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History > 2015 > USA > Economy > Poverty (I)
Homeless in New York City,
an Unending Crisis
MAY 7, 2015
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The crisis of homelessness that ballooned under Mayor Michael
Bloomberg shows no signs of deflating anytime soon under his successor, Bill de
Blasio. Nearly 57,000 people were sleeping in city shelters at last count,
24,000 of them children. It was a disaster then. It is a disaster now.
The responsibility for it is widespread. It’s an inescapable fact that the
number of people forced to live on the streets of New York City rises and falls
based on political calculations made far up the Hudson River, in Albany, and in
the nation’s capital. And, of course, on the willingness and ability of City
Hall to grapple with the problem.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in his State of the State address in January, called the rise
in homelessness “simply a disgrace.” But calling something disgraceful and doing
something about it are two different things. Though Mr. de Blasio has placed
affordable housing at the core of his vision of a fairer city, and has pledged —
unsuccessfully so far — to get a grip on the homeless crisis, there are limits
to what he can do without Mr. Cuomo’s help.
For decades, a city-state partnership called New York/New York, established in
1990 under Mayor David Dinkins and Gov. Mario Cuomo and periodically renewed,
has created thousands of units of supportive housing — apartments coupled with
services to help those with mental illnesses and other disabilities leave the
streets.
The program is set to expire in June 2016, and advocates for the homeless have
been pressing for funding for a new New York/New York agreement to create 30,000
supportive-housing units — a huge number, but one that fits the scale of the
problem. Mr. de Blasio recently went to Albany to plead for 12,000 more units in
the city. Mr. Cuomo’s budget proposes a bafflingly meager number: 3,900.
Supportive housing is by no means just a bleeding-heart idea — the State of Utah
and the Department of Veterans Affairs are among those that have recognized its
cost-effectiveness and aggressively embraced it, with excellent results. Mr.
Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio need to strike a deal to bring about the huge potential
benefits — in reduced expenses for homeless shelters, hospital care, policing
and other things — from an upfront investment in permanent apartments for the
chronically homeless.
As for Mr. de Blasio’s own budget, to be released Thursday, aides said it would
include $100 million to tackle homelessness, with increased funding for
rental-assistance programs and anti-eviction services, like legal representation
in housing court and education in tenants’ rights. This recognizes that as
certain neighborhoods boom and rents spiral higher, the working class and poor
are ending up with no place to go, and that protecting tenants from predatory
landlords must be a core part of any solution to homelessness.
Other unfinished items on the mayor’s agenda — a higher minimum wage, the
sweeping citywide campaign to build and preserve affordable housing, major
reform of rent laws in Albany — are also part of the answer.
This crisis was a long time in the making, with the city’s homeless shelters,
occupied by too many families for far too long, allowed to fall into dangerous
disrepair and squalor. They should immediately be made safe, cleaned up and
renovated. But they should also largely be emptied — and it’s past time for this
crisis to ease.
A version of this editorial appears in print on May 7, 2015,
on page A28 of the
New York edition with the headline: Homeless in the City, an Unending Crisis.
Homeless in New York City, an Unending Crisis,
NYT,
MAY 7, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/opinion/
homeless-in-new-york-city-an-unending-crisis.html
The Nature of Poverty
MAY 1, 2015
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
Lately it seems as though every few months there’s another urban
riot and the nation turns its attention to urban poverty. And in the midst of
every storm, there are people crying out that we should finally get serious
about this issue. This time it was Jon Stewart who spoke for many when he said:
“And you just wonder sometimes if we’re spending a trillion dollars to rebuild
Afghanistan’s schools, like, we can’t build a little taste down Baltimore way.
Like is that what’s really going on?”
The audience applauded loudly, and it’s a nice sentiment, but it’s not really
relevant.
The problem is not lack of attention, and it’s not mainly lack of money. Since
1980 federal antipoverty spending has exploded. As Robert Samuelson of The
Washington Post has pointed out, in 2013 the federal government spent nearly
$14,000 per poor person. If you simply took that money and handed it to the
poor, a family of four would have a household income roughly twice the poverty
rate.
Yet over the last 30 years the poverty rate has scarcely changed.
In addition, American public spending on schools is high by global standards. As
Peter Wehner pointed out in Commentary, in 2011 Baltimore ranked second among
the nation’s largest 100 school districts in how much it spent per pupil,
$15,483 per year.
