Mayor Bloomberg releases recommendations on poverty on September 18, 2006 (Spencer T Tucker)

NEW YORK, NY November 16, 2006 —For decades government has written off poverty as an intractable problem - one that has to be managed rather than gotten rid of. According to the census nearly 20 percent of New Yorkers are living in poverty. But the Bloomberg administration believes it can reduce those numbers and at the same time become the national leader on fighting poverty in the United States. WNYC’s Cindy Rodriguez reports.

REPORTER: On August 29th, 2005 the desperation of poverty that often stays well hidden within rundown and isolated neighborhoods was painfully exposed on the t.v. screens of Americans across the country.

Images of the poor stranded and begging to be rescued from the devastation Hurricane Katrina left behind, horrified many citizens.

New Orleans had just over 100-thousand poor people before Katrina struck, New York City has 1.5 million. Often it’s hard to tell who is struggling to get by in this densely populated place. But the problem is clearly there. For instance, more than 34-thousand people sleep in city shelters each night. More than half are families with kids. And last year 1.2 million New Yorkers used food pantries and soup kitchens. Mayor Bloomberg said the poor should no longer be ignored:

BLOOMBERG: Until we marshal the best efforts of our public and private sectors to help more of them transform their lives, this will not be the city it can be or that we want it to be.

REPORTER: Bloomberg has put Deputy Commissioner Linda Gibbs in charge of helping low income New Yorkers get a step up. She says poverty has always been thought of as a problem for the federal government to deal with:

GIBBS: I think it’s been somewhat of a cop out that people haven’t been willing to say that we have resources, we have abilities, we’ve got great ideas and it doesn’t take a national agenda in order to do something about poverty.

REPORTER: Gibbs and members of a commission appointed by the mayor to study poverty traveled to Liverpool, England to come up with some of those ideas. What they brought back was an approach that Gibbs says went beyond making sure people are receiving social services:

GIBBS: …so it was as much about job development, workforce development, training and skills capabilities as it was about anything else.

REPORTER: The federal definition of poverty is - for a family four - making it on less than 20-thousand dollars a year. Gibbs acknowledges this threshhold is too low. She wants the city to create its own measure of whose poor in order to get a truer sense of the problem. But even when you use the low federal number – the city says there are 340-thousand New Yorkers who remain poor even though they have jobs. To help improve their paychecks, the mayor, who is a self-made billionaire wants to do things such as create an apprenticeship program that would train health care attendants to become nurses. He also wants to give families up to a thousand dollars back in the form of a tax refund if they pay for daycare in order to work. Gibbs says jobs are pouring into the city and it’s important the working poor have the skills to fill them:

GIBBS: We have to make sure that if people are doing exactly what everbody expresses as a desire for them, they are taking jobs, that those jobs are at decent wages and they are able to move out of poverty.

REPORTER: But training people is much more complicated than it sounds. Barbara Zerzan and Nancy Biberman should know. They run the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation in the Bronx – the poorest urban county in the United States. The non-profit offers a wide range of services for the poor including low income housing and a head start program for small children. Biberman says the challenges are enormous.

BIBERMAN: More than 60 percent of kids…don’t graduate from high school and there is the highest teen parenting rate certainly in the city if not the country.

REPORTER: A teenager who drops out of school, later becomes the adult who is hard to employ. So while training programs are good, Barbara Zerzan says many clients are not ready for higher skilled jobs. She says recently the group tried to recruit people to become Licensed Practical Nurses:

ZERZAN: It was very difficult to find people with the qualifications that were required to participate in the program.

REPORTER: Zerzan says the requirements included a high school diploma, a professional presentation, an ability to handle stress and at least an eighth grade reading level:

ZERZAN: …the average reading level of people that we’ve worked with over the past couple of years is about a sixth grade reading level. Eight grade is considered good....

REPORTER: Reforming public schools is a priority of the Bloomberg administration. But past neglect has already taken a toll on this community and the entire city. A 2005 report by a local non-profit shows there are 170-thousand young adults who are neither in school nor are they working. The plan to combat poverty is trying to make better students by paying parents to send their young children to school. The plan also includes paying teenagers to attend after-school programs in an attempt to reduce pregnancy rates.

The city says its marshaling its resources for the groups that can benefit the most – the so called working poor and young people at risk of continuing their parents life of poverty. But as far as Barbara Zerzan sees it there’s little distinction between this group of people and families recently off welfare:

ZERZAN: They are the same people who fall in and out of working depending on their situations and lay offs and seasonal work.

REPORTER: In New York City, the number of people receiving welfare went from more than 1.1 million in 1995 to just over 400-thousand in 2006. Gordon Berlin is President of MDRC, a social policy research organization and says welfare reform helped reduce dependency but not poverty:

BERLIN: We’ve made good progress on the employment side but many of the people who’ve left welfare to go to work are in low wage jobs and are what’s considered the working poor.

REPORTER: Berlin believes the working poor need easy access to benefits they still qualify for such as tax credits, health insurance and foodstamps:

BERLIN: It’s important that we try to create some type of institutional structures that both deliver the supports for the working poor and deliver the services designed to help them advance in the labor market. I think those two things together reaching out to people is really the next frontier for welfare reformers and for anti-poverty initiatives.

REPORTER: The Bloomberg administration has set up a website for low income new Yorkers. It tells them what benefits they might qualify for and gives them the addresses of agencies where they can go for help. But if you don’t have a computer or you’re not computer literate you may be out of luck. Berlin still believes though that the city is on the right track and says if experiments being tried here prove to be successful – they could end up driving national policy. For WNYC, I’m cindy rodriguez

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