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Child Welfare and Domestic Violence


A federal judge recently delivered what was called a "scathing opinion" of the Administration for Children's Services' treatment of battered mothers and their children. Judge Jack Weinstein has given New York City until June 22 to comply with an injunction designed to prevent the removal of children from the care of a battered mother who does not abuse them. The agency has appealed the judge's decision in the class-action lawsuit, which is known as "Nicholson vs. Scoppetta"

Over the past decade, advocates for both children and battered women have realized there needs to be a working relationship between the systems of child welfare and domestic violence (which almost always means violence against adult women) if they want to protect their clients effectively. However, there long has been a disconnect between services for children and those for adults.

The two systems -- for child welfare, and for domestic violence -- developed separately. Child welfare agencies provide such services as family counseling and foster care placement. They can trace their history back over a century, to the furor that arose around a New York City child beaten by her caretakers. The child welfare system emphasizes investigation, and it values preserving or reuniting families. Children are the clients, and caseworkers are given the authority to make decisions about families against the will of adult members. Parents are in a subordinate role in the child welfare system, and can be forced to undergo therapy or comply with other orders if they want to keep or get back their children.

The domestic violence system, in sharp contrast, grew out of the women's movement in the 1970's and 1980's. One of its fundamental principles is that women surviving partner abuse must be treated with respect and empowered to make their own decisions. Confidentiality is a life-or-death concern, so the need for information is always weighed against the risk of it falling into the wrong hands. Services to survivors must always be voluntary, and any decision to forego services must be respected.

AREAS OF AGREEMENT:

The two systems agree that families in which a child is being abused are often ones in which a woman is also being abused; estimates range from 30 percent to 70 percent. They also agree that both mothers and children should be asked whether they are abused at many points in their passage through the health and social service systems. They both acknowledge that a good safety plan for a non-abusing mother will usually protect her children. Finally, the systems agree that there are not enough services and shelters for the battered women and their children that are known about already, let alone the increasing numbers that will be revealed by expanded screening. The domestic violence policy currently posted on the website of the Administration for Children's Services, includes universal screening of families for domestic violence, safety planning for adult survivors, and acknowledgement that "non-abusive parents must not be held responsible for the violence committed by others." The current consensus is that in theory, an abusing partner should be taken out of the home, and the rest of the family should stay there in safety.

FAILING TO WORK TOGETHER

In practice, this can be difficult to arrange. Unless the abuser is in prison, he will often seek out his partner and continue or escalate his violence; if she stays in their home he can easily find her. While Family Court judges have the authority to bring an accused batterer to trial in three days, the judicial process is more likely to stretch the trial out over weeks or months. Judges are reluctant to prosecute misdemeanor cases, which are more common among domestic violence crimes than felonies. Family Court trials require a level of documentation lower than that needed for a criminal case, but more than many women can present, particularly when they cannot afford a lawyer or wait for free legal services to become available.

According to Carolyn Kubitschek, attorney for the plaintiffs in the Nicholson case, there are many cases in which a batterer is clearly not a threat to the child's safety. "Most batterers are very much in control," she says. "For example, they never hit their bosses." She has clients fighting to get back children who were removed by a city caseworker when there were no visible safety concerns. "One of them removed a kid even though the batterer was arrested, tried, sentenced and in prison for a three-year term. And because he's an immigrant, he'll be deported when he gets out." To Kubitschek, the risk of this batterer escaping from prison falls far short of justifying a child's prolonged separation from a mother.

Advocates for domestic violence survivors have worked hard to make it known that past wife-beating is a major risk factor for future child-beating, and that the sight of a mother being abused can cause emotional harm to her children. Child welfare caseworkers tend to conclude from this that any home where a woman is being abused is dangerous for children, so the survivor must leave her abuser to keep herself and her children safe.

However, removing children from their mother's care is no guarantee of their safety. Foster parents can abuse children or each other, and being parted from their parents is itself traumatic to some children. Kinship care could be a solution, except that it is hard to find appropriate relatives to care for the children of a battered parent. Domestic violence advocates oppose placing them with an abusive father's family, who may reveal the mother's whereabouts to the father, and let him spend time with the children against a decision of Family Court. Yet survivors of abuse often have no relatives to turn to: their abusers tend to isolate them from family, friends, and service providers to increase their control and avoid being criticized or reported.

