Neil deMause: The Website

My bad: Both my City Limits stories actually ran today. The other one is a more in-depth look at the mayor and governor’s proposed cuts to emergency food programs and job-training programs, which is just impeccable timing:

As New York City’s unemployment rate continues to climb above 10 percent, proposed spending cuts by both Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg are threatening to make life tougher for anyone who depends on government programs for food, cash grants or job training.

Potentially hardest hit: the city’s soup kitchens and food pantries. Emergency food providers had already seen the state’s Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program – which provides about $30 million a year to New York’s food banks – sliced by $2.3 million in mid-year budget cuts last year; Paterson is now proposing $1.2 million in additional cuts for 2010… [read more]

See also my budget overview article, and my colleagues Helen Zelon and Eileen Markey’s articles on education and housing cuts, respectively.

My first article for the relaunched City Limits, about the doomsday budgets proposed for New York city and state, is up. (It’s actually the second article I wrote for them, but is running first — I blame the suits at Fox.)

Economists say the nation’s recession is technically over, but whether or not the economy is actually on the mend, the recession’s impact on New York City and state budgets is only just beginning. Over the last three months, Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg have mapped out a set of austerity budgets that would slash billions in spending – with many of the reductions coming from education and social services.

This year marks a watershed for both City Hall and Albany, but for different reasons, says James Parrott, chief economist at the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute, which earlier this month issued extensive briefings on both the state and city budgets… [read more]

I’m very pleased to announced that, effective immediately, I am taking on the role of Contributing Editor for Safety Net and Workforce Development issues for the newly redesigned and expanded City Limits. I’m actually one of four new contributing editors that City Limits has brought on — that’s right, a journalism outlet actually expanding! in 2010! — with Helen Zelon (education/child development), Eileen Markey (housing/homelessness), and Jake Mooney (labor/immigration) my new colleagues.

What this means for you, the reader, is lots more articles like these, running on City Limits’ now-daily-updated website. (Did I mention the new website?) I’ll still be writing for the Voice and elsewhere, and will still be posting links here and via Twitter, for those of you who prefer your news to come to you, rather than having to hunt it down and kill it.

I’ll be assigning out some articles as well, so if you’re a journalist with a great story about the lives of (and city services for) low-income New Yorkers, drop me a line.

I check in on the state of microlending projects in Haiti, and how they will fare in the post-earthquake economy:

As Haiti continues to dig out from the earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince, local microlenders are gearing up to begin rebuilding the country’s shattered economy.

International aid groups have been “focusing on supplying food and shelter,” says Daniel Jean-Louis, a business professor at the State University of Haiti and Quisqueya University who also works as a consultant for local business groups in Port-au-Prince. “Nobody has talked yet about businesses resuming and people getting back to work.”… [read more]

Sure, Brooklyn has become fashionable on Mayor Bloomberg’s watch, but can he make it livable?

A few years back, when the New York real estate market still looked within reach of, say, itinerant op-ed writers, I got to spend some quality time touring houses in a then-unfashionable part of Brooklyn.

My most vivid memory is of the basements. One had a warren of cubicles surrounding a filthy hot plate; in another, the landlord proudly showed off the tiny rooms he’d built (“That’s craftsmanship! This rent roll is a gold mine!”) in a windowless sub-basement 20 feet underground. It was a rare glimpse into the other New York, the one where its 1.5-million-and-growing poor live… [read more]

So much for promises that the New York Times would soon diverge from the media’s obsession with the Nouveau Poor. The front page of today’s Times features a profile of foreclosed homeowners who are now living in homeless shelters that is a classic of the genre:

Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car.

But this fall, she exhausted all options. She had once owned and overseen a group home for homeless people. Now, she succumbed to that status herself, checking in to a shelter.

“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”

The message here is clear: What kind of world are we coming to? Homeless shelters are supposed to be for homeless people! Not for people without homes!

The upside of this, and no doubt how the Times and other people rationalize running these kinds of articles over and over again, is that maybe the “There but for the grace of god” element will enable other homeowners reading this to empathize with their former peers where they might not someone who lost their home for more mundane reasons than the global economic meltdown. Whether that will spill over into caring more broadly about poor people is questionable, though, especially when reporter Peter S. Goodman writes lines like:

“These families never needed help before,” said Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House in Santa Ana, Calif. “They haven’t a clue about where to go, and they have all sorts of humiliation issues. They don’t even know what to say, what to ask for.”

and

So, as lean times endure and paychecks disappear, homeless shelters are absorbing those who have run out of alternatives.

Unlike in normal times, when homeless shelters are occupied by people who haven’t run out of alternatives, and who certainly have no “humiliation issues.” Because, after all, they know they’re supposed to be poor.

There’s nothing like getting sick to make you appreciate the hazards of getting sick:

I caught a cold last week. No, it was not the swine flu. Though my head felt like it was going to explode, and I ran through enough tissues to deforest the Amazon, I was missing the two signature symptoms of the H1N1 virus — high fever and a racking cough — so I can rest assured I was laid low by some other, less headline-worthy bug…. [read more]

Reason #1 never to believe economic predictions in the media:

The number of newly laid-off workers seeking unemployment benefits fell for the third straight week, evidence that layoffs are continuing to ease in the earliest stages of an economic recovery. —AP, 9/24/09

The American economy lost 263,000 jobs in September — far more than expected — and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, the government reported on Friday, dimming prospects of any meaningful job growth by the end of the year. —New York Times, today

Reason #2, three headlines that greeted me in a stack on Google News this morning:

Manhattan Apartment Sales Bounced Back Over the Summer, but Not All the Way

Manhattan real estate sales ’stabilizing’

Manhattan Apartment Prices Drop for Second Quarter

Finally, if you want some predictions with actual research behind them, I offer Rutgers economists Jim Hughes and Joseph Seneca, who predict that we could be heading into the “Lost Employment Decade,” and that it could be 2017 before unemployment drops to pre-recession levels of 2007, and called this an “optimistic” projection: “It’s not going to be an easy slog from here.” Though of course, I read about this in a newspaper report, so it’s probably best to take it with a grain of salt.

It’s swine flu season, which means all thoughts turn to what to do when your job won’t let you call in sick:

As the H1N1 swine flu virus starts its second major sweep through the U.S., business owners are bracing for the impact of a worse-than-usual flu season on their workforces. That’s reviving debate on a contentious issue: What kind of sick leave should companies offer employees — and should it be mandated by law?

“On the one hand, you have all of our top officials saying, ‘Do the responsible thing. If you’re sick, stay home,’” says Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group that is pushing for paid sick leave laws. “You have advice from the Centers for Disease Control on exactly how many days you should stay home, and how many days we need to keep kids at home. And at the same time, we have a country where almost half the workforce doesn’t have a single paid sick day.”… [read more]

Health Savings Accounts, the Bush-spawned health insurance plans that have been derided as a mere tax dodge for the rich, are either in danger of being phased out under health reform, or likely to carry on unimpeded. You make the call:

While Washington wrangles over health care, the nation’s last big reform innovation faces an uncertain future. Health Savings Accounts, the hybrid of flex spending accounts and IRAs that President Bush created in 2003, are an afterthought in the current proposals on Capitol Hill — with strenuous debate over whether their demise would be a disaster or a welcome end to a program that never lived up to its promise…. [read more]