Remember Poverty - City Limits Magazine

SPECIAL 35th ANNIVERSARY ISSUE!
Covering new York CitY poliCY and politiCs sinCe 1976
More AMericAns Are poor thAn ever before. beverly works, studies, rAises her kids And hAs A plAn to beAt poverty. why Are we MAking it so hArd for her to win?
Urban news & InvestIgatIons
Remember Poverty?
Vol. 35, No. 3 July/August 2011
The Problem 1.5 million new Yorkers can'T afford To forgeT
A Shelter Is Not a Home . . . Or Is It? REVISITED Family Homlessness in New York City Ralph da Costa Nunez
Have shelters become a surrogate for low-income housing?
ICPH
Institute for Children, Poverty & Homelessness
www.ICPHusa.org USA
A Shelter Is Not a Home Or Is It? Revisited looks at the New York City family shelter system over the past four mayors and offers a blueprint for change. A Shelter Is Not a Home Or Is It? Revisited is available at www.ICPHusa.org or at Amazon.com.
IN THIS ISSUE
CITY LIMITS AT 35
05 | Getting It Covered A look back
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Vol. 35, No. 3 July/August 2011
City Limits is published bi-monthly by the Community Service Society of New York (CSS). For more than 160 years, CSS has been on the cutting edge of public policy innovations to support low-income New Yorkers in their quest to be full participants in the civic life of the nations largest city. City Limits 105 East 22nd Street, Suite #901 New York, NY 10010 212-614-5397 CityLimits.org features daily news, investigative features and resources in the citys five boroughs. Letters to the Editor: We welcome letters, articles, press releases, ideas and submissions. Please send them to magazine@citylimits.org. Subscriptions and Customer Service: U.S. subscriptions to City Limits are $25 for one year for the print edition, $15 for one year for the digital edition and $30 for both the print and digital editions. Digital and print single issues are $4.95. To subscribe or renew visit www.citylimits.org/subscribe or contact toll free 1-877-231-7065 or write to City Limits, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9253. Contributions: City Limits depends on your support to provide investigative journalism and cover the five boroughs. Contribute at www.citylimits.org/support or contact 212-614-5398 for development opportunities. For Bulk Magazine Orders: Visit www. citylimits.org/subscribe or contact City Limits subscription customer service at 1-877-231-7065 or write to P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9253. Magazine Distribution: For retail and newsstand distribution opportunities, visit www.citylimits.org/distribution or e-mail distribute@citylimits.org. Sponsorship and Advertising: We offer organizations, businesses and agencies advertising and sponsorship opportunities on CityLimits.org and in City Limits magazines print and digital editions. Additional advertising opportunities are available on City Limits Mobile Page, Video Features and E-Newsletters. Visit www.citylimits.org/advertise to download our media kit and rate card or call 212-614-5398. Jobs and Marketplace: Submit job listings, calendar events, marketplace listings and announcements at www.citylimits. org/post. Periodical Postage Paid: New York, NY 10001 City Limits (USPS 498-890) (ISSN: 0199-0330) If the Postal Service alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within a year. Postmaster: Please send address changes to: P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9253. Copyright 2011. Printed in Canada. All rights reserved. No portion or portions of this journal may be reprinted without the express permission of the publishers. City Limits is indexed in the Alternative Press Index and the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals and is available on microfilm from ProQuest, Ann Arbor, MI 48106.
THE FEATURE / SURVIVAL GUIDES

For these New Yorkers, the fight against poverty is personal. By Neil deMause Photographs by Marc Fader
CHAPTERS
15 | Whos Counting? 3 million in or near poverty + one recession = zero interest 18 | Even Entrepreneurs Need Food Stamps Tanya Fields has two jobs. One is running her own nonprofit. The other is fighting to keep the benefits she needs until shes on her feet. 30 | Why the Homeless Eat Out Walter Greene was laid off, got sick, became homeless. What now? 46 | Beverly Has a Plan Working, studying and hoping the rug doesnt get pulled out 53 | Sharons Homework After raising a family and burying a husband, Sharon Jones is aiming for self-sufficiency. Is it a long shot? 60 | Help Wanted What do people on the bottom need to succeed? Lets ask them.
SIDEBARS
21 | How Low Did They Go? Welfare numbers with an asterisk 23 | Welfare Reform at 15 No Mission Accomplished banner, please 32 | After the Innovations Stage 2 for Bloombergs plan 38 | Census Tract 192 A photo essay 54 | Finding Their Place Under Obama, HUD and DOE target pockets of poverty
MORE
64 | HomeWork Do something about it 64 |Extra Extra Business opportunities
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ON THE COvER: Beverly Davis, 22, is a home health aid. She is going to college and plans to be a police officer, but budget cuts and benefits rules threaten to thwart her. Read more about Beverly starting on page 46.
Not a Kid Anymore

City Limits informally celebrated its 35th birthday in February with an office party for past and present staff. Along with food and drink, we served a healthy helping of New York City nostalgia: Classic New York movies played on our computers, reminding alumni of the good, and bad, old days. When renowned investigative reporter Tom Robbins, a City Limits editor in the early 1980s, caught sight of the riot scene in Fort Apache, the Bronx as it played on my PC, he pointed to the screen and said, Hey, I think Im this shot somewhere. Seems that when Paul Newman was filming the flick in 1981, Robbins joined a protest that claimed the movie was portraying a sensationalized view of life in the Bronx. Robbins chuckled, saying, We had signs that said stuff like Paul Newman Hurts the Bronx. Liberal credentials (he was on Nixons enemies list, after all) notwithstanding, Newman was slighting a part of the city that had already suffered enough insults, thank you very much, from Robert Moses highways to Roger Starrs planned shrinkage and Howard Cosells quick camera pan. Someone had to stand up and tell it like it was. Why does City Limits exist? To be that someone. We were founded in 1976 with a very utilitarian purpose: to share information among housing activists in different neighborhoods fighting similar battles against nasty landlords and a negligent government. But we have always aimed for a loftier goal: reminding readers of the irrepressible dignity and basic human worth of people who live in the wrong neighborhoods or make too little money. The city has evolved since then, and so has City Limits, which has gone from mimeographing its monthly newsletter to tweeting about new video that we post to our blog. But for all that has changed, a basic fact still confronts us: Some of the 100,000 or so babies born in the city this year will grow up comfortable, and some will grow up poor. Being poor, they will have little say in the debate about the future of their city or even in the debate over how to help them. Their challenges will be ignored by most of us until a tiny few mug or squeegee their way into our consciousness. Thats how its always beenbut not how it ought to be, because as Neil deMause reports in a feature story that is so apropos for our 35th anniversary issue, poor people know a lot more about poverty than the rest of us do. So until theres another outlet that covers povertyalong with education, government, housing, the environment and the criminal justice systemwith the depth and nuance those subjects deserve, City Limits will try. With the help of people willing to tell us their stories, reporters ready to accept low pay to write them and readers like you who support our telling these facts, well get closer to the city New York could be. Reservations are now being accepted for our 40th birthday party. Maybe well serve Newmans Own popcorn this time. Sincerely, Jarrett Murphy Editor in Chief
Remember Poverty?
City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3
CIty LImItS StAff

Director Mark Anthony Thomas Editor in Chief Jarrett Murphy Deputy Editor Kelly Virella
BoARD
Mark Edmiston, chair Adam Blumenthal Andy Breslau Michael Connor David R. Jones Andy Reicher Michele Webb
WHATS NEW AND WHATS NExT AT CITYLIMITS.ORg
Contributing Editors Neil deMause, Marc Fader, Jake Mooney, Diana Scholl, Helen Zelon Advertising Director Allison Tellis-Hinds
Up NExt The Fire Next Time

How firefighting and building safety have and haventchanged since 9/11
COMING IN SEPTEMBER
AND THE WINNERS ARE
Marketing Assistant Nekoro Gomes Creative Direction Smyrski Creative Proofreader Danial Adkison Interns Catherine Dunn, Johann Hamilton, Isabel Moschen, Gena Mangiaratti
City Limits magazine has nabbed seven major journalism awards this year. Read or revisit this compelling coverage at citylimits.org/magazine: Hope or Hype in Harlem? Our March 2010 look at the Harlem Childrens Zone won top education honors from the New York Community Media Alliance and an investigative award from the Education Writers of America. A Risky Play? This September 2010 report on the citys shift to artificial turf won investigative honors from NYCMA and the national Society of Professional Journalists. The Black Depression Our May 2010 investigation of black male joblessness recently beat work from The New York Times and WNYC to win the Deadline Club award for covering minority issues.
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More than ever, New York Citys poor depend on nonprofits. And New York Citys nonprofits depend on Lawyers Alliance.
For families and communities affected by poverty, nonprofit organizations in New York City are a lifeline to the services and guidance that can mean a better future. For more than 40 years, Lawyers Alliance has been the leading provider of business and transactional legal services for nonprofit organizations that are improving the quality of life for thousands of New Yorkers every year. Lawyers Alliances legal staff, which includes 14 experienced attorneys, is joined by a network of more than 1,400 volunteer attorneys from more than 100 law firms and corporate legal departments. By connecting lawyers, nonprofits, and communities, Lawyers Alliance helps nonprofits to develop affordable housing, stimulate economic development, and operate vital programs for children and young people, the elderly, and other low-income New Yorkers. To learn more about our services to nonprofits, including direct legal representation, educational workshops, publications, and a Resource Call Hotline, please visit www.lawyersalliance.org/nonprofits.php.
171 Madison Avenue 6th Floor New York, NY 10016 Tel: (212) 219-1800
www.lawyersalliance.org
Getting it Covered
1976/1980
Founded by housing organizations in the midst of New York Citys fiscal crisis, City Limits was launched to chronicle efforts by tenants and neighborhood advocates to preserve decent housing in neglected communities. In its first years, the magazine kept an eye on city agencies, state regulators and problem landlords.
City Limits at 35
35 yEARS of CIty LImItS

www.citylimits.org 5
1981/1985
Ed Kochs mayoralty ushered in complex changes in housing and transit, while Ronald Reagans ascendance meant a colder federal shoulder for the citys poor. Homelessness arrived as an issue.

6 Remember Poverty? City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3
1986/1990
As neighborhoods fought to stop smokestacks, the environmental beat became a regular part of our coverage. The citys racial politics made national news, from violence at Howard Beach to David Dinkins pioneering campaign for mayor.
7
1991/1995
America discovered crack, Rudy Giuliani swept into office and new ideas for how to improve neighborhoodslike the Harlem Childrens Zonewere born.

1996/2000
As crime fell, concerns rose about the overpolicing of neighborhoods of color. A new child welfare apparatus grew out of tragedy, and the old social welfare system was overhauled by workfare.
9
2001/2005
September 11 challenged New York, and then a new mayorMike Bloomberg changed it. Charter schools emerged as a contentious issue. And once-neglected neighborhoods began to worry about something called gentrification.