Women sometimes choose to stay with abusive partners because they have no safe place to go, or they won't be able to support themselves, or they lack a sense of hope and confidence that they can succeed on their own. These fears can be well-founded, as is the most powerful incentive to stay with the abuser, the fear that he will track his partner down and "punish" her or her children for leaving. According to the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, two out of three women killed by their partners have left or are in the process of leaving them.

INCHING TOWARD CHANGE:

In 1998, the Columbia University School of Social Work trained 400 municipal caseworkers and supervisors in how to empathize more with survivors of domestic violence, and how to uncover and deal with their abuse. An evaluation by trainers showed that, as a group, the participants gained empathy with survivors, but became less likely to take any of the possible action covered in the training.

Alisa del Tufo, of the Urban Justice Center , is a fifteen-year veteran of the struggle to integrate child welfare and domestic violence services. She has worked with the Administration for Children's Services on training projects, and now provides training services to a group of 60 private child welfare agencies. "ACS is doing a lot actually," she says. "They're doing things now that have been talked about for a decade." As an example, she cites the agency's plan to place domestic violence specialists in each of the agency's field offices. When this was tried in a single office, caseworkers were grateful to have an experienced advisor on hand; workers from other locations called to consult with the domestic violence specialist.

Del Tufo describes the three-day domestic violence training program inaugurated at the agency in March as being "more sophisticated and detailed" than the one-day program that concluded training for new recruits in recent years. "But the system only changes if training goes on over a long period of time, and is followed up with support and accountability." Instead, caseworkers are afraid to try new tactics with room for large errors. "It's a pretty punitive place to work," says del Tufo of the agency.

Municipal child welfare workers continue to err on the side of what they regard as the child's safety. "At 5:30 on a Friday afternoon they'll say, 'Mrs. Jones, unless you go into a domestic violence shelter immediately we're going to take your kids away.' Meanwhile for every space in a domestic violence shelter, there are fifty women trying to get in." Del Tufo concedes that there are times when children need to be removed temporarily, but notes that children remain in foster care "for months and years" after their mother has arranged for their safety with her.

The Weinstein opinion cites a case beginning in August 2000, three years after the city retrained nearly half of its caseworkers and supervisors, in which an abused mother's children were removed because they were living in "overcrowded" conditions at her grandmother's home. They were returned only when the mother agreed to take them to a homeless shelter. The children spent ten weeks going from foster homes to the city's Emergency Assistance Unit and to a temporary shelter.

In mandated reports submitted by the Administration for Children's Services to counsel in the Nicholson case, the agency declared that it is changing its policy statement. Carolyn Kubitschek says, "We don't know what their new policy is, because they won't tell us." The agency continues to prosecute battered mothers in Family Court rather than arrange for the safety of both mother and child.

According to the national Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crimes against women by intimate partners decreased by 20 percent between 1993 and 1998. That news is welcome, but it could be even better. The child welfare system has the power to give battered women a valuable defense: the right to seek help without risking the loss of their children.

A federal judge recently delivered what was called a "scathing opinion" of the Administration for Children's Services' treatment of battered mothers and their children. Judge Jack Weinstein has given New York City until June 22 to comply with an injunction designed to prevent the removal of children from the care of a battered mother who does not abuse them. The agency has appealed the judge's decision in the class-action lawsuit, which is known as "Nicholson vs. Scoppetta"

Over the past decade, advocates for both children and battered women have realized there needs to be a working relationship between the systems of child welfare and domestic violence (which almost always means violence against adult women) if they want to protect their clients effectively. However, there long has been a disconnect between services for children and those for adults.

The two systems -- for child welfare, and for domestic violence -- developed separately. Child welfare agencies provide such services as family counseling and foster care placement. They can trace their history back over a century, to the furor that arose around a New York City child beaten by her caretakers. The child welfare system emphasizes investigation, and it values preserving or reuniting families. Children are the clients, and caseworkers are given the authority to make decisions about families against the will of adult members. Parents are in a subordinate role in the child welfare system, and can be forced to undergo therapy or comply with other orders if they want to keep or get back their children.