The Sandtown-Winchester area of Baltimore, where Freddie Gray lived, has not
lacked for attention either. In the late 1980s, Baltimore’s then-Mayor Kurt
Schmoke decided he would make the neighborhood a model of urban restoration. He
gathered public and private actors like developer James Rouse and Habitat for
Humanity. They raised more than $130 million and poured it into everything from
new homes, new school curriculums, new job training programs and new health care
centers. Townhouses were built for $87,000 and sold to residents for $37,000.
The money was not totally wasted. By 2000, the poverty rate in the area had
dropped by 4.4 percent. The share of residents who lived in owner-occupied homes
had risen by 8.3 percent, according to a thorough study by The Abell Foundation.
But the area was not transformed. Today there are no grocery stores in the
neighborhood and no restaurants. Crime is rampant. Unemployment is high.
Despite all these efforts, there are too many young men leading lives like the
one Gray led. He was apparently a kind-hearted, respectful, popular man, but he
was not on the path to upward mobility. He won a settlement for lead paint
poisoning. According to The Washington Post, his mother was a heroin addict who,
in a deposition, said she couldn’t read. In one court filing, it was reported
that Gray was four grade levels behind in reading. He was arrested more than a
dozen times.
It is wrong to say federal efforts to tackle poverty have been a failure. The
$15 trillion spent by the government over the past half-century has improved
living standards and eased burdens for millions of poor people. But all that
money and all those experiments have not integrated people who live in areas of
concentrated poverty into the mainstream economy. Often, the money has served as
a cushion, not a ladder.
Saying we should just spend more doesn’t really cut it. What’s needed is a phase
shift in how we think about poverty. Renewal efforts in Sandtown-Winchester
prioritized bricks and mortar. But the real barriers to mobility are matters of
social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood
that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking,
and practical ambition.
Jane Jacobs once wrote that a healthy neighborhood is like a ballet, a series of
intricate interactions in which people are regulating each other and encouraging
certain behaviors.
In a fantastic interview that David Simon of “The Wire” gave to Bill Keller for
The Marshall Project, he describes that, even in poorest Baltimore, there once
were informal rules of behavior governing how cops interacted with citizens —
when they’d drag them in and when they wouldn’t, what curse words you could say
to a cop and what you couldn’t. But then the code dissolved. The informal
guardrails of life were gone, and all was arbitrary harshness.
That’s happened across many social spheres — in schools, families and among
neighbors. Individuals are left without the norms that middle-class people take
for granted. It is phenomenally hard for young people in such circumstances to
guide themselves.
Yes, jobs are necessary, but if you live in a neighborhood, as Gray did, where
half the high school students don’t bother to show up for school on a given day,
then the problems go deeper.
The world is waiting for a thinker who can describe poverty through the lens of
social psychology. Until the invisible bonds of relationships are repaired, life
for too many will be nasty, brutish, solitary and short.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 1, 2015, on page A31 of the New
York edition with the headline: The Nature of Poverty.
The Nature of Poverty,
NYT, MAY 1, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/opinion/david-brooks-the-nature-of-poverty.html
Health Problems Take Root
in a West Baltimore Neighborhood
That Is Sick of Neglect
APRIL 29, 2015
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BALTIMORE — At 49, Annette Booth already feels old.
She is obese and has trouble walking a block, never mind playing with her
grandchildren. She has had two knee replacements. She rattles when she breathes
because of asthma, and takes about nine pills a day, including medications for
anxiety and high blood pressure.
“I can’t walk too far,” she said. “If I do, I can’t breathe.”
In Upton-Druid Heights in West Baltimore — one of the city’s poorest
neighborhoods and, in recent days, the scene of some of its most vocal protests
— the cost of long-term poverty is counted in lives. Its residents die from
nearly every major disease at substantially higher rates than the city as a
whole — nearly double the rate from heart disease, more than double the rate
from prostate cancer, and triple the rate from AIDS. Life expectancy here is
just 68 years, one notch above Pakistan.
The fact that 94 percent of its population is black is lost on no one. “If the
statistics that are present in these communities were present in any white
community in Baltimore, it would be declared a state of emergency,” said Bishop
Douglas Miles, the pastor at Koinonia Baptist Church in Northeast Baltimore.
“Health disparities loom as a giant lurking in the shadows. They never get
talked about.”
Protests that have rolled across the country since the killing of Michael Brown
in Ferguson, Mo., last year may be largely about policing, but the anger and
frustration that power them have come from a deeper, less visible set of issues
that burden poor black Americans.
Poor health is a physical manifestation of systemic disadvantage. Years of
industrial decline have left swaths of this city jobless. Half the people in
Upton-Druid Heights live in poverty, slightly more than in 1970, and 64 percent
of working-age black men are not employed, according to Marc V. Levine, a
professor of history and economic development at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who has studied black employment in Baltimore.