2006/2011
City Limits adopted a new in-depth focus on efforts to improve city high schools, the NYPDs war on drugs, the recessions effect on New Yorks black men and more. Read more from City Limitsand New York Cityspast at www.citylimits.org.
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THE fEAtURE
survival Guides
For these New Yorkers, the fight against poverty is personal.
By Neil deMause / Photographs by Marc Fader
12
Remember Poverty?
Clockwise from top right: Beverly Davis, Sharon Jones, Tanya Fields and Francia Alejomothers, workers, students, low-income New Yorkers.
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Whos 6 3 Counting?
ts a simple enough question on the face of it: How many people living in New York City are poor? The answer, it turns out, depends on how you count. For decades, the milepost was the federal poverty line, a measure developed in 1963 by government statistician Mollie Orshansky to try to quantify how many Americans were in need. Noting that a federal survey had estimated the average American familys food spending as one-third of its income, Orshansky took the cost of a subsistence food basket, tripled it and deemed families earning below that amount officially poor. According to this measurewhich, except for adjustments for inflation, remains essentially unchangedmore than 1.5 million New Yorkers, almost 1 in 5 city residents, live in poverty. In the intervening half-century, however, numerous critics have pointed out problems with the poverty line. Households average spending has changed since the 1960s: Largely as a result of rising housing costs, food costs now make up only an eighth of the average familys expenses, rendering the food basket times three calculation obsolete. And by not counting government programs like food stamps and housing subsidies as income or adjusting for regional cost-of-living differences, the official measure has given a skewed picture of actual deprivation. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as part of the
86208
CHAPTER oNE
3 million in or near poverty + one recession = zero interest
1 117450 555964 3 8
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Once welfare reform passed, poor people largely disappeared from the public conversation. This despite two subsequent recessions that have caused the poverty rate to soar.
anti-poverty initiative he launched in 2007, called for the development of a new measure that incorporates these factors. By this accounting, 22 percent of New Yorkersmore than 1.8 million peopleare poor. Then, too, other critics have argued that the near poor, those earning up to 200 percent of the official poverty line, should be included in any official poverty count, since they
often have similar, if less frequent, problems ensuring that food is on the table and the rent is paid. In New York City, 3 million peoplenearly 2 out of 5qualify as either poor or near poor. Those are the raw numbers, and you can pick whichever ones you like. But none of them do much to answer the real questions we generally want to ask about poverty: What is life like in New York City when youre poor? How do people end up in these circumstances? Do the policy changes of the past 15 yearsfrom welfare reform to new housing programs to battles over increasing access to educationmake a real difference in peoples lives? And what, if anything, can be done to make things better? Answering those questions requires more than statistics or theories. It demands drilling down deep into the lives of individual poor people, a few of whose stories are presented in this issue of City Limits. The individuals profiled here are not a scientific sample, by any meansof the five, three are African American (versus 29 percent of New York Citys poor overall), four are women (versus 57 percent overall), and so onbut they are a fairly random one. They are New Yorkers who were interviewed at food pantries, at welfare fair-hearing sites, at their low-wage jobs, in class at city universitiesall the places where New Yorks low-income workers, students and parents can be found. This is a key moment to examine poverty in New York City for several reasons. First, Aug. 22 will mark 15 years since
Going Up
The national poverty rate, 1959-2009
Contrary to popular belief, the national poverty rate did decrease during the decade of the War on Poverty and the Great Society. It edged up during the Reagan era, down during the 1990s boom and in 2009 was higher than its been since 1994.
1959 22.4 pERCENt
Source:Census Bureau
1989 12.8 pERCENt
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Remember Poverty?
President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, better known as welfare reform. The new lawwhich set lifetime five-year limits and imposed strict requirements for receiving benefits would, Clinton hoped, break the cycle of dependency and give structure, meaning and dignity to our lives. The passage of the welfare reform law was the culmination of an intense two-year period of national debate about poverty, from Newt Gingrichs Contract With America to Clintons campaign pledge to end welfare as we know it to New York mayor Rudy Giulianis vow to end welfare entirely by 2000. And yet once the moment had passed, poor people largely disappeared from the public conversation. This despite two subsequent recessions that have caused the poverty rate to soar from a low of 11.3 percent in 2000 to 14.3 percent in 2009a rise that amounts to an additional 12 million people living in poverty nationwide. A 2007 study of TV news by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting found that on average, nightly network newscasts reported on poverty or the poor only once every 15 weeks, less often than they did about Michael Jackson. Though more Americans are poor now than ever before, President Obama didnt once say the word poverty in his 2011 State of the Union address. And Bloomberg, despite pledging in 2006 to achieve a major reduction in poverty for those starting their way up the economic ladder, has used the P-word only once in his past four annual addresses.
According to many low-income New Yorkers themselves, theyre less starting to climb the economic ladder than struggling through hard times that arrived unexpectedlyvia a death in COvERINg POvERTY the family, the loss of a job or the scarcity of In-depth reporting on work since the ecopeople and policy nomic downturn. And www.citylimits.org/poverty while they welcome the government programs that help them pay their bills, they note that these come with costs as wellnot just in dignity but also in time, as they are forced to navigate what is unanimously described as a welfare bureaucracy by turns hostile and maddeningly inconsistent. If there is one constant in these stories, it is that life in poverty is much like life for most other New Yorkersgetting to work on time, finding someone to watch your kids, dealing with the endless paperwork of modern lifeonly even more stressful, because the consequence of failure could be losing your income, your home or your chance to have a steady meal. I feel like Im always running, and Im out of breath, and I never catch up, says one student by day, grandmother by night as she describes juggling homework, child care and housing court. Indeed, being poor can be a full-time job. Here are the stories of a few who work it.
1969 12.1 pERCENt
1979 11.7 pERCENt
1999 11.9 pERCENt
2009 14.3 pERCENt
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CHAPTER tWo
Even Entrepreneurs Need Food stamps

Tanya Fields has two jobs. One is running her own nonprofit. The other is fighting to keep the benefits she needs until shes on her feet.
ts Monday, Jan. 31, and as usual, Tanya Fields is having a hectic morning. The Bronx mother of four has already had to juggle her schedule after her babysitter called in sick, forcing her to be late for an important appointment in downtown Brooklyn. But on this occasionunlike her daily work running a nonprofit startup or her prior years as an environmental advocatetheres no calling in sick or asking to reschedule: This appointment is for trying to keep her welfare benefits. Fields is a blur as she sweeps into the lobby waiting room at 14 Boerum Place, the glass-and-steel downtown Brooklyn building where low-income New Yorkers must come to apply for fair hearingsin which a judge can rule on challenges to decisions handed down by the Human Resources Administration, the giant city agency that oversees public benefits like welfare, food stamps and Medicaid. She passes through the metal detector that greets visitors at the door and rushes up to the window, where she talks calmly but animatedly with the worker on duty.
A minute later, shaking her head, she approaches the table of Project FAIR, the service staffed by Legal Aid lawyers that offers pro bono advice and referrals to fair-hearing applicants. Fields begins telling her story. The previous month, she explains, HRA cut off the welfare benefits and rent assistance she had been receiving since she stopped working full time two years ago during a difficult pregnancy. Shed filed for a fair hearing to object to the cutoff, and her hearing date was this morning. Unfortunately, by the time shed arranged for a substitute for her sick sitter, shed missed her hearing, and now just what is she supposed to do? Its the kind of story that could be told by any number of the people who have packed the Boerum Place waiting room to bursting and now patiently wait for their numbers to be displayed on an overhead LED board. According to the most recent official figures, more than 130,000 fair-hearing requests are filed in New York City every year, almost double the total from five years earlier. Fields, though, is somewhat exceptional, and not just because of the thick red braids and ever present
Tanya Fields is a college graduate who first went on welfare when the company she worked for folded. She is starting her own nonprofit business.
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sunglasses that make her stand out in any crowd. She also has a tale to tell that involves both extraordinary personal turns of events and byzantine bureaucratic headachesthough at Boerum Place, the latter are pretty much par for the course. Eight years ago, as a 22-year-old first-time mom, Fields graduated from college with a political science degree and was working at her first job, as an administrative assistant at NorVergence, a company in New Jersey that sold discount Internet and phone service. She had just rented her first apartment. I was so excited. I came in and paid three months rent in advance, she recalls. I was like, Im not going to be a statistic. Im never going to have to move home, and Im never going to need to get on welfare. Im going to take care of me and my child. Instead, she says, the company folded. It was a scam. It was all over the news. Three months after moving in, I lost my job, and I didnt have any savings. And I went and I opened a PA BENEFIT DOUBTS case. (Welfare benefits go by many namespublic Coverage of todays assistance, cash assistance welfare at or Temporary Assistance to www.citylimits.org Needy Familiesbut in the language of both the welfare bureaucracy and the people who receive the benefits, theyre inevitably called PA.) Fields first stint on PA lasted a little less than a year. Since then, she says, her life has been about trying to backtrack and get on footing from seven years ago. She was, she says, always robbing Peter to pay Paul. If you dont have a down period where you can regroup and get it togetherwhich I have really never hadits very difficult to try to play catch-up. By the summer of 2009, Fields was at least partly caught up, earning $40,000 a year working for an environmental organization in the Bronx, and pregnant with her fourth child. She developed complications with her pregnancy, however, and ended up taking disability leave from her job. To supplement her disability insurancewhich is capped at $170 a week in New York Statea state disability worker suggested that she apply for welfare benefits. With only minor bureaucratic hitchesI was eight months pregnant when I applied, and they made me go see their doctors to verify that I was, in fact, pregnantshe was soon receiving food stamps (now renamed Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), Medicaid coverage and $237 in cash every two weeks, plus $450 a month as shelter allowance to help her pay her $727 monthly rent on the one-bedroom apartment in the South Bronx that she shared with her children.
After her baby was born that fall, Fields returned to her job, only to find her hours had been cut to only 10 to 20 a week. She quit in January and found another part-time job, with the intent of spending her spare time launching a nonprofit organization to start green economic-development projects for poor women, an issue that shed grown interested in at her previous position. Instead, she says, she found herself spending much of her time wrangling with the city Human Resources Administration over her PA benefits, which shed kept to supplement her reduced income. First, HRA informed her in April that it was withholding part of her PA benefits for concealment, or hiding income. This, it turned out, was the echo of an old charge from 2005 that HRA had withdrawn after Fields filed for a fair hearing. (Such withdrawals are extremely common: Nearly 60 percent of fair-hearing cases end with the city withdrawing charges, according to HRA figures.) Now, five years later, HRA was reviving the old withdrawn allegation and wanted to cut Fields PA benefitswhich had already been reduced to $90 every two weeks when she returned to part-time workto $23 every two weeks. Fields applied for another fair hearing to challenge that finding several weeks later but missed it, she says, when her daughter got sick. And in any case, she wasnt sweating the PA money, since she still had a paycheck. In all fairness, I wasnt really hard-pressed. The most important things to me were the health insurance, SNAP and the shelter allowance. Those hadnt been cut, so she decided to live with the biweekly $23 welfare check and dropped the fair-hearing request. Last November, Fields got laid off from her part-time job and went on unemployment. It was at this point that, she says, she decided to forge full ahead, go back to school for my MBA, as well as really taking time to build this organization and get it to the point where it could be self-sustaining and where I would be self-employed. Within a week, though, she received a notice from HRA telling her she would need to recertify, the process by which the agency tracks changes in peoples financial circumstances: If youve gained or lost income, it will show up on a recert, and your benefits will be adjusted accordingly. I figured, this is perfect timing, because I could go in and use this opportunity to let them know about the change in my income, as a result of her leaving her job and planning to go back to school. If anything, she thought, she might get a little more temporary help while she got her new business going. Instead, she was told that her PA case had been closed three days before. The problem: Her $1,100 a month in earned income from her now-ended part-time job, the city said, exceeded the $1,062 monthly maximum for PA
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Remember Poverty?
How Low Did they Go?