The domestic violence system, in sharp contrast, grew out of the women's movement in the 1970's and 1980's. One of its fundamental principles is that women surviving partner abuse must be treated with respect and empowered to make their own decisions. Confidentiality is a life-or-death concern, so the need for information is always weighed against the risk of it falling into the wrong hands. Services to survivors must always be voluntary, and any decision to forego services must be respected.

AREAS OF AGREEMENT:

The two systems agree that families in which a child is being abused are often ones in which a woman is also being abused; estimates range from 30 percent to 70 percent. They also agree that both mothers and children should be asked whether they are abused at many points in their passage through the health and social service systems. They both acknowledge that a good safety plan for a non-abusing mother will usually protect her children. Finally, the systems agree that there are not enough services and shelters for the battered women and their children that are known about already, let alone the increasing numbers that will be revealed by expanded screening. The domestic violence policy currently posted on the website of the Administration for Children's Services, includes universal screening of families for domestic violence, safety planning for adult survivors, and acknowledgement that "non-abusive parents must not be held responsible for the violence committed by others." The current consensus is that in theory, an abusing partner should be taken out of the home, and the rest of the family should stay there in safety.

FAILING TO WORK TOGETHER

In practice, this can be difficult to arrange. Unless the abuser is in prison, he will often seek out his partner and continue or escalate his violence; if she stays in their home he can easily find her. While Family Court judges have the authority to bring an accused batterer to trial in three days, the judicial process is more likely to stretch the trial out over weeks or months. Judges are reluctant to prosecute misdemeanor cases, which are more common among domestic violence crimes than felonies. Family Court trials require a level of documentation lower than that needed for a criminal case, but more than many women can present, particularly when they cannot afford a lawyer or wait for free legal services to become available.

According to Carolyn Kubitschek, attorney for the plaintiffs in the Nicholson case, there are many cases in which a batterer is clearly not a threat to the child's safety. "Most batterers are very much in control," she says. "For example, they never hit their bosses." She has clients fighting to get back children who were removed by a city caseworker when there were no visible safety concerns. "One of them removed a kid even though the batterer was arrested, tried, sentenced and in prison for a three-year term. And because he's an immigrant, he'll be deported when he gets out." To Kubitschek, the risk of this batterer escaping from prison falls far short of justifying a child's prolonged separation from a mother.

Advocates for domestic violence survivors have worked hard to make it known that past wife-beating is a major risk factor for future child-beating, and that the sight of a mother being abused can cause emotional harm to her children. Child welfare caseworkers tend to conclude from this that any home where a woman is being abused is dangerous for children, so the survivor must leave her abuser to keep herself and her children safe.

However, removing children from their mother's care is no guarantee of their safety. Foster parents can abuse children or each other, and being parted from their parents is itself traumatic to some children. Kinship care could be a solution, except that it is hard to find appropriate relatives to care for the children of a battered parent. Domestic violence advocates oppose placing them with an abusive father's family, who may reveal the mother's whereabouts to the father, and let him spend time with the children against a decision of Family Court. Yet survivors of abuse often have no relatives to turn to: their abusers tend to isolate them from family, friends, and service providers to increase their control and avoid being criticized or reported.

Women sometimes choose to stay with abusive partners because they have no safe place to go, or they won't be able to support themselves, or they lack a sense of hope and confidence that they can succeed on their own. These fears can be well-founded, as is the most powerful incentive to stay with the abuser, the fear that he will track his partner down and "punish" her or her children for leaving. According to the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, two out of three women killed by their partners have left or are in the process of leaving them.

INCHING TOWARD CHANGE:

In 1998, the Columbia University School of Social Work trained 400 municipal caseworkers and supervisors in how to empathize more with survivors of domestic violence, and how to uncover and deal with their abuse. An evaluation by trainers showed that, as a group, the participants gained empathy with survivors, but became less likely to take any of the possible action covered in the training.