Manufacturing jobs in the city have declined by 90 percent since the late 1960s,
and much of what replaced them was too far away or required too many skills for
the local work force. In 2010, the typical household in Upton-Druid Heights had
an income of about $15,700.
“There are factors that build up and something makes it pop,” said Ralph Moore,
62, who grew up a few streets over in Sandtown-Winchester, where Freddie Gray,
the man whose death sparked Monday’s riots, was chased by police officers.
“Freddie Gray’s death made it pop. This isn’t just happening as a consequence of
his death; it was always around.”
The legacy is a grim landscape with far more vacant buildings and liquor stores
than in the rest of the city.
Mr. Moore, a program manager at Restoration Gardens, a shelter for homeless
young people, recalls having to look hard for an abandoned building in Baltimore
for a high school yearbook photograph he and his friends wanted to take in 1969.
Now they are everywhere.
“People are angry,” he said. “They don’t feel a connection with any positive
Baltimore existence. They feel like they are being ignored.”
Dynece Maberry, 54, who lives a few blocks from the CVS drugstore that was
burned and looted on Monday night, agreed. “Freddie Gray was one thing, but what
all triggered it off was years of frustration,” said Ms. Maberry, who joined the
protests. “We were marching for a rec center, we were marching for schools. We
were marching for jobs.”
At Total Health Care, a tidy brick community health center in Upton-Druid
Heights where Ms. Booth had come Wednesday morning to figure out how to renew
her prescriptions — she had been using CVS — clinicians see the problems up
close.
Janice Stevenson, clinical director for the mental health program at Total
Health Care, described a patient whose daughter, 18, was killed and thrown in a
Dumpster. The patient’s grandson died in a drive-by shooting. In all, perhaps 10
people in the patient’s immediate family had died from disease or violence by
the time she joined the program.
“It’s a lot like being in a war,” said Ms. Stevenson, who drew an analogy to the
vacant houses that dot Baltimore’s streets like broken teeth. “There’s an
emptiness inside of them that’s like the houses.”
She said children in the area had high rates of exposures to lead paint, which
can cause mental and physical impairments. City data appeared to back that up:
Upton-Druid Heights has twice the rate of lead paint violations compared with
the rest of the city.
Marcia A. Cort, the chief medical officer for the clinic, used to work in the
emergency room where patients from this neighborhood commonly went. She said
rates of intubation for asthma there were two to three times those of a hospital
just a mile and a half away downtown whose patients were less impoverished.
“Look at the life expectancy — you are old at 49,” said Faye Royale-Larkins, the
chief executive of the clinic. But she said health disparities were not part of
the anger of recent days. “You would be angry if something was taken away from
you. But if you never had it,” she added, “it doesn’t make you angry.”
Ms. Booth, who grew up in Upton-Druid Heights and now lives farther south, lived
in some of those abandoned buildings in her 20s. She was addicted to drugs and
spending all her money getting high. She says those years permanently damaged
her health. But she has something unusual: a partner, who stayed with her
throughout. They got clean together.
She said she was not surprised by the low life expectancy in the neighborhood.
Recovering drug addicts are not given too many years to live, she said. But she
has signed up for nutrition classes at the Total Health clinic and aims to lose
100 pounds.
“I don’t like broccoli, but I’m going to eat it,” she said. “I want to live long
enough to see my grandkids get married. I really want to be here for that.”
A version of this article appears in print on April 30, 2015, on page A19 of the
New York edition with the headline: Health Problems Take Root in a Neighborhood
That Is Sick of Neglect.
Health Problems Take Root in a West Baltimore Neighborhood That
Is Sick of Neglect,
NYT, APRIL 29, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/us/
health-problems-take-root-in-a-west-baltimore-neighborhood-that-is-sick-of-neglect.html
States Tighten Conditions
for Receiving Food Stamps
as the Economy Improves
APRIL 11, 2015
The New York Times
By JESS BIDGOOD
BRUNSWICK, Me. — The food pantry here, just off the main drag in
this neat college town, gets busiest on Wednesdays, when the parking lot is
jammed and clients squeeze into the lobby, flipping through books left on a
communal shelf as they wait their turn to select about a week’s worth of food.
The Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program is intended to be a supplemental food
pantry, but a growing number of clients here and at pantries around the state
have little else to rely on because of a change in state policy this year. That
change is part of an adjustment being made by states that will strip food stamp
benefits from a million childless, able-bodied adults ages 18 to 49, according
to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan organization that
focuses on low-income Americans.
