Comments
NYC TURNAROUND - New York in the 1970s: rising welfare rolls, rising crime rates, declining school achievement, abandoned housing, and above all a sense that these social problems were intractable. The liberal Mayor during the late 1960s and first part of the 1970s, John Lindsay, had basically thrown up his hands by the end of his two terms—resigned to the idea that New Yorkers needed to accept these conditions as the equation of urban living going forward.
Yet, by the early 2000s, New York had turned around in important ways. The crime rates plunged, school achievement went up, abandoned housing was reclaimed, and most of all the welfare rolls declined sharply, and welfare offices became employment centers than dispensers of benefits.
The transformation is the focus of a new documentary, “Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York” (available for pre-order this week on iTunes and Video on Demand on March 21st). The documentary goes into some detail on the policies that contributed to the transformation: the policing techniques, educational reforms, unleashing of private sector housing development, welfare reforms and new employment intermediaries.
Above all, the documentary details the overarching influence in the transformation: the initiative of elected and appointed officials, advocates, and regular citizens, to break from the liberal consensus of the time and say, “Enough: We don’t need to live like this. It’s crazy to accept crime and welfare and low school achievement as just urban living.” And to follow up this mindset with actions—even under heavy criticism.
New York’s transformation is one of the major public policy stories of the past fifty years.
***
Rudy Giuliani, the New York Mayor from 1994-2001, is center stage in the documentary, as he should be. Many of the policy changes were launched or advanced during his years in office, especially during his first term. Michael Bloomberg, his successor from 2002-2013, built on Giuliani initiatives, and added his own initiatives, in housing, commercial development, urban planning and open space.
Beyond the two Mayors, we hear from New York officials of the time, who were responsible for implementation: Bill Bratton and Ray Kelly, the police commissioners, Seymour Fliegel, the East Harlem school official and school reformer, Jason Turner and later Robert Doar, who oversaw welfare reform, and Peter Cove and Dr. Lee Bowes, founders of America Works, who put into practice the welfare to work reforms. A number of these practitioners, like Cove and Bowes were former liberals: Great Society advocates whose views shifted as they saw how the poverty programs of the time actually operated.
Former left-center Time magazine columnist and Primary Colors author, Joe Klein weighs in from time to time on the central role of public safety, as does New York historian Fred Siegel (The Future Once Happened Here) and prominent author and scholar Heather MacDonald. All emphasize how the out-of-control crime hurt most the City’s middle and lower income neighborhoods and how the policing reforms (CompStat, which closely tracked and held police officials responsible for reductions, “zero tolerance”, which emphasized addressing minor infractions) contributed to reclaiming these neighborhoods and rebuilding the city’s economy.
***
If public safety was at the heart of the city’s transformation, welfare reform also played a major role: the decline in the welfare rolls, and the transition of a significant segment of former welfare recipients into employment. As the documentary sets out, the welfare rolls under Lindsay skyrocketed as Lindsay and his welfare commissioner Mitchell Ginsberg, a former dean of Social Work at Columbia, saw welfare as the “compassionate” government policy and actually encouraged the expansion. In September 1966, 439,394 persons in New York were receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC),m the main welfare benefit program. By September 1972 that number had reached 913,987 persons.
And the number continued to grow, so that by 1994, when Giuliani took office, AFDC in New York City totaled over 1,110,000 recipients. The Giuliani Administration then took several sharp turns in policy, the main one being the establishment of work requirements and employment orientation. Welfare offices were recast as employment offices and an extensive job placement structure was put in place. Additionally, an extensive structure of public service jobs was put in place—which would grow to over 2500 positions in the Department of Parks and Recreation alone for cleaning, safety and maintenance in the city’s playgrounds.
Giuliani’s work efforts received a major boost from then President Bill Clinton. Drawing on his personal background and experience with welfare as Arkansas Governor, Clinton had a deeper understanding than other Democratic Party leaders of how welfare actually operated and the need for requirements and expectations of employment. Clinton was willing to break ranks from the prevalent liberalism, lend support to New York welfare reform, and institute some of its ideas in his national welfare reform legislation in 1996.
Giuliani’s work efforts also received a boost from the new set of workforce intermediaries, who undertook the job placement, the largest of which was America Works. In 1984, Cove and his wife and colleague Dr. Bowes, invested their own funds in launching America Works, and over the next decade America Works grew as it placed welfare recipients into jobs. It utilized a “work first” model of immediate job placement (rather than lengthy counseling/training) followed by ongoing work supports. The central idea: many if not most welfare recipients brought strengths to the labor market, not only deficiencies, and these strengths were being overlooked in the current dependency model.
For their efforts, Cove and Bowes, Giuliani, and even Clinton were heatedly attacked by advocacy groups on the left, the New York Times NYT -0.7% editorial page, and the leadership of the state and national Democratic parties. Yet, they continued on and over time the work requirements and orientation brought results. By the end of Giuliana’s second term, the number of welfare recipients had dropped to 462,000, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of job placements.
When he took office in 2002, Bloomberg was under political pressure to reduce the work requirements, but instead pushed forward, stating “We will not our city to recede to the culture of dependency.” Between 2002-2013 Bloomberg’s We Care welfare initiative placed more than one million recipients into jobs, and caseloads fell to under 380,000.
As Bloomberg would note in subsequent years, many long term welfare recipients found they could function effectively in the job market. The jobs they obtained might have been mainly entry level in hospitality, health care, child care or retail. If not enough in pay to reach middle class, these jobs paid above welfare and presented the possibility for wage advancement.
The relation of welfare reform to the broader anti-poverty goals of course is complex: some of those who left welfare in New York went onto other government benefits, especially Supplemental Security Income and long term disability, others would have exited on their own, while still others returned to welfare, especially after work rules were relaxed and the employment focus diminished under Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio. But there is no question that welfare was fundamentally changed for the better during this period.
***
Near the end of the documentary, a speaker observes that reformers should not get complacent. Indeed, after Bloomberg left, the de Blasio Administration sought return to pre-1994 policies, and sought to minimize the public safety, welfare, and economic development impacts of the Giuliani/Bloomberg years. This documentary, along with other honest histories of this period, should help prevent a rewriting of history.
Further, the documentary should bring home the impact of ideas and practitioners in shaping outcomes. New York in the 1990s and early 2000s, as other major urban centers, did benefit from broader economic, social and demographic forces: the booming national economy of the 1990s, the national school reform movements, the decline in teen pregnancies. But New York’s gains were greater than other cities.
And, it is the documentary’s main theme: at a point in time, enough people—thinkers and practitioners and citizens—stopped accepting the excuses for social dysfunctions, and came together to do something.
How relevant this theme is today.
(A new documentary, Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York, identifies the policies that led to New York’s turnaround in employment, public safety, and welfare reduction in the 1990s and early 2000s. How timely it is for today.)
(Michael Bernick served as California Employment Development Department director, and today is Counsel with the international law firm of Duane Morris LLP, a Milken (Institute Fellow and Fellow with Burning Glass Institute, and research director with the California Workforce Association. His newest book is The Autism Full Employment Act (2021). This article was featured in FORBES.)
