Justice
The 10 Cities Getting a Philanthropic Boost for Economic Mobility
An initiative funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Ballmer Group focuses on building “pipelines of opportunity.”
Each year, about 40,000 people in Essex County, New Jersey, get evicted. Almost half of them are in the city of Newark, where more than three-quarters of the population are renters.
As housing in Newark, spiked by a surge in interest from priced-out Manhattanites, grows more expensive, evictions keep getting filed—“sometimes arbitrarily; sometimes because of poor management,” said Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, who’s trying to balance his city’s reviving fortunes with the needs of its many low-income residents. And sometimes, “simply because landlords want to lease it out in order to raise the rent for other folks.”