Welfare numbers with an asterisk
Outside the city Human Resources Administration office on Manhattans 14th Street. Offices like this, which the city calls job centers, have played a key role in the reduction of welfare rolls. Whats unclear is where all the former or would-be recipients went.
Just 15 years ago, 1 in 3 New York City households received public assistance, and it was relatively easy to stay on the rolls indefinitely. Then came Mayor Rudy Giulianis war on welfare and the federal welfare reform law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, policies that have been largely kept in place by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Today, only about 350,000 city households (about 1 in 9) receive PA at any given time, a number thats remained roughly steady since 2007, despite the economic downturn. The total number of New Yorkers who use welfare benefits at least some of the time, though, is most likely far higher. Welfare experts have long noted the prevalence of cycling (families
moving on and off welfare as their life circumstances change) and churning (disappearing from the rolls for a month or two at a time, as a result of having benefits cut off for administrative reasons). On average, roughly one-quarter of welfare case openings in New York State are for people who had previously gotten welfare. Theres no way of knowing how many people cycle on and off welfare: The city Human Resources Administration, which oversees welfare and other public benefits, says it doesnt track how many people receive welfare during a given year; it only takes snapshots of the caseload in each month. That makes it impossible to tell how many New Yorkers rely on welfare for at least
part of their annual income. Of course, even those who are not eligible for or not interested in public assistance can still get other benefits: The number of New Yorkers receiving food stamps, for example, passed a record high of 1.8 million last December. Thats double what it was at the end of Giulianis term, thanks to both a continued high unemployment rate and aggressive outreach by Bloomberg, who has made getting food stamps into the hands of more poor New Yorkers a priority. As for how many of those people receiveor are trying to receivewelfare as well, the city officially doesnt know. Neil deMause
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www.citylimits.org Remember Poverty?
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eligibility. This meant she would lose that last $23 a week in PA benefitsbut more important, her $450-a-month shelter allowance too. Fields was left with only $1,008 a month in unemployment insurance to live onplus $698 in food stampsout of which she had to pay household expenses plus her $727 monthly rent. Her immediate solution: She stopped paying rent. There was no way for me to pay the rent without us all going hungry and broke. It was at this point that Fields filed the fair-hearing request that has brought her to Boerum Place this day in January. The Project FAIR paralegal on duty has some hopeful news for her: HRA was supposed to have disregarded half of her earned income for purposes of calculating her eligibility, and it looks as if they failed to do so. Now, though, she has missed her appointment and must wait for a new one in February which means, in all likelihood, the rent will go unpaid for another month. Demographically, according to HRA figures, Fields is fairly typical of welfare recipients in New York City. At age 30, she is smack in the middle of the 25-to-44-year-old demographic that makes up 41 percent of welfare recipients; like 43 percent, she is black; like 82 percent, she is a woman. (Her four kids are an outlier: Among recipients of TANF, the welfare program for families with children, the average number of children per household in New York City is 1.68, according to HRA data.) But in other ways, she is anything but typical: As a graduate of Brooklyn Tech and Baruch College, she has a level of education that is rare among the citys poor. I dont come from the cycle of poverty, she says, noting that she was raised in Harlem by a blue-collar-worker father. I have certainly had people in my past who have utilized the welfare system. But it wasnt something in our family that we were ever proud of. I dont remember my father ever using food stamps. It was very entrenched in us that you make your own way in life. Its that drive that motivated her to start the BLK ProjeK (or the Black Project), her nascent nonprofit, and throw all her time and energy into it despite the risks of giving up her only source of steady income while raising four kids. The organizations goal is to build grassroots economic-development projects around issues of food and the environment. I didnt know if it was called food justice or food racism, she says of the ideas that prompted the project. I knew it was called Im spending too much damn money on food that doesnt taste that good and is making me fat. She is full of ideas: encouraging urban farming on a plot of land near her Bronx apartment (something she says shes gotten a pledge of $250,000 from Councilmember Maria del Carmen Arroyo to help launch), creating cooperative housing, making connections with rural farmworkers, getting a license for a Green Cart and using the cart as a worker-training program for
I have certainly had people in my past who have utilized the welfare system. But it wasnt something in our family that we were ever proud of. I dont remember my father ever using food stamps. It was very entrenched in us that you make your own way in life.
local women, setting up healthy snack carts outside schools to compete with shaved-ice vendors. Since leaving her last job, shes worked from home. Still, her two children who are too young for school are in daycareshe tried working with the kids at home, she says, but found it impossible. It was greatdont get me wrong. But Id take a break and play Mega Bloks, and then Id look up and half the day would be gone. Instead, she sends them to a neighbor who runs an informal child care businesspaying the cost for the past year and a half with the help of child care subsidies provided by HRAand contents herself with occasionally visiting them for lunch. Fields admits to feeling shame and disappointment at receiving welfare. I have friends who are teachers and lawyers and going back to get their doctorates and own real estate, she says. Being surrounded by that oftentimes makes me feel very lonely. Rushing to keep up with both her work life and her PA case, she says, gives her constant reminders of her straddling two worlds: Its beyond ironic to be in the welfare office and be on a conference call with a councilwoman. Theres something about that thats so funny, its not funny. Fields also knows well that shes an odd case, as someone whos chosen to strike out on her own rather than seek another wage job. But she insists shes no different from other New Yorkers who decide to start their own businesses: The reality is, if you dont have significant savings, if you dont have some top-line credit youre willing to put up as collateral, if you dont have a home you can maybe take out equity onand now, thats not even an optionthis whole patriotic American idea that weve got of small-business owners, thats not reality. For a low-income person, when you dont have some real societal
continued on page 26
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Remember Poverty?
Welfare Reform at 15
No Mission Accomplished banner, please
President Clintons 1996 welfare reforms polarized advocates. Their impact has been more complicated than early critics predicted or recent champions admit.
In his autobiography, Bill Clinton cast his decision to sign the 1996 welfare reform bill in simple terms: America needed legislation that changed the emphasis of assistance to the poor from dependence on welfare checks to independence through work. Nearly seven years after that signing, Tommy Thompsonwho as Wisconsin governor pioneered workfare and then implemented the 1996 bill nationwide as President Bushs Health and Human Services secretaryproclaimed that the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program had exceeded the most optimistic expectations by assisting millions of families in moving from dependence on welfare to the independence of work. And in 2006, 10 years after TANF and 12 years after New York City began imposing workfare on cash assistance
recipients, Mayor Bloomberg told The New York Times: When I came into office, we were going into an economic slump, and most people thought that the welfare rolls would go up. The truth of the matter is, they have gone down. Theres no question that fewer people are receiving welfare these days: National welfare rolls declined from 12.6 million recipients in 1996 to 4.6 million in 2010, and the citys plummeted from 1.2 million in March 1995 to 350,000 this past March. But when Clinton and the Republican Congress converted federal welfare to a block grant program (giving states an incentive to spend as little as possible on benefits), imposed time limits on welfare receipt, allowed states wide latitude on how to enforce work requirements and rewarded states that reduced their welfare caseload,
there was no doubt that welfare rolls were going to drop. The question is whether the 1996 reforms did anything to reduce the poverty that welfare allegedly perpetuated. Fans of TANF have argued that it has reduced poverty. In his 2003 remarks, Thompson pointed out that since welfare reform, the rate of births to unwed mothers has stabilized, the share of young children living with married mothers ended a decades-long decline in 1996 [and] the share of unmarried women with a young child stopped growing and began to decline. In 2006, the Brookings Institutions Ron Haskins noted that most of those who left welfare had found jobs and that from 1993 to 2000, single mothers income rose and child poverty fell. LaDonna Pavetti, the vice president for family income support policy at the
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Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), concurs: What you see is right around the time of welfare reform, you had somewhat of a spike in single moms with earnings. You see this pretty steep increase in employment. But, she adds, Pretty much all those gains have been lost. Were back to 1997. Indeed, since 2000, child poverty has climbed steadily, from 16.2 percent to 20.7 percent in 2009. The general poverty rate has risen as well. Yes, many people are no longer getting public assistance, says poverty historian Michael Katz of the University of Pennsylvania, but they are still poor. While welfare rolls have plummeted, the number of people getting food stamps increased from 26 million in 1996 to 40 million last year. Indeed, many former welfare recipients are working but only surviving because they get other government benefits like food stamps and Medicaid. This is something that TANF cheerleaders embrace. Haskins, for one, wrote in 2006, It is better to cajole mothers to take low-wage jobs and supplement their income rather than to allow them to languish on welfare. Leaving aside that under the old system around 40 percent of recipients tended to go on welfare for less than two years at a timenot exactly languishingits not clear that having people off welfare and working but still needing benefits really constitutes the independence that Clinton touted as the goal of TANF . Whats more, this sort of packaging together resources in an unstable way cant be good for kids, says Pavetti. What does it mean when you dont have any stable connection to a support system, to an income source? What we see is this sort of picture of instability. In one month, peoples situation looks OK, and in the next month it falls apart. Triumphal literature about welfare
Evidence suggests, however, that todays needy families are, in large measure, not getting help to which they are legally entitled.
reform also ignores possible macroeconomic effects. Todays high level of black male joblessness could be at least partly attributed to welfare reform that forced millions of low-wage female workers into the labor pool. Pavetti, however, thinks the increased work emphasis did benefit some welfare recipients. After all, in theory at least, work offers former welfare recipients a chance to advance and earn more, sets a positive example for children and helps poor women shirk the stigma that came with cash assistance. Welfare doesnt offer any of that. Whats more, TANF lovers and haters generally agree that the expansion of the earned-income tax credit since welfare reformtotal EITC benefits grew from $23 billion in 96 to $49 billion last yearwas a great thing. But even the EITC is no panacea: Since its a program that helps only those who work, its of little use when the economy plunges into a recession and jobs dry up. As poverty scholar Mark Levitan noted in a recent report by the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity, Within a policy context that emphasizes work-plus-benefits, prolonged periods of joblessness will continue to consign many single parents and their children to poverty. Unless, of course, they get welfare, which is still supposed to provide at least temporary help to those who cannot work. Evidence suggests, however, that todays needy families are, in large measure, not getting help to which they are legally entitled. In 1996, for every 100 families that were in poverty, 79 were on welfare. In 2010, the figure was 28, according to CBPP . This casts doubt on the value of the welfare caseload reduction since 1996. If caseloads went down because people are doing better, then that is an appropriate measure of success, says Pavetti. If they went down because of harsh rules and because people couldnt get the help they need, then its not a success. In seven states today, less than 10 percent of the poor population gets welfare. It is just truly people are not being served, says Pavetti. And its not because weve had this incredible decline in poverty. States can reduce their caseloads by imposing tougher time limits or work requirements or by creating administrative burdens that make it difficult to get welfare in the first place. Most advocates for the poor disliked the pre-reform welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), because it was heavily stigmatized and poorly funded. The purpose of AFDC was to keep people alive as cheaply as possible, says Katz. But it was better than nothing, says Liz Accles, senior policy analyst at the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies. People need cash to live, to pay bills, to buy essential things, Accles says. Without that, I dont know what you have. Jarrett Murphy
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Remember Poverty?
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INSIGHt
tanyas timeline
SpRING 2003 Tanya Fields, mother of one, graduates from college and gets a job. SUmmER 2003 The company folds, job disappears. Fields goes on public assistance. 2005 HRA says Fields is concealing income, attempts to end benefits. Fields files a challenge. HRA retracts the accusation.
SomEtImE LAtER Fields goes off welfare, gets a job at an environmental advocacy organization. SUmmER 2009 Fields, pregnant with her fourth child, develops complications, goes on disability and gets public assistance, Medicaid and Food Stamps. fALL 2009 Baby is born. Fields returns to work parttime. Welfare benefits are cut to $90 every two weeks. But then her work hours are reduced.
JANUARy 2010 Fields quits, gets another part-time job. ApRIL 2010 HRA says Fields is concealing income again and cuts her benefits to $23 every two weeks. Fields applies for a fair hearing. She misses it when her daughter gets sick. NoVEmBER 2010 Fields is laid off from her part-time job and goes on unemployment. Decides to go back to school for her MBA so she can start a grassroots environmental organization.
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investment and some real hand-holding, you are taking an enormous risk that can cost you everythingyour home, your children and everything. And that is the point that Im at right now. And shes indignant whenever city caseworkers suggest that because shes working for herself, she shouldnt be receiving PA. This is a case of me having a hardship that is not permanent, that is temporary, and using a safety net to get through that. This is what you are supposed to exist for, she says. Her father, she says, will occasionally encourage her to just get a job, any job, and save her nonprofit work for her off-hours. Fields says she thinks about itI bartended and waitressed in collegebut she tried that path before, and it wasnt working. Instead, shes mulling how to turn her expertise into speaking fees or other income. Ive got a good brain in this big ol head of mine, she wonders aloud. How do I use this? On the last day of March, two months to the day after her missed fair-hearing appointment, Fields is late yet again, this time for a meeting at the Legal Services of New York office in the busy South Bronx shopping district of the Hub; she explains that she needed to print some things out. Asked for a court paper, she shuffles through a two-inch-thick yellow folder until she finds it. This time, it turns out, being punctual wouldnt have helped: She cant get an appointment until the end of the next month.
26 Remember Poverty?
Thats a problem, because shes facing a Housing Court date the following Mondaya product of her decision to stop paying rent when her welfare and shelter allowance were eliminated. She wants help from LSNY at the hearing, but on learning that wont happen, she shrugs and heads for the train downtown to Union Square, where she needs to visit the mammoth city social services center at 109 East 16th Street to deal with the latest complications in her HRA case. At her rescheduled fair hearing in February, she explains, no immediate decision was reached. However, the HRA representative recommended that in the interim, Fields was welcome to reapply for benefits. And so, in early March, Fields went to her local job centeras city welfare centers have been rebranded since the Giuliani administrationto submit an application to open a brandnew PA case. I told the gentleman that Im self-employed, that Im getting unemployment, but that I have a job that Im working more than 35 hours a week. That 35 hours is a key threshold for anyone applying for public assistance in New York City. The main legacy of welfare reform is its work requirement: According to the 1996 law, states must show that at least half of all job ready individuals receiving welfare are working at least 30 hours a week (20 hours for those with children under 6 years of age). HRA upped that to 35 hours in 1999, according to agency spokesperson Carmen Boon, in order to create and reinforce strong work habits through a 35-hour week comparable to a regular workweek.
NoVEmBER 2010 HRA says Fields must recertify her income. Fields hopes she can increase the benefits she receives since she is now out of work. DECEmBER 2010 HRA closes her public assistance case. She loses her $23 a week and $450 in shelter allowance. She continues to get transitional childcare vouchers. She stops paying rent. JANUARy 2010 Fields misses fair hearing to challenge benefits cut, because babysitter was sick. mARCH 2010 In visit to HRA center, learns that welfare
benefits will be restored but reduced by 80 percent. Also told that the business she has started doesnt count as work under welfare reform. LAtER IN mARCH Is sent to a Back to Work vendor, given a basic reading test. Her welfare case is closed for failure to comply. She loses transitional childcare benefits. ApRIL 2010 In visit to HRA center, learns that HRA has admitted an error in closing her case back in December. She should get her benefits restored.
At the Ryder Job Center in the South Bronx, Fields received two surprises: First, while her part-time salary had been considered earned income, her unemployment insurance was tallied as unearned incomeand that counted differently toward calculating her PA. (The city allows an earned-income disregard that ignores half your work income for the purpose of deciding whether youre eligible for PA; unearned income, including UI, gets counted in full.) Her benefits under this new PA case, she was informed, would be just $92 a month including both her PA and shelter allowancethough she would still be eligible for child care subsidies and food stamps. Second, Fields may have been working hard at starting the Black Project, but it was an odd kind of work, with no pay stubs or other proof of employment of the kind HRA usually expects. So he says, Well, I dont know how to put this in the system. So Im going to send you to the Back to Work program. I want you to play nice, and theyll give you an exemption. Fields knew enough about the welfare bureaucracy to be wary of Back to Work. The centerpiece of HRAs strategy for moving individuals off welfare and into jobs, it has been allocated more than $300 million since it was instituted in 2006 and has been a lightning rod for criticism. The low-income membership group Community Voices Heard charged in 2008 that only 8 percent of people referred to Back to Work end up placed in jobs for at least 30 days. (HRA has strenuously objected to CVHs conclusions, noting that some participants
drop out because they find work on their own; according to HRA data, 20 percent of people enrolled and assessed by Back-to-Work end up in jobs that last at least 30 days. Of those placed in jobs, the agency says, 77 percent stick with them for at least 90 days.) I knew something about this didnt sound right, she says. But its 8 oclock at night, Ive been there for six hours, I just want to get out of there, so I say, OK. Once she arrived at her assigned Back to Work vendorthe city contracts out all its job-readiness work to a handful of large private not-for-profit organizationsshe was told to attend a required orientation, which turned out to be a three-hour test of, she says, basic reading and math skills. Surprise, surprise, at the end of the test, theyre like, Wow, you did really great. I dont think weve had anyone who ever came in here and had these types of scores. And Im like, Well, I have a college education, and I have a job. I have a solid work history. Thats what I came here to speak with you about. Eventually, she was able to contact the agency director, who recognized her from her previous job. But he had bad news: He couldnt give her an exemption. Shed need to go through the Back to Work training and job search; otherwise, her case would be closed for failure to comply. She managed to wrangle a five-day extension and headed back to the Ryder Center. And guess whatthe case is FTCd anyway. FTC, for failure to comply, is the catchall term that the city gives to any infractions against welfare rules, whether quitting
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One of Fields four children, at home. The post-reform welfare system does offer help with childcare, but benefit rules can make that help hard to access.
The workers eyebrows go up as she listens to the tale of Fields journey from full-time employee to part-time worker getting supplemental benefits to self-employed nonprofit founder with a welfare case open, then closed, then open again with reduced benefits.
job training or failing to show up for an appointment because the notice never arrived (or the babysitter got sick). According to figures that HRA provided to Councilmember Brad Lander last November, in the first nine months of 2010, 44 percent of PA applications were denied; of those, nearly two-thirds were for failure to comply. Fields says the Ryder worker could neither tell her why shed been FTCd nor do anything about it. Once that happens, they all become slaves to the machine: Well, the computer automatically did this, and theres nothing we can do, other than tell you to start it all over again or ask for a fair hearing. Even after her PA case closed in December, Fields remained eligible for transitional aid, since she had, in HRAs eyes, transitioned from being poor enough to be eligible for PA to a paying job. For three months, she still received about $1,000 a month in transitional child care vouchers. With the FTC, those have been cut off. Her goal today on East 16th Street is to see if she can somehow get them reinstated. A half hour after leaving the LSNY office in the Bronx, Fields arrives at her destination, the third-floor office for applications for child care subsidies. The waiting room is packed with bored women and their even more bored children.
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Remember Poverty?
A 2-year-old sleeps across two faded blue metal chairs, a stuffed dinosaur in a green T-shirt sitting beside him. A printed sign offers advice about transitional child care, which it says is available to anyone who has gotten three months consecutive PA in the past year and is currently working: If you do meet these guidelines, call 311 and ask for the ACD program. In pen, someone has corrected the word do to dont. Fields marches up to the desk and recites her saga of aid cutoffs and fair hearings and failure-to-comply notices, in truncated form, to the worker there. Right, Fields concludes, its a mess. She returns to the waiting area, where the kids are growing even more boredif possibleby the minute, as are their parents. Its like a pediatricians waiting room, only with no toys or magazines. Fields mutters that somebody should at least provide juice boxes. The last time she was here, she recalls, was seven years ago, when the office was open on Saturdays; thats since been ended. Its a policy that strikes her as insane, given that shes here to apply for transitional benefits, which are specifically for people who are transitioning off benefits after finding a job: If Im working, I cant be here. Fields has a meeting set up for later in the afternoon with a potential intern for her project. Shes now afraid shell have to cancel. Shes hopeful, though. Workers like to clear out the waiting room by noon, she says, so they can go to lunch. Sure enough, shes soon telling her story yet again, this time to a different worker, whose eyebrows go up as she listens to the tale of Fields journey from full-time employee to part-time worker getting supplemental benefits to self-employed nonprofit founder with a welfare case open, then closed, then open again with reduced benefits, then FTCd. The worker nods sympathetically and purses her lower lip. Fields hands over paperwork from her yellow folder: a letter from a board member of her organization, a letter from the program that donates her office space. Do you have your W-2? No, thats the thing. Im self-employed. The worker disappears into an inner office, then returns. She huddles with Fields behind a pillar by the counter. Finally, Fields returns to the sea of chairs with an oddly bemused expression. So theyre not going to restore my benefits, because I need more proof of my income, she says of the transitional benefits that were cut off in March, . But She holds out a computer printout: her results from the rescheduled fair hearing back in February, which the worker has just looked up; they were released, it turns out, only this morning. The judge has agreed with Fieldsand her Project FAIR
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adviser back in Januarythat HRA miscalculated her eligibility when it closed her old PA case in December. This makes the dispute over her transitional benefits moot. Now she will be getting all her original benefits restored, including child care and housing, retroactive to December. She will still need to work on getting it sooner rather than laterHRA has 30 days to comply with fair-hearing verdictsbut now she can at least go in to her Housing Court hearing on Monday and promise that money is coming soon. And, she says excitedly, now I can make my meeting! As Fields enters the elevator, two young women get on as well. One is complaining loudly to the other: Theyre trying to get me off public assistance, and I have to go back on public assistance to get child care? That dont make no sense! Within half a minute, Fields has given the woman her card. The whole system, she advises her, is just messed up.
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Why the Homeless Eat Out

