Max Politics Podcast: Vicki Been on De Blasio Era Housing Policy, Neighborhood Rezonings, & More
Then-Deputy Mayor Vicki Been (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
January 12, 2022 - Max Politics Podcast: Vicki Been on De Blasio Era Housing Policy, Neighborhood Rezonings, & More
Former Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Vicki Been joined the show to reflect on housing policy and outcomes during the de Blasio years, when she was first housing commissioner before returning to NYU then re-joining the administration as deputy mayor. Been discussed affordable housing planning, the implementation of Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, neighborhood rezonings, advice for the new Adams administration, and more.
Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.
City Continues Expansion of Online Access to Public Benefits
Online access is key (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
With New York City still in the clutches of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing shift to a more digital world, the city’s Human Resources Administration is continuing its efforts to expand online access to services for low-income New Yorkers.
The shift is meant to improve delivery of services and, more importantly, provide people with flexibility and convenience in accessing benefits, “which means not taking time from work or family,” said Steven Banks, former commissioner of the Department of Social Services-Human Resources Administration (DSS-HRA), when the latest iteration of the online portal was launched by the de Blasio administration in 2017.
DSS-HRA administers critical benefits for millions of New Yorkers, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), colloquially known as food stamps, direct cash assistance, emergency grants for rental or utility needs, and other benefits. The agency provides benefits to more than 3 million people every year.
For years prior to the pandemic, HRA labored to modernize and make access to services and benefits easier. Building on the Bloomberg-era ACCESS NYC portal, which was meant to help people more easily determine their eligibility for benefits, the de Blasio administration began in 2015 to develop an online portal with greater functionality. The new portal would allow people to submit documents online related to their benefits cases, thereby preventing the bottlenecks, wasted time, and accessibility challenges of having to visit an HRA location in person.
As Banks noted in a December interview on the Max Politics podcast from Gotham Gazette, the city has had to follow strict state and federal regulations around the disbursement of benefits.
“But what we could do is to say, let's not make it so miserable to get help…One of the fundamentals was, don't make people have to wait in offices,” he told host Ben Max. “You and I do our banking online, you rarely go to a teller, I rarely do, too. So why couldn't our clients have the same opportunity? Not a requirement, but an opportunity to do business online, therefore providing an opportunity to people who needed more help who wanted to come into an office, it wouldn't be overcrowded, the staff would be able to focus on more complicated cases.”
The portal would also allow HRA clients to view appointments online and receive text and email notifications. In 2016, HRA first began to pilot an online application platform for cash assistance, which would allow the benefit to be recertified remotely.
In 2017, the city launched the new online portal, rebranded as ACCESS HRA, largely focused on food assistance benefits. At the time, the city lacked permission from the state to institute a similar citywide online application for cash assistance – state regulations required that individuals appear in person at HRA centers.
But when the covid pandemic struck, the agency had already laid the groundwork for that system and finally received a waiver from the state to expand the online application to cash assistance on an emergency basis. According to HRA officials, within days the agency had incorporated cash assistance and rent-arrears payments into the mobile platform.
Now, nearly all benefit programs are available online and through mobile applications, including among them the Fair Fares program that provides half-price MetroCards to low-income New Yorkers.
According to HRA officials, the agency is working on a significant expansion of its online systems. It is developing a mobile application for child support referrals and applications, and making accessible through ACCESS HRA both Home Energy Assistance Program benefits and an online application for Medicaid.
“If you can’t provide an experience that’s similar or better to other domains like shopping, banking, otherwise, then [benefits applicants] think that you’ve designed a system that's less trustworthy and a little less dignified for folks who are coming to us at some of their hardest moments,” said Lauren Aaronson, deputy commissioner for business process innovation and design at DSS-HRA, in an interview last month.
According to data provided by HRA, as of October 2021, ACCESS HRA received more than 6.5 million monthly logins, with about 63,000 new accounts created each month. In a major shift from just a few years ago, new benefit applications are submitted almost entirely online.
As of December 14, about 95% of new SNAP applications were submitted online, as were about 87% of all cash assistance applications and nearly all applications for Fair Fares.
HRA’s continuing reforms to its system come at a time when applications for food and cash assistance have spiked amid the pandemic, after declining for years. In February 2020, there were 327,013 cash assistance recipients, a number that rose to a high of 390,441 in August that year before there was a decrease. In November 2021, the latest figures available, there were 376,685 cash assistance recipients. Similarly, there were 1.48 million SNAP recipients in February 2020, increasing to 1.7 million by September before beginning to trend downwards as the city’s employment picture improved again after the massive job losses of the early pandemic months. In November 2021, there were 1.67 million SNAP recipients.
HRA’s work could also form the basis for Mayor Eric Adams' pledge to create a centralized “MyCity” digital portal for all city services and benefits. Adams has promised a data-driven “real-time governance” model to improve efficiency in city agencies and to make it easier for New Yorkers to access city government.
“Eric believes that many of the problems created by the City’s dysfunctional agencies can be addressed through better use of data and technology,” Evan Thies, a spokesperson for Adams’ campaign, told Gotham Gazette in October, when Adams was all but assured to win the general election. “One of Eric’s top priorities during transition would be to vet possible solutions to improving the systems we rely on for the efficient delivery of City services so that he can immediately begin providing a better quality of life to New Yorkers who depend on their government every day.”
