A Tale of Two Cities: The worst of times for the city's poor
By Daniel Goren
Most of the poor live in neighborhoods the wealthy rarely see, and a good portion of their days are spent in the offices of government agencies that often seem to create more suffering than comfort. A review of hundreds of court documents, academic studies, government audits and reports, and hundreds of interviews with community advocates, current and former city officials, police officers, scholars, and the poor themselves, shows that former Democratic mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer's "other New York" is entrenched and growing, and agencies that serve it appear unprepared for the task. More...
The Same Old Story: Will the city's Human Resources Administration ever right itself?
By Danielle Knight
Since the early 20th century, the various administrations of New York City have restructured the social service bureaucracy over and over, attempting to provide support to the city's poorest citizens. At the turn of the century, the agency was called the Department of Public Charities. It later became the Department of Welfare and eventually the Human Resources Administration. Yet with each restructuring, the core deficiencies of the system have remained the same, and people have been left without the support they need to escape poverty. More...
Mother's Day and Every Other Day: How the homeless survive in New York
By Lizzie O'Leary
The Emergency Assistance Unit, or EAU, is ground zero for homeless families. A low, brick building between a parking lot and a trash-filled park ten blocks from Yankee Stadium, the EAU is the sole entryway to the New York City family shelter system. On the corner, directly in front of the door, a crowd of families gathered with whatever they could carry, waiting to be taken to their overnight placement — the hotel or temporary shelter provided by the Department of Homeless Services. Children cried and parents lost their patience as the crowd packed into the yellow school buses and vans that would transport them to shelter. As each bus departed, a new group of families assembled, each surrounded by their belongings. Some carried their possessions in suitcases and duffel bags. Others crammed their clothes and belongings into black plastic garbage bags. More...
Frontline: The daily battle in the city's job centers
By E. L. Wasson
Multiple visits to nine of New York City's job centers and an examination of class-action lawsuits and state audits indicates that efforts to lift the city's poorest permanently out of poverty are being stymied by a persistent adversarial culture between front-line workers and clients; by confusing eligibility rules and contradictory performance goals; and by some workers who appear under-trained or wholly unqualified. More...
Go Figure: Determining the success of Welfare to Work is almost impossible
By Carrie Levine
The city has paid private contractors like America Works tens of millions of dollars to place public assistance recipients in jobs over the past three years, and welfare recipients have dropped off the rolls at record rates. But the argument over whether privatizing employment services for welfare recipients is helping the poor is taking place with little solid information to document how effective the programs have been. More...
Big Talk, Small Return: The city’s welfare fraud unit punishes many innocent people
By Andrew Blackman
In 2002, an internal Eligibility Verification Review report showed that it conducted 55,782 interviews. Out of those 55,782 cases, it discovered 58 people with duplicate cases open, 20 people who provided false documentation, and four people who gave a false Social Security number. Meanwhile, it denied public assistance to thousands of people for missing interview appointments, failing to cooperate fully with staff, or not being home when the investigators called. Even for those who are eventually approved for public assistance, EVR is a long and often frustrating process, riddled with delays, inconsistencies and long, long waits at the single EVR office in downtown Brooklyn. More...
Stamped Out: Negotiating the food stamp bureaucracy
By Kate Pickert
Between Nov. 25 and Dec. 2, 2002, three women and one man walked into 32 New York City food stamp offices. They each told city workers they were childless single adults earning $900 in gross salary per month. They asked for food stamp applications. Sometimes, they didn’t get them. They looked for food stamp information posted on the walls. Sometimes, they didn’t see it. Fortunately for them, these four people could afford to buy groceries and feed their families. They didn’t need food stamps because they are not poor. These four people work for the City Council’s investigation unit and visited the food stamp offices to gauge the city’s competence in administering a federally funded nutrition program. The investigation revealed a system still wrought with glaring inadequacies. More...
Small Bites, Big Apple: The quest to feed New York's hungry
By Cynthia Needham
The sidewalk was empty that day in February 2003, except for the snow drifts, which climbed up the side of the Bethel Holy Church in Harlem, partially covering the sign: No Soup Kitchen Today. Alan Davis, a middle-aged homeless man, walked slowly down the block and sighed when he saw it. "Well that's too bad," he said, more disappointed than angry. He'd seen it before. Adverse weather, a lack of food and funding problems make signs like that a familiar sight in New York City. More...
