History > 2008 > USA > Poverty (I)

Cal Grondahl

Utah Standard Examiner

Cagle

18.9.2008

L: US President George W. Bush.

Al Meyerhoff,

Legal Voice for the Poor,

Dies at 61

December 25, 2008
The New York Times
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Al Meyerhoff, a leading labor, environmental and civil rights lawyer who brought a landmark case to stop sweatshop conditions for 30,000 workers on the Pacific island of Saipan, died on Sunday in Los Angeles, where he lived. He was 61.

The cause was complications of leukemia, his wife, Marcia Brandwynne, said.

Mr. Meyerhoff, a loud, friendly bear of a man with a thick mane of tousled hair, rose to prominence in several legal fields. As a civil rights litigator, he successfully challenged a California law that prevented illegal immigrant children from attending public school. As an environmental lawyer — he worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council for 17 years — he challenged the continued use of cancer-causing pesticides.

As a labor lawyer, he was co-lead counsel in suing Gap, Nordstrom, Ralph Lauren and 20 other retailers, accused of obtaining garments from Saipan factories that used guard dogs and had barbed-wire fences. Many of the workers, some of whom Mr. Meyerhoff said were indentured servants, were immigrants from China who had paid several thousand dollars to work in Saipan and were forced to toil 12 hours a day, seven days a week, often without overtime pay.

“Saipan is America’s worst sweatshop,” Mr. Meyerhoff said in an interview with The New York Times in 1999, referring to the island in the Northern Marianas Islands, an American commonwealth near the Philippines. The lawsuit was one of the most ambitious ever brought against sweatshops, sending a signal to sweatshop owners in dozens of countries to improve conditions.

As part of the $20 million settlement, the apparel companies agreed to pay back wages, follow a code of workplace conduct and pay for an independent monitor to inspect the Saipan factories. Mr. Meyerhoff waived any fees.

Over the decades, Mr. Meyerhoff produced numerous op-ed articles for The Los Angeles Times and The Huffington Post Web site, many letters in The New York Times and The Washington Post and articles in law journals and environmental magazines. He also testified 50 times before Congressional committees.

“I was meant to do this work,” Mr. Meyerhoff told online magazine of the Cornell University Law School this year.

Albert Henry Meyerhoff Jr. was born in Ellington, Conn., on Sept. 20, 1947. He told the Cornell Web magazine that as a boy he was harassed by bullies and that as a result he developed “an active dislike of the abuse of power.”

Mr. Meyerhoff graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1969 and from the Cornell law school in 1972. After law school, he turned down a high-paying corporate law job to take a $60-a-week position with California Rural Legal Assistance, which represented migrant workers and the rural poor. In one lawsuit, he challenged the University of California over its underwriting of research on farm mechanization, saying it hurt farm workers and family farms.

In 1981 Mr. Meyerhoff joined the Natural Resources Defense Council and became director of its public health program. He helped pressure the chemical industry to adopt tougher standards on pesticides by invoking a rarely used amendment under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that prohibited the use of animal carcinogens in processed foods. His litigation helped persuade the industry to ban several dozen carcinogenic pesticides.

In 1988, he joined Coughlin Stoia, a class action law firm, from which he brought the Saipan lawsuit, sued Enron and challenged Mexican cross-border trucking, asserting that it violated United States health and safety standards.

Besides his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Leah, of New York City, his mother, Ruth, of Ellington, Conn., and his brothers, George of Van Nuys, Calif., and Alan of Panama City, Fla.

“He was a warrior against the chemical industry,” Frances Beinecke, president of the N.R.D.C., said of Mr. Meyerhoff. “He was a champion of the underserved. He fought long and hard to make the world a safer place for farm workers, for kids, for people working in factories and for people living in poverty who couldn’t represent themselves.”

Al Meyerhoff, Legal Voice for the Poor, Dies at 61, NYT, 25.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/business/25meyerhoff.html

Uninsured Put a Strain on Hospitals

December 9, 2008
The New York Times
By REED ABELSON

As increasing numbers of the unemployed and uninsured turn to the nation’s emergency rooms as a medical last resort, doctors warn that the centers — many already overburdened — could have even more trouble handling the heart attacks, broken bones and other traumas that define their core mission.

Even before the recession became evident, many emergency rooms around the country were already overcrowded, with dangerously long waits for some patients and the frequent need to redirect ambulances to other hospitals.

“We have no capacity now,” said Dr. Angela F. Gardner, the president-elect of the American College of Emergency Physicians, which represents 27,000 emergency doctors. “There’s no way we have room for any more people to come to the table.”

In a report to be released Tuesday, her group warns that the nation’s system of emergency rooms is in “serious condition.” Dr. Gardner argues that any public discussion of overhauling the current health system must include the nation’s emergency departments.

The number of patients coming to emergency departments has been steadily increasing. Helping push up that volume have been the growing ranks of the uninsured, because emergency rooms are legally obliged to see all patients who enter their doors, regardless of their ability to pay. But even insured patients who have no quick access to regular doctors are also showing up — among them older people, who represent the fastest growing population of emergency room visitors.

So far, there are no firm figures on the recent influx. But even two years ago, when a government survey found that the annual volume of visits to emergency departments had reached 120 million — a third higher than a decade earlier — doctors considered many emergency rooms overburdened.

Now the recession, whose full impact is yet to be seen, threatens to make conditions even worse, emergency doctors say. Hospitals are absorbing increasing amounts in unpaid medical bills, and some are already experiencing much higher numbers of patients without insurance.

For example, Denver Health, a public hospital system, had a 19 percent increase in emergency visits by uninsured patients in November — to 3,325, up from 2,792 a year earlier.

“Virtually every time I work a nine-hour shift, I encounter a couple of patients who have never been here before because they’ve just lost their insurance,” said Dr. Vincent J. Markovchick, the director of the hospital’s emergency medical services.

They include patients like Matthew Armijo, 29, who was laid off from his client services job at a technology company in August and could continue his health insurance only through October. He showed up at Denver Health’s urgent care center, a part of the emergency department, suffering from increasing abdominal pain. Mr. Armijo said he went there because he would not have to pay anything.

Denver Health expects the amount of care it delivers for which it will never be paid to grow to more than $300 million this year, compared with $276 million in 2007.

Some patients are people who have delayed seeking medical care as long as they can, like those who arrive during an asthma attack after deferring treatment.

“I am definitely seeing patients coming in presenting worse in their illness because they are further along,” said Dr. Katherine A. Bakes, the director of the program’s emergency services for children.

Other doctors around the country also report treating people who seem to have no other option. One emergency room doctor in Iowa, Dr. Thomas E. Benzoni, said he recently saw a mother come in with her two children for what he thought was routine care. When he asked her why she had not gone to her family doctor, she said she did not have health insurance.

“I don’t know what else she was supposed to do,” Dr. Benzoni said.

The increase is not affecting all emergency rooms. Some emergency physicians, in fact, said there had actually been a recent decline in visits. A report by the American Hospital Association for July, August and September found a slight overall decrease in hospital traffic, including emergency visits, as some people apparently sought to avoid spending money on anything they did not deem absolutely essential.

But as the recession continues, many officials of the college of emergency doctors predict it is only a matter of time until the rising number of uninsured and the delays in getting primary care create a crisis.

“I think we’re seeing the tip,” said Dr. Nicholas J. Jouriles, the group’s current president. Patients, he said, will have no choice but to come to the emergency department when they have no money or insurance. “They will get turned away elsewhere,” he said.

One of the doctors’ major concerns is the long waits by patients requiring a hospital bed. The doctors group, surveying its members last year, learned of at least 200 deaths related to the practice of “boarding” — in which patients on stretchers line the corridors until they can be moved into a bed.

“Crowding is a national public health problem,” said Dr. Jesse M. Pines, an emergency physician in Philadelphia.

Patients forced to wait for hours on end for a bed clearly suffer.

“It was pure hell,” recalled Robert Roth, whose 90-year-old mother, Kato, last year spent 36 hours at the emergency department of a Queens hospital, near her home in Jackson Heights, waiting for a room after going to the emergency room in the middle of the night. Mrs. Roth, who had a recent series of falls, said she had been hearing music in her ears, and both her son and the doctor he called were worried about a possible stroke.

After the first five hours of waiting, she became increasingly disoriented and delusional. Mr. Roth was unable to stay with her during the entire wait. After he left and returned, he said, the hospital staff told him they had no idea where she was. She turned up in an empty room off the emergency department, and her physical and mental condition had clearly deteriorated, Mr. Roth said. She believed that she had been kidnapped.

When she had to go several weeks later to another emergency department in Manhattan, she endured a 20-hour wait for a room, again becoming disoriented after several hours, forcing her to be sedated.

The emergency staffs “just seemed overwhelmed, overwhelmed,” said Mr. Roth, who wondered why emergency departments could not handle the elderly in a special fashion.

Dr. Ann S. O’Malley is a physician and senior researcher for the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonprofit group in Washington that has studied emergency services in different communities. While some hospitals have taken steps to reduce crowding and move patients more efficiently from the emergency department into rooms, Dr. O’Malley said, others have responded by expanding their facilities — attracting more patients.

“Emergency departments,” she said, “are a kind of barometer of the general health of the rest of the system.”

Dr. Eric J. Lavonas, an emergency physician in Denver, said: “The nation’s emergency rooms are the end of the line. We will strain and stretch and bulge under the weight.”

Dr. Gardner, of the emergency doctors’ group, said the question now is whether the emergency room safety net will break — how often people with heart attacks will not be able to get care in time to be saved. Her group’s report, she said, is meant to alert people to the precarious nature of the system.

“What they don’t understand,” she said, “is that the system is fundamentally flawed and will fail.”

Melinda Sink contributed reporting from Denver.

    Uninsured Put a Strain on Hospitals, NYT, 9.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/business/09emergency.html

Governors Urge Obama

to Help The Poor,

Boost Economy

December 2, 2008
Filed at 1:03 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - U.S. state governors urged President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday to pump money into infrastructure and help support the poor as a sinking economy hits state budgets hard.

Obama, who takes over from President George W. Bush on January 20, pledged to involve states in his plans to tackle the U.S. recession and create or save 2.5 million jobs.

The president-elect has spent much of the time since his November 4 victory over Republican John McCain forming his economic team and advocating a massive new stimulus package.

"I'm not simply asking the nation's governors to help implement our economic recovery plan, I'm going to be interested in having you help draft and shape that economic plan," Obama told a meeting that included Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate.

"I'm going to listen to you, especially when we disagree because one of the things that has served me well in my career is discovering that I don't know everything," Obama said.

