Vicki Carpenter asks what the boards of two dilapidated schools have been doing about basic maintenance.

Assistant professor of finance Noah Smith believes the economic doomsayers are jumping the gun.

Record numbers of people are sleeping rough or in cars as Auckland's desperate housing shortage makes life harder than ever for those at the bottom.

Trailblazing legal crusader Dame Silvia Cartwright speaks candidly to David Fisher about longer jail sentences, child poverty and the strain of being Governor-General.

If we want to resist the trends dividing New Zealanders into the haves and the never-wills, the OECD has some policy suggestions the Government could take on board.

Just over two years ago, Housing Minister Nick Smith announced that "this year" the Government was developing a housing warrant of fitness, writes Brian Rudman.

You'd be surprised just how hard it is to find a family willing to let a Herald writer snoop around their home and ask all sorts of intrusive questions about their substandard living conditions, writes Peter Calder.

"It makes me feel happy." Darcy Rakete, the poster boy for the Jammies in June fundraiser, is glad to help others less fortunate than him.

Broadcaster Wendy Petrie has joined the campaign to get warm pyjamas on needy kids this winter.

Child poverty figures can be hard to believe. The very word poverty hardly seems appropriate for a country with New Zealand's welfare net.

Could business have expected more from a Budget labelled by Finance Minister Bill English as "a plan that's working"?

After some confusion about Whanau Ora, Dita De Boni visited a provider to better understand the initiative.

Finance Minister Bill English says there will be no new initiatives to address poverty in tomorrow's Budget New Zealand - despite the Prime Minister suggesting otherwise last month.

The petition comes as the Salvation Army said it fed 9.5 per cent more people last year in its Midland region than it did in the year before.

The house where Freddie Gray's life changed forever sits at the end of a long line of abandoned row homes in one of this city's poorest neighbourhoods.

Returning home to New Zealand after more than 10 years away I find a country both hearteningly buoyant and unsettlingly fragile. Let me explain - the view of one returning son.

The conservative Maxim Institute think-tank has joined the call for official targets to reduce child poverty.

With more children coming to school hungry, a scientific study will for the first time guage the impact nutrition — or lack of it — has on learning.

There's growing economic segregation across the USA - wealth is concentrating in areas just as poverty does.

The Salvation Army has delivered a report on the state of the nation, revealing housing is a major issue that needs to be addressed.

Prime Minister John Key has announced a review of the ways the Government spends billions on vulnerable families and children ahead of the Budget in May.

Combined wealth of world's richest 1 per cent will overtake that of remaining 99 per cent by 2016 unless action taken to curb "shocking extremes" of inequality.

Thirty years ago, NZ was a much more equal society. It could be so again. But it will take a huge shift in the mindset of the majority. Changing this state of affairs is a moral challenge to us all.

A new year means a wealth of resolutions. Most of us want to make life better, challenge ourselves or realise some of our ambitions

Isis' vaunted exercise in state-building appears to be crumbling as living conditions deteriorate across the territories under its control.

A French mayor has been accused of a shameful lack of Christmas spirit after banishing homeless people from the city centre by putting cages over public benches.

As I turned on to the corner of Hobson St, I froze. About 200 people were standing on the pavement. It was the queue to get into the City Mission.