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New Programs Aim To Prevent Homelessness


With the homeless population at a record high and likely to get worse, thanks in part to an exhaustion of federal subsidy money and skyrocketing costs of providing shelter, two new projects — one funded by the Bloomberg administration, one by United Way of New York City -- are focusing on the prevention of homelessness. Homeless advocates are skeptical about both.

Six New Centers

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s homelessness prevention strategy was kicked off this month with the opening of one of six new centers that will be run by community-based organizations. The centers are in areas of the city that send significantly more people to city shelters than other areas.

"It’s a very daunting task," said Mary O’Reilly of Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens, one of the six organizations that will receive $2 million each year for the next three years to set up what are being called HomeBASE centers. "Our assignment is to really identify people most at risk of homelessness in Community District 12. And catch them at a point where we can prevent them going into the shelter system or becoming homeless."

The organizations are currently setting up office space, hiring staff and organizing themselves to accept clients. Much of their $2 million will be used to pay clients’ rent, often long overdue, in order to prevent their eviction. The rest will go to hiring staff – case workers and supervisors — who can work directly with people at risk of becoming homeless.

The Department of Homeless Services is having the organizations meet every two weeks to discuss progress. In their respective community districts, the agencies are each expected to serve 400 people annually who are in danger of becoming homeless. The people must be receiving public assistance or have low incomes. But beyond that, the agencies have some independence to tailor their programs.

Dealing With A Suitcase Full of Problems

These programs will be dealing with the many problems confronting most people who are in danger of becoming homeless, among them:

  • Unemployment and underemployment
  • Family discord/Domestic violence
  • Mental and physical illness

“I have yet to see someone become homeless due to one problem,” said Renee Fueller, program director of the HomeBASE center that H.E.L.P. USA is operating in Community District 6 in the Bronx. “They usually have like a suitcase full of problems.”

At the same time, Fueller said, each agency is playing to its own strengths. "One of our strengths is employment training and placement."

Citizens Advice Bureau will operate a HomeBASE center in Community District 1 in the Bronx. It will help people through intensive case management to deal with family conflicts and mental health issues.

"Depression in particular is a serious problem that leads to homelessness," said Scott Auwater, Citizen Advice Bureau’s assistant executive director. "There are some people who simply cannot get out of bed in the morning." As a result, he said, they miss required appointments to receive benefits or fulfill obligations at city agencies that help them pay their rent. And they miss court dates at Housing Court, leading to a speedier eviction.

In addition, Citizens Advice Bureau said it would specifically focus on problems people have keeping their Section 8 rent subsidies. As many as 20 percent of people in city shelters, Auwater said, ended up in the shelter because they lost their Section 8 assistance. That is why Citizens Advice Bureau is participating in a study of Section 8 subsidies administered by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development -- another effort to prevent homelessness.

In Queens, O’Reilly said Catholic Charities would look to helping people by tapping into a broad network of agencies that can help people in separate ways.

"We really think the community alliance is a key to success,” O’Reilly said, “There’s a strong network out there. We’re going to bring to that the folks in the trenches working in food pantries, at shelters, who are aware of the greater needs.

“What we’ve been found is that when we’re able to partner what we have with other organizations, there is a holistic approach that can fill the gaps,” she said.

O’Reilly cited her agency’s partnership with Community Mediation Services, an agency that helps families resolve problems that often tear them apart – leading some members to city shelters. In other cases, mediators can also intervene to repair broken landlord and tenant relationships.

Sounds Great, But Where Are the Resources?

Some advocates said the city’s new focus on prevention did not seem sincere.

"Everything they’re saying sounds great, there just are no resources yet,” said Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless. “You can’t say you’re going to prioritize prevention until you put resources into it.”

Mayor Bloomberg has cut city spending on prevention in every budget he has sent to City Council, Markee pointed out. And the homeless population has increased by 25 percent on his watch, he said.

“If you look at the mayor’s track record you can’t consider it as anything more than talk,” he said.

The city needs to commit significant resources to three areas to resolve the problem, Markee said:

  • Financial assistance to help people pay rent arrears;
  • financial assistance to help people pay ongoing rent;
  • legal services to help people avoid eviction.

The United Way To Prevent Homelessness

A pilot project that the United Way of New York City is funding, and that is expected to be launched in December, will apparently focus on the third of these, the legal services. The agency is keeping many of the details of the project under wraps. In lieu of granting an interview, the organization gave me a statement:

 

"We're in the early stages of working with Justice Fisher and the housing court system to develop an innovative, holistic approach to addressing the needs of those confronting eviction,” said Larry Mandell, president and CEO of the United Way of New York City, in the statement, referring to Judge Fern Fisher, the chief administrative judge of the Civil Court of New York City. “Ultimately, we expect the program to help meet the short-term needs of clients in addition to examining longer-term solutions to prevent future eviction, but at the moment it's too early to talk about the details."