alter Greene is, at least, set for groceries. On this drizzly Saturday morning in February, Greene has just made his first visit to the Metro Baptist Churchs weekly food pantry. Every Saturday, about 150 people patiently queue up outside the century-old church, hard by a Lincoln Tunnel entrance ramp in the wasteland blocks west of Times Square, before entering and showing free membership cards that entitle them to enough food to provide three to four days worth of meals for each household member. On this day, Greene emerges with a shopping bag stuffed with boxes of cereal, canned goods and even some fresh produce for himself and his wife. Now all he needs is somewhere to cook it. Were in a noncooking facility, explains Greene, who looks younger than his 51 years. In the shelter, the [Department of Homeless Services] police come in there and they search everybodys rooms. Stuff that they find in there that we aint supposed to have in there, they throw it out. Like our hot plates, the spoons and forks, and stuff like that. Greene, like the other estimated 3.3 million New Yorkers designated food insecure because they dont always know where their next meal is coming from, has another option: He could go to a soup kitchen to eat. Unlike food pantries, which use a combination of government grants and private contributions to supply groceries, soup kitchens serve prepared meals, at least until the food runs out. But Greene would rather prepare his meals himself, especially since he has diabetes. Me and my wife, Im able to cook, shes able to cook. I just cant eat everybodys cooking. Instead, he says, he sometimes risks the wrath of the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), which runs the shelter at 317 West 45th Street where he and his wife have lived for the past year, and sneaks in a hot plate: But well clean up behind ourselves, cause that room is very clean, the little room that they give us.
Walter Greene was laid off, got sick, became homeless. What now?
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Remember Poverty?
CHAPTER tHREE
Outside Walter Greenes shelter, the former Aladdin Hotel on West 45th Street. Greene says his fellow residents misbehave. City officials say theyve taken steps to address that.
INSIGHt
How Walter Greene Got, Lost, And Re-Got Benefits
Loses his job Moves into a shelter Applies for welfare Gets welfare Does a one-day moving job, makes $136 Reports it to HRA HRA cuts off his benefits He complains, is sent for eligibility verification review Blood test reveals high blood sugar Sent to WeCARE program for disabled welfare recipients Benefits ($194 cash, $244 Food Stamps for him and his wife) restored
After the Innovations

