As I mentioned here, the fact that there are many poor people in New York City is, in some ways, a phony issue. According to 2005 data from the Census Bureau, the New York Metropolitan Area as a whole had a poverty rate of 12.6%, below the national average of 13.3%. Poverty is high in New York City because it is the part of the metropolitan area where the poor are permitted to live; taking regional and national economic trends as a given, the more places for the poor to live a municipality provides, the more poverty it will have. A better focus for public policy is how well the poor live in New York City, and to what extent the city provides an environment their families to advance out of poverty, if not in this generation than in the next. In my view, the city is a worse place to be poor today than it was 50 years ago. That is the real issue.
Most recent analysis of poverty in the Untied States takes one of three perspectives as a given. To conservative ideologues, the problem of poverty is the result of bad individual decisions with regard to learning, sexuality, family, and work. For liberal ideologues, it is the result of inequitable public policies. To “objective” analysts, it is the result of shifts in the global economy. In this case, I believe the liberal and conservative ideologues are half-right, and the “objective” analysts are not right at all.
Both in the 1950s and today, most working poor people have been employed in the local service sector, and have been unaffected by globalization. If anything, globalization has improved the lot of the worst off workers by reducing the price of the goods they buy. For example, televisions are no longer made in the United States; today, unlike 40 or 50 years ago, virtually every poor household has a color television set. Clothing, toys, restaurant meals are all more readily obtainable by the less well off today. Food prepared at home takes an ever-lower share of household income, even for those at the bottom. Globalization, if anything, has caused more equality between those working in the local service sector and those in unionized, large-scale enterprises. It isn’t low- and moderate-income families who have suffered from the change.
Conservative ideologues are half-right in that, as the Brookings Institution found recently, if everyone graduated from high school, got married before having children and stayed married, the poverty rate would be just four percent nationwide.
But liberal ideologues are half-right in that New York’s working poor, and working people just out of poverty, had access to better public services and benefits in the 1950s than today, in at least a relative sense. At that time, New York City’s public schools were among the best in the country. Public hospitals and clinics provided health care that, while not as good as what even the poorest have access today, were not much worse than what the affluent received at the time. The extensive network of public parks, beaches and pools provided extensive recreation opportunities. With fewer automobiles on the streets, those were available for recreation as well.
Today, public spending on health care has soared, but a substantial share of the working poor are uninsured. New York State’s education spending is the highest in the country, but it is so inequitably distributed that most of the city’s children receive a worse education today than was available 50 years ago. While parks that receive substantial private donations, such as Central Park and Prospect Park, provide the same quality experience as 50 years ago, that cannot be said of the public facilities in all city neighborhoods. The better off can now order books online and have the delivered to their door; if those with low and moderate incomes want to go online or get a book at a library, opportunities are limited because libraries are open just a few days per week.
The only people with low and moderate incomes who are clearly better off today than 50 years ago are the elderly, who are both less likely that others to be poor, here and nationally thanks to public benefits, and have had a separate set of public amenities created just for them through public programs. But to the extent they must rely on the public services left to the rest of us, they are worse off as well. One reason my recently deceased grandmother lived as long as she did was her ability to walk to senior swim time at a community indoor pool in southwest Yonkers where she lived. Swimming, I believe, helped her back recover from an assembly line accident that forced her to retire early. That pool, built in the 1930s, has since become deteriorated and closed, and there is no plan to replace it.
It isn’t all bleak. Whereas 15 years the City of New York was content to allow a certain level of crime as long as it was confined to poor neighborhoods, today it accepts an obligation to keep all its residents safe. And whereas 30 years ago the city’s transit system was falling apart, today it provides a level of mobility. Still, government-generated education and health care inequities offset these gains.
In an absolute material sense, today’s poor New Yorkers are far better off in than the poor of 50 or 100 years ago, or even the middle class in much of the world. But our definition of poverty is relative, and as long as that is the case, some people will be poor because they are poorer than others. That shouldn’t mean, however, that their lives are bleak, or short, or that their offspring lack the opportunity to develop their talents and advance. For much of the past four decades, however, this has been the case in New York. That is what needs to change.
What do I think of the Mayor’s recently-released poverty proposals? After more than 30 years of sacrificing the young to benefit the old, it is good to see an emphasis on young adults and children. It is certainly worth trying to modify their behavior, to the extent it is detrimental to their lives.
On the other hand, the conclusion that the city government could reduce poverty by helping people advance out of poverty is mistaken. Even if every poor person in the city were to advance, to the extent that the city continued to have low-income housing – and the report proposes more of it – more low-income people would arrive to take their place. If the city actually wanted to reduce its poverty rate, it would work to ensure that all new housing, and more existing housing, was targeted to the non-poor rather than the poor, while attempting to convince advancing families to remain in the city. The report proposes, instead, to direct more resources to the creation of more housing for those below the poverty line.
The report confuses three objectives that are very different:
- Improving the lives of the poor people living in New York City;
- Helping the next generation of poor people now living in New York City to advance out of poverty; and
- Reducing the poverty rate, which is to say the number of poor people able to live in the city.
These are different, sometimes complimentary and somewhat difficult goals. It doesn’t help to confuse them.