Slideshow: Getting back to nature in Gary, Indiana

Jon Lowenstein / NOOR

As both the economy and the population in Gary, Ind., decline, nature slowly takes over the city's abandoned homes and buildings.

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By Nick Bogert, NBC News contributor

GARY, Ind. -- No matter which direction Arthur Joe looks from his home, he sees abandoned properties and the blight they attract.

Next door is an empty house where “drugheads” – as Joe calls them – often set up camp. Behind is a duplex with trash visible through every broken window, and an alley clogged with refuse spilling from several abandoned lots.

Across the street is a vacant house owned by Joe’s landlord. Joe mows the grass there, vowing “we’re going to put it back together.”

For decades, Gary has been ravaged by economic decline and a long, deep housing bust, and putting it back together won’t be easy. Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson thinks letting vast swaths of her once-prosperous city, the birthplace of Michael Jackson, return to nature might be a solution.

“I’d like to see 100,000 folks in Gary. That’d be great,” the mayor said recently, walking through a neighborhood where empty lots and structures outnumber occupied homes. “We could probably do it in 35 square miles.” That’s 25 percent more residents on nearly 40 percent less land.

With five broken teeth, three cavities and a painful gum abscess spreading to her sinuses, Patty Kennedy knew she had to get in line early for a free dental clinic held last month in San Jose, Calif.

The 53-year-old woman from Modesto, nearly 100 miles away, was counting on the care to repair not only her smile and her worsening health -- but also her chances of getting a job.

“I’d love to work at a grocery store as a cashier. I’d even go for bagger,” said Kennedy, who camped out overnight at the CDA Cares clinic sponsored by the California Dental Association Foundation. “At this point, I’d do whatever.”

But like many of the more than 2,200 people who showed up for the 5:30 a.m. clinic on May 18 and 19, Kennedy knew that bad teeth translate into poor employment prospects, even for the best workers.

“I really don’t smile a lot,” said Kennedy, whose husband, Lucas, also 53, lost his job five years ago when California’s construction economy tanked. “I know that when you have a job, you want to have a pleasant attitude and you've got to smile and be friendly.”

Lack of access to dental care is a particular problem in California, where budget woes virtually eliminated access to the state’s Denti-Cal program in 2009, leaving an estimated 3 million poor, disabled and elderly people without oral health services. In 2012, CDA events provided about $2.8 million in free care to nearly 4,000 people.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images file

People are handed bread during a food distribution by the Food Bank of the Southern Tier Mobile Food Pantry on June 20, 2012 in Oswego, N.Y.

Across the country, schools are getting out for the summer. And while most students will leave their classrooms happy for the break, some parents will be fretting about how to feed their children without meals provided through schools.

The hot summer months bring a fresh challenge for food banks in the nation’s poorest and hungriest counties: How to make sure millions of children get regular, healthy meals when they aren’t in school.

“The time of year in the United States (that) an American child is most likely to go hungry is the summertime, and the principal reason for that is school is out,” said Kevin Concannon, undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services with the USDA.

That often means summer vacations – not the winter holidays – are the busiest time of year for food banks, because they are struggling to fill the gap for children who are not getting regular meals through federally funded school lunch programs and other services.

“We know hunger, just generally across the board, is a bigger problem in summer,” said Celia Cole, chief executive of the Texas Food Bank Network, which represents regional food banks across the state.

Texas is home to six of the 10 counties in the country that had the highest rate of childhood food insecurity in 2011, according to data to be released next week by Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks. All told, nearly 1.9 million Texas children, or 27.6 percent of kids in the state, were living in food-insecure households in 2011, according to Feeding America.

Many food banks also see summer as a time to meet their most important need.

By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News

Two decades after President Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it," Americans blame government handouts for persistent poverty in the United States more than any other single factor, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday.

Peter "Hopper" Stone

Mitchell (blue shirt) and Cameron (red jacket) are a well-to-do gay couple raising an adopted daughter, Lily, on the TV show Modern Family.