The MyCity portal would serve a much broader audience than ACCESS HRA, which is almost solely for low-income New Yorkers requiring assistance and is not, for instance, useful for a business owner seeking a license renewal, a lobbyist filing a required report, or a multitude of other reasons that New Yorkers need to interact with city government and could benefit from a streamlined, online process.
One crucial innovation, said HRA’s Aaronson, would be to create a digital locker or wallet that can store people’s identifying information “allowing clients to own their own data rather than us trying to share it amongst ourselves,” and then allow them to use that for any service provided by the city. A previous attempt to pilot such a central data locker ran into bureaucratic obstacles and failed to launch, according to outside expert Hana Shank, director of strategy for Public Interest Technology at New America, a nonprofit think tank, who worked on that project.
“It's super easy to say that everything in one place makes so much sense but I think the devil’s in the details there and good design should allow us to make these happen without having one single application for everything,” she said.
[Listen: Max Politics Podcast: Steven Banks on the De Blasio Administration's Social Services Reforms]
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Mayor Adams Wants to End Agency Silos; Five City Initiatives Have Been Doing It
New Yorkers at work (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly cited inefficiencies of city government for failing New Yorkers and has vowed that he will end silos that prevent city agencies from working together for better governance. His predecessor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, attempted some of that with five pilot programs aimed at addressing poverty-related issues. Those pilot programs are nearing the end of their timeline and, according to the official coordinating the efforts, have made “significant progress” despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, they could help inform Adams’ approach writ large.
“We continue to be dysfunctional in every other agency, we operate our city in silos, and due to that, we are inefficient...Just pouring money into our city is not going to solve the problem,” Adams said at a candidate forum when he was running for mayor last year. It was his oft-stated criticism that city agencies are bogged down in red tape and often perform duplicative tasks that increase costs while hampering the efficient delivery of services. Last month, just two weeks before taking over at City Hall, he again reiterated that sentiment. “We have to stop operating in silos and come together and operate as a team,” he said in a PIX11 interview.
The de Blasio administration took a few steps in that direction through The Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity (or NYC Opportunity), an office that uses data and research innovations to try to reduce poverty in the city. In July 2019, the office launched five initiatives to mitigate “service silos” across city agencies, help New Yorkers, and offer lessons for inter-agency collaboration.
The programs were aimed at increasing school attendance for children in shelters, increasing family access to early childhood services, improving domestic violence shelters, improving street homelessness tracking, and expanding college and career prep services for people leaving city jails and state prisons.
The five programs, with a total budget of $6 million, were meant to last till the end of the current fiscal year, June 30. “Projects will continue at least through the end of the fiscal year, and several are being considered for funding continuations into the following fiscal year,” said David Berman, director of programs and evaluation at NYC Opportunity, in an email.
The first initiative was a collaboration between the Department of Education and Department of Homeless Services, which developed a new data sharing system that gave shelter providers real-time access to student attendance and academic performance that was already available to schools. It is meant to reduce chronic school absences (missing 10% of school days or more each year). The data system is being piloted in 25 shelters, and will be expanded to 200 shelters and also to students in foster care, according to Berman.
The two agencies also trained hundreds of frontline staff at both agencies in a new joint approach that recognizes the points of intersection on the road from homelessness to permanent housing. More than 500 additional staffers will receive the training this spring.
To improve access to early childhood services for families, the Administration for Children’s Services and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) developed a new website, NYC Telehealth Tips, to provide guidance to providers and families transitioning to remote prevention and therapeutic services. With more than 200 hours of research, the agencies designed tools that help families navigate therapeutic and prevention services.
According to Berman, seven prototypes are being tested that can “enhance referral, intake, and feedback processes” and those programs will finish in the spring. The scope of the project was also expanded during the city’s covid response.
DOHMH and the Human Resources Administration (HRA) partnered to improve the design of 10 domestic violence shelters in the city to make them more “human centered” with trauma-informed care in the lived environment. Three of those shelters have been completed, which will affect roughly 275 residents, NYC Opportunity estimated. The second phase of design has been launched and construction will be completed by the end of the 2022 fiscal year. The third phase is scheduled to be finished in fiscal year 2023, with its timeline extended because of procurement delays and increased building costs.
Berman pointed out that the pandemic led to significant implementation struggles as staff were reassigned to the pandemic response and programs went remote. Contracting delays also affected the launch of some of the programs.
Among those affected was the initiative to improve how street homelessness is tracked. But the Department of Homeless Services nonetheless has launched the program, integrating data from its StreetSmart system, which is used by homeless outreach workers, with data in the CARES Collaborative Homeless Management Information System, a nonprofit system to more accurately count the number of homeless people on city streets.
The college and career prep initiative for those leaving incarceration was “delayed significantly” because of contracting issues at CUNY, Berman said, and it had to be fully virtual at launch because of the pandemic. There are now 80 students enrolled in the program, which includes tutoring services, and 40 more have expressed interest as referrals have increased.
Berman said that NYC Opportunity is going to reevaluate the headway it has made across the five initiatives. “NYCO would like to conduct an evaluation of the project after each project has completed (in the next 1-2 years), after the Covid emergency situation has died down enough for the projects to be implemented in a more steady-state manner,” he said.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
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