T h e i d e a s a n d t h e

. i d e o l o g u e s b e h i n d
,
N e w Y o r k ' s
w e l f a r e o v e r h a u l
D(((MBlR 1998 $1.00
Clobal Localism
O
ne of the great perks of putting out a magazine about New York City neighbor-
hoods is that you get to avoid the more ponderous global problems of the day.
Wall Street 's manic depression is well-covered in publications like Crain's,
which has been furiously putting the best face on a potentially dismal 1999 with wishful
headlines like: "Wall St. Layoffs Won't Derail City's Economy."
But occasionally these wider concerns reach such a point that you just can't ignore
EDITORIAL
them. In September, when the economic gloom was thickest, the
International Monetary Fund met in Washington D.C. , an event
entirely overshadowed by the near-collapse of the Brazilian stock
market and Bill Clinton's impeachment travails. The meeting itself
produced no big decisions, but buried in the equivocations was one
truly astounding speech by World Bank President James
Wolfensohn.
Wolfensohn, an Australian billionaire investment banker, talked about the roots of the
world turmoil, which he did not trace to Asian banking calamities, hedge funds or Russia's
collapsing currency. Instead, he discussed the global threat presented by poverty.
"We must address this human pain," Wolfensohn told the gathering of world economic
ministers. "We must go beyond financial stabilization .. . We must focus on the social issues.
"Because if we do not have the capacity to deal with social emergencies, if we do not
have longer term plans for solid institutions, if we do not have greater equity and social
justice, there will be no political stability. And without political stability, no amount of
money put together in financial packages will give us financial stability, " he said.
So far, the world, the country, the stale and the city are far from recognizing thaI imper-
ative. But these world problems will persist and the trouble will eventually find us.
Take Merrill Lynch's layoff of 3,400 employees, 700 or so from its headquarters in the
World Financial Center. Layoffs are evil, but this one didn'l cause too mllny tremors on Ihe
Left. It wasn't like a light truck assembly plant closing in Flint. The average income of the
newly "right-sized" Merrill Lynch workers was $170,OOO-about as much as it cosls to
run a small neighborhood housing organization in this city for a year.
The cuts are shocking because they came so quickly in a time of relative prosperity.
But what is most bothersome is the fact that the company never seemed to consider imple-
menting an organization-wide pay-cut that would preserve everyone's jobs. No one thought
to share the pain because no one had ever thought to share the profit.
And that's the point Wolfensohn makes about the troubles in the world economy. A little
unselfishness goes along way in serving self-interest.
~ -
-Glenn Thrush, Editor
Cover illustration by Charles Senties
City LIfTlitsrelies on the generous support of its readers and advertisers. as well as the following funders: The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.
The Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock. The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation.
The Scherman Foundation. The North Star Fund. J.P. Morgan & Cc. Incorporated. The Booth Ferris Foundation. The Annie E. Casey Foundation"
The New York Community Trust. The New York Foundation. The Taconic Foundation. M&T Bank. Citibank. and Chase Manhattan Bank.
(ity Limits
Volume XXIII Number 9
City Limits is published ten times per year. monthly except
bi-monthly issues in June/July and September/October. by
the City Limits Community Information Service. Inc .. a non-
profit organization devoted to disseminating information
concerning neighborhood revitalization.
Publisher: Kim Nauer
Editors: Glenn Thrush. Carl Vogel
Senior Editor: Robin Epstein
Associate Editors: Kemba Johnson. Kathleen McGowan
Contributing Editors: James Bradley. Michael Hirsch.
Andrew White
Intern: Aaron Clark
Desi gn Di rection: James Conrad. Paul V. Leone
Advertising Representative: John Ullmann
Proofreaders: Anne Arkush. Sandy Socolar
Photographers: Melissa Cooperman. Mayita Mendez
Center for an Urban Future:
Director: Neil Kleiman
Associate Director: Julie Hantman
Board of Directors*:
Beverly Cheuvront. Girl Scout Council of Greater NY
Francine Justa. Neighborhood Housing Services
Rebecca Reich. LlSC
Andrew Reicher. UHAB
Tom Robbins. Journalist
Celia Irvine. ANHO
Pete Williams. National Urban League
Affiliations for identification only.
Sponsors:
Pratt Institute Center for Community
and Environmental Development
Urban Homesteading Assistance Board
Subscription rates are: for individuals and community
groups. $25/0ne Year. $39/Two Years; for businesses.
foundations. banks. government agencies and libraries.
$35/0ne Year. $50/Two Years. Low income. unemployed.
$1 O/One Year.
City Limits welcomes comments and article contributions.
Pl ease include a stamped. self-addressed envelope for return
manuscripts. Material in City Limits does not necessarily
reflect the opinion of the sponsoring organizations. Send
correspondence to: City Limits. 120 Wall Street. 20th Fl. .
New York. NY 10005. Postmaster: Send address changes to
City Limits. 120 Wall Street. 20th Fl. . New York. NY 10005.