The meeting came the day after the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed that the United States had entered recession in December 2007. The downturn, which many economists expect to persist through the middle of the next year, is already third-longest since the Great Depression.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, touted as a possible energy secretary in the Obama administration, opened the meeting by pressing for Congress to extend unemployment benefits and increase food stamp availability.

"Those are things that don't go to us as governors, don't go to our budgets but help our citizens," he said.

Rendell said on Monday governors would ask for $136 billion in infrastructure funds to stimulate the economy immediately and cover health care for the poor.

Obama acknowledged that, unlike the federal government, U.S. states had to balance their budgets. He said immediate measures were needed to help deal with the crisis.

"Forty-one of the states that are represented here are likely to face budget shortfalls this year or next, forcing you to choose between reining in spending and raising taxes," Obama said. "To solve this crisis and to ease the burden on our states, we need action and we need action swiftly."

Nearly all 50 governors attended, including California's Arnold Schwarzenegger, who on Monday declared a fiscal emergency and called lawmakers into a special session to tackle a widening budget gap.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)

(additional reporting by Deborah Charles and Lisa Lambert

Governors Urge Obama to Help The Poor, Boost Economy, NYT, 2.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/washington/politics-us-usa-obama.html

Editorial

Sewing Up the Safety Net

November 27, 2008
The New York Times

Largely missing from the discussion about the faltering economy is the recession’s impact on the 37 million Americans who are already living at or below the poverty line — and the millions more who will inevitably join their ranks as the downturn worsens.

Poverty and joblessness go hand in hand. If unemployment rises in the coming year from today’s 6.5 percent to 9 percent, as some analysts predict, another 7.5 million to 10.3 million people could become poor, according to a new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The prospect of nearly 50 million Americans in poverty is even more daunting when one considers the holes that have been punched in the safety net over the last quarter-century. Since the Reagan administration, the federal government has steadily reduced its role in curtailing poverty, or even in coordinating state and local efforts to help alleviate it.

Meanwhile, most states reduced or eliminated cash assistance for single poor adults and limited access to food stamps. Stricter eligibility requirements keep thousands of people from collecting jobless benefits. Facing budget deficits, cash-strapped states will be tempted to cut social programs even more. The experience of being poor in America, never easy, will soon become even more difficult for more people — unless Congress boosts food stamps, modernizes the unemployment compensation system and takes other steps to strengthen the ability of the federal and state governments to help the millions who will need assistance.

This is all the more important since the current poverty statistics significantly understate reality. The federal yardstick used to gauge poverty is severely outdated, giving too much weight to some factors in a typical family budget, like the cost of food, and not counting others, like the cost of child care and out-of-pocket medical costs. It also doesn’t consider regional differences in the cost of living and doesn’t include the cost of child care, taxes or the value of noncash benefits such as food stamps or tax credits.

The National Academy of Sciences years ago recommended a new measure of poverty that takes such variables into account. But the revised framework has never been adopted because, among other reasons, it would add several million more people to the ranks of the poor.

If there was ever a time for more precise measurements, it is now. Better numbers will produce a better understanding of poverty, and will enhance Washington’s ability to respond in the difficult days ahead.

    Sewing Up the Safety Net, NYT, 27.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/opinion/27thu3.html

States forced

to cut health coverage for poor

28.10.2008
USA Today
By Julie Appleby

Economic troubles are forcing states to scale back safety-net health-coverage programs — even as they brace for more residents who will need help paying for care.

Many cuts affect Medicaid, which pays for health coverage for 50 million low-income adults and children nationwide, including nearly half of all nursing home care. The joint federal-state program is a target because it consumes an average 17% of state budgets — the second-biggest chunk of spending in most states, right behind education.

"Medicaid programs across the U.S. are going to be severely damaged," says Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association. He expects some hospitals nationwide may drop services and some hospitals and nursing homes may lay off employees.

Among the cuts:

• Hawaii this month halted funding for a 7-month-old program aimed at covering all the state's uninsured children.

• South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford must decide by Thursday whether to sign a budget that would slash $160 million in health care, including an 8.1% cut to Medicaid and a 10.8% cut to the Department of Mental Health. Programs to help autistic children, the elderly who need prescription drugs and low-income workers may be hit.

• California in July cut payments to hospitals 10% under its Medicaid program, Medi-Cal. It had planned to restore 5% in March, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called an emergency legislative session Nov. 5 to deal with lower-than-expected revenues.

Health care is a likely target, says Jan Emerson of the California Hospital Association, who expects more hospitals to drop out of Medi-Cal if extra cuts occur. Less than half the state's hospitals currently contract with Medi-Cal. They treat Medi-Cal patients in their ERs, but then transfer them to other hospitals.

• Massachusetts this month cut $293 million from its Medicaid budget, including $40 million from the Cambridge Health Alliance for care it already provided to low-income residents. The alliance, which runs three hospitals and dozens of clinics, says that cut plus other state cuts could total an amount equal to the cost of 650 full-time employees — or 20% of its workforce. "We can't absorb that without some serious re-evaluation of what we do," spokesman Doug Bailey says. "Everything is on the table."

The cuts follow several years of strong budgets and state efforts to bring health coverage to more low-income adults and children.

"When the economy goes down, states have increased pressure (from more uninsured), yet have to curtail plans to broaden coverage," says Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-partisan think tank.

For every 1% jump in unemployment, about 1 million more people enroll in Medicaid, the group found in September.

Lawmakers in at least 27 states are facing budget gaps just months after dealing with some of the largest shortfalls since the recession in 2001, reports the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank. States can only make Medicaid cuts that affect people covered under optional state programs, such as children whose families earn slightly more than federal guidelines require.

"We're expecting budget gaps for the rest of this year and into fiscal 2010 to be about $100 billion," says Elizabeth McNichol, a senior fellow at the center. "Health care gets hit hard when states have to cut back."

    States forced to cut health coverage for poor, UT, 28.10.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-10-28-health-cuts_N.htm

U.S. Reports Drop in Homeless Population

July 30, 2008
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON — The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — from 175,914 to 123,833 — from 2005 to 2007, Bush administration officials said on Tuesday.

Housing officials say the statistics, which are collected annually from more than 3,800 cities and counties, may reflect better data collection and some variation in the number of communities reporting. But officials also attribute much of the decline to a policy shift promoted by Congress and the administration that has focused federal and local resources on finding stable housing for homeless people suffering from drug addiction, mental illness or physical disabilities, long deemed the hardest to help in the homeless population.

Under the strategy, known as “housing first,” local officials have over the last eight years increasingly placed the chronically homeless into permanent shelter — apartments, halfway houses or rooms — and provided them with services for drug addiction, mental illness and health problems.

Until cities and states began adopting the plan, many homeless people seemed to shuttle endlessly between emergency shelters, hospitals and the street. Officials and housing experts say the “housing first” program has begun to stabilize the chronically homeless population, which the administration defines as disabled individuals who have been continuously homeless for more than a year or have experienced at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years.

Researchers who study the issue say they believe the decline is the most significant in years.

“We can all be encouraged that we’re making progress in reducing chronic street homelessness,” the housing secretary, Steven C. Preston, said. “But we must also recognize that we have a long way to go to find a more lasting solution for those struggling with homelessness every day.”

Some advocates for the homeless criticized the administration’s focus on the chronically homeless, saying that homeless families and those who live on the margins — in motels or doubled up with friends and family — are falling behind.

In New York City, for instance, the number of chronically homeless people dropped to 5,233 in 2007 from 7,002 in 2005, statistics show. The total number of homeless people increased to 50,372 from 48,154 during that time.

Nationally, chronically homeless people account for about 18 percent of the homeless population.

“We should be focused on ending homelessness for everybody, not just a small segment of the homeless population,” said Michael Stoops, the acting director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group based here, who said homeless families needed additional resources.

Mr. Stoops said he remained concerned that cities and states were undercounting the homeless. And he said that federal cuts in financing for affordable housing programs had left the country unprepared for the waves of people struggling to find housing after losing homes to foreclosure.

But Martha R. Burt, a research associate at the Urban Institute here who has studied homelessness for more than two decades, described the decline in chronic homelessness as “nothing short of phenomenal.”

“These are the people who everyone thought were hopeless: the undeserving poor,” Ms. Burt said. “They’re not hopeless. You can get them into housing, and for the most part they will not go back into the street if they have the right supportive services.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development collects the statistics as part of its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. Nationally, the total number of homeless people counted on a single night in January — the measure used to count homeless families on the streets and in shelters — dropped to 666,295 in 2007, from 754,147 in 2005.

The report said that 1.6 million people spent time in homeless shelters between Oct. 1, 2006 and Sept. 30, 2007. Seventy percent of those people were individuals; the rest were families with children. About 13 percent of all homeless adults living in shelters were veterans.

Dennis P. Culhane, a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of this year’s report, acknowledged that “a lot of people in tough housing situations don’t get counted.” Mr. Culhane said the government needed a standard measure and counted only people living in shelters or on the street.

Mr. Culhane attributed much of the decline in chronic homelessness to the efforts of Congress, administration officials and local communities. In 1999, Congress told HUD to direct about one-third of its financing for homelessness to permanent housing.

Meanwhile, federal and local officials embraced the focus on the chronically homeless. HUD has financed the development of 10,000 to 12,000 new units of supported housing for that population every year over the past four years, Mr. Culhane said.

“We’re moving in the right direction, without a doubt,” he said.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity, said more money was needed for homeless families and children.

“While this is great news,” Ms. Waters said, “we cannot rest because there is much that remains to be done.”

    U.S. Reports Drop in Homeless Population, NYT, 29.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/30homeless.html

    Related > http://www.hudhre.info/documents/3rdHomelessAssessmentReport.pdf

Drop in homeless count seen

as 'success story'

28 July 2008
USA Today
By Wendy Koch

The U.S. had 12% fewer homeless last year than in 2005, and the greatest decline occurred among those who chronically live on the streets or in emergency shelters, according to a federal report to be released Tuesday.

"This is a success story," says Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor and co-author of the report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He attributes the decline to better tracking and to increased efforts to house the "chronically homeless" — disabled adults who are continuously homeless for at least a year.

The number of people on the street or in emergency shelters on a single night in January, the month in which the tally was taken, fell from 763,010 in 2005 to 671,888 last year, the report says. Most were homeless temporarily. Among those who were chronically homeless, the number fell from 175,914 in 2005 to 123,833 in 2007.

"This reduction is the largest documented decrease in homelessness in our nation's history," says Philip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates federal efforts. He says it shows that the increase in housing units for the long-term homeless, funded by HUD and communities, is working.

Homeless advocates say the data, which come from 3,800 cities and counties that receive HUD funds, do not count every homeless person and do not reflect this year's weaker economy.

