Bloomberg on Rebates: 'We Issue the Checks'

The City Council Should Support Elimination of $400 Rebate
By Alex S. Vitale
It may never arrive, but my wife and I have already spent our $400 property tax rebate. No, we didn’t go shopping or pay off credit card debt. Instead, we spent it the way the city should, we donated it to the Coalition for the Homeless and the Food Bank for New York City.
Even before the current economic crisis, levels of homelessness and hunger have been on the rise, reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression. Last year 1.3 million New Yorkers relied on a food pantry or soup kitchen. Thirty one percent of those served were children, whose numbers have increased by almost 50% since 2004. Nearly 1 in 4 children in New York are living in poverty. These food pantries and kitchens are underfunded, often turn people away as supplies run out, and rely primarily on a declining number of volunteers to run their operations.
Current food stamp levels, which affect 1.86 million New Yorkers, provide an average of only $1.18 per meal per person and 60% of recipients deplete their monthly allotment within 2 weeks. Despite the low levels of the benefit and outdated eligibility requirements that deny services to many in need, food stamp participation increased by 67,000 in just the second half of 2007, with further increase this year and undoubtedly more to come.
Despite this increase in need, the city’s support for emergency food programs has remained flat for several years and the state has actually reduced funding.
Last year over 100,000 New Yorkers spent time in a homeless shelter. On any given night there are 35,000 staying in the city’s shelter system, 27,500 of them families with children. In September a record number of new families entered the system, with close to 1,500 new families a month becoming homeless. Many more live outdoors, in the subway system and in abandoned buildings. The Housing Authority estimates that another 100,000 people in need of housing are living doubled up in public housing units. The vast majority of these people are children and their parents.
While the mayor has touted his homelessness plan and its efforts at homelessness prevention and rehabilitation of housing units, very few new units affordable by the very poor have been created and little more is in the works. Earlier this year Bloomberg cut $3 million in homelessness support and prevention programs and has announce more cuts for next year. Emergency shelters and rental assistance is certainly necessary, but until large amounts of truly affordable housing is made available, the city’s record high homelessness levels are likely to grow.
Homelessness and hunger are largely the result of a mismatch between declining wages and employment levels on the one hand and increasing housing and food costs on the other. This basic dynamic is further exacerbated by inadequate treatment and support of the mentally ill and substance abusers. Solutions to these problems must take this into account rather than blaming the poor.
The City and the State need to take a variety of drastic actions to address this growing crisis and a $400 property tax rebate is not one of them. They need to raise welfare payment levels, which are worth only about 60% of what they were 30 years ago in real dollars, increase the minimum wage and ensure that it is enforced, invest substantial new dollars in the creation of new affordable housing, provide supportive housing to those with special needs to ensure their ability to remain housed, and increase direct assistance to the city’s food pantries and soup kitchens.
These initiatives will not be cheap, and the federal government should play a major role in seeing them fully implemented. However, local government does have resources that it can call on. Over the last generation billions of dollars have been spent to subsidize luxury and market rate housing, high end commercial real estate, professional sports stadiums, and high finance. These subsidies have undermined the city’s finances and encouraged the creation of a mono-economy based on the fortunes of Wall St; an economic gamble that we may be suffering the consequences of for many years to come.

Alex S. Vitale is assistant professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics.