Thursday, July 19, 2012
According to numbers from the U.S. Census, 12.8 percent of Maldonians live below the poverty level. See how we compare to other nearby cities and towns. .
In the United States, the poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent, according to the U.S. Census. That number was up from 14.3 percent in 2009 and 12.5 percent in 2007. Malden's poverty rate is below the national average, but at 12.8 percent, the percentage of people living in poverty in Malden is greater than the statewide average of 10.5 percent. The U.S. Census uses a number of "thresholds" to measure poverty, which you can find here. In the example given by the U.S. Census, using 2010 numbers, a family of five, with a mother, father, great aunt and two children living in the household, would be considered living in poverty if the family income were $26,675 or less. How does Malden compare to other communities in the area? By way of …
Thursday, April 19, 2012
The state's city-to-city unemployment rates for February 2012.
The national unemployment rate has been a hot topics since the start of the Great Recession. At 6.9 percent, Massachusetts as a whole has a lower unemployment rate than the nation (8.3%). The rates have been dropping at an excrutiatingly slow pace, which is good news. But the national and state level rates don't tell the whole story. Unemployment numbers for cities and towns are the last figures released for a given month. While we know Massachusetts' March unemployment rate, we only have February numbers for cities and towns. The chart below has the February unemployment numbers for Malden and the surrounding communities. Malden has a rate comparable with most of its neighbors. The March figures for individual cities and towns comes out…
Friday, April 13, 2012
Ideally, housing and transportation costs should be less than 45 percent of your income. Are you under that goal?
Housing is generally anyone's largest expense, but it's not the only factor you should consider when buying a home. Sure, you may find a cheaper home the further you move from Boston, but the transportation costs of getting to and from work everyday offset some of those gains, according to an index compiled by the Center for Neighborhood Technology. The group, funded by the Brookings Institution, developed the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index to examine how transportation costs, when added to housing costs, affects the overall affordability of a community (you can read about the methodology used here). The rule of thumb adopted by the study states that housing is affordable if it's 30 percent or less of your total income. …
Mike Noneya
1:29 pm on Saturday, July 21, 2012
Even if it cost less to house a person who's incarcerated, than treat their addiction. Removing that person from the community, only removes them. It doesn't stop the problem. Cause once their prison term is over, they're coming straight back to the same neighborhoods they left and are usually a lot worse then before they went in. They need detox, rehab, vocation/life skills training, employment … more ›