A recap of the week’s equity news

“Obama Promotes Plan For Urban Development,” - The Wall Street Journal

Barack Obama’s campaign plans to relaunch his “urban agenda” Monday in what people close to the strategy say is an effort to assure urban leaders and voters of the Democratic nominee’s commitment to cities and minorities without alienating skeptical white voters.

The plan features an increase in the minimum hourly wage, a new White House office focused on metropolitan areas and $60 billion to establish a national bank to finance public-works projects.

“Nation’s Poverty Rate Holds Steady as More Get Health Insurance,” - Washington Post

The nation’s poverty rate held steady as median household income edged upward and the number of Americans without health insurance decreased by more than 1 million people last year, according to annual census data released today.

The Census Bureau report says that 37.3 million people — or 12.5 percent of the population — fell below the official federal poverty threshold in 2007, which is not statistically different than the 12.3 percent who were in poverty in 2006.

“Cities Debate Privatizing Public Infrastructure,” - New York Times

Cleaning up road kill and maintaining runways may not sound like cutting-edge investments. But banks and funds with big money seem to think so.

Reeling from more exotic investments that imploded during the credit crisis, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the Carlyle Group, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse are among the investors who have amassed an estimated $250 billion war chest — much of it raised in the last two years — to finance a tidal wave of infrastructure projects in the United States and overseas.

A piece in the July issue of The Atlantic is stirring up quite a controversy. In “American Murder Mystery,” journalist Hanna Rosin tries to find the root cause behind the crime spikes in many of the nation’s mid-sized cities.

Her controversial culprit: the demolition of public housing and the spread of those using Section 8 vouchers out into other neighborhoods.

The article focuses largely on the surge of violence in Memphis, Tenn., and the findings of two married University of Memphis researchers — Richard Janikowski, a criminologist who had been tracking emerging crime patterns in the city, and his wife, Phyllis Betts, a housing expert who had been evaluating where residents went after the city demolished its public-housing projects.

Over dinner conversations, the couple realized the geography of their work was overlapping. They wondered if it was more than a coincidence.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals….On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country. Eventually, they thought, they’d find other researchers who connected the dots the way they had, and then maybe they could get city leaders, and even national leaders, to listen.

The piece generated a fascinating back and forth on NPR’s new morning show The Takeaway today. The show’s host interviewed both Hanna Rosin and Xavier de Souza Briggs, an MIT professor of sociology and urban planning, to rebut Ms. Rosin. It’s definitely worth a listen.

Also, you can watch researcher Phyllis Betts talk about her findings in Memphis: