March 22, 2013 |
The following piece is part of AlterNet's series on poverty, Hard Times, USA.
Earlier
this month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg perfectly described a day in the
life of your average homeless New Yorker. “You can arrive in your
private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight
to the shelter system and walk in the door and we've got to give you
shelter,"
he said on his radio show, addressing the record rate of homelessness in the city.
50,000
people, including 21,000 children, are currently crowded into the
city's emergency shelters, a 61 percent rise from when the Mayor took
office,
according to the Coalition for the Homeless.
Last month, the Mayor had
assured reporters that "Nobody's
sleeping on the streets," a claim easily refuted by a look at the
city's homelessness statistics and/or going outside in New York. As it
turns out, the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) had recently
suspended a
program making it easier for homeless families to get into shelters
when the temperature dips below freezing. The DHS did not share this
information widely; it came to light after a
New York Daily News report highlighted
the case of 23 year-old Junior Clarke, who told the News that he, his
wife, and 4 year-old daughter were turned away from the city's intake
center on a freezing day. When they refused to leave, staff threatened
to call the police.
“They tried to make us leave and we refused,” Clarke
told the Daily News. “You know some people leave, walk away and go sleep on the train with their families.”
As the
7th richest man in America finishes
his final term in office, he leaves behind one of the biggest wealth
gaps in the country: income inequality in Manhattan is the second worst
in the US, according to
the New York Times. New York's poverty rate has risen to the highest level in a decade, the
Times also noted. 1 in 3 New York kids live below the
poverty line. In parts of the Bronx, two thirds of residents live
in areas of extreme poverty.
At
the start of his second term, the Mayor raised the hopes of advocates
for the poor by expanding the definition of poverty to account for the
high cost of living in the city. But as sociologist Francis Fox Piven
told the Gotham Gazette, "If we thought a new measure would mean more generous policies, we were wrong."
In fact, many Mayoral actions have significantly worsened the lives of the poor. Here's a look at some of his greatest hits.
1. Booting Homeless Families from Priority Access to Housing Aid
At
the start of his second term, the Mayor promised to reduce the rate of
individual and family homelessness in the city by two-thirds in 5 years.
Today, there are as many homeless New Yorkers as during the height of
the Great Depression, according to the
Coalition for the Homeless. The Mayor blames the recession and, strangely, the
Coalition for the Homeless itself, but
homelessness advocates point to a series of ill-advised policy
decisions that separated homeless families from the government aid that
had kept many of them housed.
In 2005, the administration cut homeless families'
priority access to Section 8 federal housing aid. In
its place, DHS came up with Housing Stability Plus, a program designed
to fire up homeless families' magic bootstrap powers by making aid
temporary and contingent on work requirements. Families were only
eligible if they were on Public Assistance but they also had to
work, which counterproductively meant that if one parent got a full-time
job they could
lose their housing. A 2007 Coalition report found that families were being funneled into
slumlord properties, where
kids could build character by overcoming hardships like rat
infestations and lead in the walls. The Advantage program, another
impermanent rental subsidy that restricted rental help to 2 years,
followed. Despite the administration's efforts, the rate of homelessness
continued to climb as families ran out of Advantage subsidies without
substantially improving their economic situation and had no choice but
to return to shelter.
Half of the program's costs were paid by
New York state. When Governor Cuomo cut off funds, the Bloomberg
administration scrapped the whole thing, leaving the city with no
permanent housing plan for the city's neediest families.
2. No Plan to Address Homelessness
That didn't go well! This week, a report by
Coalition for the Homeless found
that as of November, 2,818 former Advantage families had returned to a
shelter. A quarter of the families going into the city's shelters are
former Advantage users, which explains, in part, why the rate of
homelessness is high as during the 1930s.
The Mayor's current
plan seems to consist of saying out-of-touch-rich-guy things (" ... it
is a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before,"
Bloomberg said when asked why homeless families were staying in shelters
so long), and opening up emergency shelters. Spending on temporary
shelter has jumped 30 percent since 2008, according to the
Independent Budget Office.
If
the Mayor had his way though, the best strategy for lowering the cost
of shelter is to let fewer people stay in them. At a press conference
defending his large soda ban, the Mayor philosophized about the
responsibility we have to take care of one another. Minutes later he
warned that the city's policy of housing the homeless
threatened to set off mass unrest.
"You're
gonna see an uprising here," he said. "The public cannot afford to
continue to do what we've been doing with homeless where everybody has a
right to shelter, whether they need it or not. The public at some point
is going to say to their elected officials: 'I don't want to pay
anymore,"
he said.
Although
the Department of Homeless services can deny families shelter -- only
35 percent of families that apply for shelter are accepted -- they don't
have the same luck with homeless individuals because of various state
and city laws that require the city to house any individual who asks for
shelter.
Meanwhile,
a plan by
City Council members Christine Quinn and Annabel Palma to move homeless
families into permanent housing instead of putting them in expensive
emergency shelters is gathering dust. They suggest re-prioritizing
shelter residents in the allocation of federal housing subsidies, and
adding a rental assistance program similar to Advantage. So far, the
administration seems intent to leave the problem to the next guy.
3. Crushing the Living Wage Laws
Contrary
to nasty stereotypes, many people without permanent housing have jobs;
they just don't earn enough to support life in one of the costliest
American cities.
The campaign for a living wage in New York
famously united clergy, antipoverty advocates, and unions. A large
majority of City Council members stood behind the two bills. The
widespread support was not surprising, since it's pretty hard to come up
with a convincing opposition to the measures, which simply demanded
that development projects that receive more than $1 million in taxpayer
subsidies pay their workers
a decent wage: 10 dollars an hour with health insurance, or $11.50 without.
Advocates pointed out that
developers who underpaid their workers were being subsidized by
taxpayers twice: once when they got the initial public money and again
when their workers were forced to resort to food stamps, housing aid,
and other social services in order to survive on their measly
earnings. The city had already been more than kind to developers, with
business tax subsidies growing by 180 percent in the past decade,
according to the
Fiscal Policy Institute.
While
the Mayor enthusiastically supported that government intrusion into the
market, he deemed the living wage to be an unacceptable government
overreach. The measures were "a throwback to the era when government
viewed the private sector as a cash cow to be milked, rather than a
garden to be cultivated," the
Mayor mused poetically. But things were serious. "The last time we really had a big managed economy was the USSR and that didn't work out so well,"
he warned on his radio show.
When
the City Council overwhelmingly passed the legislation, the Mayor
vetoed it. When the Council overrode his veto, the Mayor
actually sued the City Council to prevent the measures from taking
effect. In the meantime, Council member
Christine Quinn got busy weakening the measure. In
the end, the legislation applied to only 400 or 500 workers, reported
the New York Times, allowing companies like Fresh Direct, which was
about to receive a $100-million package of tax breaks for moving to the
Bronx, to underpay
their workers in peace.
4. Budget Cuts
At
the start of his second term, the Mayor launched an anti-poverty
initiative that consisted of a series of pilot programs, many of them
privately funded. They included job training and teaching poor families
how to save money. The administration also introduced conditional cash
transfers, rewarding families that met goals like going to the doctor,
school attendance for the kids or even getting a library card. The money
could certainly make a short-term difference for families that
participated but antipoverty advocates argued that the cash transfers
and other programs were too small to address the root causes of poverty
like high rates of unemployment, skyrocketing rents and low wages. (Cash
transfer was abandoned when it showed little impact on the
behavior of participants.)
At
the same time that the Mayor was introducing and then giving up on
untested programs, the administration's proposed budget cuts ended up
primarily impacting public services that helped the poor. An analysis by
the
Gotham Gazette found
that programs aiding the city's poor and working class residents --
including those providing child care, health, education and homeless
services "have lost a disproportionate number of workers -- 6 percent to
more than 26 percent of their staffs." They point out that at the same
time the police department "lost fewer than 3 percent of its uniformed
officers, and the corrections department has actually increased its
uniformed staffing by 2 percent."