At its core is a basic question: As the economy improves, should states continue
waivers that were enacted during the recession to allow healthy adults who are
not working to get food stamps longer than the law’s time limit? Maine is one of
the states that say no.
Last year, the administration of Gov. Paul R. LePage, a Republican, decided to
reimpose a three-month limit (out of every three-year period) on food stamps for
a group often known as Abawds — able-bodied adults without minor dependents —
unless they work 20 hours per week, take state job-training courses or volunteer
for about six hours per week. Maine, like other states, makes some exceptions.
“You’ve got to incentivize employment, create goals and create time limits on
these welfare programs,” said Mary Mayhew, the commissioner of health and human
services in Maine. She said the measure was in line with Mr. LePage’s efforts to
reform welfare.
The number of Abawds receiving food stamps in Maine has dropped nearly 80
percent since the rule kicked in, to 2,530 from about 12,000. This time limit is
an old one, written into the 1996 federal welfare law. But, during the
recession, most states took advantage of a provision that allows them to waive
it when unemployment is persistently high, which meant poor adults could stay on
the program regardless of their work status.
Maine is one of eight states that qualified for waivers in 2015 but decided to
use them only in parts of the state or not at all. And, as the economy improves,
more states will cease to qualify for the waivers, even if they want them. The
Agriculture Department estimates that 23 states will cease to qualify for
statewide waivers in the 2016 fiscal year.
“It means life gets tougher for those childless adults who face barriers already
getting back into work,” said Ed Bolen, a senior policy analyst at the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities.
He said those adults tended to have limited education and faced a postrecession
labor market in which many people who want to work still cannot find jobs.
According to the federal Agriculture Department, the households of able-bodied
adults receiving food stamps in 2013 had average gross incomes of $308 per month
— or less than 30 percent of the federal poverty guideline.
The re-emergence of the work requirements has stoked discontent
among advocates for the poor and hungry who say the law is unfair because states
are not required to offer food stamp recipients a work assignment before cutting
them off, and because searching for a job does not necessarily count. The
Agriculture Department makes money available to states willing to pledge work
assignments to food stamp recipients, but many states do not take advantage of
it. Recently the department announced that it had provided $200 million to 10
states for pilot programs that would help people find jobs and move them off
food stamps.
“If the job situation in the area is a really a tough situation, this is an
incredibly harsh provision,” said Ellen Vollinger, the legal and food stamp
director for the Food Research and Action Center. “There’s going to be harm, and
it’s going to show up in greater hunger, probably in greater instances of health
problems and could show up in greater instances of homelessness.”
Around the country, food pantry directors are girding for an influx of hungry
adults as the work requirement re-emerges. In Wisconsin, the time limit kicked
in statewide on April 1, and the independent Legislative Fiscal Bureau there has
estimated that 31,000 people could lose their food stamps.
“We’re going to run out of food,” said Sherrie Tussler, the executive director
of the Hunger Task Force Milwaukee. “It’s going to cause wide-scale hunger here
in Milwaukee, and we’re in trouble.”
The staff at the food pantry in Brunswick estimated that 10 clients a week have
been losing their food stamps to this provision. It expects that it will see an
increase in visits and the amount of food it will need to provide.
Jackie Dulack, 38, picked up bread and pork at the Brunswick pantry, and had no
plan for when the food ran out. Ms. Dulack, who said she was unemployed and had
no income, received a letter from the state last fall saying she would lose her
food stamps if she did not meet the work requirement.
She said that her food stamps had since been cut off and that the general
assistance office had told her that she would need to be working to get them
back. (The State Department of Health and Human Services would not confirm her
benefit status, citing privacy law.)
Ms. Dulack is training to become a personal care aide, but her courses do not
count toward the job-training requirement.
“How,” she wondered, “do you expect people to live and feed themselves and
survive with nothing?”
Officials have emphasized that people can meet the work requirement by
volunteering about six hours a week, and that is happening here: Warren Bailey,
40, has been unable to find work in towing or fast food and so has signed up as
a pantry volunteer. But there is concern in the state that there is not enough
volunteering or job-training capacity for food stamp recipients who cannot find
jobs, especially in rural parts.
“If you’re not lucky like me and found this place, the food pantry, I don’t even
know where else I would go,” Mr. Bailey said.
In Kansas, the number of childless, able-bodied adults receiving food stamps
dropped by 15,000 in the month after the waiver expired in December 2013,
compared with the roughly 3,000 to 4,000 people who had been leaving the program
monthly before the change, according to the Center for Budget and Policy
Priorities.
