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.

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.

Mostly lost in all the coverage of the new Census Bureau poverty stats (with unemployment skyrocketing, more people are poor!) is this tidbit from Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution:

Using data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and others about the likely trajectory of the recession, we find that, absent other changes, the poverty rate will increase rapidly through 2011 or 2012, at which point about 14.4 percent of the country will be in poverty, up from 12.5 percent in 2007. As the recession ends and employment levels increase, the poverty rate will begin to steadily decrease though it will not, at least over the next decade or so, reach its 2007 level.”

One reason for the projected continued rapid rise of poverty: The extended unemployment benefits and “Making Work Pay” tax cuts that have helped everyone but the very rich will have expired by then, forcing millions more people below the poverty line. Happy recovery!

More New Yorkers are struggling, but good luck getting info from the city on how to get help:

When Judith Rubinstein was named NY1’s “New Yorker of the Week” recently, she was immediately deluged with 70 phone messages. They weren’t congratulations — that’s what Facebook is for — but rather viewers calling for the help that her organization Connecting To Advantages provides in accessing public benefits, from tax rebates to food stamps.

The callers ran the gamut, from seniors needing help with utilities to laid-off middle-class workers with mortgages and no way to pay them. “And a 19-year-old with a baby,” Rubinstein recalls, “who said, ‘I went to the food stamp office, and they said they couldn’t help me until I was 22, but I was sure they were wrong.’ And in fact, they were wrong.”… [read more]

There are some tentative signs that the recession may finally be able to do what Hurricane Katrina did not: Get the news media to pay attention to the 1 in 8 Americans — or more, depending on how you’re counting — who are living in poverty. Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran a long essay by Barbara Ehrenreich decrying the media focus on the “Nouveau Poor” and noting that while the economic hard times have been hardest on the already-poor, they’ve all but disappeared from the public debate in favor of laid-off stockbrokers forced to limit their vacation travel. (To be fair, the already-poor were mostly never there to begin with.) Notes Ehrenreich bitterly: “‘Low-Wage Worker Loses Job, Home’ is nobody’s idea of news.”

That’s certainly been the case, but could it be changing? Witness today’s Wall Street Journal, which takes a look at rising welfare rolls that actually manages to dig deeper than the usual recitation of stats, citing my former radio comrade Liz Schott to the effect that though welfare rolls are rising, they’re still lagging far behind food stamp enrollments, a sign that there are plenty of needy unable to meet the strict income and work requirements imposed by welfare reform. “But people in between have the hardest time,” one food stamp recipient (and non-Nouveau Poor person) told the Journal. “You don’t make enough money to get by but you make too much to get help.”

The real test, of course, is to see whether this is a trend: While it’s hopeful that the Times piece says “First in a series,” the rest could end up all being about former yacht salesmen who are forced to buy their steaks at Costco. Stay tuned.

A visit to a welfare-to-work program whose participants say it actually, like, works:

Say one thing for the women packing an airless classroom in East Harlem: They’ve mastered call-and-response. “You have skills and education, what else do you need?” asks Angelo Rivera, who is teaching this career development class to a group of about 30 public assistance recipients, all female. “Experience!” comes the answer.

A few minutes later, Rivera throws another one at them: “Ready for the question?” It’s actually a quote, and he wants to know – “Who said that?”

There’s silence, then someone ventures: “Abernathy?”… [read more]

I take a look at two recent reports on poverty in New York, and their widely divergent findings:

When elected officials and nonprofit advocates gathered on the steps of City Hall last Wednesday to announce the release of a new Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies report, “The State of New York’s Social Safety Net for Today’s Hard Times,” it marked the culmination of a season of reports criticizing the city’s policies toward the poor.

“Despite an increase in the need for public assistance a year into a deep recession,” declared FPWA executive director Fatima Goldman, “the welfare rolls in New York City have actually decreased in 2008 by nearly 70,000 recipients.”… [read more]