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No Breaks For Low Income New Yorkers; Also: Unemployment


If a series of proposed budget cuts by Governor George Pataki take effect, poor New Yorkers are in for some tough times.

No More “Invisible” Supplemental Security Income

The Pataki administration has proposed new regulations that will affect at least 26,700 impoverished households in which members have disabilities. The changes involve Supplemental Security Income, which is only available to people with major, long-term disabilities.

Until now, Supplemental Security Income has been covered by an “invisibility rule,” which recognizes that people with disabilities need this money for extra costs associated with their conditions; it is not counted toward the household’s income when determining the size of their monthly welfare check. The rule allows people with disabilities to eat nutritious food for special diets, wear clothing modified for their needs, and make small changes to their homes so that they can move around safely, without depriving other family members of income.

The governor proposes counting this as household income. The average loss to a household in which at least one member receives welfare benefits and another receives Supplemental Security Income will be about $90 a month. A single mother with a child who has a disability will see her monthly welfare check reduced from $414 to $250. (The child’s monthly Supplemental Security Income check of $575 in 2003 would not be affected).

This will bring the state only $9 million closer to filling in a budget gap over $5 billion.

The state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance received dozens of comments in opposition to the new regulation, during the mandatory public comment period that ended March 8. When asked whether this public reaction might convince the state to change its course, Susan Antos of the Greater Upstate Law Project said, “They hardly ever do that. We’ve met with them about this and they didn’t seem to hold out any possibility of that.”

Some advocates believe that the invisibility rule is supported by state legislation passed before federal welfare reform, and that changes in federal welfare law do not affect that aspect of state law. Antos anticipates that people targeted by the new policy may have to take the state to court to win back their benefits.

Fiscal discipline for children

A welfare recipient who does not comply with all the rules, such as showing up for appointments and returning forms on time, can be “sanctioned.” This means that the person responsible for compliance, usually a parent, loses their benefits until they correct the situation. Until now, children in a sanctioned family have continued to receive assistance, even when their parents were cut off. Governor Pataki has proposed full-family sanctions, which will punish children for their parents’ behavior. As of mid-February, 2004, over 15,000 households were being sanctioned in New York City.

The penalty for chronic neediness

Another proposal of the governor’s is to wean welfare recipients off of their benefits by reducing them by ten percent after one year (for childless households), or five years (for households with children). This overlooks the fact that studies have found that long-term recipients have more disabilities and less education, and are less likely than other recipients to find jobs that pay enough to disqualify them for public assistance. About 42,000 families have reached the five-year limit.

Keeping the working poor in poverty

Nearly one in ten welfare recipients are employed, but earn so little that the family still qualifies for public assistance. The governor proposes a change in the complex formula that determines how much of a family’s earned income will be deducted from their public assistance. The result will be to effectively cut benefits even if a family’s earnings are not increasing. For a mother of two starting out at the minimum wage for a 40-hour week, five years of continuous work and five percent annual raises would still leave her below the poverty level.

“If the governor really wants to focus on getting people to work so they can get off of welfare, he needs to raise the minimum wage and make education and training more available to low-income people,” says Cristina DiMeo of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies.

Minimum wage wars in Albany

The New York State Assembly overwhelmingly passed a bill this month that in 2006 would raise the minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to $7.10. The increase would mean a minimum-wage worker supporting two family members could earn a salary almost equal to the poverty level, rather than 20 percent below it, which is the present situation.

“The majority of the Senate supports it,” says James Parrott of the Fiscal Policy Institute. “But as we know, that’s not enough to bring it to a vote.” Senator Joseph Bruno, as Majority Leader, has in past years refused to allow the full chamber to vote on the issue. The governor is opposed to the bill.

Attitude towards the poor

The state budget cuts described above add up to about $77 million in savings, or less than half the value of already enacted tax cuts that will cost the state $164 million in the coming year.

“We’re very concerned that these are all targeting the most vulnerable people,” says Cristina DiMeo of the proposed state changes. When the proposals above are looked at as a group, they reveal the following assumptions:

  • Poor people get that way because they refuse to work. If they do work, they refuse to earn high salaries. Their poverty is not related to the shortage of jobs, their lack of education, or the fact that the jobs they can get pay too little to get them out of poverty.
  • If you give them too much assistance, the poor will squander it on “luxuries” like grab bars for family members with disabilities. Those who break the rules need to see their children go without necessities before they will change their ways. Those who take too long to find jobs will discover new opportunities if they lose a chunk of their monthly benefits.
  • The best way for poor people to earn their way out of poverty is to give tax breaks to rich people who will invest them in creating new jobs, just as they have throughout the current “jobless recovery.”

THE UNEMPLOYED

New York was among the six states with the highest unemployment rate as of December, 2003: 6.2 percent. For the city of New York, the 2003 unemployment rate was 8.5 percent. These days, it takes the average unemployed worker nearly five months to find a new job, the longest time in 20 years.

 

Yet, last month, the U.S. Senate fell two votes short of passing an extension of unemployment benefits, after the House of Representatives had passed its version of the bill. For the first time in three decades, there is no federal program to extend unemployment benefits in any January when more than 270,000 workers ran out of them – even though in January of this year, 392,000 Americans used up their unemployment benefits, more than in any January since 1983.