Subscriber complaints call: 1-800-783-4903
Periodical postage paid
New York. NY 10001
City Limits IISSN 0199-0330)
1212) 479-3344
FAX 1212) 344-6457
e-mail: CL@citylimits.org
On the Web: www.citylimits.org
Copyright 1998. All Rights Reserved. No
portion or portions of this journal may be reprinted with-
out the express permission of the publishers.
City Limits is indexed in the Alternative Press
Index and the Avery Index to Architectural
Periodicals and is available on microfilm from University
Microfilms Intemational. Ann Arbor. MI 48106.
CITY LIMITS
DECEMBER 1998
FEATURES
The Battle of Richmond Hill
megal subdivisions are transfonning suburban homes in Queens into
modem-day tenements and fire-traps. Closing them down may sound like a
good idea, but where will all the tenants go? By Glenn Thrush
Jason's Brain Trust
When Jason Turner was hired to revamp New York City'S welfare system,
he brought his ideological convictions and those of his closest advisors with him.
By Carl Vogel and Neil deMause
Judge Dread ~
Evaluating the performance of nonprofits has become big business and evaluators
have become big power players. Now it's time to judge the judges. By Robin Epstein
PIPELINES
Not Quite Fed Up ~
This year's budget yielded a $70 billion surplus, but only a few new dollars for
New York City's underfunded social service, education and environmental sectors.
Sweep for Your Supper II!JIIIII
Homeless shelter residents are being asked to work in their lodgings, some earning
63 cents an hour at janitorial jobs that prevent them from fmding real work-or
independence. By Kemba Johnson
Review
Marsh of Progress
Cityview
Vacant Scare
Spare Change
Council Manic
Editorial
Briefs
Ammo
COMMENTARY
129
By Paul Parkhill
130
By Michael McKee
134
By Carl Vogel and Glenn Thrush
DEPARTMENTS
2
5
31
Professional
Directory
Job Ads
32
33
SUBSCRIBE TO
THE PREMIER NEW YORK
URBAN AFFAIRS NEWS
MAGAZINE
(i
Limits
Learn what City Hall doesn't want you to know about New YorKs neighborhoods.
And find out what New Yorkers are dOing about it. With award-winning news
coverage and more than 20 years of journalism experience, City Limits uncovers
the story in housing, social services, politics and organizing.
"Tremendously helpful to anyone who needs to understand the politics of
poverty and moo In New York City. Conslstently Inclslve and reltsble:
- Jonathan Kozol. author of Savage Inequalities
News. Analysis. Investigative reporting. Read it in City Limits and know it first.
OTHER CITY LIMITS COMMUNITY INFORMATION SERVICE PUBLICATIONS:
(ityUmits W ~ k I y AN INDI SPENSABLE SOURCE ON POLI TICS. COMMUNITY ACTION AND NEIGHBORHOOD NEWS .
... AND FROM THE CENTER FOR AN URBAN FUTURE, NEW YORK'S ONLY
NEIGHBORHOOD-ORIENTED POLICY INSTITUTE
NEIGHBORHOOD JUSTICE: A COMMUNITY RESPO SE TO JUVE lLE CRIME
CHI LD WELFARE WATCH: COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE OF THE CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM
YES! Start my subscription to
City Limits magazine.
Individuals/N onprofits
o $25/one year 0 0 issues)
o $39/two years (20 issues)
Business/Government/Library
o $35/one year 0 $50 2 years
YES! Send my copy of
Neighborhood Justice.
0 $5.00
YESI Send my copy of
Name
Address
YES! Please send me the
City Limits Weekly E-mail and Fax Bulletin.
E-Mail Address: ________ _
or Fax Number: ________ _
o FREE
Child Welfare Watch. City State Zip
o $2.00 ----"'-----------'-'----'-'---'----= ---------
YES! Send my copy of
the Child Welfare Forum video.
0 $15.00
SEND YOUR ORDER TO:
City Limits, 120 Wall Street, 20th Floor
New York, NY 10005, (212) 479-3344
Halcyon Days

rl

.
. "
-.
The Not-So-Young Lords
C
olumbus Circle. Thomas Jefferson Park.
The Washington housing projects.
Ismael Nuiiez, a Puerto Rican polit-
ical activist, is all worked up over
Manhattan's place names. "George
Washington was a slave owner, an imperialist," he
tells 150 East Harlemites, "and he didn't grow up
in East Harlem."
Almost everybody crammed into the old audi-
torium of the Spanish United Methodist Church on
East III th Street is from the neighborhood, so
they laugh.
These people-teachers, parents, politicians,
poets-have been summoned to celebrate and pre-
serve their neighborhood's political history. The
event was sponsored by Place Matters, a citywide
group dedicated to promoting and preserving com-
munity history.