Stage 2 for Bloombergs plan
and trying to do something about an intractable problem. Several of the programs that CEO launched have registered real success. Take CUNY ASAP a program that , provides financial help and academic support to community college students. The students who participated graduated at a rate of 55 percent, while a control group had a paltry 24 percent graduation rate. The Office of Financial Empowerment (OFE) had 99 percent of its returning clients achieve one of the programs objectives, like increasing their savings. School-based health clinics registered nearly 30,000 visits. Other programs didnt impresslike the City Hiring Initiative and a 311 language access program. True to the mayors word, once CEOs rigorous evaluation regime revealed that these programs were falling short, they were canceled. One program showed decidedly mixed results, and it happened to be the most controversial part of the CEO portfolio: the conditional cash transfer (CCT) initiative, which offered small payments to low-income families who attended their kids school conferences, took their child to the doctor or dentist and got or kept a job. The program offended many because it seemed premised on the idea that poverty is a result of poor choices by poor people, who might instead be bribed to make sound life decisions. It didnt seem to really address the root causes of poverty, says Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies executive director Fatima Goldman, who was also on the 2006 commission. But CCTs defenders say the program simply acknowledged that low-wage workers cant always afford to take
Mayor Bloombergs poverty initiative garnered national headlines but has yet to deliver on its promise of a major reduction in the number of New Yorkers living in poverty. Photo courtesy City Hall.
In early 2006 Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a bold ambition: to make a major reduction in the number of children, women and men who live in poverty in this city over the next four years. He created the blue-ribbon Commission for Economic Opportunity to study poverty and devise an approach for reducing it. Later that year, the new Center for Economic Opportunity began implementing the commissions plan. In the more than four years since, CEO has launched 40 anti-poverty programs and earned the mayor a lot of buzz. Brookings Institution president Strobe Talbott called the Bloomberg effort among the most ambitious, extensive and innovative in the country. Even five years after the mayors promise, with no significant reduction in poverty, CEO still has fans nationwide. Its a very high-profile initiative, says Chris Wimer, an associate director at Stanford Universitys Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. Its become sort of a national model
for people looking at poverty work. The recession obviously hampered the mayors poverty reduction push, but CEO was never positioned to make a major dent anyway. Most of its programs served only a couple thousand people, in a city where more than a million live in poverty. The small scale reflected a relatively small budget but also the fact that CEO was set up to be a laboratory, testing programs on small pools of people to find successful approaches that other agencies or the federal government could then expand. The idea was to run a set of programs and evaluate them and then make some decisions to continue them or to discontinue them, says Mindy Tarlow, executive director of an ex-offender employment program and a member of the mayors 2006 commission. I know when I was sitting there, I wasnt thinking, Oh, were going to reduce poverty in four years. I was thinking, Oh, this is great. Were pulling together as a cross-discipline group of people
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Remember Poverty?
This is has been a difficult year in Greenes life. In early 2010 the moving company in Brooklyn where Greene worked suddenly shut down. He just closed down completelyhe didnt want to run it no more, he says, his soft drawl betraying his North Carolina origins. (His family moved to New York City when he was 6.) He tried finding jobs doing the same things hed been doing in his 30-year working lifemoving, roofing, driving a forklift, working on cars every now and thenbut he says he had little luck in the current economy. Soon, he and his wife were forced to vacate their Brooklyn apartment and begin their tour of the homeless shelters run by DHS. The move gave them membership in a recently less exclusive club. The exact number of homeless New Yorkers is a matter of intense debate. The city, citing figures from its annual Homeless Outreach Population Estimateor HOPEin which volunteers fan out across the city each January to count people living in the streets, says street homelessness has declined 40 percent since 2005, to 2,648 individuals. Advocates for the homelessparticularly the Coalition for the Homeless, whose senior policy analyst Patrick Markee has waged an annual media war against the HOPE figuresinsist that the citys count misses numerous people, especially because its taken in the dead of winter, when many otherwise street homeless may be tempted to enter a shelter for the night. The one thing the two sides agree on, though, is that the number of shelter dwellers, while down slightly from a couple years ago, is still near an all-time high. The citys current shelter census is over 35,000. Forty percent are children; of the 8,000 or so single adults, nearly three-quarters are men. Greene says the first two shelters he was housed at, the El Camino Inn on Jamaica Avenue in Queens and the Park View Hotel on Central Park North, werent so bad. Then, after a brief breakup with his wife in which he stayed with his mom at a senior facility in Brooklyn, they reunited and were assigned to the DHS shelter in the former Aladdin Hotel on West 45th Street. This shelter, Greene says, is a nightmare: Its nasty. People throw shit out their window. I been in one before, but it wasnt like this, with people throwing food and throwing feces out the window. Its totally pathetic and nasty. A prewar brick building on an unassuming block in the theater districtacross the street from both a Broadway show and a gentlemans clubthe Aladdin (formerly the Longacre, as its faded sign still identifies it) gives little indication from the outside that its home to 117 homeless couples. On closer inspection, though, one sees the guard posted in the lobby and the signs
The one thing the city and advocates agree on is that the number of shelter dwellers is near an all-time high.
pasted to the front door: New curfew: 8 p.m.-4 a.m., Effective 4/7/11. As if on cue, a woman emerges and asks what the interest is in her building. You have to tell everyone how terrible this building is! she says, giving her name as Lakiya. Its stinky. We got bedbugs. The city pays $3,000 a month to house couples there, she alleges, when for $1,000 a month they could be providing vouchers for private housing. Visitors to the buildingthose who are allowed past the guardpass through a lobby with vending machines for snacks and prepaid phone cards, as well as stacks of drywall and tiles waiting to be installed. Much work is being done on the former hotel, building manager John Warren explains as he helps lead a DHS-organized tour, following its conversion into a Next Step shelter in March. Next Step is a program for homeless individuals who, explains DHS deputy commissioner Barbara Brancaccio, just arent getting it in terms of following an independent-living plan. To that end, residents at Next Step shelters are offered extra social servicesat the Aladdin, Volunteers of America is contracted to supply 15 staffers, including housing specialists and a client responsibility coordinatorand also extra rules: the no-hot-plates edict, says Brancaccio, is part of an attempt to eliminate distractions. The overall message, she says, is Now you have to get it together. Now your work is you. And does this result in people getting it together faster, and thus shorter shelter stays? We would hope, says VOA program director Jack Clark. Inside, the Aladdin looks not unlike any other slightly run-down Manhattan apartment building, albeit with tiny rooms barely large enough for a bunk bed. (This is a particular complaint of Greenes, who misses the old double beds, even if they took up most of the room: I got to take the top bunk off in order for me and my wife to lay down, so when we sit up, we dont be hitting our heads.) There are no immediate signs of vermin.
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time off work to do the things that will put their family on a path out of povertylike keeping medical and school appointmentsso they need cash incentives to make those activities feasible. Over its first three years, CCT (which was privately funded) paid out $5.3 million in rewards, an average of $3,000 per each of the 2,400 participating families per year. But it posted dramatic success in just one area: Families that received money from CCT were less poor. This was not shocking: If you give poor people money, they will probably be less poor. In the area of health, the frequency of dental visits improved, but the number of people who had a doctor or got an annual checkup didnt increase by a significant amount. (It turns out most poor people already have a doctor thanks to Medicaid.) There was no effect on elementary or middle school attendance; it turns out poor people already send their kids to school at a fairly high rate. In fact, there was no educational impact at all on fourth and seventh graders. For ninth graders, attendance rose, but the only detectable impact on educational achievement occurred among those who were already learning at grade level. Many CEO programs have graduated to a second round of evaluation, or even implementation. CUNY ASAP , for example, is now the focus of a random assignment evaluation study and is being used to help shape the new community college CUNY is developing. Other programs have proved their mettle but need money to take the next step; for instance, nurse-family partnerships, which provide home visits to new parents, were a success, but theres no funding yet to take it to scale. Five CEO programs, however, are about to be implemented more broadly in New York and in other cities around
the country thanks to a $5.7 million funding award by the public-private national Social Innovation Fund. The SaveNYC program matched up to 50 percent of any amount of a lowincome familys tax refund that was saved rather than spent; renamed SaveUSA, itll take on a new life in Newark, N.J., San Antonio and Tulsa, Okla. Jobs-Plus, a workforce development program that was piloted among public housing residents in New York, will get a second life in San Antonio. WorkAdvance calibrates job training to growing industries and will be rolled out in Tulsa and the Ohio cities of Cleveland and Youngstown. The paid internships of the Young Adult Program will be tested in Kansas City, Mo., and Newark. Each program will also have a New York City site, and the programs will reflect lessons learned during the first round of testing. Also getting a second look, despite its very uneven performance in the initial round of evaluation? Conditional cash transfers. Theyll be tried again in the Bronx and Memphis, Tenn. That was a surprise to Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies policy analyst Bich Ha Pham. We are concerned about the emphasis on the idea that poor people are making bad choices, she says of the CCT. It just seems like they set it up with some flawed assumptions. Asked why CCT is being pursued, CEO director Veronica White argues that the initial results showed promise. In terms of the poverty reduction effect, it was hugethe families were more likely to say that they didnt move, because they could afford the rent, more likely to be food secure, more likely to have savingsevery one of those kind of poverty reduction impacts was great, she says. The health impacts were all positive but tiny, definitely worth looking at. Why was the effect on school outcomes all but absent for elementary and middle schoolers? We dont know why, she
says, adding that a deeper evaluation is under way. Maybe it doesnt work. Everything is mixed. Nothings blackand-white about this program, White adds. Lots of grays. White points out that lessons learned in the first CCT round will improve it for this second outing. Families will be offered help to create plans for maximizing their cash rewards. And students will be given tutoring to reach the incentive thresholds. In other words, theyll be provided help and money, not just the money, White says. Whether CCT is worth continuing or not, it bothers many low-income advocates that CEO has decided not to spend much time improving traditional safety net programs like cash assistance or streamlining how those programs are administered by agencies like HRA. To me, that was like a crime and fire plan without the police and fire departments, says New York City Coalition Against Hunger executive director Joel Berg. Fact is, a CUNY student trying to take advantage of a great program like ASAP might be thwarted because of the work requirements associated with cash assistance. But at least CEOs robust research arm continues to make strides toward getting a better grasp on exactly how big a problem poverty is. For decades, analysts have bemoaned the shortcomings of the federal poverty rate, which ignores social safety net income and regional differences in the cost of living, giving a skewed picture of how many are truly poor. So CEO developed a new measure for poverty that followed work by the National Academy of Sciences, and this has helped spur the Census Bureau to begin providing a supplemental statistic to complement its traditional poverty count. In years to come, this work will give a more accurate idea of how much or how little progress Bloombergs larger antipoverty initiative can claim. Jarrett Murphy
34
Remember Poverty?
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The worst thing on display on this dayat least in the small sampling of unoccupied rooms offered up for perusal on the touris a broken sink covered in a trash bag. In another bathroom, the bathtub is clean but covered in chip marks; Brancaccio makes a face, with an expression that almost exactly matches that of a New York City real estate agent explaining, All that will get cleaned up before you move in. In a small meeting room lined with computers that, Clark explains, will soon be available to shelter residents for them to work on rsums and the like, shelter officials say theyre working to improve conditions at the Aladdin. The problems with people throwing things from the roof, Brancaccio suggests, could have been because residents were climbing scaffolding on the front of the building, since removed. A second DHS official, program administrator Marian Moore, says more security cameras have been installed, plus window bars, so folks cant throw stuff out of the window. Another new rule thats helped, says Moore: limiting TVs to no bigger than 19 inches, which she says has kept down the noise, as well as resident arguments about the same.
Greene has no complaints about the lack of largescreen TVs, but he does about the curfew, which had been set at 10 p.m. at all city shelters since 2009 and is now 8 p.m. at all Next Step shelters. DEvELOPINg STORY (This, Brancaccio explains, is another attempt to remove Housing and development in distractions.) Anyone not the five boroughs www.citylimits.org/housing in by curfew, says Greene, gets signed out and must go back to DHS to be re-placed. Then theyll keep you down there two or three days. If they dont find you nothing, you got to sit there. You cant lay down in the chairs or do nothing. Im trying to just get out of the shelter system, period, he says. Theres too much stuff going on in the shelterspeople walking the halls all night with drugs in the building. I dont want to be around that stuff. His wife, he says, did drugs in the 1980s but is now clean. I dont want her to fall back and go back to that stuff again. Well be in the same boat we was in before.
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Povertys Place
High and low poverty rates across the city, state and nation
Sources: Census Bureau, OECD, World Bank. Neighborhood designations based on location of Census tracts with highest and lowest poverty rates.
0%
North Riverdale, Bronx
Upper East Side, Manhattan
2.5%
THE BRONX
Crotona, Bronx
71%
ATTA N
Lower East Side, Manhattan
51%
MAN H
Queensbridge, Queens
50% 0%
Bellerose, Queens
West Brighton Houses, Staten Island
60%
QUEENS
Emerson Hill, Staten Island
1.3%
BROOKLYN
STATEN ISLAND
East New York, Brooklyn
96% 0%
Flatlands, Brooklyn
Among New York Cities

Kiryas Joel 71% Peach Lake 0%
Among New York Counties

Bronx County 28% Nassau County 5%
Among 10 Largest Cities

Philadelphia 24% San Jose 10%
Among the States

Mississippi 21% New Hampshire 8%
Among OECD Countries

Mexico 21% Czech Republic 5.4%
Among All Counties

Per Capita Income, Dollars Burundi $140 Monaco $200,580
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Remember Poverty?
14 Boerum Place, site of the office where benefits recipients can challenge HRA decisions at a fair hearing.
To get out of the shelter system, though, Greene needs money. And that is turning out to be a problem. After his layoff, Greene applied for public assistance and was rewarded with $76 a month in cash benefits, plus food stamps. In February, though, his benefits were unexpectedly cut off. The troubles began, he says, when he was called in to work a one-day moving job on a military base. He dutifully submitted his pay stub to his local Job Center (the city offices that handle public assistance cases), he says, to report the $136 in income. The next month, he says, I went to go get my food stamps and my cash on my card, and they said I was turned off, that I was making too much money. So I said, How am I making too much money? I only worked one day a week. Greene eventually concluded that the HRA worker had incorrectly entered his one days pay as his daily rate for a full-time job. But it was too late, he said. His case had been closed. There was nothing to do but reapply and start the process all over again. Thus began weeks of visits to various government agency offices. First, he was sent to ARBOR, one of the main HRA contractors, for eligibility verification review, the procedure by which the city determines who is eligible for benefits and who among them must be enrolled in work programs. They wanted me to go to a job program, which I cant do because I got high blood pressure and Im taking pills and stuff for my leg, says Greene. (In addition to his high blood pressure and diabetes, he says, he has a sore shoulder from working moving jobs and a bad knee that keeps him from walking more than a few blocks without pain.) They said, That doesnt matter. You can still work. Greene says he was also doubtful about the kind of work that HRA could offer. I dont read that good, to tell the truth.
I dont know too much about computers, because I never went to school to go on computers. When I get work, I go to a tire shop. I change tires on a car. I do an oil change. You know, greasy work, thats what I like to do. But all the stuff they tried to give me, I could not do it. Eventually, a test came back showing high blood sugar, which kicked him over to a new set of appointments with WeCARE, the citys program of medical and psychological evaluations. (WeCARE, run under a contract with HRA by the private groups FEGS andagainARBOR, has earned criticism for poor oversight from the city comptrollers office; it is the same program that forced Tanya Fields to make a doctors appointment to prove that she was eight months pregnant.) Apparently it was determined that Greene needs dental work. He answers one phone call with what sounds like a mouth full of cotton: I just got three teeth pulled. For now, he spends his days alternating between doctors visits and job-training classes, though he has doubts the latter will ever find him a job hes qualified for. But for the interim, at least, Greene and his wife have their PA benefits restored. Its hardly a fortune: $194 a month in cash aid plus $244 in food stamps, for Greene and his wife combined. Still, this is actually about 20 percent more than it would have been three years ago. In 2008 the state legislature agreed to a 30 percent hike in the PA grant, which hadnt been adjustedeven for inflationin 18 years. The last 10 percent of the hike, though, was canceled as part of Gov. Andrew Cuomos budget cuts, costing Greene and his wife about $20 a month in extra income. Its not enough for us, he saysespecially since without a kitchen or a refrigerator at the shelter, he cant cook. Its crazy.
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From right to left: J. Santiago, Jeremy Fantauzzi and Oswaldo Mota share a laugh while hanging out on the corner of East 120th and Pleasant Avenue.
Census tract 192 is located at It is one of the poorest censu some of the people we met th
the far eastern end of Harlem. us tracts in the city. These are here. Photos by Marc Fader.
40
Remember Poverty?
Opposite, top: Manuel Amparo is surrounded by the things he collects and then sends to children in his native Honduras. Opposite, bottom: Paul Weston and Kenneth Bazemore hang out in one of the courtyards of the Wagner Houses. This page: The Wagner Houses, which encompass 22 buildings and more than 2,000 apartments, anchor Census Tract 192
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The crosswalk on East 120th street and Pleasant Avenue.
42
Remember Poverty?
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43
44
Remember Poverty?
Opposite: Madeline Alcanatara, 2 years old, runs along the fence of a playground in the Wagner Houses.
This page, top: Preston Roopnarine, 2, his cousin Madeline Alcantara, 2, and Adira Turbi, Madelines mother, play in a playground in the Wagner Houses.
This page, bottom: Preston Roopnarine, 2, with his dog
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CHAPTER foUR
Beverly Has a Plan

