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The Poverty Commission: Measuring Up?


New York City officials have declared an ambitious campaign against poverty, but they must also put together a fuller picture of the effects of poverty in the city, according to Lawrence Aber, a member of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Commission for Economic Opportunity, which last month released its report, Increasing Opportunity And Reducing Poverty In New York City. Aber, a professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, co-chaired the commission's “work group on data evaluation.” He chatted recently about the shortcomings in the current methods used to measure poverty, and about how to determine whether the city’s new anti-poverty efforts are succeeding:

THE SHAPE OF POVERTY IN NEW YORK CITY

GOTHAM GAZETTE: In its report, the Commission for Economic Opportunity says it wants to work towards developing a "more nuanced picture of poverty and well-being as experienced by New Yorkers." What don't the statistics we currently use tell us about poverty in New York City?

LAWRENCE ABER: The main statistic that the city and the nation use is the percentage of people in households with incomes below the federal poverty line, which is now $19,800 for a family of four. That official poverty measure has a lot of flaws. The main one is that it doesn't take into account differences in what it takes to live compared to what it took in the 1960s...

A second problem is that it doesn't account at all for regional differences in the cost of living. It's the same federal poverty line in Biloxi, Mississippi as it is in the Bronx. It doesn't stand to reason that a dollar goes as far in New York as it does in Biloxi.

The third big problem is that it is a measure purely of income poverty, and it doesn't include measures of families' wealth, assets, or debt. Imagine you're making $19,800 and you own your own house, car, and vegetable patch, and you don't have credit card bills. Then imagine you're making $19,800 and you don't own your own house, car or vegetable patch, and you've got extensive debt. The poverty line can't distinguish between those two families, and the second family is much more economically stressed than the first family.

The final problem is that [we] measure the percentage of people below a cutoff instead of some kind of continuous score. It doesn't stand to reason that someone who makes $10 above the cutoff is wealthier than a family that makes $10 below the cutoff.

1.5 Million Live In Poverty? Maybe Double That

GOTHAM GAZETTE: So do you think that the commonly cited figure that 1.5 million New Yorkers live in poverty is an understatement?

LAWRENCE ABER: Yes I do. That is technically the number of people who live in households with incomes below $19,800. Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs disagrees with me somewhat, because she says that if you take into account the benefits that families get, then the number of people living in households with economic resources below that level is lower.

That's technically true.

But the official line would be much higher today if the original methodology [were reapplied]. That was based on studies that showed that it cost about a third of a low or moderate family's income to feed four people adequately back then. Now food costs less than 15 percent of a family's income. There are other expenses that are much, much higher: transportation costs for going to work, health care costs, childcare costs to be able to work. If you total up in price what on average it costs to provide minimally adequate food, shelter, clothing, basic expenses, for a family of three in New York City, Wider Opportunities for Women estimates that it costs over $40,000 to reach what it calls family economic self sufficiency.

GOTHAM GAZETTE: About how many New Yorkers would be below that line?

LAWRENCE ABER: I haven't run those numbers, but nationally it about doubles or triples the number of people who live in families that cannot meet their basic needs.

Economic Opportunity Index

GOTHAM GAZETTE: One of the recommendations in the commission's report to measure poverty more accurately is to create an Economic Opportunity Index. What is that?

LAWRENCE ABER: An Economic Opportunity Index wouldn't just measure poverty; it would measure a number of dimensions that might go into the economic security of New Yorkers. This would include the percentage of New Yorkers who are covered by health insurance, and the percentage of New Yorkers who are employed. The idea behind an economic opportunity index is to create something like the Dow Jones Industrial Average -- a composite score of many dimensions of the economic and social life of New Yorkers that represents their economic wellbeing.

A single score like that would have several advantages. First, if one dimension of economic wellbeing went up and another went down, you might say things got better or worse if you're only tracking one when, trading off, they stayed the same. A multi-factor system like that is going to create a more reliable gauge.

Second, it's an effective communications tool. One of the things the commission recommended is to demystify this process and help citizens of New York understand the economic health of their fellow citizens and the city as a whole. We think an economic opportunity index could be a big contribution both scientifically and from a communications standpoint.

GOTHAM GAZETTE: Is the city already collecting the data needed to do this?

LAWRENCE ABER: No. The city has a lot of the data, but a few things would have to be collected anew. Right now city data mostly comes from people who are seeking services. Well, if poor people aren't seeking services, they're not getting into the numbers. The only way you can get some of the numbers for the population of poor people as a whole is to survey them directly.