In East Harlem, that meant bringing together
players from the neighborhood's two great hey-
days. In the I 960s, Puerto Ricans, led by the
Young Lords, began asserting their cultural and
political power throughout the city. The legendary
Lords were responsible for nurturing a generation
of political leaders, and unleashing ex-member
DECEMBER 1998
Geraldo Rivera on an unguarded world.
A half-century earlier, East Harlem was almost
entirely Italian and undergoing a similar coming-
of-age. It was from these streets that the careers of
the city's two greatest socialists were launched:
Congressman Vito Marcantonio and the Little
Flower, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
The roots of those days run deep. Even though
he's a staunch conservative, Vincent Velella, the 84-
year-old Bronx Republican who runs the city Board
ofElections, grew up in the neighborhood and claims
Marcantonio as a boyhood friend. Between coughing
fits at the podium, Velella insisted that Marcantonio,
whose pro-Communist stance helped him carry East
Harlem as the American Labor Party's 1949 mayoral
candidate, was not really as red as reputation had it.
"Today, people make Marcantonio out to be a radi-
cal, but he was never a radical," he said.
Carlito Rovira, a fonner member of the Young
Lords and still a Communist, was less apologetic
about his past associations.
Rovira, now a truck dispatcher and part-time
writer for Worker's World, hadn't been back to the
old church in almost 30 years. One of the last
times he was inside, he was beaten by cops after
the Young Lords entered the building in hopes of
convincing the reluctant church leadership to start
a neighborhood children's program.
Rovira bitterly recalled the hostile congrega-
tion singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" as he
and his friends were dragged out.
"We were about community, we were about
self-determination," said the avowed atheist, his
voice tinged with bitterness. "The church was an
alien in the community."
But the billy clubs seemed pretty far away on
this day, as Rovira made his way through the
crowd shaking hands and hugging old friends. It
seemed that everybody knew someone, whether
they were from the old neighborhood or not.
The only people who seemed a little out of
sorts were 30 architecture students from Denmark,
who were in town to study civic affairs. As speak-
ers screamed, chanted poetry and reveled in polit-
ical arcana, they scribbled meticulous notes, trying
to take it all in stride.
When asked what she thought, one of the
women in the group said she expected no less.
"After all, you're Americans, right?" she said.
-Aaron Clark

Briem .......... ------.......... -------------
c
Housing
Lien Days
Ahead
F
or the first time since the 1970s, tax-
delinquent buildings are being auc-
tioned off in New York. A total of 105
buildings, 22 of them apartment build-
ings or houses, were slated to go on the
block on November 2. But the other half of the
city's tax arrears policy, a plan to rehabilitate bro-
ken-down buildings in low-income neighbor-
hoods by transferring them to responsible land-
lords, has yet to get underway.
Before Rudolph Giuliani took office, the city
would take buildings from landlords who
refused to pay taxes. The policy left the city
government in charge of some of the worst-
and least profitable-buildings in the city. So in
1994, the mayor ordered the city's housing
department to get out of the housing manage-
ment business, stop taking buildings and sell off
the remaining stock to private landlords, com-
munity groups and tenant associations. But
without the threat of foreclosure, the city no
longer had the muscle to get tax payments from
deadbeat landlords.
Two and a half years ago, the administration
hit on a novel plan: privatizing the tax-collecting
business. The city sold off close to 15,000 proper-
ty, water and sewer tax liens, worth about $500
million, to a private trust. The trust then hired
white-shoe collection agents to fetch those debts,
plus 18 percent interest and penalties. Owners who
don't pay up will see their buildings auctioned
off-these 105 buildings are the first of the lot.
''To a certain extent, it's a good thing this is
happening," says New York University law school
professor and real estate expert Michael Schill. "It
makes owners of tax-delinquent buildings under-
stand that they have to begin paying taxes, or else
there will be real consequences."
But Schill points out that the process is not
well supervised-and this could lead to a replay of
the housing disasters of the 1970s, where dilapi-
dated buildings were run into the ground by debtor
landlords. One worry is that the program is being
managed by the city's revenue-generating finance
department instead of the housing agency, whose
mission is to preserve buildings. "We need to be
tracking the buildings, making sure some respon-
sible owner takes them, manages them," says
Schill.
"A lot of questions are raised by this auction
issue," agrees Anne Pasmanick of the Community
Training and Resource Center, which provides
technical assistance to small landlords. "There are
a lot of unknowns. They've had success in getting
revenue in, but we don't know if other measures
of success are being evaluated."
Distressed buildings in poor neighborhoods
can't be auctioned off under this plan-instead,
they are supposed to go into an alternate program
where the properties are temporarily transferred to
private agencies, then handed off to responsible
owners. But while the auctions are now underway,
the city has not moved ahead with this alternative
plan. A pilot version of the program is scheduled
to begin soon in the South Bronx, but, according
to Celia Irvine of the Association for
Neighborhood and Housing Development, it
remains bogged down in technicalities.
