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Professor Hammonds: Other important aspects of this community?
Ron Morrison: At least three-fourths of the people who commuted drove alone. And public transportation -- very few people took public transportation. More people walked to work than took public transportation.
Professor Hammonds: That's interesting. I hadn't noticed that at all.
Ron Morrison: So it must have created two problems: one for parking, and the other one, the environment.
Professor Hammonds: Well, what kinds of things did people think that this community needed, and what were the categories you were going to use to -- what were the most useful categories for the allocation of those, the kinds of things that you wanted to see this community have?
Matthew DeBoer: We looked at the population figures, and we compared them with the poverty figures, and that led us to think that also perhaps a community college, a government-funded college of some type with flexible scale of payment for the single mothers and the lower-income families would be appropriate.
Ed Morrison: Along those same lines, we felt that a factor in determining poverty is the health condition, and we felt that there should be some sort of public assistance programs or initiatives established to assist those poverty households, particularly the ones with young children, because there seems to be almost a trap where it becomes inescapable after a while if it isn't addressed at a younger age.
Professor Hammonds: Other groups?
Steve Seto: To follow up on that comment, the other end of our group felt that, you know, we had to address the poverty level at the age 65 or over, so universal health care at both ends -- under 18 and over 65.
Professor Hammonds: Yes?
Larry David: We looked at programs for teenagers and children at risk. We looked at day care programs for children, so that way mothers and fathers also could go out and work and have attention paid to their children. We looked at programs to keep kids in school, perhaps alternate high schools, voc. ed.; also teenage pregnancy programs in order to keep more of the children in high school and keep them from dropping out or leaving to find work when they're unprepared.
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