Giuliani welfare record critiqued

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Article published Dec 2, 2007
Campaign 2008

Giuliani welfare record critiqued


By JOELLE FARRELLMonitor staff

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Dec 2, 2007




Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who often touts his record on crime reduction and tax cuts when he visits New Hampshire, said last week that he was most proud of the welfare reforms he initiated as mayor.
"We moved more people off welfare than the population of most cities in this country: 640,000 people," he said at the Politics and Eggs forum in Bedford last Monday. "And we found them jobs."
Giuliani's welfare policies drastically cut the number of people on welfare, but not all of the people who left the rolls - or were forced from them - found jobs. Many were wrongly denied benefits, including food stamps, which led more people to seek emergency shelter and food, city anti- poverty advocates said.
During Giuliani's tenure, the poverty rate declined only marginally, remaining about 70 percent greater than the rate for the rest of the country, according to the independent Citizens Budget Commission. The rate of homelessness increased from 23,431 people in the shelters each night to 34,576 people, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. About 500,000 fewer people received food stamps, forcing many to turn to food pantries and soup kitchens, said New York State Sen. Liz Krueger, who oversaw a nonprofit organization that helped poor people avoid eviction and secure emergency food during Giuliani's mayoral terms.
"The data shows that he moved them off of welfare, but he did not move them out of poverty," she said. "The easiest thing in the world to do is close a welfare case. The question is what happened to the household when you closed their welfare case. Many ended up not being able to pay their rent, putting themselves at greater risk for eviction and homelessness."
Mary Brosnahan, executive director of the New York-based Coalition for the Homeless, said it's unclear how much welfare reform may have contributed to homelessness. Giuliani also discontinued a program that gave homeless families priority for low-cost housing and tightened up standards for shelter eligibility, which worsened homelessness in New York City, she said. Homelessness continues to plague the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who has put some of his own money toward poverty initiatives in the city.
"The overarching theme in his administration as it relates to poor people was get tough and crack down," Brosnahan said. "Certainly just in terms of numbers, that approach was a complete failure.
"Tonight in New York City shelters, we will have over 36,000 people, including 15,000 girls and boys," she said. "The toll it takes on those kids is just staggering. I see this as port of the Giuliani legacy."
Giuliani's campaign did not respond to requests for comment. But Jason Turner, who oversaw Giuliani's welfare policies as commissioner of the city's human resources administration, disputes the data presented by anti-poverty advocates. He said the best statistical indicator of the success of Giuliani's welfare reform comes from the U.S Census: In 1996, two years after Giuliani's reforms went into effect, 16 percent of single mothers with a high school education or less - the demographic most likely to be on welfare--were in the workforce. By 2001, that number had increased to 44.5 percent, he said.
"That's a social revolution that's never been seen before," Turner said.
Asked if those entering the workforce could still be suffering economically, working a minimum wage job, for example, Turner said that a woman with two children working a full-time minimum wage job is entitled to up to $4,600 annually with the federal earned income tax credit.
"Add food stamps, if you're still eligible, and you're above the poverty line," he said. "You have to get them on the ladder of employment and you're out of poverty. Yeah, you still have economic struggles, but this is the way out of them."
Andrew White, director of the Center for New York City Affairs, a policy institute that examines poverty issues at The New School, said wages for single mothers with only high school education decreased dramatically during Giuliani's time as mayor. People were leaving the welfare rolls, but many were still poor.
"If your measure of success is just stopping the payment of welfare, then (Giuliani's) programs were a huge success," he said. "If your measure is stabilizing families, strengthening neighborhoods and reducing poverty, then his method was too much on the inflexible and Draconian side."
Giuliani initiated welfare reform more than a year before the federal government put its own reform measures into place.
Also, the rate of welfare reduction in New York City under Giuliani was slightly lower than the national average. In New York City, welfare was reduced 58 percent, while nationally welfare was reduced 62 percent.
Working-class roots
Unlike some of the wealthy candidates running for president, Giuliani rose from working-class roots. His father, Harold, worked as janitor and a bartender. His mother, Helen, stayed home to take care of her only son, according to Wayne Barrett's biography, Rudy! Giuliani attended Manhattan College and New York University Law School before becoming a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
His background informed his view on welfare and public assistance. He and his family worked hard to make their own way, and Giuliani believes others should do the same. He thinks giving someone a check for nothing is insulting and creates an underclass society dependent on entitlements, he has said at campaign stops.