everly Davis has always worked. From when she was 15 years old, she says, she worked part time at a Dr. Jays clothing store in the Bronx, while finishing high school and raising two children. In 2009, after six years on the job, Davis was told by a new manager that she was being let go. I wasnt upset, but I understood how the business went. So I wasnt going to let that stop me. I was still on public assistance, receiving my portion that they gave me, but I wasnt comfortable with it. I was only doing that to make ends meet and to feed my children. Instead, she applied for a training program run by Cooperative Home Care Associates, a worker-owned and cooperatively run home care agency in the Bronx. It was public assistance ready, she says, meaning that HRA works with the employer to ensure that the job counts toward her mandated work hours. That, she says, made it a plus for me. But more than that, Davis sees it as the perfect stepping-stone to a better life. Shes not only raising two children and working 36 hours a week but also studying criminal justice at Monroe College. With her home care job and public benefits tiding her over until then, shes confident that she wont be long for the low-income world: Im going to be a cop for five or six years. After that, Im going to go back to law school and become an attorney. And after I become an attorney, Im going to go to become a judge. Hopefully, it works out.
Working, studying and hoping the rug doesnt get pulled out
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Remember Poverty?
Beverly Davis is going to school in hopes of becoming a police officer in Westchester Countya career plan that shes banking on to get her family out of poverty.
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Of New Yorkers who work full time, 6.6 percent have incomes below the poverty line, according to Census data; many more workers are near poor, earning less than twice the poverty threshold. It is a vast population that goes largely unnoticed by many in the city, even as low-wage workers staff the citys restaurants and retail stores. And they are most likely only getting more numerous: A May report from the Drum Major Institute noted that 82 percent of all job growth in New York City in the previous year came in the citys five lowest-paid industries: hotels and food service, retail, administrative and waste services, health care, and other services, which includes maintenance and laundry services. One of the biggestand fastest-growingfields of low-wage work is home health care. By 2016, according to the state labor departments projections, nearly 300,000 New Yorkers will be employed as home attendants, either as health aides or personal caregivers for the elderly or infirm. As a job that doesnt require a college degree, it has attracted a large number of applicants, mostly women, from around the city. (HRA says 12 percent of its job placements are in home care.) But in part because the pool of potential labor is so huge and in part because of a state home care bureaucracy that has encouraged the growth of subcontractors that siphon off much of the states fixed Medicaid payments for home care, wages are invariably low: $8.50 an hour on average in the city, according to Meghan Shineman, New York policy analyst for the Bronxbased direct-care advocacy group PHI National. As a result, she says, 1 in 7 low-wage workers in the city is a home care worker. The 22-year-old Davis works 12 hours a day, three days a week, earning $8 an hour to help a homebound woman with her daily routine. (Cooperative guarantees fixed hours to its employees, helping it avoid the fluctuating hoursand paychecksthat have driven some home care aides at other agencies to take up residence in homeless shelters.) Other days, she takes care of her two children, ages 7 and 4, and takes night courses at Monroe. I have long days and nights, where I have to get up at 6 oclock, come to work, do my 8 in the morning to 8 at night, then from 8 at night Im on my way to go to school, and I leave school at 10:50 at night. And then Im going home, doing projects, doing research. Papers got to be in by 12 a.m. sometimes. Davis, though, remains relentlessly upbeat, her soft voice belying her steely resolve to see her self-assigned mission through. It helps, also, that she has family support. My mom, she helps me, she says. I live alone, so on Saturdays I bring [my children] to her house, and my son goes to school four blocks away from her house, so she takes them to school and picks them up. Davis also receives government help in the form of food stamps, Medicaid and child care subsidies, though now that she works full time, even at low wages, she is earning too much per year to be eligible for welfare. The benefits she gets are a big help, she says, as she talks personal finances with two colleagues at Cooperatives offices in the South Bronx. Im able to take care of my childrens necessities, my own personal things and pay bills. Now, sometimes I have to pay my rent, so I have to hold
A Growing Gap
Share of wealth held by the richest 1 percent in 1980
10%
United States
10%
New York State
12%
New York City

Source: Fiscal Policy Institute
48
Remember Poverty?
Income concentration in New York and America
Share of wealth held by the richest 1 percent in 2007
23.5%
one check out then pay the other bills in portions. Still, she says, its working out for me well. By contrast, Davis co-worker Francia Alejo, who attended the same training course as Davis last January and works five days a week for Cooperative, says shes steered clear of the public benefits system at all costs. I dont have food stamps, she says. I dont have public assistance. I dont have housing. I have to pay rent. I have to pay my bills. I have to pay my gas for my car. I have to pay for my food. I have to do something on the side. I do taxes. I do travel. She also offers weight-loss coaching; she whips out her business card: Take Shape for Life: Pierda Tallas, Fcil, Saludable y Econmico. Only one time did she apply for public benefits, Alejo says: Their people, they treat you like an animal when you are there at the office. Thats why I dont like that. One time I was there, and I quitripped up the papers and, No, I dont want this, because they were saying I qualify. She does, however, have the benefit of a $558-a-month rent-regulated apartment and a roommate: If I dont have that person in my house, believe me, I go to public assistance! For many Bronx parents, rent and food arent the only major expenses. There is also education: With schools in the borough widely considered among the citys worst, many parents have traditionally sent their children to parochial schools. And that costs money. Alejo notes that she just switched her 10-year-old daughter from a Catholic school to a charter to save money. I was paying $320 a month, she says. I am paying $550, remarks Milevy Joga, another Cooperative worker with two children in high school. Because you got two? No, for one. For one? For high school. Ah, because high school. Something happened in my house that was very funny, says Joga. Her 11-year-old son, she says, was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. The therapist was asking him what is the cause that he is so depressed. He said, It is because Im scared to lose my shelter, because my mom and my dad, they have a lot of problems. And we have such little money that Im scared to lose my shelter and lose my food. I tell my little son that he never was going to lose the shelter, because its the first thing that I pay in my house: I pay the rent, and I pay the school. That was the priority things. They have an imagination also, remarks Davis. Sometimes you may cry, but you dont cry in front of your child, but the way you do something different from whatever you did the last day, its like, Oh, Mommys going through something. Is the bills paid? When they see you rubbing your face, all thats on their mind. Ive been single for four years, she continues. Its just me and my children, aside from my family being my support team. So I have to stay a step above my bills and a step above whats
United States
35%
New York State
44%
New York City
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49
INSIGHt
AGE: 22
Will Budget Cuts Stop Beverly Davis?
CURRENtLy: Raising two children, working 36 hours a week as a home health aide and studying criminal justice at Monroe College. Was receiving food stamps, Medicaid and child care subsidies. pLAN: Become a police officer in Westchester County pRoBLEm: New York State budget cuts may derail a city program that paid $765 of her $1,070 monthly rent, meaning her monthly payment will quadruple. ANotHER pRoBLEm: Her transitional food stamps and child care benefits have been cut off.
coming next. Thats why I registered for school. Because if I dont do it now, later on Im going to have so many bills, its going to be over my head. With this in mind, Davis says, she made sure to take out student loans only for tuition and books, not living expenses. I dont want to have loans and loans to pay back. Davis is especially fortunate in one way: Last summer, to get out of her grandmothers overcrowded house, she took her children to live in a shelter for a few months. This made her eligible for Work Advantage, the program launched by Bloomberg in 2007 that paid 70 percent of the rent for individuals moving out of shelters into private apartments.
The Bloomberg program that Work Advantage replaced, Housing Stability Plus, reduced housing aid by a fifth each year over five years, resulting in a wave of evictions after the first years 20 percent cut kicked in. (It also was restricted to PA recipients, meaning that having your benefits cut offor finding work that raised your income to where you were no longer eligible could result in eviction.) Housing Stability Plus was widely panned. But Work Advantage, which, instead of tapering support over five years, cut off completely after two, similarly drew criticism as insufficient to ensure long-term housing stability. The Coalition for the Homeless issued a report in February charging that one-quarter of Work Advantage enrollees had already returned to shelters. But Davis says shes not worried about what will happen come 2012. By that fall, she says, she plans to have a job as a police officer in Westchester County (Its more dangerous here than up there), so Ill be good by then. She says she cant wait to be done with school and with the entire public benefits system: I dont want nothing to do with themnot in a bad way. They did help me. But I dont want to get comfortable with them. Because I know that I can do a whole bunch of other things than just staying there waiting for people to help me. In March, however, Davis gets a jolt when the state of New York announces that as part of its drastic budget cuts, it will be eliminating the state funds that supply one-quarter of Work Advantages budget. Soon after, the city Department of Homeless Services declares that without the state money, the program will be shut down. Letters go out from DHS to all 15,000 Advantage clients: The City is no longer authorized to continue the program. As a result, no further Advantage rental assistance supplement payments will be provided to your landlord on your behalf. This means that your Advantage rental supplement amount is now $0.00. PA clients will still be eligible for a smaller shelter allowance; those not receiving welfare benefits will henceforth get nothing. For Davis, who earns too much to get welfare, this will mean losing $765 a month in state rent subsidies on her $1,070-a-month one-bedroom apartment in East Tremont. I dont know how Im going to make ends meet, she says. Im going to have to find a job in school or ask for more hours. Its going to be a lot, but I dont want to be homeless. As soon as the announcement of Advantages pending elimination is announced, the Legal Aid Society files suit on the grounds that the city promised in its
50
Remember Poverty?
Francia Alejo, another home health aide, says shes steered clear of the public benefits system at all costs.
I dont have public assistance. I dont have housing. I have to pay rent. I have to pay my bills. I have to pay my gas for my car. I have to pay for my food. I have to do something on the side. I do taxes. I do travel.
Advantage leases to supply rent subsidies for one year. A temporary restraining order forces DHS to pay subsidies in April through June; beyond that, though, the future for Davis and the others remains uncertain. On top of this, Davis has just learned that her transitional food stamps and child care benefits have been cut off. I didnt even know I was cut off until I went backand they said, Oh no, we cut you off today, she says. Im like, What? I never received any notice. I never received no documentation saying I was cut off. They just said it was closed due to me working. Im like, Thats insane, because I worked before, and I was getting transitional food stamps and Medicaid. Cut off, though, is cut off. So I have to reapply all over again. And as this is going on, Im taking finals and everything. I passed my finals! But goodness, its just so much. Davis is resigned to another trip to the HRA office. Finding time between work, school and child care, though, makes it a challenge. I was going to do it today, she says. But they came to plaster my house because I had lead paint poison. Maybe next weekif she can find the time.
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Sharon Jones husband died at age 49 in 2004, leaving her with $3,000 a month in survivors benefits to support her four kids and two grandchildren.
52
Remember Poverty?
CHAPTER fIVE
sharons Homework
n a meeting room high atop Hunter Colleges East Building, a group of undergraduates are discussing the trials and tribulations of life as a college student. With the shades drawn to block out the midday sun, the five women sit around and swap stories. They talk about commuting, about juggling time commitments, about the long hours of schoolwork that are a college students lot. I literally live in Hunter, says Wankairys Decena, a senior from Queens. And then at night I get home at 12, 1 sometimes. Sometimes even 3, depending on how long the librarys open and how long it takes for me to do all my assignments. I cannot concentrate at my house. Yeah, mine too, replies her classmate Sharon Jones. Its just constant. But where do you go? And kids need to be taken care of. The conversation turns to other topics: How to study on the train in order to make it from class to your job without being late, dreaming of being able to afford to move into an apartment or even the dorms. Someone mentions the latest round of CUNY tuition hikes that came with state budget cuts: an extra $150 per class. Its a hole, says third-year student Jannelly Lahoz. Its like youre digging yourself deeper into the hole. Jones nods in agreement. I feel like Im in it, and the dirt just keeps coming. The students are of various ages and from different backgrounds, but they have one thing in common: They have been brought together this semester for the Community Leadership Program, a two-semester credit-bearing Hunter seminar
After raising a family and burying a husband, Sharon Jones is aiming for self-sufficiency. Is it a long shot?
taught by members of the Welfare Rights Initiative, a student group started in 1995 to support low-income CUNY students. Theyve just spent their last class role-playing how to lobby a state senator; now theyve turned to discussing the methods they resort to in order to make it to class in the first place. Two decades ago, 30,000 students attended CUNY while receiving welfare benefits, but that number plummeted to about 6,000 after the city, citing the 1996 welfare reform law that limited welfare recipients to one year of postsecondary education, began cutting off benefits for students unless they spent 35 hours a week in work activities. The exodus sparked bitter complaints from welfare advocates, particularly WRI, that the new policy was closing the most proven road out of poverty for individuals receiving welfare: higher education. HRA officials respond that they believe the most effective way to avoid being on PA long term is employment, though agency spokesperson Carmen Boon allows that once employment is obtained, a person might decide to supplement it with training and education. Though no one in the meeting room receives public assistance, almost everyone gets by with the help of low-income benefits of one kind or another. Decena lives with her parents, who receive food stamps and Medicaid. Stephanie Benjamin, a senior sociology major, gets food stamps to supplement her part-time job; she tried to apply for PA but changed her mind when she learned her husband would need to attend HRAs Back to Work program because his part-time job at a day care center didnt meet the 30-hour-a-week threshold. Jones lives on about $24,000 a year in Social Security income. I dont
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finding their place
Under Obama, HUD & DOE target pockets of poverty
The presidents place-based anti-poverty initiatives have been scarred bybut survived budget cuts. Photo courtesy White House.
Amid the partisan battles that erupted over this years $3.4 trillion-dollar federal budget, few observers noticed the skirmish involving President Obamas anti-poverty programs. In their budget plan, House Republicans zeroed out all three parts of the presidents Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative: the school-centered Promise Neighborhoods, the housing-focused Choice Neighborhoods and the law enforcement-oriented Byrne Criminal Justice Initiative. While Byrne ended up unfunded, Promise and Choice survived with $30 million and $65 million apiecefar less than Obama requested but more than might have been expected in a political environment where concern for the poor is absent. They were trying to kill everything in sight, says Patrick Lester of the United Neighborhood Centers of America.
What ended up happening is the president pushed hard. Obama began to chart his antipoverty approach in a 2007 campaign speech in which he praised the work of Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Childrens Zone, an effort launched in 1994 to provide comprehensive services to all residents of a low-income, 97-block area of central Harlem. About a decade into that effort, the HCZ launched the first of two charter schools that have become the hub of the entire Harlem project. Promise Neighborhoods is an effort to take that idea of schoolgenerated neighborhood change and replicate it in other communities. Choice Neighborhoods reflects a similar approach but has a different ancestry: It grew out of experience with the 1990s HOPE VI public housing renovation program. HOPE VI was launched to deal with distressed public housing
developments, and it succeeded in destroying tens of thousands of units of failed housing (as well as some that were not in failure). But many HOPE projects did not replace the demolished housing with anything that truly improved the neighborhood or the prospects for its public housing residents, in part because the program looked narrowly at housing and not at the other elementseconomic development, schools, public safety, health carethat make a neighborhood viable. As HOPEs shortcomings became apparent, latter-year HOPE grantees began to employ a more comprehensive approach, one that evolved into Choice Neighborhoods. Some of the best HOPE VI innovations were strategies that went beyond the housing and that went beyond the walls of the development to look at education and the labor market, says Luke Tate, special assistant to U.S. housing secretary (and former New York City housing chief) Shaun Donovan. It necessitated reaching into the neighborhood in a more integrated way rather than having public housing separate and apart from the neighborhood. Similarly, the Byrne Criminal Justice Initiative was an outgrowth of the Department of Justices weed-and-seed program, which combated localized crime by combining law enforcement and community restoration. All three programs reflect the administrations belief in place-based strategies that coordinate multiple agencies and programs to improve a particular neighborhood, city or region. This approach undergirds not only anti-poverty funding but also Obamas urban-planning strategy,
54
Remember Poverty?
Unique People Services, Inc.