LOOKING FOR WHAT WORKS

GOTHAM GAZETTE: The report's recommended focus on the working poor, young adults, and children under five has been criticized as too narrow, but the overall report has also been described as too vague. What is your perspective on these critiques?

LAWRENCE ABER: First, on the issue of those three target groups: [the commission has] said very clearly that there is no intention to roll back any of the current investments in low-income families, the aged, welfare recipients, and a number of other subgroups of the poor for whom the city is already doing a fair amount.

The commission identified these three groups who, as the report said, we believe can benefit most directly, immediately, and dramatically from well-focused and coordinated interventions. I endorse that, and when you think of it, in a way they are groups that society as a whole invests the least in right now. Are these the only three subgroups to address? Absolutely not. Are they ones that represent over half the poor, and where we think we can identify strategies that could make a difference in the short-run and really significantly change things? Yes.

There will be a stage two of the initiative. If the city is successful in stage one, it should cast its eyes on the next challenge.

In terms of overly vague, there were 30 commissioners working on a five-month time line with a very active, ambitious, and savvy city administration. The main way we could reach consensus was to articulate recommendations at a general enough level to be of helpful guidance, but not to micromanage.

The people in the commission are not people in government, and they don't have all the technical resources necessary to turn general recommendations into a specific action plan. When Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the initiative, he also charged Deputy Mayor Gibbs to come up with an action plan and implementation plan in 60 days.

Things will get more concrete with the next phase of the action plan, and they'll get more concrete after that. It takes awhile for government to turn recommendations into specific actions.

GOTHAM GAZETTE: Were you able to identify any specific programs or strategies for confronting poverty in New York City that you can definitely say, "this is something worth expanding", or, "this program is absolutely not working"?

LAWRENCE ABER: The city posed the challenge to itself that said, "How can we do this without more state and federal help"? I think that there was the perception that good quality childcare for our youngest kids both worked as a school-readiness strategy and worked as a work-support strategy. The childcare tax credit is an indication of the city taking responsibility to expand resources on a strategy that works.

GOTHAM GAZETTE: Were there any strategies or specific programs that you didn't think were worth the investment?

LAWRENCE ABER: The commission did look at some strategies that did come under question, but I think there wasn't a lot of general conversation at the commission about things that weren't working. As a commissioner, I personally believe we should be ready to identify and eliminate expenditures that aren't having an impact on families' real economic security and investment, and then use that money to invest in more effective strategies.

We will undoubtedly find things where we want to shift the investment. That's hard to do in a commission where people pour their life's blood into different components of that. That job is going to end up falling on government. Personally, I think, appropriately so.

HOW WILL WE KNOW WE'RE WINNING?

GOTHAM GAZETTE: What tangible ways are there to measure the success of the city's effort?

LAWRENCE ABER: The first is that there are going to be action steps. In order to implement the childcare tax credit, for example, there are going to have to be several concrete steps taken. Some city and state legislative changes will have to be made, and a new governor will have to adopt these changes. Then the word has to get to families in ways that they actually take up the tax credits. Each of those steps is measurable; you can set up benchmarks.

The goal is to take each of the action items and create such measurable benchmarks, then track the city's progress against those benchmarks.

But even if city government does all of the things the problem can be getting worse if the nation goes into a profound recession. We would know that the problem is getting worse by having an alternative measure of poverty and an economic opportunity index; those would show a worsening economic condition for New York City residents caused by the national recession.

But these measures can't be used in a simple-minded way to say whether a city initiative is working, because other things affect the poverty status of New Yorkers.

GOTHAM GAZETTE: How will city agencies be held accountable for their performances?

LAWRENCE ABER: The commission recommended that New York City continue to build on its beginning tradition of accountability in a couple of other areas in city life, [such as] crime control, and homelessness reduction. There, internal benchmarks are tracked, and commissioners are held accountable by the mayor, politically and directly.

We also encourage the city government to look at approaches in other places. The United Kingdom under Tony Blair developed a major anti-poverty initiative in the late 1990s. They have developed an approach where the budgets of national agencies are affected by whether they meet benchmarks or not. This is a process called joined-up government.

GOTHAM GAZETTE: How long will it be before we can expect to see results?

LAWRENCE ABER: I think we can expect changes in government action in a year, changes in patterns of investment in two years, and changes in outcome in three years. That's enormously ambitious, but you see the logical sequence there.