-Kathleen McGowan
REFUSED SHELTER
T
he city's notorious Emergency Assistance Unit is supposed to
find homeless families places to live. In past years, with shel-
ters overbooked, the agency has been transformed into a
flophouse, with homeless families left to sleep on office desks and
floors. The agency has also been accused of arbitrary screening
procedures that turn away legitimately needy families. So a group
of shelter operators spent six months interviewing more than 500
A. survey of homeless families
shows one-third were initially
turned away by the EA.U.
homeless families who made it into their shelters. Their results, reported last month: Nearly one-third of the families
said they had initially been turned down at the EAU; some had to reapply more than a half-dozen times. Although
their circumstances and paperwork didn't change, their luck at the agency eventually did. The process creates
"unnecessary and unreasonable hardship," says the report-not to mention a lot of wasted time.
23%
340/0
II RiUected 6 or more times D RiUected 2-5 times II RiUected once

CITY LIMITS
.7 ........ --------...... - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - B r i e ~
L---_A _HE_D_GE_F_UND_FO_R_HAR_D_T_IM_E_S----'I
~
rg

S\-\ORl TERtv1
CAPITAL.
\'A AN AG EMENT
~ ~ ~ I
=
-
-
"I'M HEAVILY LEVERAGED IN FOOD, SHELTER AND WARM CLOTHING ... "
Workfare
$600 Million
Man
T
he mayor's plan to put all welfare
recipients to work might be the corner-
stone of a national political run, but it's
going to cost New York City taxpayers
an extra $600 million a year, according
to the city's Independent Budget Office (lBO).
If the city Human Resources Administration
continues with plans to require all but the most
severely disabled recipients to take workfare
assignments, costs will rise by a half billion dol-
lars in 2000 and to $601 million by 2002.
Since 1995, Giuliani has cut the welfare rolls
by 253,000, largely by forcing people off the dole
who won't or can't take workfare jobs. But even
though the city is expected to shed an additional
100,000 welfare slots over the next several years,
those savings will be drowned by the cost of new
workfare programs.
"Everybody on welfare, even the people who
have workfare jobs, still gets their check," says
IBO analyst Paul Lopatto, one of the report's
authors. "The ones who have the workfare assign-
ments also need to receive training, placement ser-
vices and child care services. It adds up to addi-
DECEMBER 1998
tional cost."
The cash crunch will be especially tough in
2002, when some 50,000 people are expected to
lose the federal share of their welfare benefits
under the federal five-year lifetime limits. The
state and city have agreed to create a Safety Net
Assistance program to help ease the welfare
refugees into the workplace. This will tack an
additional $124 million onto the city's budget.
In October, city welfare boss Jason Turner
released the results of a phone poll of 126 former
public assistance recipients, which showed that
only a third had failed to find some kind of job.
But the survey's minuscule sample size and
phone-it-in methodology elicited jeers from wel-
fare advocates. -Glenn Thrush
Polluters
Steam-
Cleaned Suit
W
hen Browning Ferris Industries
closed its South Bronx medical
waste incinerator in June 1997,
bowing to four years of communi-
ty pressure, locals celebrated their
victory. But the party may have been premature.
Now an agreement between BFl and the state
environmental agency gives the neighborhood a
tough choice: Accept a new sterilizing plant or
face the incinerator's return. The huge waste man-
agement company wants to tum its old incinera-
tor, which amassed more than 440 emissions vio-
lations since 1993, into a plant to steam-sterilize
medical waste.
At a recent public meeting, officials from the
state Department of Environmental Conservation
explained the terms of a consent order signed by
the agency, BFl and its Bronx Lebanon Hospital
Center sponsor. The company promises to remove
its incinerating equipment, as long as its new ster-
ilizing permit is approved.
According to the agreement, if residents file
suit against the plant, the state will allow BFl to
reapply for its incinerator permit. But even if the
company seeks a new permit, says Mary Ellen
Kris, DEC Region II administrator, the agency is
committed to preventing BFl from operating
another incinerator at that site.
Neighborhood activists don't know if they'll
sue. "[We're] not against autoclave [sterilizers],"
says Frances Sturim of the Bronx Clean Air
Coalition. "They're safer than incinerators. It's
BFl's record in the country and around the world
that's disgusting."
Other provisions of the consent decree call for
BFl to pay the state $50,000 for past emissions
violations, fund an environmental impact state-
ment and spend $200,000 on environmentally
beneficial projects, such as asthma education and
recycling. -Kemba Johnson
s
PIPELINE <;
,
:M
Not Quite Fed Up
The good news out of Washington is that there isn't much bad
news in this year s budget.
T
he fruits of Washington's sound fis-
cal policy were plucked from the
vine this year in the form of a $92
billion surplus. It's the capstone of
the Clinton economic policy and Ross Perot's
sole lasting legacy in American life.
But for New York, it's the same old
story: A budget full of mixed blessings-
and many sins of omission.
"We have such lowered expectations
that when they stop beating us, we are
relieved," says welfare expert Liz Krueger,
of the Community Food Resource Center.