Administrative Office 4234 Vireo Avenue, Bronx, NY 10470 Phone:(718) 231-7711; Fax: (718) 231-7720 www.uniquepeopleservices.org
Yvette Brissett-Andre, Executive Director Cheryelle Cruickshank, Assoc. Executive Director Unique People Services provides residential and supportive services to people living with HIV/AIDS, individuals formerly homeless with a mental illness, and individuals with developmental disabilities in the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan.
Unique People Services celebrates 20 years of providing social services to people with special needs. Join us at our premier gala on Thursday, October 13, 2011 The Riverside Church, 490 Riverside Drive, New York City.
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get food stamps, she says. I dont get book money. I dont get transportation money. I have no computer. With that money, Jones is the primary support for herself, four children ranging in age from 16 to 27 (a fifth has moved into his own apartment), two grandkids and two dogs in a four-bedroom rent-subsidized apartment on Roosevelt Island. (I feel like I live in a zoo sometimes, she says.) A wiry 51-year-old with short hair dyed black, she is three semesters away from finishing her B.A. after getting her associate degree at LaGuardia College. I have no familytheyre all dead, she says. So its not like you can call Mom. If I dont have it, I dont have it. Its not like I can say, Do you have some bread? Do you have some toilet paper? Jones grew up on East 38th Street in Manhattan, the oldest of six children; her aunt, who lived next door, had 11 of her ownand my grandmother lived with me as wellone big happy Irish family! Her father worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield, while her mother stayed home and took care of the kids. Both died young from cancer when Jones was in her 20s, as did her grandmother and aunt. It goes back to the health insurancethey really didnt have access to it at the time, she says. And also, with that stigma of not going to the doctor for whatever reason, you just waited. So by the time they went, it was too late. So yeah: city life!
With five siblings, Jones says, she felt lucky that her parents had been able to pay for Catholic school for her, and she never thought about college. Instead, she spent several years working as an administrative assistant and legal secretary, eventually landing a job as a social-work case manager for homebound seniors for Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, a social service agency on the Upper East Side. On weekends, she moonlighted placing home care attendants for the same agency. For most of that time, Jones was the primary breadwinner in her household. Her husband, formerly employed by Blue Cross Blue Shield, was told he needed a heart transplant at age 36 and had to go on disability. After eight years, though, she says, I got tired of training social workers out of school with degreesand me with my experience teaching them, I was getting less than them. She briefly tried nursing schoolif she paid her tuition out of pocket, she could get reimbursed by her union, Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Unionbut soon realized she didnt have the money to front the tuition costs. Unfortunately, college doesnt call for one class here and one class there, she says. Especially when you have to do the core classes, it just doesnt work. But I didnt have the money, and I wasnt eligible for financial aid. Jones quit her job in 2004 and relocated to her sister-in-laws house in New Jersey, where she worked in a day care center
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The Harlem Childrens Zone is the model for Obamas Promise Neighborhoods program. Photo: Rebecca Davis
where the Partnership for Sustainable Communities is pooling funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation to address interlinked housing, transit and environmental challenges that particular places face. In 2009, the White House ordered all federal agencies to conduct a placebased review of their policies to see where arbitrary borders between departments might be adjusted to make programs work better and cheaper. On the poverty front, that means that while the Department of Education has a lead role on Promise Neighborhoods, and HUD on Choice Neighborhoods, both programs might end up tapping into very broadand very similarsets of federal programs. Both Promise and Choice also put a premium on leveraging private investment to augment public dollars. Last September, the DOE named 21 winners of Promise Neighborhoods planning grants (out of 339 applicants) of up to $500,000 each. Winners included a Boston Promise Neighborhood based around the 23,000-resident Dudley Street neighborhood, and a St. Paul, Minn., effort that will reach 250 blocks.
Choice Neighborhoods is also at a nascent stage. Because some communities had, through HOPE VI and other mechanisms, already developed a local planning process to develop local initiatives, HUD offered two streams of Choice funding this yearplanning grants, which 119 communities applied for and 17 won, and implementation grants, which 42 communities applied for, with six being asked to submit more detailed plans for a final round of consideration. In these early days, its unclear exactly what the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative will look like once it is implemented because it will involve unique mixes of programs at different sites. More will be clear when the planning grant winners apply for a second of grants for implementation. Among anti-poverty experts, Choice and Promise are greeted universally as interesting ideas. Theres debate, however, over how significant theyll be. Sheldon Danziger, a leading poverty researcher based at the University of Michigan, isnt sure that the Harlem Childrens Zone model will translate to other cities. One would have to think that (questions about) our ability to replicate programs that are uniquely run by a talented and charismatic
leader leads one to be skeptical about replication, he says, referring to Canada, HCZs passionate, high-profile leader, who has recruited politicians and hedge fund magnates alike to help the childrens zone succeed. Danzigers skepticism extends to the relatively small size of the programs, which are dwarfed by traditional safety net offerings like food stamps and the earned-income tax creditprograms that, he says, are smashingly successful and more successful than those [new] programs could ever be. Lester is more optimistic. Its easy to conclude that these are tiny programs that in the long run arent going to change very much, he says. But he adds, These two programs are integrated into and touching these much bigger funding streams, of existing DOE, HUD and other federal programs that, ideally, Promise and Choice will better coordinate. Whats going to happen is, these much bigger funding streams are going to be dramatically transformed along the lines that are being addressed by these much smaller programs. Thats assuming, of course, that the new programs continue and expand to more low-income urban neighborhoods and rural areas. Obama has requested $150 million for Promise and $250 million for Choice in the fiscal 2012 budget. To date, Congress has given him nowhere near what he sought for either program; this years Choice money is actually being carved out of a different budget line. Whats more, Obamas proposed 2012 budget halves funding for the Community Services Block Grant, which funds vital anti-poverty projects at a scale Choice and Promise dont approach. More cuts will come if people averse to both deficits and tax hikes tighten their grip on Congress. As Lester points out, The outcome of the next election will very significantly affect where this goes. Jarrett Murphy
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Remember Poverty?
for several monthsthat was hellbefore returning when her sister-in-law died. Back on Roosevelt Island, reasoning that when youre 50, you have to go to the market with something, she enrolled at LaGuardia College for her associate degree. Then her husband died at age 49, leaving her with a little over $3,000 a month in Social Security survivor benefits as her only income. It took Jones four years to finish her associate degree. After graduating in 2010, she entered Hunter to pursue her B.A. The day before school started, I didnt even know if I could start, she says, as she waited on word for what financial aid shed be eligible for. I dont get book money. I dont know whyIm still learning! Two semesters in, she has yet to choose a major, though shes thinking about sociology, with an eye to eventually doing social work. She needs to do something soon, she knows: If I dont grab a major, TAP isnt going to cover anything. TAP, the Tuition Assistance Program, which provides up to $5,000 a year in state tuition aidenough to pay for two full semesters of Hunter tuition, though not mandatory fees or book costsis a lifeline for New Yorks low-income college students. At LaGuardia, Jones says, she wasnt eligible for TAP (she never got a satisfactory explanation why); at Hunter she is, but it comes with strings: She cant use it for four- or six-week classes, meaning she cant enroll at Hunter for summer or winter courseswhich really sucks for me, because Ill graduate when Im 100. Its a calculus that is likely only to get more difficult in the future. On top of the CUNY budget cutsmore than $300 million over the past three years, according to the faculty union, even as enrollment has risen more than 18 percent over 2005 levelsthe Obama Administration recently eliminated federal Pell Grants for summer courses, as a budget-cutting measure. Jones commutes daily to Hunter from Roosevelt Island, where she has lived since a chance acquaintance suggested she and her husband apply for housing there, allowing their family to move out of its railroad apartment on the Upper East Side. She initially hated the islands insular lifeafter a while, you get tired of the same sandwich shopbut has since grown to appreciate the pluses of a place where everyone knows her by name. After three decades as a working mom, though, shes ready for life on her own again: I dream of a studio and a Murphy bed and one forkbecause two implies somebody has to stay. Thats my goal. Her two oldest daughters both work in food service, one at a bar and grill near her apartment on Roosevelt Island, the other at a McDonalds. Even with two incomes plus the Social Security benefits from the death of her husband, she says, its not really enough to get by. She
Low (Income) Profile