"Chronic homelessness may be down, but the non-chronic population is increasing," says Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. He says he's getting reports of shelters filling with families that have lost homes to foreclosure.

A lot of people become homeless when they are forced to choose between paying for food and gas, which have sharply increased in cost this year, or housing, says Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a non-profit group.

"These are tough times," says Culhane, adding that homeless numbers often reflect the economy. He says this year's homeless data, which HUD is starting to receive for January, paints a "mixed" picture of increases in some areas, such as Connecticut, and decreases in others, including New York City.

Mangano sees an upside to the weak housing market, saying foreclosures create opportunities for communities to buy properties at lower prices to use as shelters.

For the first time, HUD's report includes a count of people using shelters or transitional housing during a full year. From October 2006 to September 2007, 1.6 million people sought help for homelessness. Of those, 69% were men, 64% were minorities, and 30% were in families.

    Drop in homeless count seen as 'success story' , UT, 28.7.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-07-28-homeless_N.htm

Letters

To Help Those on the Lowest Rungs

June 22, 2008
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “After 75 Years, the Working Poor Still Struggle for a Fair Wage,” by Adam Cohen (Editorial Observer, June 17):

While raising the minimum wage is necessary, it is not sufficient to improve the financial well-being of most low-wage workers.

Government policy makers must learn from the positive effects of the welfare-to-work strategies of the Clinton administration. The support services provided to those who leave welfare are valuable for many other groups that employers are reluctant to hire, including those with criminal records.

In addition, an expansion and strengthening of vocational programs at community colleges is crucial to skill development and wage growth.

The government must also reduce the phasing out of benefits from the earned income tax credit and food stamps so that wage increases are not offset by the reduction in benefits from these and other means-tested programs.

A comprehensive strategy, with a higher minimum wage as its foundation, can enable many families to distance themselves from poverty.

Robert Cherry
Brooklyn, June 17, 2008

The writer is a professor of economics at Brooklyn College.

•

To the Editor:

The minimum wage isn’t only a matter of assisting the working poor. It’s also a matter of assisting the broader middle class and achieving a more fair and equitable wage distribution.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, after New York State increased its minimum wage to $6.75 an hour from $6 in 2006, the median wage also rose for those who had been earning up to at least 91 percent over the state minimum wage and most likely rose above that.

Meanwhile, in those states that still had the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, the median wages of those making up to at least 91 percent over the minimum wage were stagnant.

The real opposition from businesses to raising the minimum wage comes from the obligation they feel to raise the wages of those who earn somewhat more than the statutory minimum wage.

Given that a minimum wage that keeps up with, say, the rate of inflation may put an end to wage stagnation at the bottom of the wage distribution and among the lower middle class, the overall welfare benefits cannot be overstated.

Oren M. Levin-Waldman
New York, June 17, 2008

The writer is a professor of public policy at Metropolitan College.

•

To the Editor:

We commend Adam Cohen for calling attention to the importance of the minimum wage and for pointing out that in real dollars, that wage is worth far less than it was in the 1960s.

Mr. Cohen rightly notes that public work supports, like the earned income tax credit and subsidized health insurance, are also effective ways to help low-wage workers. But another issue — child care — also needs our attention.

Good care is unaffordable even for many middle-income families — in nearly every state, center-based care for two children costs more than the state’s median rent.

Research is clear that providing children with high-quality care in their earliest years improves school achievement, which, down the road, means a stronger work force.

In addition to higher wages and health insurance, our nation should make affordable child care for all families a priority.

Nancy K. Cauthen
New York, June 17, 2008

The writer is deputy director, National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University.

    To Help Those on the Lowest Rungs, NYT, 22.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/opinion/l22wage.html

Food Stamps Buy Less, and Families Are Hit Hard

June 22, 2008
The New York Times
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Making ends meet on food stamps has never been easy for Cassandra Johnson, but since food prices began their steep climb earlier this year, she has had to develop new survival strategies.

She hunts for items that are on the shelf beyond their expiration dates because their prices are often reduced, a practice she once avoided.

Ms. Johnson, 44, who works in customer service for a medical firm, knows that buying food this way is not healthy, but she sees no other choice if she wants to feed herself and her 1-year-old niece Ammni Harris and 2-year-old nephew Tramier Harris, who live with her.

“I live paycheck to paycheck,” said Ms. Johnson, as she walked out of a market near her home in Hackensack, N.J., pushing both Ammni and the week’s groceries in a shopping cart. “And we’re not coping.”

The sharp rise in food prices is being felt acutely by poor families on food stamps, the federal food assistance program.

In the past year, the cost of food for what the government considers a minimum nutritional diet has risen 7.2 percent nationwide. It is on track to become the largest increase since 1989, according to April data, the most recent numbers, from the United States Department of Agriculture. The prices of certain staples have risen even more. The cost of eggs, for example, has increased nearly 20 percent, and the price of milk and other dairy products has risen 10 percent.

But food stamp allocations, intended to cover only minimum needs, have not changed since last fall and will not rise again until October, when an increase linked to inflation will take effect. The percentage, equal to the annual rise in prices for the minimum nutritional food basket as measured each June, is usually announced by early August.

Some advocates and politicians say that this relief will not come soon enough and will probably not be adequate to keep pace with inflation.

Stacy Dean, the director of food assistance for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington social issues research and advocacy organization, estimates that the rising food prices have resulted in two fewer bags of groceries a month for the families most reliant on the program.

“We know food stamps are falling short $34 a month” of the monthly $576 that the government says it costs a family of four to eat nutritional meals, she said. “The sudden price increases on top of everything else like soaring fuel and health care have meant squeeze and strain that is unprecedented since the late 1970s.”

The declining buying power of food stamps has not gone unrecognized in Washington. In May, Congress passed a farm bill that would raise the minimum amount of food stamps that families receive, starting in October. The bill, which was passed over President Bush’s veto, will also raise for the first time since 1996 the amount of income that families of fewer than four can keep for costs like housing or fuel without having their benefits reduced.

This month, a coalition led by Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. called on Congress to immediately enact a temporary 20 percent increase in food stamps. Officials at the Agriculture Department, which administers the program, say there is no precedent for such an action. Families on food stamps have been hit hard across the nation, but perhaps not as hard as families in New York, where food costs are substantially higher than prices almost everywhere else, including other urban areas, according to the Food Research and Action Center, a research and advocacy group in Washington.

The more than one million New Yorkers on food stamps receive on average $107 a month in assistance, which is slightly higher than the average for the rest of the country. But it is not enough to close the gap in food costs, experts say.

Poor families interviewed in the New York area say that they are not going hungry — thanks in large part to the city’s strong network of 1,200 soup kitchens and food pantries — but that they have really felt the pinch. To cope, many say, they are doing without the basics.

June Jacobs-Cuffee of Brooklyn shares $120 a month in food stamps with her 19-year-old epileptic son. She says that even after her once-a-month trip to the food pantry at St. John’s Bread & Life in Brooklyn, she has had to give up red meat and is also cutting back on buying fresh fruits and sticking instead with canned goods and fruit cocktail.

“It is not a question of running out, yet,” she said. “But it does require very careful budgeting.”

The most recent census data showed that from 2003 to 2006 an average of 1.3 million New Yorkers identified themselves as “food insecure,” meaning that they were worried about being able to buy enough food to keep their families adequately fed. City officials are concerned that the food price increase has caused that number to increase significantly.

“I am much more worried about the state of hunger in New York City than I was 6 or 12 months ago,” said Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. Ms. Quinn said that food pantries were increasingly complaining about being tapped out. She added, “What we are hearing from constituents is that they are having to make tougher and tougher decisions like to water down milk for kids or not purchase medication to keep money for food.”

Yessenia Villar, who lives in Washington Heights and works tutoring children in Spanish and English, knows about tough choices. She says it is getting harder to stretch her monthly $190 in food stamps to cover food for herself, her mother and her 5-year-old daughter. At the end of the month, she runs out of oil, rice and, most painful of all, plantains, which have gone from five for $1 to two for $1, she says.

She says she has stopped buying extras like summer sandals for herself, and has also given up treats like cookies and ice cream for her daughter. “I used to make all my groceries for $150 a month and then have a little extra,” she said. “Now it is, like, crazy.”
 

Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

    Food Stamps Buy Less, and Families Are Hit Hard, NYT, 22.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/nyregion/22food.html?hp

Editorial Observer

After 75 Years, the Working Poor Still Struggle for a Fair Wage

June 17, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM COHEN

At the height of the Great Depression, industry convinced President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress to enact a law allowing companies to collude to drive up prices. To balance out this giveaway to big business, the law gave workers something that they had long been fighting for: the first federal minimum wage.

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the National Industrial Recovery Act — which Roosevelt signed June 16, 1933, at the end of his famous first 100 days — and of the federal minimum wage. It was a grudging, almost accidental win, and the road since then has been rocky. Advocates for low-income workers have had a hard time keeping the minimum wage at a reasonable level and passing other laws necessary to fulfill the original goal: ensuring that people who work hard can achieve a reasonable standard of living.

When progressives set out to establish a national minimum wage, they faced stiff opposition. Industry insisted that government should not interfere with its relations with its employees. Organized labor was also opposed. (“If you give them something for nothing,” one labor leader objected, “they won’t join the union.”) The pro-business Supreme Court presented the biggest obstacle, ruling that minimum wages were unconstitutional.

The Depression provided an opening. Progressives injected minimum-wage and maximum-hours provisions into the NIRA. These provisions were technically voluntary, but if companies wanted the government to approve the minimum prices and production limits they desperately wanted, they had to agree to minimum wages. Most industries adopted a minimum hourly wage of at least 40 cents.

The Supreme Court declared the NIRA unconstitutional, but the idea of a federal minimum wage had taken hold. In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act — which a more progressive Supreme Court upheld — creating a mandatory federal minimum wage.

The new law was enormously effective: within a year, it brought millions of low-paid workers up to a wage of 30 cents an hour. It also had major weaknesses, notably that it was not indexed to inflation. Congress has to raise it, which leaves low-income workers at the mercy of politics.

The minimum wage continues to have powerful enemies. Businesses that pay low wages lobby strongly against increases, arguing that they cause jobs to disappear. The Bush administration has been hostile. When Elaine Chao was nominated to be the next labor secretary, she called for states to be able to opt out of the federal minimum wage — which would destroy the whole idea of a national minimum wage.

Last year, the new Democratic-controlled Congress raised the minimum wage for the first time in 10 years. The increase was a real victory. But even with it, the minimum wage — which reaches $7.25 an hour in 2009 — is still far below where it was in the 1960s, in real dollars. A family of three earning the 2009 minimum wage would still be well below the federal poverty line. And because the minimum wage remains unindexed, low-wage workers will fall even further behind before Congress rouses itself to grant another increase.