"When it comes to governrnent funds, a
good news budget is one that doesn' t hit
poor people even harder. But do I think peo-
ple should take to the streets in joy? No."
Here's a breakdown of how the half-
trillion-dollar spending plan will affect
low-income New Yorkers.
EDUCATION
A hike in school spending
was the top budget headline and
Bill Clinton's proudest
achievement this year, but the
reality is that the increases are
not as large as the White House
would have the world believe.
The big news was $1.2 bil-
lion to hire 100,000 new ele-
mentary school teachers nation-
wide over the next six years, a
plan that would limit kinder-
garten through third grade
class size to 18 children per
classroom. While welcome,
that money is budgeted for
only one year's salary for each
teacher. And the more than
$100 million that New York
State will receive under this
formula doesn' t necessarily
meet the system's greatest
needs.
That's because a similar
state scheme is already on the
horizon. The Ladder pro-
gram, a three-year, $225
million funding stream to
reduce K -3 class size by
hiring more teachers, is
scheduled to begin next
year. The state program,
bringing class size down to 20, left local
districts footing as much as one-third of
the bill, so the federal legislation will fill
some gaps.
But an opportunity to fix the city's
crowded, decrepit schools has gone unre-
alized. An amendment that would have
allowed $22.6 billion in federal school
construction and restoration bonds over
the next two years didn' t make the final
cut. New York City stood to receive $1.6
billion under the plan.
The federal governrnent
has never been in
the school facility
funding business
in any signifi-
cant way before,
but the real reason
the amendment
was shot down
may have more to
do with politics. Republicans were unwill-
ing to give credit for such a popular mea-
sure to the amendment's main sponsor,
Illinois' Democratic Senator Carol
Moseley-Braun, who is in a re-election
race the GOP has identified as a must-win.
SOCIAL SERVICES
Social services are in marginally better
health, with incremental increases across
the board and most of the House of
Representative's nastiest cuts nixed.
The Department of Health
and Human Services got its
biggest hike in seven
: years, with an $800 mil-
lion increase in AIDS-
related funding, including
$300 million for substance
abuse and treatment programs.
AIDS prevention money was bumped
up 5 percent to $660 million, $25 million
more than Clinton requested, and the
Congressional Black Caucus secured a
$110 million chunk for prevention in
African-American communities.
Three Presidential requests-reautho-
rizing low-income utility bill subsidies,
funding for youth summer job programs,
and more than $300 million for Head
Start-that were slated to be killed wound
up surviving. Medicare got an additional
$163 million.
But the social services block grant was
cut nearly $400 million below last year, and
the Wells tone amendment, which would
have opened up welfare work requirements
to include two years of college or a second
year of vocational training, was stripped
from the higher education bill.
HOUSINe
The Department of Housing and Urban
Development programs got a
$2.7 billion increase this
year, for a total budget
of $24.5 billion.
Section 8-the pro-
gram that subsidizes
rents for poor tenants
in private housing-has
50,000 new vouchers to
help families corning off
of welfare, and the bill
CITY LIMITS
eliminated a system delay that used to
freeze up 40,000 vouchers a year. Next
year should see 100,000 more vouchers,
and another 100,000 added in 2001.
Capital improvement money for public
housing increased to $3 billion, and the
HOPE VI program, which is demolishing
the nation's most decayed projects and
replacing some with small buildings, was
boosted by 20 percent.
The Trojan horse: a public housing
reform bill that Republican Rick Lazio has
been trying to pass for two years. Tenant
advocates were horrified by earlier House
versions of the bill, which would have
replaced some of the poorest tenants with
working-class ones and introduced stiff
work requirements. In the version that
passed, the worst of these provisions are
gone, and most of the spaces in the pro-
jects are still reserved for the poor.
"It's a far cry from where the House
bill was, and even better than the Senate
bill," says Linda Couch of the National
Low Income Housing Coalition. "It's pret-
ty good news."
HUD also increased homeless housing
money by 18 percent, up to nearly $1 bil-
lion-but that may not matter much
since, as of late, New York State has been
much less aggressive in grabbing its
share. HUD got a $11 million increase for
AIDS housing funds, and through the
omnibus spending bill, Congress pushed
the sum up another $10 million to a total
of $225 million. It's a substantial
increase, but with many new jurisdictions
now eligible for the funds, New York's
share probably will climb by only 2 per-
cent-just keeping up with inflation.
There was also good news for gay rights
advocates: the defeat of the Riggs
Amendment, which would have denied
federal housing funding to cities that rec-
ognize same-sex marriage.
ENVIRONMENT
For years residents of the South Bronx,
home to the city's worst asthma rates, have
wondered what's in the air, and whether
it's there because of environmental racism.
The federal Environmental Protection
Agency was just given the green light-
and $400,OOO-to look into both issues. If
the agency concludes that the city subject-
ed Hunts Point to a disproportionate num-
ber of potentially harmful facilities, the
city could lose its federal environmental
funding. Most jurisdictions settle, though,
before such drastic measures are taken.