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

When gays and lesbians are featured in popular culture, what do we see? White, wealthy women who host talk shows or affluent men doting on their kids -- like Mitchell and Cameron from "Modern Family." So it’s no wonder that the conventional wisdom is that gay people in America have tons of money and fewer economic struggles than the rest of the population.

By Eun Kyung Kim, Avni Patel and Erica Hill, NBC News 

Christina Hubbert recently started on the road to a better life with the help of a low-interest loan that allowed her to buy a 2006 Honda, ending her dependence on public transportation.

A car means Hubbert no longer spends two hours each way to and from work in suburban Atlanta. It means spending more time with her 3-year-old daughter — and no longer having to wake her up at 5 every morning so she can be in the office by 8. It also means saving hundreds of dollars each week in day care late fees she incurred when she couldn’t get to the center before its 6:30 p.m. closing time.

Jim Seida / NBC News

Nora Gonzalez, right, is unable to work as a caregiver because of criminal justice debt she has been unable to pay since being convicted of passing a bad check in 2005. Here, she assists Cleo Nimietz, her boyfriend's mother, who suffers from sarcoma, in the latter's Federal Way, Wash., home.

By Lisa Riordan Seville and Hannah Rappleye, NBC News 

Cash-strapped cities and states increasingly are trying to tap a previously overlooked pot of money – uncollected fines, fees and other costs imposed by civil and criminal courts – in order to help them balance their books.

And when people don’t pay these court-ordered debts, some local officials have not been shy about tossing them in jail, leading to the creation of modern-day “debtor’s prisons” full of poor offenders, advocates say.

By Izhar Harpaz and Sopan Deb
Rock Center

For millions of people struggling with the Great Recession, the American dream had become just another jaded catchphrase. But for single dad and Army veteran Dan Greeley, a Longmont, Colo., resident, the future looked promising.

In 2011, Greeley was about to be promoted to director of operations at Sister Carmen, a nonprofit community center and food pantry, and he was certain that his higher income would finally allow him to fulfill a dream: to buy a house for his three young children, ages two, four and six.

“Everything I do is for my kids,” Greeley told NBC News' Lester Holt in an interview airing Friday, March 15 at 10pm/9CDT on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams. “I can live in an apartment and be happy. But they want a house, they want a backyard. They’re going to get a house and they’re going to get a backyard.”

But instead of getting a raise, Greeley was forced to take a pay cut.

He fell victim to what is known as the "Cliff Effect," when a small increase in a family's income can lead to an abrupt termination of an essential public benefit like food stamps, health insurance or child care assistance.

For Greeley it was child care. As the single parent of three young children he needed lots of it and it came at a high cost -- $2300 a month, almost all of his take-home pay. And that was before his rent, car payments, utilities and health care bills. Not to mention the money he needed to put food on the table.

“The way I was brought up, we didn't ask for help,” Greeley said. “We just figured it out and this was the first time I had to ask for help.”

As long as he earned below $50,000 a year, Greeley qualified for as much as $1,700 a month through Colorado’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), a fund jointly subsidized by the state and federal government to support working parents.   But as a result of budget cuts in 2010, Boulder County lowered the income limit to 185 percent of the federal poverty level for a family of four – about $41,000. That was $3000 less than what Greeley was making.  And even though his upcoming raise would have increased his income a bit more, it would not have been nearly enough for Greeley to pay for his kids’ child care on his own; Greeley would have been earning more, but would in fact be worse off.

“My stomach was in knots,” Greeley said. “Supposed to get a raise, and instead, I took a pay cut.”

Sister Carmen CEO Suzanne Crawford, Dan’s employer, couldn't believe it when her newly minted director of operations showed up ashen-faced at her office. “For me, it was really educational,” she said. “Because I would never in a million years expect an employee to come in and ask me for a pay cut.”

When Americans think about poverty, chances are they don’t picture places such as the suburbs surrounding Cape Coral, Fla., Colorado Springs, Colo., and Atlanta.

