We Live Here

We take a break from public policy and social systems, and instead explore different perspectives about what "My America" means to our listeners.

In our episode last week, we brought you stories of people navigating the nation's biggest program aimed providing housing for the low income, elderly and disabled. This week's podcast widens the scope a bit, and takes a look at the changes happening in federal housing policy. Trust us, it's a lot more exciting than it sounds! Featuring stories and voices from St. Louis, Chicago, Oakland and Phoen...

Housing choice vouchers -- commonly known as Section 8 -- are supposed to give people with low incomes the freedom to pick where they want to live. But for many voucher holders, that's not how the story actually plays out. With help from reporters in Georgia and San Francisco, this week we explore just how tough it is to find affordable housing in America -- even with a little boost from Uncle Sam...

In 2015, 188 people were victims of homicide in St. Louis. In this episode, we bring you stories of those who have to cope and carry on. Because from a family, to a neighborhood, and beyond...as you follow the wake of each homicide, the ripples get wider and wider.

What's the Missouri legislature done in the two sessions since Michael Brown's death? A little, but not nearly as much as was anticipated in 2014, when Ferguson was in the international spotlight. In this episode, veteran political reporter Jason Rosenbaum, who's covered the story the entire time, gives us a retrospective look at the last two years and talks about what may come next.

Despite the decades-long fight for school desegregation, America is, for the most part, still sending its white and black children to separate schools. Here in St. Louis, this angst over school segregation and integration never really went away. In fact, St. Louis is home to the longest running formal desegregation program in the country. In the latest podcast, we take you through its past, presen...

We Live Here investigates school suspensions in the early grades. We dig into state discipline data and find: In Missouri, when white kids in K-3 act out, they’re kicked out of class. But the black kids get kicked out of school. We also take a look at what other cities and states are doing about suspensions

We start Season 2 of We Live Here by exploring a concept we're calling "burden of proof." And we ask why is it that race and class have such a huge impact on who gets believed in society. We explore this through the narrative of St. Louis lawyer Thomas Harvey, who confronted his own difficulties believing poor people and black people.

It’s the holiday season, and like many of you, we’re taking stock. Taking stock of what we accomplished with this We Live Here project; the stories and...

The nationwide debate about gun control, mass shootings, and violent crime was once again jump-started in the wake of recent massacres at a county...

This week’s show started with a simple question we could not get out of our heads as we followed the recent shakeups at Mizzou. We’re referring to, of...

There is this term that gets thrown around in education circles that we felt needs some exploring. School to prison pipeline. It sounds like schools...

Racial disparities are a huge topic in education. And Missouri schools — specifically those in the St. Louis area — have been singled out as having some...

The arcane world of school finance in Missouri can be harder to understand than the most obscure poem or the most difficult calculus problem. But clear...

This is Kameel Stanley's inaugural article for St. Louis Public Radio's We Live Here project. We asked her to introduce herself. Here is what she wrote:...

This week's We Live Here podcast is something a little different. Recently, we've been looking at health and the way that toxic stress can impact...

A year after Michael Brown’s death, is the landscape around racial and economic disparities in St. Louis and beyond starting to shift? Can some changes already be seen?

A single school can tell us a lot about the health of the community in which it exists. It can also tell us a lot about how systemic problems with transportation, food, housing and crime adversely impact impoverished communities and the health of the people who live there.

Given that treating people is already a challenging task, imagine the extra challenge that comes from treating people who experience toxic stress — the stress that comes from constant exposure to poor housing conditions, lack of quality food or exposure to violence.

While most people think of the "Delmar Divide," as simply a line that separates a mostly white community to the south and a mostly black community to the north, the reality is that the divide represents huge disparities in health.

A sliver of the 1.5 million people in federal and state prisons will remain in prison for life. But the vast majority are released at some point. How does someone adjust to life outside after spending years behind bars?

Even pleading guilty to a misdemeanor can come with some other penalties. These are called collateral consequences, and they're the focus of this episode of We Live Here.

In this episode of We Live Here, we explore the price and perils of our public defender system.

On this episode of We Live Here we introduce you to four police officers who discuss not only what life is like during the day-to-day grind of work, but also the question of whether or not race makes a difference for African-American officers in majority white police departments.

We Live Here spent the last several weeks ramping up to explore race in St. Louis and, specifically, how systems intersect with people to create a lot of the inequality in our region... and around the country. Now, we are moving from the general to the specific. We will spend the next several months exploring the criminal justice system.