The EPA will also receive $91 million to
help communities assess the level of cont-
arnination on local brownfield sites and
devise plans for their redevelopment.
TRANSPORTATION
The communities that line Brooklyn's
Gowanus Expressway had hoped that the
federal budget would include the $18
million that had passed in an earlier
authorization bill a few months ago to
study alternatives to the expressway. It
didn' t make it. But with $51 billion set
aside nationally for transit improvements
in the new generation of transportation
funding-the Transportation Equity Act
for the Twenty First Century (TEA-21)
-the city could take a crack at turning
more drivers into straphangers. TEA-21
will provide $216 billion from 1998 to
2003 on improving the nation's trans-
portation infrastructure, from highways
to pedestrian safety.
States and localities have more flexibil-
ity to use TEA-21 funds than under its p r e ~ Co.
decessor, which expired in 1997. The
wide-reaching program can also claim a
role in welfare-to-work: $750 million to
link people who are dependent on public
transportation to jobs in inaccessible
areas .
-Kemba Johnson,
Kathleen McGowan and Carl Vogel
. BankersTrust Company
Community Development Group
DECEMBER 1998
A resource for the non-profit
development community

Gary Hattem, Managing Director
Amy Brusiloff, Vice President
130 Liberty Street
10th Floor
New York, New York 10006
Tel: 2122507118 Fax: 212.2508552
s
e

PIPEliNE ~
,
Good shelter work
programs teach
real skills-like
making gourmet
mayonnaise, which
George (center)
and Carlos (right)
master here.
--
Sweep for Your Supper
A common shelter work program may be keeping residents
from leaving homelessness behind. By Kemba Johnson
H
omeless, and fresh from a
prison term for assault, TIm
wanted only two things: a
new life and a stable place in
which to build it. So as the
first signs of winter sent homeless men and
women streaming into the city's shelters
last year, Tim joined them, finding a spot
at the massive 850-bed Bellevue Men's
Shelter.
His caseworker told him he had a
choice: Either start cleaning Bellevue as
part of the shelter's internal Work
Experience Program or be transferred to
the 1,OOO-bed Camp LaGuardia shelter in
Orange County.
Tim explains that it would have been
nearly impossible to hold a job in the city
and live at Camp LaGuardia, located 90
miles outside of Manhattan. "You don't
want to live upstate," he says. As he sees it,
his caseworker basically gave him the
choice between hope and defeat.
So Tim-not his real name-started
working four hours a day, five days a week
for 63 cents an hour in Bellevue's shelter
WEP. He and his 40 or so fellow workers
cleaned bathrooms and mopped and swept
the building's eight floors, doing the same
janitorial work as the shelter's few union-
ized community assistants.
Tim still lives in Bellevue and is afraid
of getting kicked out if he is identified.
Other shelter residents interviewed for this
article requested that only their first names
be used.
In the system's large shelters for single
adults, resident labor has become a com-
mon, cheap way to maintain services in the
face of downsizing and budget cuts at the
city Department of Homeless Services
(DHS). Last year, about 1,400 other resi-
dents-one-fifth of all single adult shelter
residents in adult shelters-were in some
type of shelter WEP, according to the
Coalition for the Homeless.
Like the city welfare agency's official
Work Experience Program, shelter WEP
partICIpants get benefits-in this case
housing-in exchange for their work.
They also get a very small stipend, typi-
cally around $12.50 for a 20 to 25 hour
work week. DHS officials emphasize that,
unlike the welfare program, shelter WEP is
not mandatory. Technically, the work is
voluntary.
Residents report, however, that shelter
operators make it clear that it is in their
best interest to pitch in. Some, like Tim,
have been threatened with a transfer
upstate. These residents complain that the
program, billed as job training, is really
just ill-paid custodial work that prevents
them from finding a real job. They say
shelter WEP, as it is commonly known,
makes it impossible to save money or get
the skills needed to escape the system and
become self-sufficient.
Other nonprofit-run shelters offer more
substantial jobs programs that pay up to $2
an hour and are designed to give residents
a marketable skill like cooking. But those
programs are the exception and workers
say that most shelter jobs are dead-end.
"There's nothing wrong with pushing a
broom if there are jobs open," says
Michael Polenberg, an advo-
cate at the Coalition for the
Homeless. "But if pushing a
broom four days a week for
six months would qualify
you for getting a job, people
wouldn't be complaining.
People would be rushing to
sign up."
S
ince 1994, DHS' bud-
get has been reduced
by $68.4 million, in
part by contracting out the
daily operation of 35 of the
city's 42 shelters to nonprof-
it managers. The agency
hopes nonprofits will pro-
vide better services in the
shelters-while saving the
city money. Many salaried
community assistants who
used to clean and cook for
the residents have since
been laid off or redeployed
to other city agencies. This
trend continued after the city
halted privatization. Since
1996 there have been only
seven city-run shelters. That
year DHS employed 669
CITY LIMITS
aides; in 1999 the number will fall to 531.