Economists, who are more sophisticated today than they were in 1933, now place more emphasis on raising the Earned Income Tax Credit. Because it is tied to family income rather than wage levels, the tax credit can be targeted precisely at workers who need it most. There has also, understandably, been considerable focus this year on trying to provide the working poor — and everyone else — with affordable health care.

In this year’s “change” election, more attention should be paid to the working poor, who were hit especially hard by the economic policies of the last eight years. There should be talk of tax credits and health care — and the minimum wage. Advocates for the working poor argue for a better raise than the one Congress passed last year — perhaps one set at half the national average hourly wage, which would bring it roughly to where it was in the 1960s, and tie it to the rate of inflation.

The minimum wage can play a vital role in lifting hard-working families above the poverty line. But as Roosevelt understood, it is also about something larger: what kind of country America wants to be. “A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy,” he said in the Congressional message that accompanied the Fair Labor Standards Act, can plead “no economic reason for chiseling workers’ wages.”

    After 75 Years, the Working Poor Still Struggle for a Fair Wage, NYT, 17.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/opinion/17tue4.html?ref=opinion

In Food Price Crunch, More Americans Seek Help

May 7, 2008
Filed at 7:26 a.m. ET
By REUTERS
The New York Times

BALTIMORE (Reuters) - Carolyn Stanley, a single mother with five children, receives $327 in food stamps each month to feed her family. With prices for staples like bread and cheese going ever higher, each month is harder than the last.

She buys hot dogs over higher-quality meat and feeds her kids cereal, but even with other government support she often has to seek help from local churches and from friends.

"The food runs out somewhere within the middle of the month, or getting close to the end," said Stanley, 49. "It is not easy. I pray."

While food inflation is causing tensions and riots around the world, even the affluent United States is being touched. Stories such as Stanley's are becoming more common as Americans increasingly turn to food stamps and other programs to make ends meet.

At a cost of about $39 billion to the U.S. Treasury, nearly one in 10 Americans -- 28 million people -- are expected next year to use food stamps, which would be the highest enrolment in the program apart from a spike after the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005.

U.S. food prices are expected to rise by up to 5 percent this year, part of a global trend driven fueled by consumption in rapidly developing countries such as China, adverse weather, and the funneling of food crops to make biofuels.

"People don't want to talk about hunger in America because that's not supposed to have happened. Didn't we take care of that a generation or two ago?" said Kevin McGuire, Food Stamp director for Maryland. "Well, not really." The number of beneficiaries jumped 12 percent in Maryland from a year ago.

MAKING ENDS MEET

The crunch comes as the economy takes a sharp turn for the worse and many see the number of people receiving food stamps as advance indicator of an economic slump.

Today, food stamp officials are not only watching more people apply for the benefits, they're seeing more of them come from the working poor, people whose low-wage jobs still leave them eligible under the program's strict income caps.

"Having a job isn't enough anymore. Having two or three jobs isn't enough anymore," said Marcia Paulson, spokeswoman for Great Plains Food Bank in North Dakota, where nearly half the households on food stamps have at least one adult with a job.

"Our pantries are overwhelmed," said Diane Doherty, director of the Illinois Hunger Coalition, which helps the needy find food assistance and sign up for food stamps.

Doherty said people's food stamps are running out more quickly due to higher prices -- often within two weeks. More than ever are receiving stamps for the first time, she said.

"They're just not able to make ends meet when they're trying to raise a family on these meager salaries, with the cost of housing and now with the cost of gas," she said.

Maryland's McGuire is one official who believes that the annual adjustments in food stamp dollars have been inadequate.

Nationally, the average benefit per person early this year was about $100 per month -- around $1 a meal.

The government will adjust that payout in June, but people won't see their benefits change until October.

Stanley, who receives no child support for her daughters, the youngest of whom is in the first grade, hopes that federal officials will act more quickly.

"If you've ever lived the crunch of that poverty level, you would understand that people need more," Stanley said.

OUTREACH PARTLY BEHIND GROWING ROLLS

Program officials are quick to stress that food stamps were never intended to make up a family's entire food budget, and point to other programs that can help needy families -- school lunches, after-school programs, and food banks.

"We firmly believe that no American should go hungry," said Kate Houston, a deputy undersecretary at USDA.

The growing rolls of food stamp beneficiaries is a mixed picture, Houston said, reflecting in part a success in reaching out to eligible people who hadn't received help in the past.

"The program is designed to expand and contract based on economic conditions," she said.

House and Senate lawmakers, forging a final compromise on a giant agriculture law, now plan to add over $10 billion to the food stamp program over the next decade, raising the standard income deduction, boosting the minimum benefit to $14 a month, an increase of $4, and giving more to food pantry donations.

Food stamp officials are counseling people on how to make their stamps last as long as possible -- buying ground beef or other meat when it's on sale and freezing it, for example.

That may be cold comfort for people like Sandra Fowler, 42, a mother in suburban Chicago who recently applied for food stamps, and describes her situation as increasingly desperate.

Fowler is months behind on mortgage payments on her house and is going through a messy divorce.

"It will feed my children, at least. I've been going to a food pantry, waiting in line. The choices are really limited -- there might be some eggs, canned goods," she said.

Most experts predict that high crop and fuel prices will linger for at least two to three years, and sky-high oil and gasoline prices are unlikely to abate any time soon.

Even in the country known as the 'land of plenty,' McGuire said, the cost crunch "affects literally at a gut level what's going on" for the less fortunate. "We're going to need to start stitching the safety net a little bit bigger."
 

(Reporting by Missy Ryan; Additional reporting by Andrew Stern in Chicago and Carey Gillam in Kansas City; Editing by Russell Blinch and Eddie Evans.)

    In Food Price Crunch, More Americans Seek Help, NYT, 7.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/lifestyle-usa-poverty-foodstamps.html

Downturn Reviving Rift Over ’96 Welfare Change

April 11, 2008
The New York Times
By PETER S. GOODMAN

In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Despite howls of protest from some liberals, he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance.

As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton supported her husband’s decision, drawing the wrath of old friends from her days as an advocate for poor children. Some accused the Clintons of throwing vulnerable families to the winds in pursuit of centrist votes as Mr. Clinton headed into the final stages of his re-election campaign.

Despite the criticism and anxiety from the left, the legislation came to be viewed as one of Mr. Clinton’s signature achievements. It won broad bipartisan praise, with some Democrats relieved that it took a politically difficult issue off the table for them, and many liberals came to accept if not embrace it.

Mrs. Clinton’s opponent in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, said in an interview that the welfare overhaul had been greatly beneficial in eliminating a divisive force in American politics.

Mrs. Clinton, now a senator from New York, rarely mentions the issue as she battles for the nomination, despite the emphasis she has placed on her experience in her husband’s White House.

But now the issue is back, pulled to the fore by an economy turning down more sharply than at any other time since the welfare changes were imposed. With low-income people especially threatened by a weakening labor market, some advocates for poor families are raising concerns about the adequacy of the remaining social safety net. Mrs. Clinton is now calling for the establishment of a cabinet-level position to fight poverty.

As social welfare policy returns to the political debate, it is providing a window into the ways in which Mrs. Clinton has navigated the legacy of her husband’s administration and the ideological crosscurrents of her party.

In an interview, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that “people who are more vulnerable” were going to suffer more than others as the economy turned down. But she put the blame squarely on the Bush administration and the Republicans who controlled Congress until last year. Mrs. Clinton said they blocked her efforts, and those of other Democrats, to buttress the safety net with increased financing for health insurance for impoverished children, child care for poor working mothers, and food stamps.

Mrs. Clinton expressed no misgivings about the 1996 legislation, saying that it was a needed — and enormously successful — first step toward making poor families self-sufficient.

“Welfare should have been a temporary way station for people who needed immediate assistance,” she said. “It should not be considered an anti-poverty program. It simply did not work.”

During the presidential campaign, she has faced little challenge on the issue, in large part because Mr. Obama has supported the 1996 law. “Before welfare reform, you had, in the minds of most Americans, a stark separation between the deserving working poor and the undeserving welfare poor,” Mr. Obama said in an interview. “What welfare reform did was desegregate those two groups. Now, everybody was poor, and everybody had to work.”

Mr. Obama called the resulting law “an imperfect reform.” Like Mrs. Clinton, he called for an expansion of government-provided health care, child care and job training to assist women making the transition from welfare to work — programs he says he helped expand in Illinois as a state senator.

Asked if he would have vetoed the 1996 law, Mr. Obama said, “I won’t second guess President Clinton for signing.”

Among some advocates for the poor, the growing prospect of a severe recession and evidence of backsliding from the initial successes of the policy shift have crystallized fresh concern. Many remain upset that Mrs. Clinton, once seemingly a stalwart member of their camp, supported a law that they contend left many people at risk.

“If there is no national controversy about welfare reform, we paid an awfully high price,” said Peter Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who has known Mrs. Clinton since her college days, and who quit his post as assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest after Mr. Clinton signed the measure.

“They don’t acknowledge the number of people who were hurt,” Mr. Edelman said. “It’s just not in their lens. It was predictably bad public policy.”

Forcing families to rely on work instead of government money went well from 1996 to 2000, when the economy was booming and paychecks were plentiful, economists say. Since then, however, job creation has slowed and poverty has risen. The current downturn could be the first serious test of how well the changes brought about by the 1996 law hold up under sharp economic stress.

“We should have enormous concern about the lack of a fully functioning safety net for families with children,” said Mark H. Greenberg, director of the Poverty and Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.

In many ways, Mrs. Clinton has sought to moderate her liberal image since leaving the White House. But on welfare, she has faced the opposite problem: accusations from some liberals that she sold out their principles for a politically calculated centrism.

On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton is largely focused on the middle class. Since the departure from the Democratic race of John Edwards, who had made poverty a centerpiece of his campaign, there has been little debate about social welfare policy. But in promising on Friday to establish a cabinet-rank poverty-fighting position if she is elected, Mrs. Clinton reintroduced the topic and the question of her record.

In the interview, conducted last month, Mrs. Clinton said she had followed through on her promise to address what she viewed as shortcomings in the welfare law after being elected to the Senate in 2000. She said she had pressed for legislation that would have increased financing for child care for poor mothers by up to $11 billion, seeking to expand food stamps, and allowing welfare recipients to draw cash aid while attending school.

Those provisions were blocked by the Republican leadership.