When Work Isn't Enough: New York City's working poor
By Joel Rubin
The working poor service those wealthier than themselves. They are custodians, security guards, cashiers, retail sales workers and home health attendants. They work the "McJobs" at fast-food joints throughout the city, and labor at sewing machines in Chinatown. Most low-wage workers are not members of unions. And critically, nine out of 10 of the working poor are adults. "These are not teenagers working part-time after school flipping burgers," said David Jones, president of the Community Service Society. "These are adults trying to support their families." More...
Jobless, Homeless and Invisible: The plight of New York's mentally-ill
poor
By Daniel Goren
The mentally ill in New York City struggle — period. But those unfortunate enough to be both mentally ill and poor? They wait, sometimes for days, to sign up for public assistance while suffering from depression, paranoia, hallucinations, convulsions and anxiety. Some later lose those benefits because of bureaucratic bungling and are forced to re-apply. Listing their illness on work applications, they fear, will expose them to discrimination. Many don't work and instead scrape by on benefits that are barely enough to cover two nutritious meals a day. "Home" is often a dirty, dangerous city-funded apartment. More...
Fostering Neglect: How New York City's foster care system fails children
By Susan Phillips
As a billion dollar industry aimed at caring for and protecting some of the city's poorest and most vulnerable children, New York's foster care system, on many levels, fails to provide a viable alternative to remaining at home. The Administration for Children's Services under Commissioner William C. Bell is lauded by some for improving preventive services for at-risk families, providing better training for front-line workers and finally starting to confront the race and class biases that permeate the child protective system. But the agency still spends about $2 billion a year removing a disproportionate amount of poor, black and Latino kids from their homes, leaving traumatized children in the care of mostly untrained strangers who are expected to work miracles. An over-burdened, adversarial family court system, modeled after the criminal courts, plunges many defensive and desperate parents into vexation and despair. More...
All in the Family: The poor and their struggle to stay together
By Chris Maag
Despite terrible pressures, many poor families find the strength they need to stay together. They depend on informal systems of support, including friends and relatives. They depend on private organizations, including churches and after-school programs. And they depend, sometimes warily, on government programs. More...
What Golden Years? New York's elderly poor battle for their dignity
By Clancy Nolan
When Christos Goussis fell behind on his rent payments, he was
72 years old and living alone in an apartment in Queens. He had
survived for a time on his savings, supplemented by a monthly
$77 Social Security check. But by November 2001, he had exhausted
his savings and he stopped paying his rent, power and phone bills.
Goussis, a Greek immigrant, had no family or friends in the United
States and had not applied for Medicaid, the federal health insurance
plan for the poor. Goussis was blind, and suffered from prostate
cancer, hypertension, atrial fibrillation (a fluttering of the
heart's chambers) and vertigo. More...
Pushing Uphill: The struggle to house homeless people with HIV and AIDS
By Christine Ong
Ana Ojeda does not associate with the other tenants in the Broadway Studios on West 101st Street in Manhattan. Drugs are rampant, she said. Ojeda lives in a tiny room with no bathroom of her own. Communal bathrooms are across the hall. But the toilets, Ojeda said, are often clogged with syringes and paper towels. "They let people in and they go in the bathrooms and do drugs," she said. Ojeda, 38, goes from floor to floor in search of toilets that work. More...
Dream Deferred: For immigrants, the fight for a better life is doubly difficult
By Barney Gimbel
Three months ago, Anatoly Aronsky had a comfortable life in the Ukraine. His day started at 7:30 a.m., when he ate breakfast and read the newspaper in the kitchen of his modest two-bedroom condominium in Kiev. He would help his wife, Shoepan, pack lunch for his young son, Ilya, and then hop in the company sedan that drove him the 30 minutes to work. His office at the investment banking firm where he worked was small, but it had a large window that overlooked the city where he was born. Behind his desk, his two doctoral degrees — one in geophysical engineering, the other in economics — hung next to the photograph of his family at his son's eighth birthday party. Now, Anatoly Aronsky is living a nightmare in New York City. More...
Hooked: Drug addiction and crime in New York
By Eric Gershon
Virtually all the neighborhoods identified by the city health
department as having the greatest need for publicly funded substance
abuse treatment facilities are in high-crime, low-income neighborhoods:
Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and East New York
in Brooklyn; East, Central and West Harlem in Manhattan; the South
and East Bronx; Far Rockaway and South Jamaica, Queens; Stapleton
in Staten Island. More...
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