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As Bloomberg Crafts Anti-Poverty Specifics, Optimism and Worries
Other cities likely to watch New York’s performance closely

By Neil deMause

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (R) Commission on Economic Opportunities issued its recommendations for fighting poverty last September, Bloomberg indicated that city agencies would have 60 days to come up with plans for implementing them. Four months later, while the city has appointed a new poverty czar and announced funding goals, few other details have been made public.

Back in December, Bloomberg announced the appointment of management consultant Veronica White to run his new Center for Economic Opportunity. He also committed to raising anti-poverty spending by $150 million, two-thirds of which would go to an “Innovation Fund” to finance new initiatives.

While the mayor said the Center would ultimately oversee more than 30 programs to “increase opportunity,” only a handful have been even hinted at in public: a refundable state child-care tax credit (which would require state legislative approval), individual development accounts to help encourage savings, job training targeted to growth industries, and increased outreach to encourage poor people to apply for the earned income tax credit and fend off predatory lenders.

While poverty experts cheered the mayor’s newfound commitment to aiding the needy, most are taking a wait-and-see attitude on the actual follow through.

“I’m very, very happy about the dollar commitment,” said Bill de Blasio (D-Brooklyn), chair of the Council’s General Welfare Committee. “The big outstanding question is the detail of how it’s going to be implemented.”

In particular, de Blasio hopes the mayor will devote more attention to increasing access to food stamps, which the poverty commission reported are only going to 72 percent of eligible New Yorkers.

Last April, Bloomberg overruled his own aides and blocked an application for a federal waiver that would have allowed the city to provide the federally funded benefit to more New Yorkers. According to Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, 361,000 fewer city residents are receiving food stamps now than 11 years ago, despite continued high levels of need.

In fact, Berg said, hunger has been notable for its absence from the mayor’s public statements, with Bloomberg instead focusing on improved food quality in low-income neighborhoods. And while Berg declared himself “pretty thrilled” with many of the new initiatives, he was particularly interested in individual development accounts, which for the first time would allow New Yorkers to accumulate savings without losing food stamps and other benefits, though he worries that “hinted in the rhetoric is perhaps the assumption that poor people are poor because they just don’t know how to spend their own money. Certainly financial education can help, but if you’re earning $14,000 a year and you’re paying $2,000 a month in rent, all the education in the world isn’t going to help your situation.”

As soon as Bloomberg announces the specifics of his plan, de Blasio plans to hold public hearings on them. He voiced concern that a cross-agency program like Bloomberg’s presents some especially tricky challenges.

“Look at our intelligence agencies at the federal level,” de Blasio said. “The minute you ask agencies to share and be creative and knock down turf walls, it’s difficult.”

Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs, who oversees many of the agencies likely to be involved, did not return calls by press time for comment on how the Bloomberg administration was planning to facilitate the transition, or any of the other specifics planned.

Mark Greenberg, director of the D.C.-based Center for American Progress’ poverty task force, says with the U.S. Conference of Mayors preparing its own study of ways to combat poverty, other cities will likely be watching New York’s performance closely.