“We’ve had to mostly spend our time since President Bush came in to office preventing bad things from happening,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Many welfare advocates dispute Mrs. Clinton’s characterization. Since entering the Senate, they say, she has shown a predilection for compromise at the expense of the poor.

When the overhaul bill came up for reauthorization, Sandra Chapin, a former welfare recipient affiliated with a coalition called Welfare Made a Difference, lobbied Congress to allow more women to attend college while they received aid. Mrs. Clinton “wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” Ms. Chapin said.

Ms. Chapin, now program director of the Consumer Federation of California, posted an e-mail message to a discussion board in February accusing Mrs. Clinton of having “had a hand in devaluing motherwork in this country, and no doubt sending thousands of children and their families deeper into poverty.”

In the interview, and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton said she had serious misgivings about some of the changes proposed to the welfare system as the issue percolated through Washington in the mid-1990s.

Her husband had taken office with a pledge to dismantle the old system. He embraced time limits for cash aid and allowing states to largely decide for themselves how to spend the money. He set out to expand job training, access to health care, child care and food stamps.

When the Republicans took over Congress after the 1994 elections, making Newt Gingrich the House speaker, they seized the initiative. Twice, they passed bills seeking to impose time limits on welfare benefits while cutting other aid. Twice, Mr. Clinton vetoed the bills, with the encouragement of Mrs. Clinton.

In August 1996, three months before Election Day, Congress sent the White House a third bill. This one imposed time limits on cash benefits and barred most legal immigrants from receiving welfare. But it maintained guarantees for Medicaid and food stamps and increased financing for child care. This time, Mr. Clinton signed.

“I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in her memoir.

Mrs. Clinton remained troubled by parts of the bill, she wrote in her memoir, particularly the provision barring welfare for legal immigrants. But “pragmatic politics” had to be considered. “If he vetoed welfare reform a third time,” she wrote, “Bill would be handing the Republicans a potential political windfall.”

Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of Children’s Defense Fund, an activist group that had given Mrs. Clinton her first job, blasted the Clintons as betraying the poor, opening a rift that Mrs. Clinton called “sad and painful.” Mrs. Edelman’s husband, Peter, quit his administration post.

In the years that followed, the number of those on welfare rolls plummeted by more than 60 percent. A study last year by the Congressional Budget Office found that from 1991 to 2005, poor families with children saw their inflation-adjusted incomes climb by 35 percent, as employment climbed.

In recent years, however, low-skilled women have struggled. The percentage of poor single mothers neither working nor drawing cash assistance surged from under 20 percent before the welfare overhaul to more than 30 percent in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service. During the same period, the number of children in poverty rose to 12.8 million from 11.6 million, according to census data.

    Downturn Reviving Rift Over ’96 Welfare Change, NYT, 11.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/us/politics/11welfare.html?hp

Poor get poorer as recession threat looms: report

Wed Apr 9, 2008
4:26am EDT
Reuters
By Lisa Lambert

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The gap between rich and poor in many states has broadened at a quickening pace since the last U.S. recession, which could make it difficult for low-income families to weather the current economic downturn, according to a report issued Wednesday.

Since the late 1990's average incomes have declined 2.5 percent for families on the bottom fifth of the country's economic ladder, while incomes have increased 9.1 percent for families on the top fifth, said the report from the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Economic Policy Institute.

The result is that the average incomes of the top five percent of families are 12 times the average incomes of the bottom 20 percent.

"The report's bottom line is that since the late 1980's income gaps widened in 37 states and have not narrowed in any states," said Jared Bernstein, one of the report's authors. "In fact, we've found that the trend toward growing inequality has accelerated during this decade."

Meanwhile, the middle class has remained virtually stagnant, with average incomes growing by just 1.3 percent in nearly eight years, the report said.

The report drew from 20 years of U.S. Census Bureau data collected from 1987 through 2006 on post-federal tax changes in real incomes, and is one of the few to record income inequality on a state-by-state basis. It did not include capital gains and losses in its calculations.

The technology boom and economic expansion of the late 1990's put many lower-income families in better positions at the start of the 2001 economic downturn than they are in now, when many economists say a downturn has begun, Bernstein said.

Elizabeth McNichol, another author of the report, said wages grew before the 2001 recession, but they did not increase much during the past several years of recovery. In a conference call with reporters, she pointed to Connecticut, which has had the greatest increase in income inequality since the 1980's, according to the report.

In Connecticut, incomes of the wealthiest 20 percent are eight times those of the poorest 20 percent, according to the report. New York has the greatest disparity, with incomes of the top 20 percent 8.7 times the bottom ones, followed by Alabama, where the top are 8.5 times the bottom.

Only recently has Connecticut begun recovering from the downturn of six years ago, according to Douglas Hall, associate director of research for Connecticut Voices for Children, who participated in the call. By August 2007 the state gained enough jobs to make up for those lost in the last recession, he said, but now it is losing them again.

Even though the study did not include capital gains, Bernstein said the effects of booming wealth on Wall Street for most of this decade did contribute to the spread between incomes, showing up as higher salaries.

Some have criticized income inequality studies. Writing for the conservative Cato Institute last year, Alan Reynolds said tax law changes skew the numbers. For example, executives once took stock options that were taxed as capital gains but now take nonqualified stock options that are taxed as salaries.

Bernstein said that if the report had considered capital gains, the disparities would have likely been greater, as capital gains generally affect higher-income people.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

    Poor get poorer as recession threat looms: report, R, 9.4.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0838901420080409

Food Stamp Use at Record Pace as Jobs Vanish

March 31, 2008
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s.

The number of recipients, who must have near-poverty incomes to qualify for benefits averaging $100 a month per family member, has fluctuated over the years along with economic conditions, eligibility rules, enlistment drives and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which led to a spike in the South.

But recent rises in many states appear to be resulting mainly from the economic slowdown, officials and experts say, as well as inflation in prices of basic goods that leave more families feeling pinched. Citing expected growth in unemployment, the Congressional Budget Office this month projected a continued increase in the monthly number of recipients in the next fiscal year, starting Oct. 1 — to 28 million, up from 27.8 million in 2008, and 26.5 million in 2007.

The percentage of Americans receiving food stamps was higher after a recession in the 1990s, but actual numbers are expected to be higher this year.

Federal benefit costs are projected to rise to $36 billion in the 2009 fiscal year from $34 billion this year.

“People sign up for food stamps when they lose their jobs, or their wages go down because their hours are cut,” said Stacy Dean, director of food stamp policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, who noted that 14 states saw their rolls reach record numbers by last December.

One example is Michigan, where one in eight residents now receives food stamps. “Our caseload has more than doubled since 2000, and we’re at an all-time record level,” said Maureen Sorbet, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Human Services.

The climb in food stamp recipients there has been relentless, through economic upturns and downturns, reflecting a steady loss of industrial jobs that has pushed recipient levels to new highs in Ohio and Illinois as well.

“We’ve had poverty here for a good while,” Ms. Sorbet said. Contributing to the rise, she added, Michigan, like many other states, has also worked to make more low-end workers aware of their eligibility, and a switch from coupons to electronic debit cards has reduced the stigma.

Some states have experienced more recent surges. From December 2006 to December 2007, more than 40 states saw recipient numbers rise, and in several — Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, North Dakota and Rhode Island — the one-year growth was 10 percent or more.

In Rhode Island, the number of recipients climbed by 18 percent over the last two years, to more than 84,000 as of February, or about 8.4 percent of the population. This is the highest total in the last dozen years or more, said Bob McDonough, the state’s administrator of family and adult services, and reflects both a strong enlistment effort and an upward creep in unemployment.

In New York, a program to promote enrollment increased food stamp rolls earlier in the decade, but the current climb in applications appears in part to reflect economic hardship, said Michael Hayes, spokesman for the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. The additional 67,000 clients added from July 2007 to January of this year brought total recipients to 1.86 million, about one in 10 New Yorkers.

Nutrition and poverty experts praise food stamps as a vital safety net that helped eliminate the severe malnutrition seen in the country as recently as the 1960s. But they also express concern about what they called the gradual erosion of their value.

Food stamps are an entitlement program, with eligibility guidelines set by Congress and the federal government paying for benefits while states pay most administrative costs.

Eligibility is determined by a complex formula, but basically recipients must have few assets and incomes below 130 percent of the poverty line, or less than $27,560 for a family of four.

As a share of the national population, food stamp use was highest in 1994, after several years of poor economic growth, with an average of 27.5 million recipients per month from a lower total of residents. The numbers plummeted in the late 1990s as the economy grew and legal immigrants and certain others were excluded.

But access by legal immigrants has been partly restored and, in the current decade, the federal and state governments have used advertising and other measures to inform people of their eligibility and have often simplified application procedures.

Because they spend a higher share of their incomes on basic needs like food and fuel, low-income Americans have been hit hard by soaring gasoline and heating costs and jumps in the prices of staples like milk, eggs and bread.

At the same time, average family incomes among the bottom fifth of the population have been stagnant or have declined in recent years at levels around $15,500, said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

The benefit levels, which can amount to many hundreds of dollars for families with several children, are adjusted each June according to the price of a bare-bones “thrifty food plan,” as calculated by the Department of Agriculture. Because food prices have risen by about 5 percent this year, benefit levels will rise similarly in June — months after the increase in costs for consumers.

Advocates worry more about the small but steady decline in real benefits since 1996, when the “standard deduction” for living costs, which is subtracted from family income to determine eligibility and benefit levels, was frozen. If that deduction had continued to rise with inflation, the average mother with two children would be receiving an additional $37 a month, according to the private Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Both houses of Congress have passed bills that would index the deduction to the cost of living, but the measures are part of broader agriculture bills that appear unlikely to pass this year because of disagreements with the White House over farm policy.

Another important federal nutrition program known as WIC, for women, infants and children, is struggling with rising prices of milk and cheese, and growing enrollment.

The program, for households with incomes no higher than 185 percent of the federal poverty level, provides healthy food and nutrition counseling to 8.5 million pregnant women, and children through the age of 4. WIC is not an entitlement like food stamps, and for the fiscal year starting in October, Congress may have to approve a large increase over its current budget of $6 billion if states are to avoid waiting lists for needy mothers and babies.

    Food Stamp Use at Record Pace as Jobs Vanish, NYT, 31.3.2008,http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/us/31foodstamps.html?hp

Washington’s Grand Experiment to Rehouse the Poor

March 21, 2008
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

WASHINGTON — When District of Columbia officials tore down the decrepit housing project in southeast Washington where Samantha Jackson lived with her teenage son, they promised that they would build a more attractive, mixed-income community and that former tenants like herself could come back.

“I was very happy,” recalled Ms. Jackson, 42, a school custodian. “The area was rough and scary.”

