Poverty Reflects Nation's Indifference

After the interruption of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty" in the 1960's by the war in Southeast Asia, America retreated from addressing widely acknowledged economic inequities. And while poverty is systemic, our national disposition has been to blame the poor for the very conditions our institutional failures have wrought.

Recently, we have witnessed a shift in the nation's political landscape. It now appears we have an opportunity to alter current thinking about the policy interventions that could have a real impact on poverty. It's vitally important that we take advantage of that window of opportunity.

Working, Yet Still Poor in America

Nearly three and a half million New Yorkers are living in or near poverty -- over 40 percent of the city's population. New York is not alone. High rates of poverty are the rule rather than the exception in many cities across the nation.

When we discuss poverty in New York City, we are primarily talking about communities of color. Poverty is a condition that devastates Black and Latino neighborhoods in New York and many other large cities.

In New York City, we can point to several reasons for the persistence of poverty. We have an educational system that has utterly failed -- an economy that produces either very high wage jobs or very low wage jobs -- a labor movement that is struggling to reclaim its stature -- and a generation of youth who are on the cusp of adulthood without marketable skills, and as result face a grim future.

In our society, a life in poverty often begins early. And in many instances it is rooted in an inadequate education that results in a meaningless "academic" credential or worse, the abandonment of educational aspirations.

The Community Service Society (CSS) believes that the route to escaping poverty is through work. But it has been amply demonstrated that holding a job will not necessarily pull a working family out of poverty. There are a number of reasons why low-wage workers find they cannot escape poverty, including the lack of health benefits, the rise in housing costs and increasing rent burdens, and the assault on organized labor.

As to the latter point, I believe we need to strengthen unions and reinvest in organizing workers. We should endorse the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that labor is backing to restore collective bargaining rights in the workplace. I also firmly believe that all low-wage workers should be unionized. And health care coverage should be made universal -- a system along the lines of Medicare, but available to all Americans.

We are talking about big, costly policies and programs. Nothing less will have any significant impact on urban poverty considering the scale of what we are seeing in New York City and other cities. It's an expensive proposition but let's put this into perspective. A single Nimitz class U.S. Navy nuclear aircraft carrier costs about $4.5 billion to build; and our nation has ten such carriers in active duty. You do the math. How much impact could we have on urban poverty with those kinds of funds -- as a start, at least, for school funding, for training programs, for getting people into the workforce?

High rates of
Urban poverty

There have been some initial steps toward confronting poverty here in New York.

From Mayor Bloomberg's Commission on Construction Opportunities came a new High School for Construction Trades, Engineering, and Architecture that opened last fall. And 40 percent of construction industry apprenticeships were earmarked for formerly excluded groups and individuals -- an unprecedented agreement with the city's trade unions.

The mayor's Commission for Economic Opportunity, on which I served, took a targeted approach to addressing poverty, focusing on three distinct groups of the poor: working poor adults, young adults age 16 to 24, and children age five and under. The mayor committed $150 million to develop policies to address their immediate needs and create avenues for sustained mobility throughout the course of their lifetimes.

However promising these initiatives, New York City cannot and should not take this on alone. Poverty is a national problem and requires a resource commitment of a similar scale.

Next year a new president will be elected. During the last municipal election, voters of color cast the majority of ballots for the first time in the city's history. In 2009, the City Council is poised to become minority majority for the first time. A new governor sits in Albany for the first time in twelve years. And the city's congressional delegation now holds key leadership positions in the 110th Congress.

Our public officials are in positions to affect policies and develop far-reaching programs that will not just impact New Yorkers but residents of urban communities throughout the nation. It's why, given our history and current focus, we are taking seriously our responsibility to provide direction and guidance to our federal officials on these critical issues.

A National Imperative

Just last week, a report from the Center for American Progress, based in Washington, D.C., advanced three policy initiatives that it maintains would reduce poverty in America by 26 percent: increasing the minimum wage, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and expanding child care subsidies. None of these are beyond the realm of the possible, especially in a climate of political change.

It is one of the reasons why CSS has launched a monthly public policy forum on Capitol Hill to engage advocates, policy analysts, Congressional staff, and academicians in an exercise to vet policy alternatives with the goal of reaching consensus on an economic mobility agenda for low-wage workers.

Now is the time to use our collective political strength to deal with the systemic issues of poverty, not just for New Yorkers, but also for all Americans.

From the New York Amsterdam News
May 17 - 23, 2007