Alisa del Tufo, of the Urban Justice Center , is a fifteen-year veteran of the struggle to integrate child welfare and domestic violence services. She has worked with the Administration for Children's Services on training projects, and now provides training services to a group of 60 private child welfare agencies. "ACS is doing a lot actually," she says. "They're doing things now that have been talked about for a decade." As an example, she cites the agency's plan to place domestic violence specialists in each of the agency's field offices. When this was tried in a single office, caseworkers were grateful to have an experienced advisor on hand; workers from other locations called to consult with the domestic violence specialist.

Del Tufo describes the three-day domestic violence training program inaugurated at the agency in March as being "more sophisticated and detailed" than the one-day program that concluded training for new recruits in recent years. "But the system only changes if training goes on over a long period of time, and is followed up with support and accountability." Instead, caseworkers are afraid to try new tactics with room for large errors. "It's a pretty punitive place to work," says del Tufo of the agency.

Municipal child welfare workers continue to err on the side of what they regard as the child's safety. "At 5:30 on a Friday afternoon they'll say, 'Mrs. Jones, unless you go into a domestic violence shelter immediately we're going to take your kids away.' Meanwhile for every space in a domestic violence shelter, there are fifty women trying to get in." Del Tufo concedes that there are times when children need to be removed temporarily, but notes that children remain in foster care "for months and years" after their mother has arranged for their safety with her.

The Weinstein opinion cites a case beginning in August 2000, three years after the city retrained nearly half of its caseworkers and supervisors, in which an abused mother's children were removed because they were living in "overcrowded" conditions at her grandmother's home. They were returned only when the mother agreed to take them to a homeless shelter. The children spent ten weeks going from foster homes to the city's Emergency Assistance Unit and to a temporary shelter.

In mandated reports submitted by the Administration for Children's Services to counsel in the Nicholson case, the agency declared that it is changing its policy statement. Carolyn Kubitschek says, "We don't know what their new policy is, because they won't tell us." The agency continues to prosecute battered mothers in Family Court rather than arrange for the safety of both mother and child.

According to the national Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crimes against women by intimate partners decreased by 20 percent between 1993 and 1998. That news is welcome, but it could be even better. The child welfare system has the power to give battered women a valuable defense: the right to seek help without risking the loss of their children.

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits. She is currently on the staff of Bronx Independent Living Services.

Job Training


Back in 1998, when Congress passed the Workforce Investment Act, it looked like the one good thing that everybody could agree came out of the much-criticized movement called welfare reform. A large chunk of public money saved by cutting the welfare rolls, the law said, would have to be reinvested into helping welfare recipients get paying jobs.

Each local government had to recruit a Workforce Investment Board, with a majority of its members from the local business community, to provide expert advice on the qualifications that employers currently look for in new hires. The board was supposed to come up with a plan, develop a written agreement with the government welfare agency, and run the program.

New York City's Human Resources Administration apparently had some problems with this scenario, because the city was one of the last places in the nation to form a Workforce Investment Board, and the board has been allowed little input in the city's job training programs.

The city's top welfare official, Jason Turner, did not believe in job training. His statement, "It's work that sets you free," notorious for inadvertently echoing a Nazi slogan, reflected the conviction that a low-paying job today is better for a welfare recipient than a better job postponed for a period of training. Turner used his control of workforce development funds to delay and avoid providing services to people on welfare.

The city is left with $67 million from past years' unspent federal funding that, if not used by June 30, may be diverted to more ambitious employment programs elsewhere in the state. "It's ludicrous, when we have budget deficits and people are out of work, to lose any money because we didn't spend it," said David Fischer of the Center for an Urban Future. (See his article, "The $67 Million Question")

One place where the funds were needed was in setting up "One-Stop Centers," where job hunters--welfare recipients or not--can receive a full range of services under one roof, from government and nonprofit agencies. While Los Angeles has 18 one-stop centers, New York currently has just one. Until the city opens the six additional centers that were announced in November, all job hunters in the city must travel to Jamaica, Queens to get one-stop employment services.

For the Human Resources Administration, employment services under the Workforce Investment Act have been relatively simple to administer. They picked 14 major contractors, agreed to pay them massive amounts of money, and let the contractors deal with the dozens of community-based organizations delivering most of the specialized services.