In some states, advocates have sounded the alarm about the administration of the
change. After Minnesota became ineligible for a statewide waiver at the end of
2013, Colleen Moriarty of Hunger Solutions was alarmed, she said, when more than
twice as many adults as predicted lost food stamps. And legal advocates in Ohio
filed a civil rights complaint after the state declined the waiver for 2014 for
all but 16 rural counties, noting that cities with large populations of poor
minority residents were not in counties that received the waiver.
A version of this article appears in print on April 12, 2015, on page A17 of the
New York edition with the headline: States Tighten Rules for Receiving Food
Stamps as Economy Improves.
States Tighten Conditions for Receiving Food Stamps as the
Economy Improves,
NYT, April 11, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/us/politics/states-tighten-conditions-for-receiving-food-stamps-as-the-economy-improves.html
How Expensive It Is to Be Poor
JAN. 18, 2015
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center released a study that
found that most wealthy Americans believed “poor people today have it easy
because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
This is an infuriatingly obtuse view of what it means to be poor in this country
— the soul-rending omnipresence of worry and fear, of weariness and fatigue.
This can be the view only of those who have not known — or have long forgotten —
what poverty truly means.
“Easy” is a word not easily spoken among the poor. Things are hard — the times
are hard, the work is hard, the way is hard. “Easy” is for uninformed
explanations issued by the willfully callous and the haughtily blind.
Allow me to explain, as James Baldwin put it, a few illustrations of “how
extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
First, many poor people work, but they just don’t make enough to move out of
poverty — an estimated 11 million Americans fall into this category.
And yet, whatever the poor earn is likely to be more heavily taxed than the
earnings of wealthier citizens, according to a new analysis by the Institute on
Taxation and Economic Policy. As The New York Times put it last week:
“According to the study, in 2015 the poorest fifth of Americans will pay on
average 10.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes, the middle fifth
will pay 9.4 percent and the top 1 percent will average 5.4 percent.”
In addition, many low-income people are “unbanked” (not served by a financial
institution), and thus nearly eaten alive by exorbitant fees. As the St. Louis
Federal Reserve pointed out in 2010:
“Unbanked consumers spend approximately 2.5 to 3 percent of a government
benefits check and between 4 percent and 5 percent of payroll check just to cash
them. Additional dollars are spent to purchase money orders to pay routine
monthly expenses. When you consider the cost for cashing a bi-weekly payroll
check and buying about six money orders each month, a household with a net
income of $20,000 may pay as much as $1,200 annually for alternative service
fees — substantially more than the expense of a monthly checking account.”
Even when low-income people can become affiliated with a bank, those banks are
increasingly making them pay “steep rates for loans and high fees on basic
checking accounts,” as The Times’s DealBook blog put it last year.
And poor people can have a hard time getting credit. As The Washington Post put
it, the excesses of the subprime boom have led conventional banks to stay away
from the riskiest borrowers, leaving them “all but cut off from access to big
loans, like mortgages.”
One way to move up the ladder and out of poverty is through higher education,
but even that is not without disproportionate costs. As the Institute for
College Access and Success noted in March:
“Graduates who received Pell Grants, most of whom had family
incomes under $40,000, were much more likely to borrow and to borrow more. Among
graduating seniors who ever received a Pell Grant, 88 percent had student loans
in 2012, with an average of $31,200 per borrower. In contrast, 53 percent of
those who never received a Pell Grant had debt, with an average of $26,450 per
borrower.”
And often, work or school requires transportation, which can be another
outrageous expense. According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human
Rights:
“Low- and moderate-income households spend 42 percent of their total annual
income on transportation, including those who live in rural areas, as compared
to middle-income households, who spend less than 22 percent of their annual
income on transportation.”
And besides, having a car can make prime targets of the poor. One pernicious
practice that the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. — and the protests
that followed — resurfaced was the degree to which some local municipalities
profit from police departments targeting poor communities, with a raft of stops,
fines, summonses and arrests supported by police actions and complicit courts.
As NPR reported in August:
“In 2013, the municipal court in Ferguson — a city of 21,135 people — issued
32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses, mostly driving violations.”
The story continued:
“ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis-area public defender group, says in its report
that more than half the courts in St. Louis County engage in the ‘illegal and
harmful practices’ of charging high court fines and fees on nonviolent offenses
like traffic violations — and then arresting people when they don’t pay.”
The list of hardships could go on for several more columns, but you get the
point: Being poor is anything but easy.
I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at
chblow@nytimes.com.
How Expensive It Is to Be Poor,
NYT,
JAN 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/opinion/
charles-blow-how-expensive-it-is-to-be-poor.html
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