But a variety of sources at the court and at agencies in the Bronx who were familiar with the project said its approach will be to help people with their cases in Housing Court; lawyers will help tenants defend themselves in court while social workers will help them address the issues causing their problems at home or elsewhere.

A special court will be set up at Bronx Housing Court to deal with two zip codes where many more people than usual end up in city shelters, 10451 and 10455. Court papers will even bear a colored page to indicate that the person is assigned to the new court.

The United Way has awarded grants amounting to several million dollars to Legal Services for New York, which primarily provides legal services to low-income people, and to a community-based organization called Women in Need. The Office of Court Administration is also closely involved in the project, but like the United Way has declined to comment on it.

The project has incited a lot of speculation and comment in the court itself. Innovation in the court is not new. Two community courts in Harlem and Red Hook focus services on specific zip codes. But the resource centers in those courts offer limited assistance to tenants compared to what is envisioned for the United Way’s project.

Sounds Great, But What About A Legal Right To An Attorney?

Advocates said the United Way project would offer tenants helpful services, perhaps, but avoided dealing with the real problem in Housing Court: While most landlords are represented by attorneys, most tenants are not.

“This is not about stopping people getting evicted,” said Judith Goldiner, staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society. “It’s all about window dressing. Maybe you get a little more money in there, make the landlords happy. But you seriously don’t want to get into what the issues are, which is that the landlords have lawyers and tenants don’t.”

Establishing the legal right to an attorney in Housing Court – the way defendants now have in criminal court -- would be more effective, advocates said. When tenants are represented they are much less likely to be evicted. The result is also more cost effective.

“I think the obvious and still true answer is that when people have legal representation they’re far and away more likely to retain their homes,” Markee said. “Landlords have lawyers, tenants don’t. If there were a right to counsel, we’d see far fewer evictions in Housing Court, that’s for sure.”

Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.

 

The Battle Over Social Security


The biggest domestic issue in the 2004 Presidential election has barely been mentioned by the candidates. More New Yorkers will be personally affected by the future of Social Security than by events in Iraq. George Bush has made it clear that "reforming" it will be high on his agenda if he serves another term. John Kerry has declared that he opposes privatization, the type of reform advocated by Congressional Republicans and the President.

Over 740,000 elderly New York City residents receive Social Security retirement benefits, plus nearly 290,000 younger spouses and children of retirees and disabled workers. About three out of five elderly Americans depend on Social Security for at least half of their income. Those who now receive Social Security benefits would not be affected by proposals on the table, which are limited to people under the age of 55.

The Social Security debate has been publicized as a choice between letting the government control the taxes we pay into the system, versus letting each individual worker invest his or her share of those taxes. Many Americans believe that Social Security funds will run dry before today's younger workers retire, and that if they could pay taxes into personal stock trading accounts, they would be able to invest their money more wisely than the government does.

In reality, the future of Social Security depends on factors no one can predict. Federal analysts make forecasts based on their assumptions; critics of the administration question both these assumptions and the conclusions drawn from them.

The Bush administration predicts that in 2042, the Social Security system will no longer have enough to pay the full benefit every recipient is promised under today's system. Even this is in dispute: the Congressional Budget Office thinks the system will be fully funded until 2052. To put the problem in perspective, the shortfall predicted by the Bush administration is about one-third the size of the federal revenue loss that will result if the president's income tax cuts continue.

Shortly after he took office, Bush appointed a Social Security Commission to propose reform measures. They developed three models for reforming Social Security which would allow workers to pay a small part of their payroll taxes-2 to 4 percent-into personal accounts managed by private financial investment companies, who would invest them in return for a small fee. Workers who chose not to participate would receive the amount they would be eligible for under the traditional program.

Conservative think tanks and Republican members of Congress have proposed more radical changes to Social Security. One bill introduced in 2004 would redirect half of the taxes now paid to Social Security into personal accounts. Other plans gradually reduce the minimum benefit guaranteed to retirees. Most require government subsidies from outside the Social Security fund.

Any reduction in Social Security benefits would disproportionately harm New York residents, because so many future retirees will be people of color, and people with low incomes. Currently the majority of New York States elderly residents are white, but that picture is changing. The state Office for the Aging estimates that by 2015, the number of minority senior citizens will have risen by 51 percent. Nationwide, the average white retiree depends on Social Security for less than 40 percent of her annual income. By contrast, Social Security supplies the average African-American and Hispanic retiree with 54 percent and 66 percent, respectively, of their income.

Today about one in six elderly New Yorkers lives in poverty. According to the Century Foundation, benefits under one proposal from Bush's Social Security Commission would have to be reduced by a third within three decades. The average elderly woman on Social Security now receives benefits of about $10,200 a year, only slightly above the poverty level of $9,310. If benefits were reduced by a third, many more New Yorkers would be impoverished.

For most Americans in the lower income brackets, their largest financial asset is their house, but few low-income New Yorkers own their own homes. Unlike home owners, renters cannot take out home equity loans when they need extra funds.

The Democratic Party platform opposes privatization. John Kerry quotes a University of Chicago economist, Austan Goolsbee, who estimates that the Bush Commission's proposals would give nearly a trillion dollars of Social Security money to the financial services industry. Goolsbee also predicts total benefits to retirees would be cut by up to 45 percent, and that investment expenses for personal accounts could consume 20 percent of the value of the average retiree's savings account.

Researchers opposed to privatization of Social Security believe the system does not need major changes. They question the assumptions of the Bush administration: that the economy will grow at half its former rate, while stock market growth remains the same.

Even if that inconsistent assumption is accepted, opponents believe that modest increases in payroll taxes and lifting the cap on taxable income would close the gap., The Social Security fund would be solvent for the next 75 years if payroll taxes were raised from 12.4 percent to 14.3 percent, an amount comparable to the rise under Ronald Reagan in 1983. In addition, earned income over $87,900 is not subject to the payroll tax; if this cap were lifted, relatively few wage earners would be affected.

Each year, Social Security checks bring about $8 billion into the New York City economy. Most of that money is spent quickly and locally, generating additional economic activity. Any action that reduces this inflow will harm New Yorkers of every age, as would the need to replace federal funds to support our aging residents.

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Portrait of Same-Sex (Married) Couples


With gay and lesbian marriages now legal in Massachusetts, court cases pending in that state and California, and President George W. Bush pushing for a constitutional amendment that would ban them, the issue of same-sex marriage is hardly a remote one.

How many New York same-sex couples would marry if they could? How many would then divorce? And how would they differ from heterosexual relationships?

The Same-Sex Marriage Market

As I discussed here before in New York City the census found 25,906 same-sex couples in "unmarried partner" relationships. Some of these couples marked "married," when they filled out their 2000 Census form, but the bureau recoded them as unmarried partners who had a "close personal relationship." (In 1990, the census added this new category "unmarried partner" to get at the large numbers of people, mostly heterosexual couples, who were living together in a relationship but were not married.)

Of course, counting the people who were in a same-sex relationship and were willing to tell the government about it is a poor way of determining the total number of gay and lesbian New Yorkers. But it probably is a reasonable estimate of the number of same-sex marriages we could expect over the short term if they were legalized in the city.

Many would probably not marry. According to the 2000 Census, about 1.1 million of the three million New York City households consisted of married couples, another 129,815 were opposite-sex unmarried partners, while there were just 15,016 male-male partner households and 10,890 female-female partner households. In other words, married couples accounted for 88 percent of all households headed by couples in New York City; unmarried opposite sex partners comprised 10 percent; and same-sex partners comprised just two percent,

Couples Compared

How do same-sex couples compare to couples of the opposite sex, both married and unmarried? Using data from the 2000 Census, here is my analysis, presented in the accompanying table:

Interestingly, same-sex couples share more with married couples than they do with unmarried heterosexual couples; the unmarried heterosexuals are younger, less well-educated, and less likely to own their own homes.

The male-male couples are much more educated and affluent than the other couples. They are also more likely to be white. The same-sex couples are more likely to be citizens and less likely to be foreign born.

Lesbian and Gay Divorce

Since same-sex marriage is not legal, there is no such thing as legal gay divorce in the United States, though recently there was the first gay divorce in Canada. However, in several countries in Europe where same-sex marriage has been legal for a number of years, we do have some information on the frequency with which gay couples formally end their unions. A recent study of divorce among gay couples in Sweden and Norway sheds some interesting light on the prospects for gay divorce in New York City. The researchers found that female-female couples were about three times as likely to dissolve their partnerships, and male-male couples were about one and one-half times as likely to dissolve their partnerships, as were married opposite-sex couples. The reasons for the higher rate of dissolution, especially among female-female couples, are not obvious from the study. Regular divorce proceedings are usually initiated by the female.

If same-sex marriage becomes legal we can be sure that there is a ready market for the institution among the roughly 26,000 same-sex couples that were willing to declare their partnership to the Census Bureau.

Andrew A. Beveridge has taught sociology at Queens College since 1981, done demographic analyses for the New York Times since 1993, and provides expert testimony on a range of cases, including housing discrimination. The opinions expressed are his alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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