Neil deMause: The Website

New York’s farmers markets and farm share co-ops are spreading like crabgrass, but if you rely on food stamps for your shopping dollars, many still remain out of reach:

Sometime in the last year, New York City reached a milestone: More than one-quarter of its adult residents are now receiving food stamps. Thanks in large part to the outreach efforts of the Bloomberg administration–with an added boost from the crappy economy–1.7 million New York City residents are now receiving food stamps (or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, as they’ve been officially known since 2008), up from 800,000 at its low point in the final month of the Giuliani Administration in December 2001.

Finding places to effectively spend those food stamps is another story… [read more]

I’ve been plenty critical of the media’s promises to pay attention to poor people since the economy collapsed, so I should give credit where it’s due: The New York Times has a front-page story today by Peter Goodman on people facing the hard choice between welfare and low-income work — and it goes way beyond the usual “poverty sucks” platitudes to actually focus on a serious policy concern: the lack of affordable child care that makes it nearly impossible for many low-income Americans, especially single parents, to escape poverty.

The story leads with an irresistable narrative hook: Alexandria Wallace is a 22-year-old single mom who wants to work, but can’t because her home state of Arizona has cut subsidized child care to any families not under the supervision of child protective services or on welfare. She had arranged a child-care swap with a friend, but that fell apart, leading to a crisis that will be all too familiar to anyone who’s tried to hold down a job while being a sole caregiver at the same time:

Her first month, she brought home about $500. She felt confident her clientele would grow.

Then, her friend canceled the swap, forcing Ms. Wallace to bring Alaya to the salon, where she tried to keep her occupied with cartoons in a back room.

Soon her car broke down, forcing her to rely on family and the public bus to get to work, which did not always happen.

Her boss had been kind, but patience wore thin.

“She was like, ‘Your baby sitter bailed on you, your car broke down. What do you have left?’” Ms. Wallace said. “She said, ‘If you can’t get something worked out, I’m going to have to let you go.’”

If there’s a flaw in the story, it’s that it only profiles two welfare recipients — Wallace and another single Arizona mom who lost her job for lack of child care — both of whom were working up until the state cut back child-care funds. But as the article notes in an easily missed aside, even back in 2000, only one in seven children whose families were eligible for subsidized child care were getting aid.

Also, Wallace in particular is counterposed to the regular poor people she’s suddenly forced to join on public assistance — the “lazy people who con the system,” as the Times describes her impression of welfare recipients, while she herself worries that she’ll “fall back to — I can’t say ‘being a lowlife.’” Without any portrayal of those who went on welfare when child care was only partly inaccessible, readers could still be left thinking that the problem is that child-care cuts are forcing the deserving poor to hobnob with the undeserving.

Meanwhile, over at Business Week, Bloomberg News reporter James Warren takes note of another poverty issue, puzzling over the falling welfare rolls in many states despite rising unemployment. “Something doesn’t compute,” he concludes, before noting that a March Government Accountability Office report blamed “rules mandating job-related searches; declining cash benefits, which ‘have not been updated or kept pace with inflation’; and sanctions tied to the search process.”

All of which is great for Business Week to be paying attention to, but it would have been nice if someone had noticed, oh, thirteen years ago when these trends first became apparent. But accepting “better late than never” is an American tradition — except, of course, when you’re trying to explain being late for work because the babysitter didn’t show.

New York City and state are getting more and more isolated in their stance in favor of fingerprinting food stamp applicants:

The Obama administration has waded into the running debate over New York’s practice of fingerprinting food stamp applicants, with a top Agriculture Department official urging the state to discontinue a practice he deems costly and ineffective.

“More cost-effective alternatives to finger imaging [an electronic fingerprinting method] should be actively considered both as a cost savings and as a means of program simplification,” wrote USDA Under Secretary Kevin Concannon in a letter to state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance deputy commissioner Elizabeth Berlin that was sent on May 7, but first made public on Friday… [read more]

Yes, three articles in one day. In this one, I delve into a much-hyped Bloomberg anti-poverty program that didn’t deliver as hoped:

When Mayor Bloomberg announced in 2007 that he was launching a pilot program to give cash incentives to poor New Yorkers for changing their behavior—including bonuses for such activities as attending parent-teacher conferences and holding down a job—the hope was to come up with a novel approach to ending poverty.