During the following month, the number of jobs nationwide increased by only 21,000, suggesting that long-term unemployed workers are not going to find jobs anytime soon.

Seven out of ten workers who stop getting benefits do so because they have run out of time, not because they find jobs. In New York State alone, more than 150,000 jobless workers are expected to run out of unemployment benefits during the first half of the year.

This number does not reflect the full extent of unemployment. Last month, for example, almost 400,000 Americans gave up on trying to find work and were dropped from the official count of the unemployed.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines the unemployed as those who “do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work”. This leaves out people working part-time, even if they are trying to find full-time jobs.

Job hunting efforts that are not considered active include looking at want ads, taking a job-training course, and letting your friends and acquaintances know that you are looking for work. People who last actively looked for work six weeks ago are not “unemployed,” and prisoners and soldiers on active duty are not even in the labor force.

If part-time workers who wish they had full-time work, and people who want to work and have looked for work any time in the last year are added to the number of unemployed, the national “underemployment” rate is nearly 10 percent.

A recent analysis by the Community Service Society shows that fewer than 52 percent of the African-American men of working age in New York City had jobs in 2003. The picture is only slightly better for African-American women, of whom 57 percent were employed. In contrast, nearly 78 percent of white men had jobs during that year.

Some of this discrepancy is caused by differences in educational levels: 11.2 percent of workers with only a high school degree were unemployed, as were 9.4 percent of those with some college, but no bachelor’s degree. For college graduates, the unemployment rate was 5.2 percent.

As tuition rises for the City University system, it becomes more difficult for low-income people to take the educational route out of poverty. Half of all adult welfare recipients are high school dropouts, but rigid welfare rules discourage them from going to college.

Federal tax cuts will cost the nation $264 billion next year, of which only $1 billion would be needed to extend unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed.

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

Foster Children With Mothers In Jail


Several hundred children entering foster care each year have mothers who are, or will be, in jail, but they have not been studied, until a recent report by the Vera Institute of Justice. “To our knowledge this is the first report ever done that looked at biological mothers in the criminal justice system who had children in foster care,” says Tim Ross, Vera's researcher director. In many ways, he says, the report, which is the result of a request from the Administration for Child Services, is good news. “When we began we were concerned that quality-of-life policing, resulting in even short jail terms, might be pushing children into foster care. But it’s not the case that the incarceration of mothers is resulting in a child’s placement. That happens rarely. We were also surprised at how relatively small the numbers are, and that most of the incarceration is jail, not prison, which is a huge distinction.” The periods of incarceration, Ross says, tend to happen after the child has been placed, not before, and they are heavily related to drug use or its corollaries, prostitution and petty theft.

Women In Prison

Working with city and state agencies, the researchers matched child welfare and criminal justice records to find nearly 15,000 mothers whose children were or had been in foster care. More than a third of the mothers had been arrested and convicted at least once in their lives. Those arrests were primarily for misdemeanors. Only a handful involved violent felonies, and even fewer involved child victims. About 20 percent of these mothers had been incarcerated at least once. About 10 percent had children in foster care during the time they were behind bars, and most of those imprisonments had occurred in the year after the child was placed.

“There is such a lack of data that we don’t know how many incarcerated women have children, how many of those children are in foster care, how many inmates have a family court matter,” says Tamar Kraft-Stolar, director of the Women in Prison Project. “The State Department of Correctional Services doesn’t track this information. We need more reports like this, and on a broader scale.”

The number of women in prison nationwide has increased more than 500 percent since 1977, more than double that of men. Of the more than a million women in the criminal justice system across the country, (about one percent of the U.S. female population), New York has the fourth highest female prison population, behind Texas, California and Florida. Most women inmates are mothers, and while men can of course be fathers, most of the women were primary caretakers of their children before they were imprisoned.

Catch-22 For Incarcerated Mothers

The Adoption and Safe Family Act provides a way for authorities to terminate the parental rights of an incarcerated parent who does not have contact with his or her child for six months, or whose child has been in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months. The average minimum sentence for a woman in a New York State prison is 58 months. The vagaries of the prison system – people being moved without warning (for security reasons), difficulty corresponding – makes regular communication and visits extremely difficult, which puts incarcerated women at significant risk of losing their kids.

The state houses more than 40 percent of its women inmates in Albion, which is 400 miles and nine hours away from New York City, where most of the women come from and where most of their children live. “If a child welfare worker can document a reason for her not to lose the kids, she won’t,” says Kraft-Stolar. “But many times the worker only has a piece of paper in front of him. And foster care agencies don’t take collect calls, which is the only way someone who is incarcerated can make a phone call.”

These are not violent criminals; 80 percent of women who entered New York State prisons in 2000 were convicted of non-violent drug or property offenses and 45 percent have been incarcerated for drug offenses specifically as a result of the punitive Rockefeller Drug Laws(in pdf format). The vast majority of the state’s more than 2,900 women prisoners are survivors of physical, sexual and/or psychological abuse. Most are African-American or Latina; most come from a handful of neighborhoods in New York City; most have prior drug and alcohol problems.