But a new book, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” finds those were among the suburban areas that saw some of the biggest increases in the number of poor people between 2000 and 2010. The growth was part of a broader shift toward increasing poverty among suburban residents over that decade.

Getty Images file

A sign in a market window advertises the acceptance of food stamps in New York City.

By Andrew Rafferty, Staff Writer, NBC News

A heated battle is brewing on Capitol Hill over cuts to the food stamp program, with lawmakers quoting Bible verses at each other and benefits for millions of people hanging in the balance.

Nearly 47 million people – one in seven Americans – rely on food stamps for some or all of their daily sustenance, according to the Department of Agriculture, a number that has grown nearly 70 percent since the financial collapse of 2008.  

The increased enrollment has caused costs to soar from $35 billion in 2007 to $80 billion last year, and now lawmakers in both the House and the Senate are targeting program for cuts even as advocates cry foul.

Legislation making its way through Congress would eliminate billions of dollars in funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. Last week, a Senate committee approved striking $4.1 billion from the program over 10 years and a House committee backed cuts five times as large.

Those actions set the stage for a congressional showdown not only over how much to slash the program, but also over the role of government in fighting hunger and poverty.

During contentious debate over the Farm Bill, which funds food stamps, in the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., invoked the Book of Matthew as he noted his opposition to the cuts.

“[Jesus] says how you treat the least among us, the least of our brothers, that’s how you treat him,” Vargas, adding that Jesus specifically mentions the importance of feeding the hungry.

Republican Congressman Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, who supports cuts to the program, had his own Bible verse from the Book of Thessalonians to quote back to Vargas: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” he said.

The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the House version of the farm bill making would throw nearly 2 million people off food stamps, most of whom are working families with children or senior citizens. More than 200,000 kids would lose access to free school lunches, according to the group.

The more modest Senate proposal would cost half a million SNAP recipients $90 each month, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. For a family of four, the current maximum monthly allotment is $668; recipients get less as their income rises. The cuts come on top of the looming expiration of a temporary funding boost the program received in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that will also slash recipient benefits.

“It is impossible to impose these types of cuts to SNAP without having the most vulnerable in our society suffer,” said Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy for the center.

Most households that get food stamps include either a child, a person over 60 or someone who is disabled, according to federal data. And all are either poor or low-income:  To be eligible for food assistance, income must not exceed 130 percent of the federal poverty line -- roughly $30,000 annually for a family of four.      

AP

Stacks of paperwork await members of the House Agriculture Committee as they consider the 2013 Farm Bill, which includes cuts to the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program.

As the economy slowly improves, dependence on food stamps has yet to decline. Decreased enrollment in the program typically lags substantially behind economic recovery, and congressional forecasters predict that under current law more people will seek benefits from the program before the rolls go down. Advocates for food stamps argue that many of the jobs created during the recovery have been low-wage, and as result the working poor often qualify for food stamps even though they are employed.  

Rachel Sheffield, a policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the proposed cuts to the food stamp program are minimal and are part of a much larger issue over how much the government spends on welfare as the country continues to go into debt. 

"The approach of the federal government really has been throwing money at the symptoms of poverty rather than addressing the causes of it," said Sheffield. The think tank calls for adjusting spending on SNAP to pre-recession levels, taking into account inflation, and also strengthening the work requirements for able-bodied adults.

Some Republicans believe the expansion of food stamps under President Barack Obama has been an intentional political strategy to win the support of low-income voters, an issue that took prominence during his 2012 re-election campaign.

“It seems to me that the goal of this administration is to expand the rolls of people who are on SNAP benefits, the purpose of which is to expand the dependency class," said Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa.

Advocates for the program say it has helped stave off hunger and deprivation for many families at a time when jobs have been hard to come by.    

James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, is working with food banks and organizations that focus on hunger issues to lobby Congress against slashing food stamp spending. For them, it is not a matter of politics or theories on the role of government, but a matter of getting people the assistance they need.

