Good Magazine is reporting that four Detroit High Schools will begin training students to work at Wal-Mart.
Students will receive 10 credits for 11 weeks of job readiness preparation with the retail giant.
Advocates say it’s a good opportunity for students, given the city’s staggering unemployment rate.
Advocates for the poor say the students are being trained for dead-end jobs and lives of subserviance.

-AS

Between 2000 and 2008, large metropolitan areas saw their suburban poverty rates grow at twice the rate of inner cities, according to a new report by the Brookings Institution.
For example, in 2008, 23 percent more people were living in poverty outside the city of Cleveland’s borders than inside it. That’s a 44 percent jump since 2000, for a total of 9 percent of the suburban population. Meanwhile the number of poor in the city of Cleveland decreased, WCPN Ideastream reports.
Similar trends were reported in Akron and Youngstown.
Also of note:
-Social service …

Take a look at this column, published in Buffalo’s weekly Artvoice.
It reviews a book, Hope and Despair in the American City by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press 2009), which examines school desegregation through metropolitan-wide school reorganization.
The premise? This work “compares the sorry recent history of Syracuse, New York with the glad success of Raleigh, North Carolina. One town tried desegregation within the boundaries of the old city and failed, and is dying, while the other town regionalized schools, and has been growing by leaps and bounds,” writes reviewer Bruce Fisher. (Fisher is …

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this Wall Street Journal article that traces the story of one home in the Motor City - and through that house, decades of history and change in the neighborhood and the city overall.
Spend a few minutes reading about 1626 W. Boston Boulevard, in Detroit’s Boston-Edison neighborhood, from its auto-industry origins to a subprime borrower.
-KG

I saw an interesting ad recently, previewing the Sundance Channel documentary Brick City.
The show will focus on Newark, New Jersey (a city that while not in the Rust Belt, has certainly had its share of problems), Mayor Cory Booker, and other city officials and residents, such as the chief of police, a gang member, and a youth counselor.
You can watch a number of clips from the show and read a bit about it on the web site.
We’ve written about Mayor Booker and his efforts to turn the city around on …

A study by a University of Michigan researcher has confirmed what we already knew: City residents pay more taxes.

“Workers in expensive cities in the Northeast, Great Lakes and Pacific regions bear a disproportionate share of the federal tax burden, effectively paying 27 percent more in federal income taxes than workers with similar skills in a small city or rural area,” according to The Atlantic.

The study asserts that city residents have higher incomes than their rural counterparts, but also contend with higher cost of living. This holds for not only pricey cities like L.A. and New York, but also Detroit.

Several Detroit Public School employees have been charged with felonies in connection with corruption and missing funds totaling tens of millions of dollars, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
This is on top of another pressing problem the school is struggling with, a $259 million budget deficit.
The charges are pretty shocking - “A probe launched by [Emergency financial manager] Mr. Bobb uncovered paychecks going to 257 “ghost” employees who have yet to be accounted for,” the Journal explained.
“He said that approximately 500 illegal health-care dependents he uncovered have cost the district …

I hesitate to even post this story, it is so violent, depressing, and hopeless.
At a recent cookout in East Baltimore, a dozen people were shot - which in itself is bad enough - but is part of a larger wave of violence that swept the city recently.
“The shootings on Conkling were not related to the shooting on Ashland, which might have sparked the shootings at Baltimore and Bond, which might have led to the shootings on Comet, which might have been retaliation for a shooting six months ago which was …

The Root Magazine is reporting that the White House has made good on its promise to establish an Office of Urban Affairs.
The office is designed to facilitate and coordinate programs that improve the lives of city dwellers. Adolfo Carrion, former Bronx borough president, will lead the office.
On the campaign trail President Obama promised to “stop seeing cities as the problem and start seeing them as a solution.”

The president has a lot on his plate right now, but this seems like a step in the right direction. We need a new vision …

Last month, 66-year-old Robert Brundage was riding his bicycle home from a Jobs with Justice meeting at the library in Toledo’s Old West End neighborhood.
Around 6:30 p.m., he was knocked off his bike by a 15-year-old who lives nearby; the teen stole Brundage’s bicycle. Brundage died.
Brundage was well-known to many in the city - he was often seen riding his bike, or attending board or other meetings for the Collingwood Arts Center, the Toledo Poetry Foundation, the Urban Coalition, the MultiFaith Council of Northwest Ohio, Toledo Area Jobs With Justice …