TO CUT POVERTY, PANEL ADVISES A NARROW FOCUS
By DIANE CARDWELL
The New York Times
August 26, 2006

Leaders of a mayoral commission charged with working to eradicate
poverty in New York City are scaling back wider ambitions to instead
focus on helping three distinct populations: young children, young
adults and the working poor.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg formed the panel in January to draw up a
template for his administration to attack chronic poverty. He described
this as a key goal of his second term, much as overhauling the school
system was during his first.

The panel has completed its fieldwork, and a memo from its leaders to
its members, which was given to The New York Times by critics of the
narrowed focus, indicates that the group is shelving suggestions to help
populations like the elderly, men returning from prison, the unemployed
and the homeless.

The Commission on Economic Opportunity, as the panel is named, is drawn
from the upper echelons of the city's business, nonprofit, academic and
social services sectors, with Richard D. Parsons, the chairman of Time
Warner, and Geoffrey Canada, who runs one of the most acclaimed
antipoverty programs in the country, at its helm. Its leaders have
traveled to the city's poorest areas and even overseas to determine
which strategies are most successful.

The memo urges the commission, as it prepares its final report to the
mayor, to hone its recommendations to include only proven methods that
will be most effective in combating poverty.

Emphasizing the need to show progress using the limited money and
authority available to city government, the approach outlined in the
memo is more business- and results-oriented than broader strategies used
in the past, which relied on federal subsidies and entitlement programs
to fight poverty at all levels.

"We must take what we have learned and fashion a realistic set of
recommendations that will give more New Yorkers a chance to lift
themselves out of poverty," reads the memo, from Mr. Parsons, Mr. Canada
and Deputy Mayor Linda I. Gibbs, who is overseeing the commission. "To
have a more powerful impact, rather than spread efforts across the
entire population," the memo suggests focusing on children younger than
6, people 16 to 24, and the working poor.

The limited scope of the recommendations has drawn private criticism
from some panel members, who have begun to wonder what the purpose was
of having the commission in the first place, though none would speak
publicly for fear of alienating the administration.

The memo suggests that the commission is tailoring its recommendations
to Mr. Bloomberg's interests and campaign promises, building on and
better coordinating existing programs rather than creating a variety of
new pilot projects.

The city's poverty rate, which is roughly twice that of the nation, has
been climbing, jumping from 17.9 percent in 2000 to 25.5 percent in
2004, said Andrew A. Beveridge at Queens College, based on the most
recent available census figures.

According to a report released last year by the Community Service
Society, an antipoverty group, the total number of New Yorkers living in
poverty is approaching 1.8 million, more than the population of
Philadelphia.

But until now, the city had not tried to take a coordinated approach to
the problem, instead spreading its efforts through individual agencies
with programs that focused on isolated or indirect methods. Those
include reducing homelessness, improving education, creating jobs by
supporting small businesses and increasing the amount of low-cost
housing available.

In taking a more targeted and coordinated approach, and one that views
antipoverty aims as part of an economic development strategy, the city
is in some ways mirroring efforts of other cities and states that are
trying to fill the gap left by dwindling federal contributions, said
Harry J. Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University.

At the same time, the panel is laying the groundwork to make measurable
progress before the end of Mr. Bloomberg's term in just over three
years. Fulfilling his promise of making a major reduction in poverty is
clearly an important element in the legacy Mr. Bloomberg would like to
leave the city.

City officials declined to discuss the memo or details about the
recommendations or their financing. But the highly coordinated focus on
children, young adults and the working poor reflects the financial
strictures under which the commission has operated.

"We have to be realistic," Mr. Bloomberg told a gathering of the
commission and city officials earlier this year. "The answer to curing
poverty can't just be bigger government. We can't make that mistake from
the past. The answer to curing poverty can't be walking away from
people. We've also made that mistake in the past."

The focus also reflects a view within the administration that the lines
between the populations may not be as distinct as they might appear.
Helping young children, officials have said, by necessity means helping
their families as well.

But for some of those who work with the poor, the memo is causing
worries that the city may scale back on its efforts for other types of
poor people.

"We are concerned that the long-term unemployed and welfare recipients
are going to be left out of the commission's recommendations," said
Sandra Killett, co-chairwoman of the board of directors at Community
Voices Heard, one of the many advocacy groups tapped by the commission
for ideas. "Shouldn't these populations be a priority in addressing
poverty? It doesn't even seem like the Human Resources Administration,"
the city's welfare agency, "is part of the process."

The memo suggests focusing on ways to provide full-day child care for
working parents, to move young adults from high school into college with
an emphasis on workplace skills and to make sure working adults get aid
to which they are entitled.In addition, the memo suggests a focus on
enhancing neighborhood-based strategies, an approach that Daniel L.
Doctoroff, Mr. Bloomberg's development deputy, has already begun in
Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick in Brooklyn and Melrose in the Bronx.

The directives to the commission also emphasize the importance of
engaging the private sector in its work, making sure that education and
work force development efforts dovetail with industries in which jobs
are expected to grow.

While some have criticized the commission's limited scope, other
commission members and outside experts said that Ms. Gibbs was right to
steer the recommendations toward a few focused goals in order to make
the kind of measurable progress that has been a hallmark of the
Bloomberg administration's results-oriented strategies. This approach
has led to reductions in homelessness during the mayor's first term.

If the administration can test projects in neighborhoods that can make
the city a model of successful antipoverty programs, it could
potentially make a case to the federal government to provide financing
for similar projects nationwide, said Gordon Berlin, president of
M.D.R.C. Mr. Berlin, whose research organization evaluates programs for
low-income people, cautioned that doing so would require collecting
compelling data, a priority the memo outlines.

Merryl H. Tisch, a member of the State Board of Regents and chairwoman
of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, said that she had been "a
little taken aback" when her attempts to include the problems of the
elderly were rebuffed. Still, she said, she came to see that the
commission was not the place to deal with them, and called the focus on
youth and the working poor realistic.

"You can't do everything in one fell swoop," she said. "You have to do
things that the city can afford and that state and federal funding would
help subsidize. It's not a perfect world, but just trying to undertake
this is extraordinary."

Jo Craven McGinty contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company