levels of economic distress.”

The Census Bureau last week published its Small Area Health Insurance Estimates (SAHIE), with 2005 data broken out in several usable formats, including: familiar county-level GIS maps in PDF format; dynamically generated interactive tables with the data broken out by state, state-specific counties and all counties; and, of course, raw data up the yazoo.

And brace yourselves for the newer data estimates coming your way next year. In its accompanying press release, the Census Bureau observes: “Currently, SAHIE are the only source for county-level estimates of health insurance coverage status. Starting next year the Census Bureau will also release such estimates from its American Community Survey. Single-year estimates will be available for all geographic areas with total populations of 65,000 or more, with three-year estimates being released in 2011 for all areas with total populations of at least 20,000.”

HUD’s new Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), authorized by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, will provide emergency assistance grants to state and local governments to acquire and redevelop foreclosed properties that might otherwise cause blight. HUD’s NSP webpage outlines the basic components of the programs and provides links to NSP regulations and tables listing state and local allocations. Click on the NSP Guide for Eligible Uses for a quick summary of the program requirements. States and the localities selected to receive grants must submit plans detailing how the will use the grants by December 1, 2008 and must obligate the funds within 18 months of receipt. The funds must be used to assist households with incomes not exceeding 120 of percent area median income (AMI) and at least 25 percent of the funds must assist households with incomes at or below 50 percent AMI. To download an audio transcript of a chat sponsored by the National Vacant Properties Campaign and KnowledgePlex on developing a strategic framework for preparing, adopting, and implementing a foreclosure/vacant properties stabilization action plan click here.

California Assembly Bill 433 (Beall) has been signed into law, eliminating the $2,000 asset limit for food stamp applicants by 2010. California Food Policy Advocates estimated that 86,000 people would become eligible for food stamps as a result of the elimination of the asset test. The California Department of Social Services, the state agency that runs the California food stamp program, must fully implement the program for new applicants by January 1, 2010. The law also requires the Department to recommend a new name for California’s food stamp program by July 2009 and requires the Department to take into account a number of characteristics of the program in selecting the name, including the fact that it is no longer distributed through stamps.

In response to a civil rights complaint filed with the Department of Justice, the Maine Judicial branch agreed to create a language access plan. The complaint cited not only Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, but also the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, both of which prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex or religion by recipients of federal assistance.

A key aspect of Maine’s model language assistance plan is the administrative order issued in October 2006, stating that all LEP individuals shall have access to language assistance during all civil as well as criminal proceedings. With the signing of this agreement, the Maine Judicial Branch now has one of the most comprehensive systems in the country for provision of services to LEP individuals in court. The court also designed a training curriculum on the effective use of interpreters and other language assistance measures. This curriculum will be used to train court personnel, including clerks and judges. The Justice Department will monitor Maine’s compliance for a period of two years.

The National Center for Children in Poverty’s has a new web-based tool - the Basic Needs Budget Calculator. The calculator shows how much a family needs to make ends meet. Basic Needs Budgets are provided for different family sizes and types. and are currently available for 6 (large urban) California.

In Race-Conscious Community Lawyering:  Practicing Outside the Box, published in the July-August 2008 issue of Clearinghouse Review Journal of Poverty Law and Policy, LSNC volunteer attorney (and former staff attorney) Tammi Wong discusses “community lawyering as a strategy to develop cultural competence between our client population and the systems with which our clients interact[.]“  The article sets forth the basic components of community lawyering practice, with an emphasis on pursuing advocacy from a client-driven framework using the Sacramento Hmong Mediation project as an example.  The project is lead by Hmong community leaders and Sacramento judges and court staff who are seeking to create a bi-cultural family court mediation system.  To read this article in its entirety, subscribe to Clearinghouse Review or order the individual article.

There is now a “blog” on the home page of the Food Stamp Guide (FSG) that tells you about the latest changes to the Guide. (Thank you, Brian!) And, for those of you that don’t live and breathe for the FSG, the Guide now has the 2009 allotments and a memo on time frames for collecting overissuances. And you can get notice of all the changes delivered to your very own computer, via the new FSG Feed. (Look at the bottom of the green navigation bar on the right; click and subscribe to the feed of your choice!)

MRDC has released a report that compared two Job Club strategies, traditional and enhanced services, in Los Angeles. The enhanced job club focused on career development activities and targeted job searches, and lasted 5 weeks; traditional focused on quick job entry and lasted 3 weeks. Those in the enhanced job club had no better employment outcomes than participants in a traditional job club. At the end of the 18-month follow-up period, about half of both groups were employed.

The Medi-Cal experts at the National Health Law Program (NHeLP) have updated their Overview of the Medi-Cal Program, a great starting point for research on Medi-Cal issues. The 2008 update includes new chapters on Medi-Cal for children, women and immigrants. For those new to the Medi-Cal world, the guide provides a glossary of common Medi-Cal terms to help advocates get familiar with the unique language of Medi-Cal.

Following up on an earlier post by Mona Tawatao, we’ve added a link to a a helpful summary of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (prepared by the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association). You can always find a link to the summary in the Foreclosure section of the Housing Law | Issues page, under “Federal Laws.”

As long time fans of DataPlace, currently setting the web-platform gold standard for community-oriented GIS mapping, may we suggest this Thursday’s (August 14) KnowledgePlex Expert Chat featuring What’s New At DataPlace: Beta and Beyond. The new DataPlace Beta site is up for public viewing. Enjoy, and have some GIS fun.

By now, based on the amount of press coverage the foreclosure-related provisions of the huge and historic Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (H.R. 3221, signed into law on July 30) have received, we know that the Act brings forth FHA reform, nearly $4 billion to stabilize neighborhoods affected by foreclosure and $180 M for foreclosure prevention counseling, among many other things.  And, we are celebrating the momentous creation of an Affordable Housing Trust Fund, a national permanent source for the production, preservation and maintenance of affordable housing, 90 percent of which will go toward rental housing mostly for those at the extremely low income and poverty levels.  We cannot thank the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) enough for leading the long-fought campaign to establish this fund.   For a very useful summary of these and all the other parts of H.R. 3221, visit Boston-based Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association’s website.  Provisions of particular interest include:  Exemption of PHAs with 550 units and under from annual plan requirement (not so good); requirement that State LIHTC administrating agencies provide HUD with project-specific demographic information on race, income, age, use of Section 8, etc.; provision permitting students formerly in foster care to reside in LIHTC units; provision harmonizing bond rules with LIHTC rules; repeal of the ban on combining Section 8 moderate rehab with LIHTC; and waiver of the income recertification requirements for  developments that are 100 percent LIHTC. 

One more thing. . .NLIHC is hosting a conference call on August 19 at 2 pm EST on the features of the Trust Fund and next steps to ensure proper implementation.  The info:  Call in 866-878-4191, Code 9671875.