As mayor, Giuliani aimed to crack down on welfare fraud and give people a greater incentive to seek work rather than public assistance. He also required all able-bodied welfare recipients to work 20 hours per week for the city in exchange for their welfare benefits, whether they answered phones for a city agency or picked up litter by the roadside. Welfare recipients were expected to put in another 15 hours a week searching for a job or receiving training and education in order to keep their benefits.
Giuliani renamed welfare centers "job centers" and set strict standards for welfare recipients. If they missed appointments with job counselors, they could be sanctioned from the welfare rolls. If they arrived late to a workfare site or didn't show, they could also lose their benefits.
Turner said the measures were meant to teach necessary workplace skills such as punctuality and organization so that workfare employees would succeed when they entered private employment.
"In real employment, you have to go to your job on a regular basis, and you have to please your boss and get things done," Turner said. "If you take 100,000 welfare recipients and you don't ask anything of them, then next year they will be as they were the year before."
But anti-poverty advocates say some of the restrictions were impractical for people struggling to get out of poverty.
"We would tell some woman with two young children, show up in another borough at 8 a.m. to sweep the park," Krueger said. "But we won't give you child care, so you have no place to leave your 4-year-old. But if you don't show up, we'll close your welfare case. . . . Women stopped showing up because they thought their answer was a child neglect case or a loss of their welfare case."
Rejection rates for those seeking welfare soared, according to Barrett's book. In 1998, 57 percent of those who applied for welfare were denied. A Bronx facility set a record in the first four months of 1999 by rejecting 90 percent of the 3,000 people who applied for welfare; 7 percent were granted assistance, compared with 61 percent from the previous year.
Eligibility for food stamps did not change. Yet in 1997, requests for food stamps in New York City dropped 15 percent, while requests for help from food pantries and soup kitchens increased 24 percent, according to The New York Times. The U.S. Department of Agriculture warned New York city officials that requiring a two-day application for food stamps violated federal law and, in 1999, the agency told the city to offer food stamps to applicants without delay.
Krueger said Giuliani's crackdown on food stamp recipients wasn't the right way to attack welfare fraud. She called it a "cruel and even sick philosophy."
"It's $1 per meal, per person per day," she said. "That's $3 per person. Is that what would motivate you to stay home and say, 'I'll just stay home and eat bonbons?' "
"You're hungry if you're only eating on food stamps," she said. "We're still trying to undo this unbelievable damage to the food and nutrition system in New York City."
On and off the rolls
Many welfare recipients were wrongly denied benefits and requested a hearing, winning in court at least 80 percent of the time, according to news accounts.
The welfare reforms also caused a "churning" of people on and off the rolls, anti-poverty advocates agreed. A welfare case would close, sometimes causing a person to seek emergency food or shelter while the case was reviewed. Then the person would usually regain the benefits. Some argue this allowed for artificial statistics - many who were knocked off welfare were simply waiting to get back on or seeking help elsewhere, advocates said.
Giuliani frustrated academics wanting to follow the people leaving the welfare rolls to see where they ended up. He cited privacy concerns and said he didn't want to be "Big Brother," according to The New York Times.
"He refused to allow any kind of research," White said. "If he couldn't control the message, he wasn't happy about that."
The city's human resources administration did offer some information to the Times, which showed that only 5 percent, or 256, of the first 5,300 people to enter Giuliani's city job centers found employment.
And the Work Experience Program, which required welfare recipients to work for the city, rarely led to permanent jobs, White said. Of the hundreds of thousands who were on welfare, only 35,000 ever participated in the program at any one time, he said. Critics argued that the work program placed too great an emphasis on temporary work instead of helping people gain the skills and education they'd need for a better-paying job.
No one is sure what happened to the 640,000 people who left the rolls.
"People get by," White said. "Even people on welfare, many of them have found ways to earn money. Whether it's healthy for them and their families," he added, no one knows.
When Giuliani was elected mayor, 1.1 million, or about 1 in 6 New Yorkers was on welfare.
"That was crazy; it wasn't healthy," White said. But Giuliani focused almost entirely on reducing the number of welfare recipients rather than solving the problems they faced.
In Bedford last week, Giuliani spoke about his welfare policies.
"I was accused by all the liberal media of being mean, being cruel," he said. "And I would go to those neighborhoods and I would say to people, 'I'm doing this because I love you more, because I care about you more, because I actually care about you as a human being not as some kind of a statistic.' "
He added, " 'I care about you as a person that I want to see being able to work, being able to take care of themselves.' "
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By JOELLE FARRELL
Monitor staff