If you're a welfare recipient, things are more complicated. You're already working three days a week to "earn" your benefits. For several weeks, during the other two days, you must go to a Skills Assessment and Placement program for an evaluation. If you look instantly employable, you will be given the use of newspapers, a computer and a phone, in order to find yourself a job.

If you don't succeed, you will be sent to an Employment Services and Placement program, which will probably have to evaluate you again because they won't get your paperwork from the assessment program. You'll be helped to write a resume, and taught how to dress and behave on a job interview. If this gets you hired for a minimum-wage job, the program will advise you on child care subsidies and providers, and how to keep Medicaid and food stamps for a period after you start to work.

If you have any major barriers to employment--you can't read, or you suffer from clinical depression--you'll be referred to a subcontractor of your Employment Services and Placement provider. This will be a smaller community-based organization, which would probably like to give you real job training, but would go out of business if it did. After another interview, you'll receive "intensive" services: more lessons in how to dress and behave at job interviews, create a resume, and complete a job application. You may get substance abuse treatment, mental health care, or case management services, as well.

The federal Workforce Investment Act provides for a third level of services: the genuine "training" component of the act, which can support education in such forms as literacy classes, English classes, vocational school, apprenticeship, on-the-job training, and community college.

However, the payment structure for welfare-to-work employment service providers, especially subcontractors, is not designed to reward providers who place clients in better jobs. The hardest clients to place are sent to subcontractors who are offered inadequate incentives for keeping clients in jobs.

New York City's employment services contracts are based on results, not on efforts made to achieve results. Such "performance-based" agreements are meant to improve contract management, but fail when they define success using the wrong measurement. In the case of employment services, the goal of self-sufficiency isn't reached the day that a former welfare recipient starts work at a paying job. Jobs must be permanent, pay a living wage, and provide health insurance and other essential benefits, to keep workers from needing to go back on the welfare rolls. Jobs like this usually require some training and academic skills. Indeed, much research that has been done into the most effective welfare-to-work strategies, such as that conducted over the past several decades by the Manpower Research and Demonstration Corporation, found that the best results come from mandatory employment programs that offer education and skills training in their mix of activities and services.

How the city's system performed even in good times was not encouraging. As of March 2001, only one in four clients had found a job. Now the local economy is going downhill, possibly longer and harder than the rest of the country. During 2001, the city lost 132,400 jobs, according to the New York State Department of Labor. The City Comptroller, William Thompson, reported that in the last quarter of 2001, the U.S. economy stopped shrinking and grew slightly, while the city's economy continued to shrink.

The first people to be laid off are usually those last hired, which would include recent placements by the city's employment services system. The number of people on welfare used to rise and fall pretty much in line with the local unemployment rate, until last July. According to the city's monthly bulletin "HRA Facts," between July 2001 and January 2002, the unemployment rate rose from 5.3 percent to 7.1 percent, while over 23,000 people left the welfare rolls.

Luckily, the city is stepping up its rate of spending workforce development funds. According to the executive director of the Workforce Investment Board, Dorothy Lehman, "The new administration is totally committed" to carrying out the mandate of the Workforce Investment Act. This summer the act comes back to Congress for reauthorization; some welfare advocates fear that New York City's past failure to support employment services will give the law's opponents ammunition against its renewal.

The Bloomberg administration is also now revising the city's five-year Workforce Investment Act plan. The public will have a chance to comment.

Read also:

 

Back in 1998, when Congress passed the Workforce Investment Act, it looked like the one good thing that everybody could agree came out of the much-criticized movement called welfare reform. A large chunk of public money saved by cutting the welfare rolls, the law said, would have to be reinvested into helping welfare recipients get paying jobs.

Each local government had to recruit a Workforce Investment Board, with a majority of its members from the local business community, to provide expert advice on the qualifications that employers currently look for in new hires. The board was supposed to come up with a plan, develop a written agreement with the government welfare agency, and run the program.

New York City's Human Resources Administration apparently had some problems with this scenario, because the city was one of the last places in the nation to form a Workforce Investment Board, and the board has been allowed little input in the city's job training programs.

The city's top welfare official, Jason Turner, did not believe in job training. His statement, "It's work that sets you free," notorious for inadvertently echoing a Nazi slogan, reflected the conviction that a low-paying job today is better for a welfare recipient than a better job postponed for a period of training. Turner used his control of workforce development funds to delay and avoid providing services to people on welfare.