The demographics of poverty in New York City
Most likely to be poor in New York City: 5-year-old Hispanic girl (39.1percent poverty rate) Least likely to be poor in New York City: 35- to 44-year-old nonhispanic white man (7 percent poverty rate)
Gender of low-income New Yorkers
Ethnicity of low-income New Yorkers
57%
43%
Hispanic Black White Asian 11%
40% 29% 21%
Family structure of low-income families with children
61%
Female single-parent household
34%
Married-couple households
6%
Male single-parent household
Work History of Low-Income families
No one worked in the past year Someone worked at least part of the year Someone worked full time for the entire year 19% 33%
47%
Source: 2009 American Community Survey 5-year estimates. Hispanic identity overlaps with race.
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doesnt get food stamps, she explainsshe asked an HRA caseworker once but was told her household income was too high. Instead, she frequents food pantries but complains that the Salvation Army referred her to one in Harlem based on her ZIP code, though thats more than a three-mile trip from her home. Until a few years ago, Jones rent was pegged to her income under the federal Section 236 program, which gives lowinterest financing to developers in exchange for providing below-market rents. But then her building, North Town Roosevelt, paid down its mortgage and opted out of Section 236 in order to begin charging market rents. It was decided that low-income residents like Jones would instead receive what are called sticky vouchers under the federal Section 8 programsticky because they continue to provide rent subsidies based on household income even after a building leaves an affordable-housing program. In May 2010, Jones youngest daughter turned 18, bringing to an end that share of the familys Social Security survivor benefits. As a result, the households income suddenly dropped more than one-third, from $3,087 to $2,008 a month. Jones says she made sure to immediately note her newly reduced income on her Section 8 recertification forms. Its a packet of like 50 papers to sign. So I sent it in, saying we no longer gETTINg JOBBED get this income. I sent Economic coverage the proof from Social www.citylimits.org Security. However, the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), which runs New Yorks Section 8 program, kept charging her the same rent: $1,080 a month. She paid her rent in June and July, then stopped, she says, to get somebodys attention. At that point, she began a months-long battle with DHCR and her private landlord, returning time and time again to Housing Court in attempts to untangle what her legal rent should be. Twice, she says, the DHCR Section 8 representative didnt show up to court and had to be subpoenaed. On another occasion, Jones says the Section 8 representative informed her that her problem was that she was too poor to live in New York City. You know what she told me? Go to Virginia, or down South. Finally, in March, DHCR agreed to lower her rent to $738 but only retroactive to January. So Jones prepared for her date in Housing Court, where before she faced off with her landlord she hoped to convince the DHCR rep to make the reduced rent fully retroactive. The day of her court date dawns clear and preternaturally blue. After scrounging up train fare, Jones enters 111 Centre Street, the 1960s court building erected on the site of the old Tombs jail. Shes already stressed about missing class, which
begins in an hour and a half uptown at Hunter; she has already been absent twice for previous court dates and once for an appointment to try to get one-shot housing aid from the city, and she is afraid of failing. She finds a seat and cracks open Borderlands/La Frontera, the book by feminist theorist Gloria Anzalda. I have a six-page paper due tomorrow. The slightly shabby courtroom, with its fixed rows of plastic chairs and water-stained ceiling tiles, is filled with a cross section of New Yorkers that wouldnt look out of place on any city bus, all appearing vaguely bored and anxious, as if awaiting a medical exam. The lawyers, recognizable by their suits and harried air, occasionally call out softly for clients: Ms. Guzman? Lets step outside for a sec. Jones hasnt been able to get a lawyer. They have drop-in [appointments], she says, but with the trains Finally, she is called to huddle with the DHCR Section 8 rep and a young man in a black polo shirt who turns out to be a paralegal for her landlords attorneys firm. The Section 8 rep tells Jones she has made a mistake: She should have filed a request to see her case file, which would include proof of her recertification application. (Jones didnt make a copy for herself at the time, a decision she now regrets.) She can make an appointment to do that at a future date to try to get the retroactive rent fixed. In the meantime, the paralegal explains, hell write up a stipulation that she agrees to pay her back rent. When the stipulation papers arrive, well past the 11 a.m. start time of her class, Jones looks them over with a frown. If she signs, she sees, she will be agreeing to pay $6,113 in two installments over the next two months. The paralegal, its clear, is concerned only with getting Jones to agree to pay her landlord her full back rent; it would then be up to Jones to get Section 8 to pay its share of the rent subsidy. Jones decides not to sign. Insteadafter hours more of waitingshe is given a June 2 date to return for an actual trial. Still, she breathes a sigh of relief. Now she has time to go make copies of her case file and maybe even to find legal counsel. And even if she loses her case, she still has the possibility of going to HRA for a one-shot deal that will pay off back rent, so long as she can show the ability to keep paying future rent. Joness biggest constraint right now is time, especially since her two oldest daughters each have a childone 6 years old, one 4 months oldand Jones is their main source of child care when theyre at work. She drops off her 6-year-old grandson at school then must be home by 3 p.m. to take over caring for her other daughters baby girl so she can head to work. And you know, a newborn is just nonstop. I feel like Im always running and Im out of breath and I never catch up, she says. Dashing down the subway stairs from Hunter to run home and send off a wire transfershe has a court order to pay her landlord $1,200 in back rentshe notes, You know whats hard too? Squeezing in time to do laundry. After finishing her associates at LaGuardia, she says, I didnt
58
Remember Poverty?
INSIGHt
EIGHt tHINGS tHAt WoULD HELp SHARoN JoNES
If the widowed mother of five, who lives on about $24,000 a year in Social Security income and is trying to get a bachelors degree, didnt have to pay CUNYs recent tuition hike of $150 per class. provides up to $5,000 a year in state tuition aid, could be used for intensive, four-to six-week classes. It cant, so Jones cant take summer or winter classes, dragging out her stay in school. If she qualified for Food Stamps. Her income is too high. She frequents food pantries instead.
2 If TAP, the Tuition Assistance Program that 3
4 If food pantries were closer. When you live on

Roosevelt Island, nothing is. lower when the familys Social Security survivor benefits dropped by more than a third because one daughter turned 18.
5 If the Section 8 program had adjusted her rent 6 7
If the Section 8 representative had shown up in housing court the first two times Sharons case came up there. If housing court had lowered her back rent. It adjusted the current rent but ordered the incorrect back rent repaid, so now Jones is appealing.
8 If she had a lawyer to help her in housing court.
even go back for my degree. There just arent enough hours in the day. Despite the time crunch, she thinks about getting a part-time job, if only so she can stop having to worry about having enough food to get through the month. I think its worrying about eating, really, for me. Not even so much the carfare money. At the beginning of the month Ill get checks, then by the last week of the month, youre hungry. Most people have to get up and worry about themselvesI have to worry about the whole house. Clothes, too, are a problematic expense: I had an internshipI couldnt buy myself clothes. Until my friend said, Sharon, dress for success! You have a certain pride and dignity about you too, and you want to stand straight. The previous semester at Hunter, she says, was especially difficult. Her daughter was pregnant, her cell phone broke, then her computer did too, and it was costing her an arm and a leg to print out reading assignments on campus. Her professor was sympathetic, she says, but still couldnt quite relate. Here I was, dealing with a professor who was talking about doing things on an iPod, she says. I just got so tired of hearing myself say I was poor to her. Shes not going to get that I dont have a smart phone. Some people just dont get it. They know the reality is there, but they dont think for a second that you dont have a computer, a smart phone, carfare money, any of that. It was embarrassing, she says, then corrects herself: Youre not embarrassed, but you kind of dont want people to know. Its hard to say, Hey, I aint got no money to get to school today.
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CHAPTER SIx
Help Wanted
or more than a centurystarting with Jacob Riis and his fellow progressive reformers, through Michael Harringtons The Other America and Lyndon Johnsons War on Poverty, to Ronald Reagans Cadillac-driving welfare queensthe U.S. has struggled to come up with a fix for poverty, or even to agree on what exactly it is that needs fixing. For Mayor Bloombergs HRA, as with Mayor Giulianis before him, the prescription has been work first. As HRA commissioner Robert Doar told City Limits in 2009, Our view is that the best way out of difficult times is employment, even low-wage employmentand then supplementing work with what the city considers work support programs: food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit for lowwage earners. Some of the individuals profiled here already work, though and others say they have no time to work because they need to take classes (or start businesses) to steer a more reliable path out of poverty. For them, poverty is not a mere function of not enough jobs or too much dependency on the system but a complex interplay of life events: jobs that disappear, family members who die, the search for affordable rents and schooling, the nations often incoherent immigration policy, the endless scramble for time that is the lot of any parent of young children. Poverty is a patchwork problem and, they indicate, it requires a multitude of solutions. For Walter Greene, its the size of the welfare grant: For two people, they need to give us more money, he says. Francia Alejo would like to see an increase in the minimum wage: Because $8 an hour, and the cost of the life comes up. Everything comes up, and the minimum wage is still there. Beverly Davis says if the Work Advantage program is eliminated, there needs to be something to help people get out of shelters when they cant amass the savingsor build the creditto get an apartment on their own: So theyre gonna need a co-signer. And the co-signer cant have no kind of felonies. They have to have a job. They have to show proof of their income. And not everyone can find a person with good credit that could co-sign for them. There is unanimous agreement, meanwhile, that the city could alleviate innumerable headaches by simply improving its welfare bureaucracys customer service. You call them, and people dont want to pick up their phone to ask them no questions, says Greene. They want you to go get a job, but they dont give you the time, and they dont hear no excuses, says Davis, Its Either you show me in black-and-white, or it doesnt exist to me. Jones recalls a time when she worried aloud to an HRA
What do people at the bottom need to succeed? Lets ask them.
60
Remember Poverty?
Need in Numbers
If low-income New Yorkers formed their own city, these would be the ten largest cities in the U.S.
New York With No Poor People
Philadelphia
6,875,232
1,547,297
Los Angeles
Poor people in New York City
3,831,868
1,516,649
San Antonio Chicago
1,373,668
2,851,268
Houston
2,257,926
San Diego
1,306,300
Phoenix
1,593,659
Dallas
1,299,542
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61
Its not that people are just poor because they made bad decisions. Its not that people are just poor because they were born into poverty. Its not that people are just poor because theres structural racism and institutional racism and genderbiased policies. Its all of those things.
worker that a benefits appointment had been scheduled at the same time as one of her classes. The worker replied sarcastically: Well, I dont know what your schedule calls for, but you have to be here. Its almost like they dismiss school completely. Like youre nothing. HRA staffers stress that they continually work to improve customer service; in particular, they cite new initiatives that should allow applicants to access documents online and to let clients obtain replacement benefit cards by visiting only two neighboring offices instead of three scattered ones. In addition, all new staff members receive a full-day training in respect, timeliness and quality, according to agency spokesperson Carmen Boon, who adds: Any allegation of rude or hostile behavior at an HRA facility should be reported to 311. Fields says she has sympathy for HRA workersif she were in their shoes shed say to herself, Im overworked, Im underpaid, Im stressed out, and you come up here with attitude telling me what I need to do? Psh!but only up to a point. It seems like the status is Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part. Thats the way they look at it. They dont want to hear about the fact that youre taking kids to school. City officials, in response, like to stress that the goal of welfare policy, from work-first through Next Step on down, is to demand of those seeking public benefits some basic standard of behavior: the personal responsibility that gave the 1996 welfare reform act its name. And, indeed, many low-income New Yorkers make their share of questionable decisions. They miss appointments. They get involved in relationships that dont last. They fail to make copies of important paperwork. Of course, manyif not mostNew Yorkers with adequate incomes do those things as well; the difference is that for them, the potential consequences of a misstep are far less dire. Asked what she would do if she were put in charge of running the system of support and public benefits
for New Yorkers with low incomes, Fields thinks for a long, long time. I dont know. I wouldnt want to be the mayor running this systemI can say that. Its tough. But, as befits a woman who is trying to reinvent low-income economic development while simultaneously keeping her welfare benefits active and raising four kids, she has POWER LINES some ideas: I think the Covering City Hall first thing you www.citylimits.org need to do is to understand that poverty doesnt happen in a vacuum. Its not that people are just poor because they made bad decisions. Its not that people are just poor because they were born into poverty. Its not that people are just poor because theres structural racism and institutional racism and genderbiased policies. Its all of those things. Mostly, though, Fields stresses that the system needs to recognize that the clients it servesNew Yorks 1.5 million poor peoplecome in all shapes and sizes and with different reasons for being where they are. One of the things that annoy the hell out of me is that folks act like people who are on public assistance are one monolithic group of folks. I mean, we know about the welfare queen stereotype. And Im going to be real with you: Some of its legitimate. She says shes met fellow clients at the HRA office who simply dont want to work. Fields knows, though, how frustrating it can be to lose a job and then have to fight over and over for help you are embarrassed to ask for in the first place. Ive certainly sat next to the woman at the PA office who was like, I aint working for no-fucking-body, she says. But even that comes from a place that I can understand.
62
Remember Poverty?
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DO SOMETHINg ABOUT IT
There are dozens of agencies, hundreds of organizations and millions of pages of research and journalism dedicated to studying, relieving and reducing poverty in New York City, America and the world. Here are few ideas for readers looking to learn or do more:
Community Voices Heard Low-income peoples membership organization cvhaction.org Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies Combines research, advocacy and direct service fpwa.org Make The Road New York Membership organization for low-income & immigrant New Yorkers maketheroad.org New York City Coalition Against Hunger Speaks on behalf of nutrition programs citywide nyccah.org Northwest Bronx Community Clergy Coalition Instrumental in reviving neighborhoods abandoned by government northwestbronx.org Center for Employment Opportunities Serves former inmates re-entering the workforce ceoworks.org
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The Death Poverty? Rememberand Life of the Neighborhood Store Homework/Extra Extra
City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3 34 5
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Have shelters become a surrogate for low-income housing?
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SPECIAL 35th ANNIVERSARY ISSUE!

Covering new York CitY poliCY and politiCs sinCe 1976

The Problem 1.5 million new Yorkers can'T afford To forgeT

Have shelters become a surrogate for low-income housing?

THE FEATURE / SURVIVAL GUIDES

Not a Kid Anymore

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3

CIty LImItS StAff

WHATS NEW AND WHATS NExT AT CITYLIMITS.ORg

Up NExt The Fire Next Time

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35 yEARS of CIty LImItS

35 yEARS of CIty LImItS

35 yEARS of CIty LImItS

35 yEARS of CIty LImItS

By Neil deMause / Photographs by Marc Fader

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3

3 million in or near poverty + one recession = zero interest

1959 22.4 pERCENt

1989 12.8 pERCENt

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3

1969 12.1 pERCENt

1979 11.7 pERCENt

1999 11.9 pERCENt

2009 14.3 pERCENt

Even Entrepreneurs Need Food stamps

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3

How Low Did they Go?

www.citylimits.org Remember Poverty?

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3

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Why the Homeless Eat Out

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3

How Walter Greene Got, Lost, And Re-Got Benefits

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City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3

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The crosswalk on East 120th street and Pleasant Avenue.

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 3