“People in the field know how much harm these cuts can cause,” said Weill. “Those who actually work with low-income Americans around the country know they can’t provide a sufficient amount of people with the help they need if these cuts take place.”

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

What if, instead of operating a variety of anti-poverty programs, the government simply mailed every poor person in America a check big enough to lift them out of poverty? That, says the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, would make more sense than what we do now – and, he says, we’d still have money left over.

Michael Tanner, CATO Institute senior fellow.

Here’s Tanner’s math: By his count, the federal government spends more than $668 billion a year on a total of 126 anti-poverty programs, including those that address housing, hunger, health care, and cash assistance. They range from TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), which most people associate with traditional welfare, to much smaller programs for Indian tribes, at-risk youth, and others. If you divide Tanner’s total by the roughly 46 million people with incomes below the poverty line, you get nearly $15,000 for every poor man, woman, and child in the U.S.

Glenn Oakley / for NBC News

"I'm not dumb, but I did a dumb thing," Raymond Chaney says of getting involved in high-interest loans that eventually got him kicked out of his apartment. Chaney rides the bus to whittle away the time -- sometimes for hours at a time.

By Bob Sullivan, Senior Writer, NBC News

For Raymond Chaney, taking out a payday loan was like hiring a taxi to drive across the country. He ended up broke — and stranded.

The 66-year-old veteran from Boise lives off of Social Security benefits, but borrowed from an Internet payday lender last November after his car broke down and didn’t have the $400 for repairs. When the 14-day loan came due, he couldn’t pay, so he renewed it several times.

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

"Poverty in America can be solved."

So says our colleague on MSNBC, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Sunday morning, she's devoting her show to finding solutions to poverty in America, putting the issue and the possible solutions in plain sight.

"I keep wondering what our country would be like if we solved poverty," Harris-Perry says.

What if children in our classrooms didn't question if there would be dinner that night? What if mothers didn't have to huddle in parked cars at night because they don't have a home? What if veterans didn't have to beg for pocket change? The first step to finding meaningful solutions to our crisis of poverty and inequality is to ask the question, what if? We do not have to simply accept inequality. We can choose a different future. We will certainly not have all the answers on Sunday, but we are going to at least ask the questions.

 

Sunday's guests do not march in lockstep. They come from across the ideological and political spectrum. They will tackle everything from economic mobility in America -- is it a myth? --  to housing, hunger and criminal justice reform.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, suggests in a blog post written for the show that school choice could go a long way to lifting people out of poverty. "Food stamps recipients can choose their grocery stores and their groceries," she says, "but parents can't choose their schools. Parents should be given school stamps, and told to choose their schools." And, she argues, get rid of the minimum wage and other policies that she says make it hard for firms to hire workers. "The economic solutions to reducing poverty are simple," says Furchtgott-Roth, "but the politics of implementing these solutions appear overwhelming, helping the poor to stay poor."

Other guests on Sunday's show will address how prisons keep many locked into poverty even after they're released, how something as simple as a new pair of boots can make it possible to get a better job, and how supporting mothers will go a long way toward lifting struggling families out of poverty.

"We refuse to see women who are low-income as they really are: kind, hard-working, smart, tenacious, and downright entrepreneurial," says Mariana Chilton, Director of Drexel University's Center for Hunger-Free Communities. "How do we end poverty in America? By honoring America's mothers."

It's bound to be an interesting and in-depth Mother's Day conversation. We'll be watching.

Jennifer Brown / The Star-Ledger

Newark Eagles Little League team player William Jones gives Coach Rodney Mason a high-five as he arrives at practice at the practice field at Weequahic Park on May 15, 2008.

The statistics are sobering. Newark, N.J., has a murder rate double that of the Bronx. A third of its residents live in poverty. Only 40 percent of its students graduate from high school. Behind those numbers, though, are people trying to beat the odds.

In his new book, “A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City,” reporter Jonathan Schuppe chronicles that effort through the story of a fledgling Little League team, its improbable coach and inspiring players.