BLOOMBERG NEEDS NEW APPROACH TO POVERTY
By Ramona Ortega
Metro
September 21, 2006

In the fall of 2005, the United Nations Independent Expert on Extreme Poverty conducted a mission to the United States. The report from the mission noted that the United States was a paradox: How could the wealthiest nation on earth have one of the highest incidences of poverty amongst industrialized nations? The U.N. mission probably did not have to go very far to reach its conclusion. Within a few miles of Turtle Bay lies perhaps the greatest paradox of all. While New York City is widely recognized as the center of the financial world and is one of the richest cities in the country, one in three children here live in poverty. And even though New York City has a municipal economy that is larger than many developing nations, 19 percent of New Yorkers live in poverty.

In January, Mayor Michael Bloomberg set out to resolve this paradox with the establishment of the Mayor’s Commission on Economic Opportunity. In launching the commission, the mayor said its goal was no less ambitious then a major reduction in the number of children, women and men who live in poverty in this city over the next four years.  The commission released its recommendations on Monday. Unfortunately, the proposals they embraced fall far short of the mayor’s goal. Instead of taking a broader approach to combating poverty, the commission is proposing timid, bite-sized steps to assist discrete segments of New York City’s residents living in poverty. The commission’s three central proposals: an expanded child care tax credit, small cash grants to poor people to make better choices, and expanded apprenticeship and job-training opportunities are certainly better than nothing, but will have little impact on reducing New York’s extraordinary poverty rate.

A year after Hurricane Katrina exposed the ugly persistence of poverty in the United States to the world and a year after the United Nations examined the extreme chasm of American wealth and poverty, Mayor Bloomberg is missing an enormous opportunity to reframe the debate on poverty and summon all of the energies of city government and the private sector to finally lift millions of New Yorkers out of extreme poverty. What is missing from the mayor’s approach is a comprehensive understanding of poverty: the concept of poverty is seen internationally as not only economic deprivation but a basic human rights issue. This view includes indicators of well-being such as health, education, food and hunger and other basic necessities to lead a life of dignity. Persistent poverty and the deep racial disparities it usually entails is and should be regarded as a violation of human rights and international norms.  Indeed we need to rethink what our obligations are as New Yorkers and as Americans to eradicating poverty. While our national and state constitutions provide us with civil rights and the promise of living with dignity, in reality we live without any official state recognition of the right to be free from hunger or the right to healthcare or education or any other right necessary to carry out a productive life. To eradicate poverty in New York we need to expand our notion of rights to include the right to be free of deprivation caused by unrelenting economic hardship.

RAMONA ORTEGA is director of the Human Rights Project at the Urban Justice