One of the things that was emphasized to us a lot by Deputy Mayor Gibbs is how important the mayor felt it was to hold his administration accountable to measurable change. That's the kind of guy he is. I think he would fail by his own standards if there wasn't measurable change in three years. And I don't think he expects to fail.

 

 

Independent Voters


There are 2.9 million New Yorkers registered as Democrats out of a total of 4.4 million registered voters, far more than any other party. But there are some 750,000 voters who are neither Democrats nor Republicans, and not members of any third parties either. They are independent voters, people who have registered to vote but have not affiliated with a political party. They make up the second-largest body of voters in the city. Indeed, there are more registered independent voters than members of the Republican, Conservative, Working Families and Independence parties combined.

There is not much concrete information on New York’s independent voters. Several pollsters report that registered independents are less likely to vote than registered members of a political party, but when they do, they tend to support Democratic and liberal candidates. According to pollster Mickey Blum, independent voters came out in substantial numbers for the 2005 election, and were more likely than registered Democrats (but less likely than registered Republicans) to support Michael Bloomberg for mayor.

Bloomberg's campaign strategist,Bill Cunningham, part of the Bloomberg 2005 team that created a $10 million database of voter profiles, says independent voters tend to be as concerned with ethics and governmental reform as with the usual voter staples of crime and health care. Cunningham says it is important to try to see which issues concern such a large number of voters: "If they took the time to register, they must want to vote. One just needs to speak to their concerns."

But candidates rarely do this, and Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf understands why. “There’s no reason to bother” reaching out to these voters, Sheinkopf says bluntly. They are not allowed to vote in the city’s primaries – and in New York City, the vast majority of elections are decided in the Democratic primary. And in those few instances where there is a competitive general election, "you don't want to wake up voters you can't control."

In other parts of the country, there have been several measures taken to try to bring independent voters into the process more equitably. These are open primaries and non-partisan elections. In New York City, the first exists in only a few cases, and efforts to implement the second have failed.

 

Open Primaries

Laws allowing independents to vote in a party's primary of their choice are plentiful nationwide. Almost half of the states even allow voters affiliated with one party some measure of opportunity to vote for a candidate from another party's primary.

In California, a voter initiative opened up their state's primary, and instituted a "blanket primary" system, where voters were allowed to pick and choose which party's primary to vote in for each individual race. But the US Supreme Court ruled(pdf format) the system unconstitutional, in a case brought by the Democratic Party, deciding that it infringed on the parties' rights. As a result, California now has a "modified-closed primary" which allows independents to vote for all races in one party's primary of their choice. Although the parties have the right to close their primary to outside voters, the major parties in California permit it.

Washington State used the blanket primary system for 70 years until it was ruled(pdf format) unconstitutional by a federal court in 2003. Voters then approved an initiative that created a "top-two" primary system, where voters could still pick and choose, as in the blanket system, but only the two candidates receiving the highest vote totals advanced to the general election.

Last month, a federal court struck down the system as unconstitutional. Washington is now using an open primary system modeled after Montana, where voters of any party affiliation can choose one party primary to vote in for all races, regardless of their affiliation. Under the new law in Washington, only major parties have a primary.

In New York, the Independence Party (not to be confused with independent voters) has reached out to unaffiliated voters, over the objection of the Board of Elections, which did not want the hassle and expense of accommodating them.

In 2003, the board appealed the Independence Party's decision to allow all voters to participate in their statewide primaries. In a scathing rebuke, the US District Judge hearing the case boiled down their argument to "we don't want to go to the trouble of ordering the adjustment of voting machines... to accommodate the Independence Party's constitutional rights. This would be 'machine politics' of an utterly new, and absurd, kind." The US Supreme Court has supported parties' rights to determine who can vote in their primary.

The following year, the Board of Elections at first refused to allow the Richmond County Independence Party to open up their primary in the 61st Assembly District to independent voters, but again the board was overruled by a federal court. The victory was, by most measures, a small one: Only 48 people total (whether independent voters or Independence Party voters) voted in that primary race.

What are the chances of the other political parties allowing independents to vote in their primaries? "If they want to vote in the Democratic Party, they can become a Democrat," said Herman "Denny" Farrell, chairman of the New York State Democratic Party.

Non-Partisan Elections

Three quarters of municipalities in the country now use some kind of nonpartisan election system according to Professor Doug Muzzio at Baruch’s School of Public Affairs.