The city is left with $67 million from past years' unspent federal funding that, if not used by June 30, may be diverted to more ambitious employment programs elsewhere in the state. "It's ludicrous, when we have budget deficits and people are out of work, to lose any money because we didn't spend it," said David Fischer of the Center for an Urban Future. (See his article, "The $67 Million Question")

One place where the funds were needed was in setting up "One-Stop Centers," where job hunters--welfare recipients or not--can receive a full range of services under one roof, from government and nonprofit agencies. While Los Angeles has 18 one-stop centers, New York currently has just one. Until the city opens the six additional centers that were announced in November, all job hunters in the city must travel to Jamaica, Queens to get one-stop employment services.

For the Human Resources Administration, employment services under the Workforce Investment Act have been relatively simple to administer. They picked 14 major contractors, agreed to pay them massive amounts of money, and let the contractors deal with the dozens of community-based organizations delivering most of the specialized services.

If you're a welfare recipient, things are more complicated. You're already working three days a week to "earn" your benefits. For several weeks, during the other two days, you must go to a Skills Assessment and Placement program for an evaluation. If you look instantly employable, you will be given the use of newspapers, a computer and a phone, in order to find yourself a job.

If you don't succeed, you will be sent to an Employment Services and Placement program, which will probably have to evaluate you again because they won't get your paperwork from the assessment program. You'll be helped to write a resume, and taught how to dress and behave on a job interview. If this gets you hired for a minimum-wage job, the program will advise you on child care subsidies and providers, and how to keep Medicaid and food stamps for a period after you start to work.

If you have any major barriers to employment--you can't read, or you suffer from clinical depression--you'll be referred to a subcontractor of your Employment Services and Placement provider. This will be a smaller community-based organization, which would probably like to give you real job training, but would go out of business if it did. After another interview, you'll receive "intensive" services: more lessons in how to dress and behave at job interviews, create a resume, and complete a job application. You may get substance abuse treatment, mental health care, or case management services, as well.

The federal Workforce Investment Act provides for a third level of services: the genuine "training" component of the act, which can support education in such forms as literacy classes, English classes, vocational school, apprenticeship, on-the-job training, and community college.

However, the payment structure for welfare-to-work employment service providers, especially subcontractors, is not designed to reward providers who place clients in better jobs. The hardest clients to place are sent to subcontractors who are offered inadequate incentives for keeping clients in jobs.

New York City's employment services contracts are based on results, not on efforts made to achieve results. Such "performance-based" agreements are meant to improve contract management, but fail when they define success using the wrong measurement. In the case of employment services, the goal of self-sufficiency isn't reached the day that a former welfare recipient starts work at a paying job. Jobs must be permanent, pay a living wage, and provide health insurance and other essential benefits, to keep workers from needing to go back on the welfare rolls. Jobs like this usually require some training and academic skills. Indeed, much research that has been done into the most effective welfare-to-work strategies, such as that conducted over the past several decades by the Manpower Research and Demonstration Corporation, found that the best results come from mandatory employment programs that offer education and skills training in their mix of activities and services.

How the city's system performed even in good times was not encouraging. As of March 2001, only one in four clients had found a job. Now the local economy is going downhill, possibly longer and harder than the rest of the country. During 2001, the city lost 132,400 jobs, according to the New York State Department of Labor. The City Comptroller, William Thompson, reported that in the last quarter of 2001, the U.S. economy stopped shrinking and grew slightly, while the city's economy continued to shrink.

The first people to be laid off are usually those last hired, which would include recent placements by the city's employment services system. The number of people on welfare used to rise and fall pretty much in line with the local unemployment rate, until last July. According to the city's monthly bulletin "HRA Facts," between July 2001 and January 2002, the unemployment rate rose from 5.3 percent to 7.1 percent, while over 23,000 people left the welfare rolls.

Luckily, the city is stepping up its rate of spending workforce development funds. According to the executive director of the Workforce Investment Board, Dorothy Lehman, "The new administration is totally committed" to carrying out the mandate of the Workforce Investment Act. This summer the act comes back to Congress for reauthorization; some welfare advocates fear that New York City's past failure to support employment services will give the law's opponents ammunition against its renewal.

