[New York] A City Hall Feeling Its Way in a Renewed Battle on Poverty

from The New York Times

By DIANE CARDWELL
Published: April 19, 2006

After four years of near silence on the issue, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared his own war on poverty during his re-election campaign. Soon after his victory, he pledged in his State of the City address to help the poor, and even convened a high-profile commission to strategize on how to fulfill that promise.

But when his aides moved recently to ease rules for obtaining food stamps for a small but significant population, he blocked them, leaving advocates for the poor and elected officials mystified.

Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday that his decision not to seek a federal waiver that would have allowed some able-bodied adults ages 18 to 49 to receive food stamps for longer periods of time was simply part of a fair-minded refusal to reward people who were able to work but not employed.

"I'm a believer that people should have to work for a living," Mr. Bloomberg told reporters at a Queens hospital. "You have to have a penalty if there's a requirement to work, and this penalty is one that's appropriate," he added. "The city has a whole host of programs to make sure that nobody goes without food."

But some outsiders say they see something else at work in the decision: a deep ambivalence toward anything that carries even the faintest whiff of welfare, a program that Mr. Bloomberg's predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, famously moved to restrict.

"Everything has existed in the shadow of the Giuliani approach," said Bill de Blasio, chairman of the City Council's General Welfare Committee. "Early on it was clear that Bloomberg wasn't trying to be Giuliani or even Giuliani Lite," he continued, adding that the administration had actively pursued certain programs to help the poor. "But the closer it gets to public assistance, the more there seems to be a fear of seeming permissive."

Indeed, even though Mr. Bloomberg holds some socially liberal ideals dear — he favors gay marriage, supports abortion rights and is pro-gun control — he has seemed far less comfortable championing the immediate needs of the poor, preferring to focus on longer-term goals like economic development, affordable housing and education reform.

In the 2005 mayoral race, for instance, he did not talk aggressively about the city's poverty rate, which has been climbing, until after Fernando Ferrer, his Democratic rival, made it a campaign issue.

"The Giuliani administration was hostile towards public benefits programs, and this administration has been ambivalent all along," said Joel S. Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, which represents 1,100 food pantries and soup kitchens, adding that in Mr. Bloomberg's major speech on welfare reform in his first term, "there wasn't a peep about food stamps."

"It's been a really significant omission all of these years that they haven't seen food stamps as work support," Mr. Berg continued, meaning a public support that helps people to secure and keep jobs.

Both Mr. Bloomberg and his human resources commissioner, Verna Eggleston, have been opposed to seeking the waiver in the past, apparently out of a sense that to receive a public benefit like food stamps, people who can work should. But as the city has continued to move people off the welfare rolls, social service officials appear to have shifted their thinking about who is truly capable of working.

"Some people have barriers that make it impossible, or very difficult, for them to find jobs," Robert McHugh, a spokesman for the city's Human Resources Administration, said earlier this week.

But the shift among city officials toward easing eligibility for food stamps — a change endorsed by Commissioner Eggleston — has not yet been embraced in the highest reaches of city government.

Mr. Bloomberg's chief spokesman, Stu Loeser, said the gap over the issue grew out of both the mayor's governing style and substance. Given that Mr. Bloomberg thinks that a frequent fault of government is to avoid trying new things out of a fear of failing, Mr. Loeser said, "it's not surprising that we have people within the administration who are exploring different ways of doing things — it's what we want."

At the same time, he continued, Mr. Bloomberg is the one who is accountable to voters and who has to make choices about how to focus the city's resources. "Are we changing our policy, or do we still have more to do in terms of reaching out to people who are currently qualified for food stamps?" Mr. Loeser asked rhetorically. "The mayor's decision is to focus on that."

This internal debate is playing out even as the Bloomberg administration pursues its own agenda of increasing the number of eligible people receiving food stamps by making it easier to apply.

Meanwhile, City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn plans to make that issue a prominent part of the City Hall budget negotiations, and she outlined her initiatives yesterday. Elected officials like Representative Anthony D. Weiner are making noise about hunger on the way to a likely 2009 mayoral campaign, and advocates for the poor are paying close attention to the shifting thinking within the administration.

"The fact that Bloomberg is focusing on poverty and the fact that we are even having this discussion," Mr. Berg said, "means that people in the administration are talking about this very seriously." Despite the problems he sees with the administration's approach, he said, "there are a lot of really positive signs."

Sewell Chan contributed reporting for this article.