In Mayor Michael Bloomberg's first term, he proposed a charter amendment to create a "nonpartisan election" system where the primary would be open to all voters and all candidates, regardless of party affiliation. Voters overwhelmingly defeated the proposal.

The cities whose primary system most resembles the 2003 proposal are Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Jacksonville.

What’s Good For Independents…

The arguments used for side-stepping the political parties go beyond an effort to include unaffiliated voters.

The Board of Elections, which manages and regulates the election process as it is laid out by law, is set up to be bi-partisan, rather than be independent. On the state level, it is made up of four commissioners, two from each major party, and two co-executive directors, one from each party, who are appointed by the commissioners themselves. In the city, a commission of ten appointees runs it, with one Democratic and one Republican commissioner from each borough, recommended by the county parties and then appointed by the city council.

This institutionalized partisanship has been blamed for much of the board's problems.

"To say you're going to get objectivity by insisting on partisanship, that's an absurdity," Governor Mario Cuomo told the Times in 1990.

A national telephone survey(pdf format), conducted in Feburuary 2006 by the, Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project showed that an overwhelming majority of people - including registered Democrats and Republicans - prefer their elections to be run by a non-partisan elected board.

The partisanship goes even deeper than the commission. State law emphasizes party affiliation be considered in the county boards' staffing decisions by mandating that its staff consist of an equal representation of the two parties.

Bloomberg called that "a recipe for ineptitude."

"Party leaders dictate hiring decisions based on party connections - or family connections - not merit. This makes it very hard to fire incompetent workers, or to recruit qualified ones," he said. And he compared it to the judicial convention system, which was recently ruled unconstitutional, calling the two systems the "last bastions of political patronage."

 

 

 

New York City Council Stated Meeting -- September 27, 2006


Every two weeks the New York City Council meets for its Stated Meeting to introduce and pass legislation. As a regular feature, Gotham Gazette covers these meetings and posts a summary of the bills passed.

It would no longer be illegal to wash sidewalks with hoses or wash your clothing in the middle of the night under a new law passed by the City Council at its stated meeting on September 27, 2006. The law is intended to update the city's administrative code.

"What we have done in a fairly painstaking detail is go through the administrative code and find what is out-of-date," said Council Speaker Christine Quinn. She added that aside from being antiquated, some of the pieces of code being changed were "silly."

One can assume that Quinn's definition of silly includes subdivision (f) of section 20-268 of the administrative code, which says used clothing merchants cannot sell "any junk, old rope, old iron, brass, copper, tin, lead, rubber paper, rags, bagging, slush or empty bottles" -- or collect such items in a cart or a boat -- "unless he or she is also licensed as a junk dealer."

Subdivision (f) would be eliminated under the new law. In addition, tour guides would no longer be required to submit three letters of recommendation from New Yorkers to get licensed, 24-hour laundromats would no longer be illegal, and the special license for "the peddling of old clothes from house to house" would be eliminated.

While many of these regulations go unenforced, small businesses are often subjected to fines for inadvertently violating them, said Councilmember David Yassky, the bill's primary sponsor.

The council passed the bill (Intro 349-A) by a vote of 48 to 0.

The council also passed a resolution that would allow the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications to solicit cable franchises interested in providing service to New York City. A similar resolution was in place until it expired in 2003.

Currently only two companies --- Time Warner and Cable Vision -- have contracts to provide bundled cable, telephone, and Internet services in the city. The resolution allows other companies to compete, which should result in lower prices and better service for consumers, according to Councilmember Melinda Katz, the measure's primary sponsor. The resolution was approved 48 to 0.

The Council also approved two mayoral appointments to the city's Board of Standards and Appeals, which hears cases from property owners seeking exemptions from the city's building code.

One of the appointees, Dara Ottley-Brown, was approved without incident. Several council members raised concerns about the other, Susan Hinkson, however. Councilmember Vincent Gentile criticized Hinkson, a Republican, of being overly partisan as the Brooklyn Borough Commissioner of the city's Department of Buildings, and Councilmember Lewis Fiddler said that she had not been forthcoming about an incident at a Kings Plaza in which several complaints were made that the public process was intentionally subverted to help a real estate developer.

The final vote on the appointment was 45 to 1, with two abstentions.

Fiddler voted against Hinkson's appointment; Gentile voted for it. Councilmember Bill De Blasio expressed concerns about Hinkson's relationships with developers and abstained. Councilmember Alan Gerson also abstained for what he described as unrelated "procedural reasons."

 



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