Advocates for incarcerated women promote preventative services. It’s long been known that drug treatment reduces drug-related crime far more than mandatory minimum sentences; a 1997 Rand study says 15 times more. It costs about $32,000 annually to confine an inmate in New York state prison, and twice that to keep one in a New York City jail. In comparison, the cost of most drugfree outpatient care ranges between $2,700 and $4,500 per person per year; even residential drug treatment programs, which can cost as much as $21,000 annually, are cheaper than locking someone up.

Effect On Children

These children being separated from their primary caretaker are often placed in foster care or kinship care, which leads to what Kraft-Stolar calls “collateral consequences.” It’s very hard for them to stay focused in school, she says. “They can’t relate to classmates, they often feel isolated and have emotional problems.” But incarceration of a mother can create complications for the child welfare agency’s family reunification policies. Although keeping the family intact is a strong predictor of the mother not returning to prison -- and the child ending up there later -- arranging and supervising visits takes time and resources, and it means the child welfare agency and the correctional institution have to cooperate.

To that end, the Administration for Child Services has been “impressively responsive,” Ross says. They commissioned the report when they began realizing from their own experience that this was an important issue. And around the same time, in 2000, they started the respected Children of Incarcerated Parents program at Rikers Island . Among other things it arranges nearly 800 parent-child visits each year, including weekly visits to Rikers Island and at least monthly visits to other city, state and federal correctional facilities. “It’s a terrific model but it needs to be expanded,” says Kraft-Stolar, noting that the program needs more resources. “The staff is overworked and underpaid and there are not enough people to provide services to visiting kids. And the problem just increases on the state level.”

The Administration for Child Services is also working toward collecting information on parents’ incarceration at various stages of a family’s child welfare case, says spokeswoman Maclean Guthrie. “While most child welfare systems do not comprehensively track this data, ACS is currently exploring the feasibility of building a database that would collect information on incarcerated parents who have children in foster care.”

 

Should Federal Rebuilding Funds Pay for Affordable Housing in Lower Manhattan?


To affordable housing advocates and many city officials, the $1.6 billion in tax free bonds Washington set aside to build housing in lower Manhattan after September 11 looks like an amazing windfall -- one that could be used to counter New York City's affordable housing shortage.

"This is an unprecedented amount of money," City Council Speaker Gifford Miller said at a City Hall press conference about the bonds, known as "Liberty Bonds."

But Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg each have control over how half of the bonds are spent. And the governor has decided that just five percent of the bonds should be set aside for middle and low income New Yorkers, saying that requiring a larger commitment might mean that nothing gets built in lower Manhattan. Generally, the state requires that 20 percent of specially financed housing projects be affordable.

Bloomberg has yet to tell the public his own plans for the $800 million in bonds he controls, saying only that he is considering charging developers who receive Liberty Bonds a three percent fee. This money would then go into a trust fund for affordable housing projects.

City Council's Proposal

Looking to influence how the mayor spends his $800 million, the City Council released its own Liberty Bonds proposal, calling for over half of the apartments built with Liberty Bonds to be affordable. "I believe that we if are aggressive about it we can get as much as 55 percent of the Liberty Bond money for low to moderate income housing," said Speaker Miller. The council's plan also calls on Congress to allow Liberty Bonds to be used above Canal Street.

Luxury Buildings

In August, the Housing Finance Agency, the state's housing authority, agreed to give nearly half of the governor's bonds for housing -- $340 million -- to three downtown residential projects that were all in the works before the September 11 attacks. In order to comply with the governor's affordable housing requirement, the two buildings in Battery Park City and one on Liberty Street agreed to set aside five percent of their apartments for tenants who make $93,000 and under.

To many New Yorkers, that doesn't sound like affordable housing. "Low-wage working families, and most firefighters, police, emergency service workers and teachers, are virtually excluded... for them, there is no room at the inn," David Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York and Ron Shiffman, director of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, wrote in a Newsday editorial.

Developers say that since September 11, banks have not been as willing to approve projects with a greater percentage of lower rent apartments. When issuing the Liberty Bonds, Congress did not say that any of the housing built downtown must be affordable. Housing Finance Agency spokesperson Sally Crockett has said that the agency is taking a major step in setting five percent aside, and the deal cannot be that great for developers: only four companies have sent in Liberty Bond applications so far.

Community Board 1 later approved the three development projects as well, voting that making sure new residential buildings are constructed right away in lower Manhattan trumps affordable housing needs.

Liberty Bonds for Campaign Contributors?

Soon after the state authority approved the projects, the citizens lobbying group Common Cause announced that the developers had given major campaign donations to Friends of Pataki, the New York Senate Republican Campaign Committee and the New York State Republican Committee. With $327,100 in donations to state committees over the past four years, Glenwood Management Corp. was the largest donor, but the other companies -- Related Companies, Albanese Development Corp. and Northwestern Mutual Life -- also contributed to state and city campaign committees.

To finance their lower Manhattan projects, each of the developers will receive about $100 million in bonds, which they will repay over 34 years. They will not have to pay real estate taxes for 20 years.



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