Instead, shelter WEP workers have
taken over those responsibilities, working
for negligible pay. The programs have
been able to wiggle around minimum
wage laws, saying that the work is job
training-although a recent court decision
(see "Under-BID") has called that claim
into question.
"[Shelter WEP workers have] been
cleaning shelters for the past 15 years, and
[the aides] were happy to have them do the
cleaning," says one shelter official who
spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"Fifteen years ago I told them, 'You are a
bunch of fools. If you keep letting WEP
workers do your job, soon people are
going to say, 'Who needs [you]?' That's
exactly what's happening."
Brooklyn's 194-bed Forbell Avenue
shelter, run by the nonprofit Samaritan
Village, planned to spend $200,000 on
work stipends for shelter residents this
year, $10,000 more than last year. It now
has only two paid maintenance employees,
and both are supervisors. In comparison,
the 41O-resident Borden Avenue shelter in
Queens has 30 salaried housekeeping
aides, at a cost of $700,000.
Shelter WEP workers are a cheap
source of labor in an expensive system. In
1997 the city spent an average of $48.77 a
day per nonprofit-run shelter resident-
that's $1,483 a month, about the going rate
for rent on a one-bedroom apartment in
Brooklyn Heights. For each shelter resi-
dent who cleans and cooks, the city can
save more than $24,500 a year in salary
and benefit costs.
DHS emphasizes that these programs
also provide discipline and structure.
Shelter WEPs are motivational, says one
agency official, and if during the program
the residents also learn soft skills, like
showing up for work on time, so much the
better. "This is an engagement program for
people not with the program," the official
explains. "It's a way to get people to do
something structured. It's job training in a
loose form."
But according to a study by University
of Pennsylvania Professor Dennis
Culhane, 80 percent of shelter residents
stay for fewer than two months. Many are
just trying to get their lives in order, and
for them, shelter WEP prevents them from
saving enough to afford their own apart-
ment.
"Ultimately, you have someone depen-
dent on the public, through welfare, shel-
ters or both," says Polenberg. "Your goal is
to get them not dependent on the public
anymore. You have to figure out the most
DECEMBER 1998
Under-BID
E
xecutives at the Grand Central Partnership and 34th Street
Partnership tIIoIWIt their job training program for homeless adults
was one to emulate. But last March, a federal court judge informed
them it was Hiegal.
The two business improvement districts had developed "Pathways
to Employment," in which homeless adults worked 40 hours a week
sweeping city streets, doing administrative work or serving as security
guards for pay that ranged between S40 to S60 a week. The BiDs also
contracted out their workers to outside businesses. In 1993 and 1994,
PTE security guards were paid Sl hour to clear homeless people out of
Bryant Park for the annual "Seventh on Sixth" fashion show.
Although the program provided workshops that taught interview and
resume-writing skills, and helped with job placement, fonner participants
said PTE was hardly ajob training program. With the help of the Urban
Justice Canter, the Coalition for the Homeless and the law firm of Cleary,
Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, they sued, claiming they were entitled to mini-
mum wage. Thejudge agreed, on the grounds that the partnerships profit-
ed from the labor of PTE workars. "The day after the decision I had pro-
gram directors at city shelters calling me up saying, 'This isn't going to
aft'act our program, is itP'" recalls Michael PoIenberg at the Coalition for
the Homeless. "It put everybody CHI notice."
Now, advocates at Legal Aid and the Coalition for the Homeless are
deciding how to force other shelter programs to improve their employ-
ment programs. "The Grand Central case has implications for these shel-
ter training programs," says Steve Banks, coordinating attomey for Legal
Aids' homeless rights prqiect. "They're similar in that people work for
less than minimum wage under the guise of training. I would hope that, in
light of the ruling in the Grand Central Partnership case, the city would
volunteer to come into compliance without litigation. If that doesn't hap-
pen, we will be forced to press for the rights of shelter residents. "
Doug Lasdon, executive director for the Urban Justice Canter, is less
confident that the ruling will apply to shelter WEP. He points out that shel-
ters don't usually contract out their employees to other businessa-as
the Grand Central Partnership did-and so can't be accllsed II the same
kind of profiteering. But Lasdon says that even if the programs are not
considered exploitative in the eyes of the court, they still aren't doing
much good for the residents: "[Shelter WEP] is antarproductive, if not
illegal." -KJ
effective way to do that. WEP assigrunents
don't accomplish that. It's simply an
exchange [of work for shelter]."
In some of the more generous pro-
grams, it is possible to save money with
enough hard work, says 11, another home-
less man who now lives at the Charles H.
Gay shelter on Wards Island, which is run
by Volunteers of America. He spent nine
months in the shelter's Project
Breakthrough WEP and says some of his
fellow residents work "overtime."