Ms. Jackson, who has been staying with a friend since the demolition in 2004, is now in line to buy, with subsidies, a new apartment in a town house in the same neighborhood, and she can hardly wait. “It looks like Hollywood to me,” Ms. Jackson said of the onetime slum where glossy buildings and the Washington Nationals stadium are also rising.

Bucking national trends and citing what they call “a moral goal,” District of Columbia officials have pledged to preserve and even expand low-income housing, replacing dangerous projects with new communities that keep both poor and “work force” residents — firefighters, teachers and laborers — in the mix.

The redevelopment of the Arthur Capper and Carrollsburg projects, where Ms. Jackson lived, is the first in the country to promise replacement of all low-income units within the same neighborhood, said Michael Kelly, director of the city Housing Authority.

“Mr. Kelly is undertaking a great experiment to see if he can turn around distressed neighborhoods and keep the original residents there to benefit,” said Sue Popkin, a housing expert at the Urban Institute. “It’s a gamble. We don’t know how to take a terrible neighborhood and make it nice while keeping the same people there.”

The federal government no longer pays to build housing projects, which in Washington, Chicago and other cities became symbols of concentrated poverty.

Since the early 1990s, it has given money under a program called Hope VI to tear down distressed projects, to be replaced by mixed communities built with private partners. In a pattern that critics disparage as “demolish and disperse,” some former tenants return but most scatter with rental vouchers, destroying community ties. District officials say they have learned from past mistakes.

The issues are in contention at the federal level now: the Bush administration proposes to eliminate Hope VI, while the House of Representatives has passed a bill that would extend it and require that all razed public housing be replaced.

The Washington venture will preserve housing, but social ties have been undermined by the stretched-out construction schedule; some former tenants will wait as long as eight years to return, in the meantime using vouchers or staying in other public housing.

Martha Queen, 72, who is raising her 17-year-old great-grandson, has been lonely and depressed since she moved to a public unit in a different neighborhood, away from her friends.

“All the things you’re familiar with, they’re gone,” she said of her former home. “It’s all rubble now.”

“I just sit upstairs and look out the window,” she added.

She has been offered a new two-bedroom at Capper-Carrollsburg, but it is smaller than the place she had before and she has resisted, fearing she would have to get rid of half of her furniture.

The Housing Authority, which controls 8,000 units, has received federal grants to tear down six projects and create mixed communities. The city says it will use bonds and private investors to redevelop more sites, but critics ask if that is financially feasible.

The current site had 707 low-income units. In the expanded community, as many low-income rentals will blend in with more than 800 homes rented or sold to working-class and more affluent people, as well as an office building, new stores and parks.

In the meantime, former tenants are offered social aid, from credit repair and job advice to drug treatment.

Ms. Jackson, who expects to buy her home in 2010, had an unpaid medical bill that tarnished her credit rating. The support program put her in touch with a legal aid center that persuaded an insurance company to pay.

Poor people will pay 30 percent of their incomes in rent. Other units are for sale, with subsidies, to the working poor, including families making as little as $25,000, while others will sell at market rates.

Many residents were suspicious. A group organized to press for a stronger role in shaping the Capper-Carrollsburg project, and fought, for example, to keep a youth center open before the final demolition.

A committee of residents, officials and neighbors decided that any returnees with a serious criminal conviction within three years of the move-in date, and anyone with seriously bad credit, would be excluded. They will keep their current vouchers or public units, officials promise.

One-for-one replacement of units will be more difficult in cities lacking high land prices, which enabled Washington to issue bonds tied to future tax revenues. Still, the drive to save public housing reflects a growing sense among urban experts of the limits of rental vouchers. Vouchers help families move out of crime-infested projects but in cities with tight housing, landlords may not accept them, driving tenants to new slums on the urban fringes.

“Vouchers sometimes have the unintended consequence of just shifting burdens around,” said Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard.

Vouchers also depend on annual appropriations; for the coming year, the funds proposed by President Bush would reduce vouchers and aid to low-income housing, according to Barbara Sard, housing director at the Center on Budget and Policy Alternatives in Washington.

Dwayne Todd, 20, grew up in the Capper-Carrollsburg projects. “I was mad when I found out they were tearing down our home,” said Mr. Todd, who has a girlfriend and two babies. “All my friends are scattered.” But the case worker helped him get a job as a security officer, and he looks forward to returning to his own place.

“I want to move back there, I have so many childhood memories,” he said. “Some people didn’t really want them to change the neighborhood this way, but for me it’s a pretty decent thing. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a project.”

    Washington’s Grand Experiment to Rehouse the Poor, NYT, 21.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/us/21housing.html

Counting the Homeless to Help End Their Plight

February 26, 2008
The New York Times
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

NEW HAVEN — Looming over a shuttered nightclub by Interstate 91 is a billboard featuring fistfuls of cash and a brassy promise that Connecticut Lottery players could win $100,000 a year in perpetuity and be “Set for Life.”

Steps away, in the brush behind a fence, lives a man named Joe whose life is far from set.

A former roofer who suffers from anxiety, Joe said he has lived for the past two years in his makeshift hideaway under the stars, surviving mainly by scrounging metal that he turns into jewelry or sells to recyclers for about $50 a week. He said he does not take drugs, but the volunteers who encountered him one recent night as they trekked through the city’s vacant lots and alleyways for the state’s annual count of the homeless said he sometimes steals bicycles to support a crack cocaine habit.

As the temperature dipped into the 20s, Joe accepted a pair of gloves and a flashlight. But he declined a ride to a shelter or to avail himself of social services that could lead to longer-term help.

“The shelters are filled with drunks, addicts and thieves, and the little I have, I’d like to hang on to,” said Joe, who asked to be identified only by his first name. “Since I’ve been staying outside, I haven’t gotten a cold or flu,” he added. “I manage to stay warm.”

Asked if there was anything more he needed, Joe told the volunteers: “No, unless you have an old laptop so I could put my stuff on eBay.”

And so Joe was counted, as part of an annual ritual in which volunteers here fanned out from 7 to 9 on a designated winter night to take stock of the homelessness problem. This year’s tally will not be available until at least March, but last year, New Haven reported 778 homeless people, roughly a fifth of the total counted statewide.

New Haven is among some 4,000 communities nationwide that have been participating in the surveys — coordinated to avoid double-counting the itinerant homeless — since January 2005; in recognition of the principle that you cannot manage what you do not measure, those that count at least every other year are rewarded in their competition for federal money.

“This is an essential business practice that was not being practiced,” said Philip F. Mangano, who has served as the Bush administration’s homelessness czar since 2002, running a council that coordinates homeless-related services among 20 federal agencies. Mr. Mangano, who previously worked as an advocate for the homeless in Massachusetts, refers to homeless people as “consumers” and compares his work to the abolition movement.

Washington has increased financing to fight homelessness every year since 2005, and President Bush is proposing $5 billion — a 3 percent increase over last year — for fiscal 2009. Connecticut’s count cost about $100,000 — $20,000 for equipment like flashlights and refreshments for the volunteers, the rest to pay analysts to go over the data — and was paid for by state agencies and private grants.

Over all, officials estimate there are 750,000 Americans who are homeless on any given night, one in five of them considered chronically homeless. But counting them is not as simple as it sounds.

One man collecting cans on Chapel Street insisted he was not homeless, saying he would catch a bus home when he finished. The volunteers were not sure whether to count him. Another man dressed in camouflage attire walked by without being approached. “College student,” guessed Debbie Fisk, the social worker guiding the three-volunteer team that let him pass.

As the director of outreach for the Connecticut Mental Health Center, Ms. Fisk is familiar with many of the street people by name and habit, and can often spot their calling cards.

This year, she started her search on Water Street, where several major roads intersect overhead like spaghetti. She and her two counting comrades squeezed through a gap in a fence and braved a thicket of thorns to reach an embankment filled with makeshift tents.

“Victor?” she called over and over, beaming a flashlight into the embankment. There was no response.

Over near Chestnut Street, Ms. Fisk found another pied-à-terre under a highway overpass, but still no occupants. Her fellow volunteer Joe Parente, a vice president at Easter Seals Goodwill Industries, spotted a pillow, blanket, toothpaste, soap, cologne, reading material, condoms, and a length of pipe that, he posited, the occupant “probably uses for protection.” Nearby, another cubbyhole featured a stuffed bear, caked in dust.

Underpasses are popular living areas, Ms. Fisk said, because they protect against the elements and are hard to spot from the street. Still, she knows one longtime occupant who ended up with dangerous levels of carbon monoxide in his blood.

Strolling by was a man who seemed delusional. He was happy to talk and be counted. Asked if his bed was nearby, he said, “Yeah, but before I sleep, I’m watching the children.”

“That’s Victor,” Ms. Fisk said once he passed. “He’s been sleeping outside for 14 years.” She added: “We’ve offered him subsidized housing, but he’s too paranoid.”

New Haven is one of about 325 cities and counties around the nation that in recent years have devised ambitious 10-year plans not just to reduce homelessness, but also to end it. And New Haven is serious. Local property taxes finance emergency shelters. Top officials chart the city’s progress and press Hartford and Washington for support.

But sometimes it seems that the more services a city offers, the more homeless people seem to gravitate to its streets. Advocates say it is no coincidence that Connecticut’s Department of Correction sometimes discharges inmates to New Haven, where those without stable homes will be cared for.

“We are faced with endless problems like that,” said Alison Cunningham, the executive director of Columbus House, a nonprofit operator of shelters and housing in New Haven.

As rain pelted New Haven one night this month, the men’s shelter on Grand Avenue and the overflow shelter on Cedar Street were both near capacity by nightfall.

Shelter operators do not like to turn anyone away, but “at some point if it gets too full, we don’t have enough cots,” Ms. Cunningham said. The Cedar Street shelter has an official capacity of 75, she added, but “we’ve reached 125 on some nights.”

Just last week, the city used the gymnasium of a school that was on break as a “temporary overflow to the overflow,” Ms. Cunningham said, to house 35 men who had nowhere else to go. She has been running Columbus House for 10 years and said she cannot remember a time with demand this high.

“It’s people struggling with the cost of living, people not being able to keep up with rent and the increase in the bills they have,” she said. “This is a very tough economy, and it’s really telling now that we see more people bailing out of housing because they can’t afford it.”

Mondale McIntyre, a soft-spoken Bridgeport native, arrived early enough to snare a spot in the Grand Avenue shelter. He said he had spent 7 of his 30 years behind bars for drug-related infractions and recently lost a $100-a-day job laminating phone book covers in West Haven for a subcontractor of AT&T.