The Bloomberg administration is also now revising the city's five-year Workforce Investment Act plan. The public will have a chance to comment.

Read also:

 

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits. She is currently on the staff of Bronx Independent Living Services.

When The Neighborhood Doesn't Want It


Although there are relatively few backyards in New York City, residents defend their territory as fiercely as any other Americans against unwanted new facilities. This syndrome is frequently called "Not In My Back Yard," and it has helped to shape the face of social service delivery in ways that project opponents could not anticipate.

What might the map of social service facilities in the city look like if neighborhood reactions were not a factor?

MORE SERVICES FOR UNWELCOME CLIENTS

The most obvious change would be a lot more housing and services aimed at clients who are not generally welcomed by their neighbors: the homeless, drug addicts, people with developmental disabilities, people with AIDS/HIV, ex-prisoners, mentally ill people, foster children, people on welfare.the list embodies some of the most pervasive urban fears. Much fear is based on inaccurate assumptions: that developmental disabilities are the same as mental illness, and that the mentally ill are more violent than the rest of us; that foster children are also juvenile delinquents; that all homeless people are visibly different from people with homes; and that drug users and alcoholics are a threat even when they are on the wagon.

An agency trying to open a group home or treatment program for people bearing one of these labels must tactfully court the chosen community and prepare for long delays in obtaining a site. Money for programs can dry up during these delays, and staff time is diverted to meetings, hearings, and the putting-out of public relations fires. According to Brad Lander, Executive Director of the Fifth Avenue Committee in Brooklyn, "Siting is as much a constraint as the cost of land." Despite the organization's long history of creating successful low-income housing in the neighborhood, nearby residents object to its plan for a transitional residence for parolees. Much effort went into "outreach, door-knocking, and community meetings" to win the local Community Board's approval for the project.

Staten Island's homeless population relies heavily on Project Hospitality, which provides food, shelter and supportive services. Its Executive Director, Reverend Terry Troia, concedes that over the years there have been "a lot of opportunities we've had to let go by," because it takes so long to get sites approved. She recalls a day care center for children of homeless and other low-income families as a project that was blocked for lack of a site.

It's hard enough to find a place to locate a new facility even when funds to pay for it are available. However, unwanted clients are often unsympathetic figures for advocates to champion to government decision-makers. No matter how much it would help the rest of us, making life easier for drug addicts and ex-convicts is not a priority for many voters. Local politicians rarely move against the wishes of their most vocal constituents, so unwanted social services have little leverage with elected officials in the competition for member item funds, or even for representation in the overall budget process of their legitimate needs.

MORE FACILITIES WOULD BE THE RIGHT SIZE

Small group homes and other sites would provide as much of the supply as was necessary to have the best possible system. Centralized settings with high capacity would not offer the advantage of decreasing the number of siting battles, but would be chosen only when centralization was needed.

Small group homes, and individual apartments in regular buildings, are among the most promising solutions to a variety of needs. They allow clients to live among diverse neighbors and eliminate the institutional feel of larger homes. For foster children, they more closely resemble a family; for adults with developmental disabilities or mental illness, they allow more independence. Unfortunately, like services for homeless people, the supply of group homes is nowhere near the demand for them.

Service providers might use more of these smaller sites if they did not arouse nearly as much controversy as larger ones. A reporter for the Riverdale Press observed bitter opposition, at a Bronx Community Board 11 meeting, to an apartment proposed to house eight developmentally disabled people under 24-hour supervision. The Fifth Avenue Committee's residence for parolees will house only ten people, but Lander recognizes that, "If we had not been able to get Community Board approval, the project would have been dead in the water because the city wouldn't have given us control of the building lot."

SERVICES WOULD BE WHERE CLIENTS NEED THEM TO BE

Service providers could look for the best building for their programs, in the location that was most convenient for their clients. Now they look for buildings where their clients can blend into the flow of other users, like hospitals, or where the surrounding community would prefer nearly any use to an existing misuse.