Every year, like clockwork,
the Mayor's proposed budget contains massive proposed cuts to programs
that help poor kids and parents, like child care and after school
programs. Between 2007 and 2011 more than 40,000 subsidized child
services spots were canned, according to the Center for
New York City Affairs. "This
year, the slots face the guillotine once again, with a $60 million cut
to afterschool programs in Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget, and
another $77 million to child care services," writes Abigail Kramer Child
Welfare Watch.
5. Affordable Housing for Rich People
One
area the administration has been willing to spend money is in building
affordable housing in the city. The New Housing Marketplace Plan, a
multi-billion dollar investment, is expected to produce up
to 140,000 housing units (the initial goal was 165,000). Small snag:
many will only be affordable for upper-income people. A new report
prepared by the
Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development found
that two thirds of the new spaces cost too much for most neighborhood
residents. In half of the districts surveyed, the majority of units are
too expensive for residents that make the neighborhood's median income
(the administration disputes their conclusions). "The typical Bronx
household would have to make 1.5 times its income in order to be able to
afford the majority of the affordable housing built in the Bronx," they
write. As Eric Jaffe
points out in Atlantic Cities, "In general terms, the affordable housing plan did create low-income housing, but it was upper-low-income housing."
For
example, an "affordable housing" apartment built in Central Harlem
costs $1,492, most likely to be rented by a relatively high income
person. In contrast, the report points to another 3 bedroom apartment in
the neighborhood, built in collaboration with a non-profit, which rents
for $531.
The plan certainly isn't ideal for poor residents being priced out of their neighborhoods. As
Alyssa Katz points
out in the American Prospect, even if the housing units provided by the
initiative served low-income people, they would not make up for the
impact of gentrification. "New York is losing far more than it's
building to deregulation and gentrification. According to the Community
Service Society, every year nearly 60,000 apartments become too
expensive for the poorest two-fifths of city residents to afford. "
While
gentrification is often seen as being inevitable, it's strongly shaped
by city policy, and the Bloomberg administration has been an especially
ardent advocate of redevelopment. In the past decade the city has
rezoned a
record number of
neighborhoods, which allows developers to come in and build expensive
new apartments or fill a street with H&Ms and Old Navys. While in
many cases neighborhood change can be positive, advocates for
lower-income people and protestors of gentrification say that despite
big promises made at city meetings, development is rarely met with
matching measures that ensure residents can stay in the neighborhood.
6. Stop and frisk
The
NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy essentially makes it a crime to be a poor
black or Latino person in New York (the policy is currently the target
of a large class action lawsuit). The shocking stats have become
familiar: 5 million stops in the last decade, close to 90% of them
minorities. Only 1 in 1,000 stops yields a gun, undermining the Mayor's
contention that the policy plays an essential role in
keeping guns off the streets. But as AlterNet's Kristen Gwynne
has reported, stats
somberly repeated by the New York Times mask the horrific on-the-ground
experience of the department's violent policing: the cold numbers
obscure what it's like to have a cop touch your penis while your
girlfriend watches.
Gwynne has also documented how aggressive
enforcement of so-called "quality of life laws" in poor neighborhoods
-- like riding your bike on the sidewalk -- sucks kids into the
criminal justice system:
A “Quality of life” summons
for disorderly conduct may seem like no big deal, but young people in
the South Bronx told me that misdemeanor summonses are so often handed
to them that they “lose track” and miss a court date. Next thing they
know, a stop-and-frisk turns up a warrant for arrest, and they are
hauled down to the precinct. The $25 fine quickly turns into $100,
stacking up to exorbitant fees for crimes prosecuted almost exclusively
in low-income neighborhoods of color.
One can see how
fining low-income people hundreds of dollars for riding their bikes on
the sidewalk doesn't ease their path out of poverty. Also, probably
pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is more complicated when going to
school or work involves being yelled at, fondled, cited, or arrested by
police.
No comments:
Post a Comment