Mr. McIntyre said that he was raised by his grandparents in North Carolina after his parents ended up “on the street,” and that he once wanted to be a zoologist, but put that dream aside “because I got into trouble.”

“When you’re young and nobody really wants to hire you, the only thing you really can do is sell drugs,” he said ruefully. “Being a young African-American coming up in the streets,” he says, he can see how becoming a drug dealer, with all the trappings “is almost a goal,” much like “a white man in Greenwich might want to be a doctor or lawyer because that’s what he’s around.”

He said he could stay with a sister in New Britain, but worried that if he did, he would not push himself to get off her couch and out of his rut. “I left to come here, so I can better myself,” he said.

But on Feb. 1, New Haven police investigating a nearby disturbance discovered a 2-year-old warrant for Mr. McIntyre’s arrest, stemming from a drug sale in Middletown.

The authorities took him into custody and confiscated his belongings. They refused to store the items, and demanded to know where they could be shipped. He gave his sister’s address, but he said the package has yet to turn up.

Released from jail 11 days later, he left with nothing but the brown prison uniform on his back.

“Everything I had on me that day — my birth certificate, my Social Security card, my identification, my life” was taken, Mr. McIntyre said. “I can’t get a job now because I don’t have my ID.”

For six years now, Unchu Yu, 55, a Korean-born woman living in Bethany, awaits New Haven’s homeless each Sunday at 7 a.m., with coffee, doughnuts and whatever else she can whip up, from spring rolls to Italian wedding soup.

Most weekdays, churches in New Haven furnish breakfast for the homeless, but on Sundays, churches have services. So Ms. Yu, who is known as Jacky, persuaded Trinity Lutheran Church to lend her a kitchen and a meeting room. “If I don’t make food, they’ve got no place to go,” she said of the people who are expected to vacate the shelters by 7:30 each morning.

Called Agape Church, her gathering is a family affair. Her husband, Siyoung Yu, who works for a computer company, frequently delivers a sermon while she cooks. “It’s not like a normal church,” she said, acknowledging that the couple could be accused of giving “the same sermon all the time.” Mostly, she explained, they urge visitors to “try to stay with God” and “get off drugs and alcohol.”

“They listen,” she said.

After worship, Ms. Yu offers rides to anyone who wants to look for work or housing. She has also co-signed leases and helped with payments needed to secure an apartment. “People think I’m crazy, but this brings so much happiness for me,” she said.

A Cheshire church provides Agape with gift-wrapped boots each Christmas. The company that runs Quinnipiac University’s dining services sends soup.

But some of Ms. Yu’s supporters suffer fatigue, as homelessness never seems to fade. Ms. Yu raises money each year to try to extend the months that some local shelters operate.

“We raised four months of money in 2002,” she said. “In 2003, we raised three months and in 2004, we raised two months. Every year, it’s the same kind of problem, all the time.”

    Counting the Homeless to Help End Their Plight, NYT, 26.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/nyregion/26homeless.html

Letters

Being Poor in a ‘Charge It’ Society

February 17, 2008
The New York Times

To the Editor:

“You Are What You Spend,” by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm (Op-Ed, Feb. 10), argues that growing income disparities in this country don’t mean very much. Consumption offers a better “measurement of financial well-being,” the writers say, and it “indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume.”

Equating consumer spending with well-being, however, ignores elements of long-term well-being like investing for retirement, saving for college education, or building wealth through home ownership.

Over the long term, you cannot spend more than you earn, unless the assets you own have appreciated. The rich have more assets, and they have appreciated in recent decades. The poor do not; they have more debt, and have been harder hit by the subprime crisis.

It’s still not easy living on a low income in this country, and the disparities between rich and poor are significant and increasing.

Michael Kiparsky
Eric Hallstein
Berkeley, Calif., Feb. 10, 2008

•

To the Editor:

What a disappointment it was to read two members of our economic elite telling us: Don’t worry. Be happy. The poor are like us, just with less money.

Prosperity is not a color television, a cellphone and a VCR, and for many of us prosperity is not its own end but a means toward well-being.

Well-being is the certainty that you can provide your children with a quality education, which W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm’s chart shows many can’t purchase. Well-being is the security of having a good roof over your head in a safe, clean neighborhood. And it is knowing that if your children become ill, you have the income to help them pull through.

I am so tired of our economists (and often, our newspapers) saying that the good life and the good society are defined by consumption (or its flip side, G.D.P.) and that the path to happiness is simply more of it.

Keith M. Wilson
Charleston, Ill., Feb. 10, 2008

•

To the Editor:

W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm seems to equate having a lot of stuff — refrigerators, stoves, cellphones, cars, color TVs, DVD players and the like — with a “lifting” of the standard of living.

I disagree. The advantages of an increase in household consumption are far outweighed by the disadvantages. Does owning a car really shorten our workday, giving us more time to read, exercise or sleep?

As for globalization as currently practiced, it has undermined the financial autonomy and social cohesiveness of communities both here and abroad.

And you call this the good life?

Karin J. Lauria
Marlborough, Mass., Feb. 10, 2008

•

To the Editor:

W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm say Americans in the lowest fifth for income are able to spend almost double their income because they have other sources of money — like bank accounts and proceeds from home sales. The major reason that poor Americans are able to outspend their income is that they borrow heavily.

Credit-card, loan and other debt is enormous among those who cannot afford to buy everything our consumerist society convinces them they need (or even what they really need).

This debt burden clearly calls into question the writers’ assertion that “consumption is a better measure of financial health than income.”

Rosalyn Benjamin Darling
Indiana, Pa., Feb. 10, 2008

The writer is a professor of sociology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

•

To the Editor:

I agree that United States income inequality is not as problematic as many claim it to be. However, homes form the core of Americans’ assets. Higher-income individuals are more likely to be homeowners. Those making less either rent and give money away every month, or pay high mortgages resulting from modest down payments.

Overall purchasing power matters, but it is also important to analyze the relative burden of a major regular expenditure on a household’s budget. Then it becomes clear that America’s free market turns out to be freer for those who are fortunate to benefit from higher incomes.

Sebastian Wisniewski
Redwood City, Calif., Feb. 11, 2008

•

To the Editor:

Decades of social science research make it clear that spending is not the whole story. Assets and debts also matter a great deal for family well-being and intergenerational mobility. They are the resources families draw on to send children to college, to help with the down payment on a first home, and to make ends meet when times are tough.

Without assets, poor families may be able to get by, but they will have real trouble ever getting ahead. Instead of dismissing inequality, we ought to focus on helping poor families to acquire assets and open up opportunities.

Equality isn’t a DVD player in every household; it’s an equal shot for all American children.

Daniel Schneider
Princeton, N.J., Feb. 11, 2008

    Being Poor in a ‘Charge It’ Society, NYT, 17.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/opinion/l17spend.html

Attacks on the Homeless Rise, With Youths Mostly to Blame

February 15, 2008
The New York Times
By AMY GREEN

CROSS CITY, Fla. — Warren Messner was 15 when he and some friends attacked a homeless man and left him for dead. Mr. Messner jumped on a log laid across the man’s ribs. He does not know why. He was high, does not remember much and wants to forget the rest.

Today Mr. Messner is a baby-faced 18-year-old serving 22 years for second-degree murder. He used to like skipping school and listening to rap music with friends. He imagined he eventually would help his father install flooring. Now he talks to his parents nearly every night from the maximum-security Cross City Correctional Institution.

“It was just a senseless crime.” he said, his eyes down, his shoulders slumped. “I wish it would have never happened. It made no sense. It was stupidity.”

Mr. Messner’s story is not unusual. Nationwide, violence against the homeless is soaring, and overwhelmingly the attackers are teenagers and young adults. In Florida the problem is so severe that the National Coalition for the Homeless is setting up speakers bureaus to address a culture that sees attacking the homeless as a sport. It is the first time the organization has singled out a particular state.

Of more than 142 unprovoked attacks on homeless people in 2007, the most — at least 32 — were in Florida, according to a preliminary count by the coalition and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Nationwide, such attacks rose about 65 percent from 2005.

In Fort Lauderdale a group of teenagers captured national attention in 2006 when a surveillance camera caught one laughing as he beat a homeless man with a baseball bat. The teenagers attacked three homeless men that night and face a murder trial in one man’s death. A year later in Daytona Beach, a 17-year-old and two 10-year-olds attacked a homeless Army veteran. One 10-year-old dropped a cement block on the man’s face, the police said.

“What could possibly be in the mind of a 10- or 12-year-old that would possess them to pick up a rock and pick up a brick and beat another human being in the head?” said Ron Book, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust. “It defies any rational thought process, but it’s also why we felt so strongly we had to do something.”

The trust has teamed with the local schools to develop a curriculum for elementary, middle and high schools teaching respect for the homeless.

Advocates for the homeless blame a society that they say shuns the homeless through laws that criminalize sleeping in parks, camping and begging.

“I think it reflects a lack of respect for the homeless that has reached such extreme proportions that homeless people aren’t viewed as people,” said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

Troubled by news photos showing those two 10-year-olds in Daytona Beach in prison suits and handcuffs, the National Coalition for the Homeless joined with AmeriCorps Vista to open speakers bureaus last fall in Key West, Jacksonville and Tallahassee. Nine more are planned in Florida. The idea is to educate students using speakers who are homeless or once lived on the streets, and the organization wants to open more bureaus nationwide, said Michael Stoops, executive director of the coalition.

The speakers are like George Siletti, who grew up in foster care and lived as a homeless drifter on and off for 25 years, starting at the age of 16. Now 51, Mr. Siletti said he took medication for schizophrenia and depression and lived in subsidized housing in Washington, addressing schools, churches and organizations about homelessness.

“I’ve had bottles thrown at me. I’ve had people spit on me, cursed me out for no reason,” said Mr. Siletti, who was attacked by teenagers in Fort Lauderdale as he and others slept under a bridge in the 1980s. “People seem to pick on the most vulnerable because they really think that they won’t do nothing.”

In Miami, students are learning from a weeklong curriculum and a DVD teaching that families are the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population. The curriculum requires younger students to make posters and older students to write essays about what they learned.

Legislation adding the homeless to hate-crime laws has been introduced in Alaska, California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio and Texas. Bills are also pending in Congress.

Mr. Messner, who is an imposing six feet, 240 pounds in his blue prison suit, talks about his crime with quiet resignation.

He and his friends were looking for a place to smoke marijuana near his home in the Daytona Beach area when they stumbled on Michael Roberts. Mr. Messner joined the attack and remembers hearing Mr. Roberts groan when he jumped on the log, but then Mr. Messner tried to pull his friends away, he said.

“He was making noises,” Mr. Messner said. “He asked one time why we was doing it to him. Why we was messing with him.”

