At first, Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor of health and human services, can seem unexpectedly enthusiastic about having a job that immerses her in poverty and suffering. Despite the many problems in her portfolio, she remains upbeat: she firmly believes that she and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Unaff.) have done and will be able to do a lot to change things.
“I am adoring my job,” she said, her blue eyes twinkling as she sat in a conference room on the first floor of City Hall. “I’m a very hands-on manager. I really love the detail.”
The job fits well with the personality and interests of a woman who has spent 30 years in city government.
“Some of that is a little bit geeky, I guess,” she said.
Gibbs oversees the departments of homeless services, children’s services, health and mental hygiene, aging, correction, probation and juvenile justice. She believes that rather than dealing with individual families or people case by case, the city has an obligation to attack each problem at its core. But each case can be instructive, she said.
“When one person comes in,” she said, “instead of just dealing with them on that issue, you can have a chance to look at the whole household and the history to see how this crisis is not a stand-alone incident, but in fact a symptom of a broader issue.”
Gibbs, who led the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) for four years prior to her appointment as deputy mayor, and before that held positions in the Koch and Giuliani administrations, views problems through a decidedly bureaucratic lens.
“The theme of my work here at City Hall,” she said, “has really been about ‘How can we help the agencies to leverage each other’s actions in a way that gives us a better result for our clients and their families?’”  
As deputy mayor, Gibbs, the lifetime bureaucrat, and Bloomberg, the billionaire technocrat, have been trying to untangle the web of funding streams, independent regulatory agencies and technological headaches that she says have led to many lost opportunities in health and human services. Gibbs said Bloomberg has turned to her to develop a more holistic approach toward the agencies now under her control.
Many of Bloomberg’s signature policies—and the ones which have actually been implemented—fall under her supervision, including the smoking and trans-fat bans and his anti-poverty and homelessness prevention programs.
For the last year, she has been administering a program which offers cash incentives to the poor of up to $5,000 annually to meet goals like attending medical check-ups, appearing at parent-teacher meetings and holding down jobs.
The program, modeled on one she and the mayor studied on a trip to Mexico City last April, is about to be reviewed for its efficacy.
“Most of the programs are in the first year of implementation, so we’ll start to see some of the results,” she said. “This year and into the next, it will be finding what is working, and what should be scaled up.”
Welfare advocates commended the mayor for the cash transfer program, though some conservative groups argued the payments provide a false incentive for people to do what they believe everyone should already be doing. Gibbs is a staunch supporter of the program, but she and the mayor acknowledge their critics—in her Inner Circle debut in March, they joked about the program, with the mayor pretending to offer Gibbs cash for being on time and conveying her message.
As deputy mayor, Gibbs has continued the work she began as DHS commissioner, when she oversaw the opening of over 2,000 new shelters and distribution of millions of dollars to landlords to place homeless people in apartments.
Gibbs said that her biggest challenge has been reducing the number of homeless families in the city. In 1998, the city recorded having 4,500 homeless families. That number has since doubled, even as Gibbs and the mayor have been trying to develop ways to fulfill his 2004 promise for a two-thirds reduction in the homeless population by the end of his term.
Earlier this month, the administration announced that street homelessness in the city was down 12 percent since the previous year and down 25 percent from 2005.
But with a year left, the numbers remain high: a Coalition for the Homeless report released in March found 35,000 people sleeping in city shelters nightly in 2007. During the last homeless crisis in the late 1980s, the shelter population hovered around 25,000.




Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst at the Coalition, accused Gibbs and the mayor of cutting off dialogue with advocates and service providers, which he said contributed to an administration failure.
“Last year was the worst year for family homelessness in modern New York City history,” he said.
Gibbs argues that advocacy groups are ignoring certain statistics in favor of others.
“I think there are many advocacy organizations that, in the interest of attracting attention to their cause, can be selective about how they report data,” she said. “Yes, there are too many homeless people. But let’s look at the big picture, and let’s actually try to figure out where we have common ground.”
She said an ongoing class action lawsuit brought by the New York Legal Aid Society has in part complicated efforts. Currently, the city cannot force homeless families to live in apartments they have previously rejected. The lawsuit, which has been litigated for over 20 years, aims to change that, giving the city the power to keep families in these apartments, and thereby prevent them from returning to the streets.
Robert Hess, Gibbs’ successor as DHS commissioner, said that having a former DHS commissioner as deputy mayor has been extremely helpful in getting the administration to focus on homelessness.
“Linda Gibbs has given keen insight into the inner workings of DHS and has been an invaluable collaborator,” he wrote, via email.
At the outset of a new recession, Gibbs said she is concerned that social services for homeless and needy children could get slashed out of the city’s budget.
“I think the real challenges in the social services is that when the fiscal situation worsens, some of the first programs that become at risk are those that in the long run can have a cost,” she said.
While a slimmer city budget could doom some homeless shelters, the city has other programs in place to address the problems, she said.
“We have proven strategies around homeless prevention and permanency solutions that are cheaper than shelters,” she said.
There is uncertainty ahead for the city, and in some ways for Gibbs as well. Serving as deputy mayor is the pinnacle of her life in government, she said.
“I have the job I always wanted,” Gibbs said. “After that, what happens, I don’t know.”
Gibbs, who majored in art in college before going to law school, has spent her life around politicians and government workers, and her husband is a lobbyist.
But whatever she does next, she ruled out lobbying, running for office or practicing law.
“Those are the top three things I definitely don’t want to do,” she said laughing.