Do Kids Count in Cascadia?
Things are looking up for Cascadia's kids. Well some things. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's annual Kids Count Data Book, released yesterday, teen birth rates in the Northwest states have steadily declined since 2000, and regional rates of infant mortality, and child and teen deaths are all down from 1990. But child poverty is up.
In the report's 10 measures of child well-being, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington fared better than average for the country overall, ranking 18th, 16th, and 14th, respectively. Montana slipped to number 34 this year.
But for Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, the number of children living in poverty is up from 2000-2003 and is above the national average, perhaps reflecting some of the economic woes the Northwest has seen in recent years. In Oregon, 41 percent of all kids in the state live in low-income families. Oregon and Washington tied at 36th nationally in the percentage of children who live in families in which no parent has full-time, year-round employment.
Childhood poverty and parental unemployment can be factors in a host of other problems from lower school performance to higher crime rates and teenage pregnancy. Tracking trends such as child poverty and the teen birthrate--in projects like Kids Count and Sightline's Cascadia Scorecard--helps raise awareness of the issues, the first step to creating change.
The Way-Too-Big House
I've been noticing that older houses in my Seattle-area neighborhood are being steadily replaced by much larger mansion-sized structures--one of which is large enough to be an orphanage. Apparently this is a national trend: the size of new single-family homes has more than doubled since the 1940s (from 1,100 to 2,340 sq.ft.), according to a recent article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (see full pdf here). Combining this with the trend towards smaller households (from 3.67 to 2.62 members), authors Wilson and Boehland find that:
In new, single-family houses constructed in the United States, living area per family member has increased by a factor of 3 since the 1950s.
This has several environmental implications. Larger houses not only use more building materials, but may also consume proportionally more. Larger houses that include higher ceilings, complex designs such as extra wings, and other features may mean that material use increases proportionally faster than square-footage.