A few days later, Mr. Roberts’s body was found. Mr. Messner agreed to a plea bargain and drew the lightest sentence of the four convicted in the attack.

He does not like prison much. He keeps busy doing yard work, exercising and reading. He likes James Patterson novels and murder mysteries. He has dropped at least 40 pounds and developed a penchant for prison tattoos. One arm reads “thug” while the other reads “life.” His mother’s name, Lori, is on one hand. On one arm is the same cross he wears around his neck, surrounded by the words “hope,” “faith” and “love.”

“I’m not a killer. I know that,” Mr. Messner said. “A lot of people, they see this story and call us killers. I’m not a killer. I regret what I did. I wish I could take it back.”

    Attacks on the Homeless Rise, With Youths Mostly to Blame, NYT, 15.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/us/15homeless.html

Op-Ed Contributors

You Are What You Spend

February 10, 2008
The New York Times
By W. MICHAEL COX and RICHARD ALM

Dallas

WITH markets swinging widely, the Federal Reserve slashing interest rates and the word “recession” on everybody’s lips, renewed attention is being given to the gap between the haves and have-nots in America. Most of this debate, however, is focused on the wrong measurement of financial well-being.

It’s true that the share of national income going to the richest 20 percent of households rose from 43.6 percent in 1975 to 49.6 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has complete data. Meanwhile, families in the lowest fifth saw their piece of the pie fall from 4.3 percent to 3.3 percent.

Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards. Looking at a far more direct measure of American families’ economic status — household consumption — indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society.

The top fifth of American households earned an average of $149,963 a year in 2006. As shown in the first accompanying chart, they spent $69,863 on food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation, health care and other categories of consumption. The rest of their income went largely to taxes and savings.

The bottom fifth earned just $9,974, but spent nearly twice that — an average of $18,153 a year. How is that possible? A look at the far right-hand column of the consumption chart, labeled “financial flows,” shows why: those lower-income families have access to various sources of spending money that doesn’t fall under taxable income. These sources include portions of sales of property like homes and cars and securities that are not subject to capital gains taxes, insurance policies redeemed, or the drawing down of bank accounts. While some of these families are mired in poverty, many (the exact proportion is unclear) are headed by retirees and those temporarily between jobs, and thus their low income total doesn’t accurately reflect their long-term financial status.

So, bearing this in mind, if we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1. A similar narrowing takes place throughout all levels of income distribution. The middle 20 percent of families had incomes more than four times the bottom fifth. Yet their edge in consumption fell to about 2 to 1.

Let’s take the adjustments one step further. Richer households are larger — an average of 3.1 people in the top fifth, compared with 2.5 people in the middle fifth and 1.7 in the bottom fifth. If we look at consumption per person, the difference between the richest and poorest households falls to just 2.1 to 1. The average person in the middle fifth consumes just 29 percent more than someone living in a bottom-fifth household.

To understand why consumption is a better guideline of economic prosperity than income, it helps to consider how our lives have changed. Nearly all American families now have refrigerators, stoves, color TVs, telephones and radios. Air-conditioners, cars, VCRs or DVD players, microwave ovens, washing machines, clothes dryers and cellphones have reached more than 80 percent of households.

As the second chart, on the spread of consumption, shows, this wasn’t always so. The conveniences we take for granted today usually began as niche products only a few wealthy families could afford. In time, ownership spread through the levels of income distribution as rising wages and falling prices made them affordable in the currency that matters most — the amount of time one had to put in at work to gain the necessary purchasing power.

At the average wage, a VCR fell from 365 hours in 1972 to a mere two hours today. A cellphone dropped from 456 hours in 1984 to four hours. A personal computer, jazzed up with thousands of times the computing power of the 1984 I.B.M., declined from 435 hours to 25 hours. Even cars are taking a smaller toll on our bank accounts: in the past decade, the work-time price of a mid-size Ford sedan declined by 6 percent.

There are several reasons that the costs of goods have dropped so drastically, but perhaps the biggest is increased international trade. Imports lower prices directly. Cheaper inputs cut domestic companies’ costs. International competition forces producers everywhere to become more efficient and hold down prices. Nations do what they do best and trade for the rest.

Thus there is a certain perversity to suggestions that the proper reaction to a potential recession is to enact protectionist measures. While foreign competition may have eroded some American workers’ incomes, looking at consumption broadens our perspective. Simply put, the poor are less poor. Globalization extends and deepens a capitalist system that has for generations been lifting American living standards — for high-income households, of course, but for low-income ones as well.
 

W. Michael Cox is the senior vice president and chief economist and Richard Alm is the senior economics writer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

    You Are What You Spend, NYT, 10.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10cox.html

Citywide

From a Shelter to a Home, but for How Long?

January 14, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID GONZALEZ

This is the year that Jose Guzman’s luck is supposed to change. After spending a year and a half in a homeless shelter with his wife and two young daughters, Mr. Guzman is living in a railroad flat at the edge of Bushwick, just across the subway tracks from a cemetery. The city is paying most of the family’s $1,170 monthly rent this year, and they are expected to save up a few thousand dollars, which will be matched by the city.

City officials call the matched savings a rainy day fund for the family when they leave the system and support themselves. Mr. Guzman calls it a delusion, since he makes only $7.15 an hour as a maintenance helper at the very shelter where he lived with his family in one cramped room.

“I’m trying to do the best I can for my family,” he said, as his 2-year-old daughter, Heyshliani, padded about barefoot in their apartment in Brooklyn, clutching a baby bottle that was tucked into a sweat sock to keep the milk warm. “But there’s never anything left at the end of the month. Save what?”

His apartment has little more than two beds, two televisions, and a ton of blankets to keep off the chill when using the electric heater becomes an extravagance. The refrigerator is equally bare, with only a few eggs, milk and some frozen hamburgers.

Mr. Guzman’s wife, Yahaira de Jesus, frowned. If they are lucky, she said, they might qualify for a second year of rental assistance.

“What happens when the city stops helping pay the rent?” she said. “I guess we’ll go back to the shelter.”

Advocates for the homeless said the Guzmans were part of a wave that pushed the number of homeless families in the city to record levels in 2007. Given the weakening economy, low wages and high rents, many advocates are worried that the formerly homeless may be knocked off their feet again.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has set a goal of drastically reducing chronic homelessness by 2009, and officials have introduced new housing programs that offer to match savings so families can better withstand tough times.

But advocates for the homeless said the plan is rushing families through the system without adequate support.

“Bloomberg’s approach to poverty is to pay people to change their behavior,” said Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless. “That is not the fundamental issue when rent for a two-bedroom is $1,100 and someone is making minimum wage.

“It’s a housing problem, and you need a housing solution,” he said. “At the end of the day, the working poor in this city do not make enough without some sort of subsidized housing.”

Before last year, the city had a subsidy program that covered the rent for formerly homeless families on public assistance over a five-year period, with city aid decreasing by 20 percent each year. That approach, advocates for the homeless said, pushed more families back into the shelter system, while landlords were left frustrated by slow payments.

The city replaced that program with four different ones that were more tailored to individual circumstances, said Robert V. Hess, the commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services. He said that although the previous program had moved thousands of families out of shelters, there were unexpected problems, including bureaucratic glitches.

Denise Holliday, a single mother of three in Brooklyn, said her benefits were cut off as soon as she started her $11-an-hour job as a medical assistant in May.

She appealed the decision until last month, when a counselor at the coalition helped her apply for one of the new programs. Still, the delays have left her behind on the rent for the two-bedroom apartment she and her children have lived in since leaving a shelter two years ago.

“They want you to get a job, but once you do they cut you off,” she said. “I mean, once somebody gets on their feet they want to throw you to the curb.”

Commissioner Hess said families with children, or people on fixed incomes, would now have their rents covered by the city while they waited to be certified for federal Section 8 rent subsidies, usually within the year.

He said that another of the new programs, specifically for working families, would pay up to $1,130 a month for a two-bedroom apartment for one year. Families would be expected to pay $50 a month toward rent and would be encouraged to save up to 20 percent of the actual rent.

By year’s end, he said, the city would match the savings as well as their $600 in rent contributions. An extra year would be allowed for those who were still shaky. He estimated that a family could have $10,000 by the end of the second year.

“There has never been in this country a local housing subsidy that was this generous with these kinds of savings-match options,” Mr. Hess said. “We are in a little bit of uncharted water. That said, from my experience, families that made it through the shelter system are really survivors. I am not going to bet against them.”

That optimism is not shared by Sister Barbara Lenninger, the executive director of the Thorpe Family Residence in the Crotona section of the Bronx. She and other shelter providers in the borough have complained to Mr. Hess that families are being rushed into permanent housing without enough time to provide them with skills and counseling to live on their own. As a result, she said, many landlords who used to take her clients now refuse to rent to them.

Commissioner Hess — who said he was unaware of Sister Barbara’s concerns even though she and several other Bronx providers sent him letters about them as recently as October — acknowledged that it was a long-standing tension.

“We think it is long overdue to move families back into the community,” he said. “Shelters are for crisis.”

But crisis seems to be all that hangs over Jose Guzman and his neighbors, who live in a three-story building with more than 170 housing code violations.

Those rare stretches of hallway walls that have not been punched in are covered with gang graffiti. The front door swings open without a lock, and so do most of the mailboxes. Wires dangle over door frames encrusted with lead paint, and the broken floors are covered with trash.

Harry Brown, the building’s managing agent, blamed the tenants of one apartment for many of the problems.

“I have animals in the building that look like humans,” he said, “a different kind of animal that needs to go to the zoo.”

City officials say the building passed inspection before families were allowed to move there. Mr. Guzman took the apartment out of frustration, settling for sporadic heat and constant mice. Even someplace this bad, he said, would be impossible for him to pay for on his own.

As he waited to go to work one day last week, Bethzaida Rodriguez, a friend, showed up at his door to stash two bulging garbage bags filled with clothes and toys in his kitchen. She met the Guzmans last year when all of them were at a shelter.

She has tried — seven times, without luck — to get into a long-term shelter since she and her three children became homeless in September. She describes her existence as a cycle of overnight shelter stays and 10-day placements that end once she is rejected for assistance.

With no permanent home, she can’t even think of looking for work. The routine is rattling her family, especially her 8-year-old daughter, who she said has psychological problems. “Every time she sees a paper slipped under the door she starts crying,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “She asks if we have to move again.”

Maybe this is the year her luck changes.

“They always reject me because they say I have a place to stay,” she said. “If I had a place to stay, do you think I’d be going through this?”

From a Shelter to a Home, but for How Long?,
NYT, 14.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/nyregion/14citywide.html