“Even though it turns my stomach to pay a mother $10 to see a doctor,” Chinese-American Planning Council executive director David Chen, a member of Bloomberg’s poverty commission, told City Limits at the time, “in a practical sense it works.”

Or maybe not… [read more]

When is a welfare scam not a welfare scam?

If you read the Which Lazy Bastards Are Ripping You Off section of yesterday’s tabloids — you can find it after the Who Is Sandra Bullock Not Sleeping With/Adopting section — you may have spotted the story that the Post headlined “Millionaires’ welfare ‘con’”: The Brooklyn DA’s office was prosecuting 32 New Yorkers for receiving nearly $1 million in welfare benefits they weren’t entitled to. The Post zeroed in on a couple of landlords with “three luxury vehicles” who’d lied about their assets to get taxpayer cash; for NY1, the hook was a married Brooks Brothers employee who claimed to be a single mom on her application, raking in $460,000.

Only one problem with the headlines (and Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes’ press release that started the whole thing): Welfare benefits — aka public assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or whatever the government is calling the cash it allots to poor people to use for expenses other than food and medical care — turn out not to be involved at all… [read more]

Mayor Bloomberg picks his top welfare policy aide to tackle homeless services. What you think of this likely depends on what you thought of his welfare policies:

City Hall announced a major shakeup in its top human services staff today, as Robert Hess, who has been Mayor Bloomberg’s commissioner of Homeless Services for the past four years, is leaving the job. Hess is taking a position at the Doe Fund, helping run its job training program for homeless individuals. His City Hall replacement: Seth Diamond, the longtime deputy commissioner of the Human Resources Administration (HRA) who’s helped formulate the city’s welfare and food stamps policies… [read more]

Ten-percent unemployment be damned, New York City is still successfully placing welfare recipients in jobs. But what kind of jobs?

The most remarkable thing about the job placement trend chart posted on the city Human Resources Administration website each month is what it doesn’t do.

Unlike so many other charts of economic indicators over the past two years, there is no post-Lehman plunge. Instead, the line—marking the number of city public assistance recipients who’ve reported finding at least half-time work each month over the past four years—bounces up and down, but is remarkably steady: The number of New Yorkers who left welfare for work in December 2009 was actually higher than in December 2006, when the city unemployment rate was a record low 4.3 percent… [read more]

With Haiti starting to drop out of the news again (despite continued problems there for earthquake survivors, not least of which is the rain), it’s an apropos time for my article to appear on how the media covered the Haitian earthquake and its aftermath:

One of the most striking images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was of poor New Orleans residents crowded together outside that city’s convention center, days after the floodwaters had receded, chanting, “We want help!” It was a scene that shocked viewers and reporters alike, who had not realized that a major U.S. city could be home to so many people who lacked the economic means even to flee in the face of oncoming danger–though the promised national conversation about poverty that was supposed to result never really arrived (Extra!, 7-8/06).

Such images couldn’t help but come to mind in the aftermath of the January 12 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti, where crushing poverty greatly worsened the devastation wrought in Port-au-Prince and surrounding towns. In TV news coverage, Haiti was described as “underdeveloped, overpopulated, and incredibly poor” (Nightline, 1/12/10), “extremely poor” (CBS Evening News, 1/12/10), “desperately poor” (CNN, 1/12/10) and, over and over, “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” Reports focused particularly on the lack of building codes that had helped lead to such widespread destruction when the ground shook, and on the lack of government emergency services to rescue quake survivors and bring them supplies.

In many ways, the TV news coverage of Haiti paralleled the round-the-clock attention to Katrina–down to the ubiquitous presence of Anderson Cooper on CNN, asking why it was taking so long for aid to arrive. But if grinding poverty in New Orleans was seen as cause for outrage (however short-lived), in Haiti it was presented more as a natural state of affairs. …

The article is print-only (for the time being, at least), but you can find the latest copy of Extra! on newsstands, if you can still find any newsstands. Or drop them a line and ask how to send them $3.95 for a copy by mail.

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]