Liz Abzug, a spokesperson for Housing and Services, Inc., describes that agency's strategy as one of replacing "drug-infested eyesores" with well-run facilities. When Housing and Services, Inc. began managing the Kenmore Hotel on 23rd Street, it had been taken over by the federal government because of drug activities inside it. According to the agency's website, at the height of its criminal career, the Kenmore generated about a thousand calls a year to 911. Now, Abzug estimates that there is only about one such call a month.

However, the supply of boarded-up and decaying city-owned properties may not be inexhaustible. Limiting new facilities to such sites does not necessarily result in ideal locations for service delivery. Social service agencies need many of the same features that urban small business owners look for in a new location: safe streets, good public transportation, and closeness to clients' homes, jobs, or other essential services.

NEIGHBORS WOULD HAVE LESS INFLUENCE ON PROGRAM DESIGN

Neighborhood opposition can sometimes improve services. Communities do not like to see people loitering on the street, unless they are drinking cappuccino. This puts pressure on agencies to provide comfortable waiting rooms for appointments, and day treatment programs for those who might otherwise have nowhere to go. Good security practices at homeless shelters make the residents feel safer, as well as the neighbors. The old Kenmore Hotel was notorious for heavy objects being dumped out of its windows at odd times, so Housing Services, Inc. agreed to put in air conditioners in response to community demands -- a benefit to both passers-by and tenants.

Parolees living in the Fifth Avenue Committee's planned transitional housing may benefit from activities intended to reassure skeptical neighbors, such as supervision by case managers and random drug testing. However, some applicants for admission to the residence will not benefit from having to pass a panel including three neighborhood residents. The entire project could fail after a year, when a Community Advisory Board will have the power to shut it down with a 75 percent majority vote.

One way to provide services without needing to open a contested facility is by operating a mobile program out of a van. This is not the chief reason why mobile programs exist: vans are the best way to reach clients who resist going to shelters, soup kitchens, clinics, and other services. While the community may complain that clients hang around a van site before it comes and after it goes, the fact that a van finds clients at a site usually means they are already in the surrounding area. This makes mobile programs more popular with providers, funders, and neighbors than they might otherwise be.

Another type of facility that is usually welcomed, at least initially, is the drop-in center for homeless or mentally ill people. Years ago, when Times Square was still seedy, homelessness was conspicuous in midtown Manhattan. Drop-in centers were opened to attract homeless people out of Grand Central, Penn Station, and the Port Authority terminal, into havens that were open during the day, when most shelters are closed. The drop-in centers may have contributed too much to the transformation of midtown into a safe, clean tourist attraction: they are losing their appeal to area businesses, who now look on them as the source rather than the solution of the problem of homelessness.

FAIR SHARE CRITERIA WOULD WORK

New York City is something of a celebrity in the world of city planning for its "Fair Share Criteria" and facility siting process. As a result of the 1989 revision of the City Charter, there are rules requiring that new facilities for programs run or paid for by the city (unless they are very small) must go through an evaluation by the sponsoring city agency and the Department of City Planning. The effect that the program will have on the proposed neighborhood must be weighed against the value of the site to the users of the new facility.

This approach won an American Planning Association award in 1992, even though few New York communities are pleased with their resulting share of city services. In practice, the criteria are still somewhat subjective and imprecise. Facts uncovered in the Fair Share impact evaluation do not dictate the final decision on a controversial site.

The design of our social service delivery system reflects neighborhood fears of undesirable outsiders. A dramatic example is recorded in the minutes of a March 28, 2001 meeting of Community Board Six in Brooklyn. The Board's Human Service Committee proposed a resolution calling for the city to have separate, decentralized intake systems for homeless single men and women, located in buildings already being used as shelters and intake centers. The resolution also called for more supportive housing and rental assistance as long-term solutions to homelessness.

The proposal was in the tradition of rational planning: it considered the needs of New York City as a single entity, acknowledged that existing shelter and intake sites encounter less red tape than new ones, and spread the benefits and burdens of services around the city by decentralizing them. The resolution was voted down, "on the possibility that it would leave the Park Slope Women's Armory vulnerable to future conversion as an intake center."

Additional Resources:

 

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits. She is currently on the staff of Bronx Independent Living Services.

 



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