"Some people are using Project
Breakthrough like a job, busting their
butts, like me, to get some walking-around
money," 11 says. He makes $2 an hour
working in the kitchen. The program also
holds out the hope of a permanent job.
Many of the administrative and mainte-
nance workers at the 950-bed shelter were
hired through Project Breakthrough.
I
n the basement of Project Renewal's
East Third Street shelter recently, a for-
mer alcoholic named George is losing
his battle to beat a couple of stubborn egg

-
B
When the bough breaks ...
Child care is a vital service needed by many thousands of
New York families.
To help make sure that child care services are available to
families who need them, Lawyers Alliance provides free
and low cost legal services to public and privately funded
child care service organizations. We also publish important
guides that explain the laws and regulations that affect
child care providers.
To find out more about Lawyers Alliance's services and
publications specifically designed to help child care
providers, call us at 212-219-1800.
99 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10013
212219-1800
of
NEW YORK
INCORPORATED
Your
Neighborhood
Housing
Insurance
Specialist
Lawyers Alliance
for New York
Building a Better New York
For 20Years
We've Been There
ForYou.
R&F OF NEW YORK, INC. has a special
department obtaining and servicing insurance for
tenants, low-income co-ops and not-for-profit
community groups. We have developed competitive
insurance programs based on a careful evaluation
of the special needs of our customers. We have
been a leader from the start and are dedicated to
the people of New York City.
For In/ormation call:
Ingrid Kaminski, Executive Vice President
R&F of New York
One Wall Street Court
New York, NY 10005-3302
212 269-8080 800 635-6002 212 269-8112 (fax)
-
yolks into homemade mayonnaise.
"Raise, raise that whisk," jokes Carlos,
a fellow resident, as he pours oil on two
eggs in his own aluminum bowl. "You're
going to break my egg yolks." The two
men, tricked out in white pants, white
shirts, white aprons and white hats, are
among 23 others taking a cooking class in
the shelter's basement kitchen.
By supplementing the shelter's DHS
subsidies with funding from outside
sources, the nonprofit Project Renewal has
set up a jobs program offering more than
the usual custodial care for custodians.
This culinary arts program is the promise
of privatization in the shelter system. For
12 weeks, these cooks-in-training learn the
basics of commercial cooking, then move
to a 12-week internship in an institutional
kitchen, where they receive a weekly
stipend of $50 that pays for transportation
and other needs. At the end of the program,
residents get a training certificate and the
skills they need to get jobs as prep cooks.
Project Renewal's administrators say
three out of four graduates get jobs.
That's why Carlos, who owned a catering
business until his own alcoholism forced
him to close it down, says he feels fortu-
nate to be in the program. "You never see
a cook without a job," says Carlos, now
whisking George's eggs with talent. "You
must be a terrible cook if you don't have
ajob."
It took six years for Project Renewal to
build this program, assembling funding
from a number of outside sources. When
the agency started the program in 1992, it
was originally answering a Request for
Proposals from the city Department of
Employment. Now funds from the federal
Department of Housing and Urban
Development keep it going.
DHS officials hoped that shelter priva-
tization would generate many programs
like this one. Project Renewal's Culinary
Arts Director Barbara Hughes believes
that as nonprofits gain more experience
with shelter management, their directors
will create more effective employment
programs. "With privatization come non-
profits like Project Renewal that will be
innovative," Hughes says.
A few feet away Carlos has frnished
whisking the mayonnaise. In a few months
he will begin his internship. He says he is
thankful that this shelter has given him a
second chance at his dream job: becoming
a chef on a cruise ship. Carlos watches,
smiling, as George makes himself a fresh
mayonnaise sandwich. ''The city needs
more programs like this," he says .
CITY LIMITS
FOUNDATION
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRILOGY
Part Three
The Battle of Richmond Hill
Without illegal apartments, housing 1n Queens would be a lot less
dangerous and overcrowded. It would also be a lot less affordable
for a new generation of immigrants. By Glenn Thrush
n the late 1880s, sitting in the study of the huge house he
built for himself in Richmond Hill, a photographer and
reporter named Jacob Riis wrote a small volume called
"How the Other Half Lives." During the days, he dragged
his camera through the corridors of Lower East Side tene-
ments, dodging rats, loose pigs and orphaned children. At
night he returned to the tree-lined repose of central Queens
to write.
"[The] large rooms," Riis said of the sub-divided tene-
ments of lower Manhattan, "were partitioned into several smaller
ones, without regard to light or ventilation ... They soon became
filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from
DECEMBER 1998
hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded,
and squalid as beggary itself."
One hundred and eight years after Riis published his book,
Nancy Cataldi has discovered that other the half now lives in
Richmond Hill.
"Half of the houses have people living in them illegally, stuffed
into basements, attics, wherever they can fit them," says Cataldi,
herself a freelance news photographer and Richmond Hill home-
owner. "In one house on my block, the guy's just a slumlord. There
are drug dealers and prostitutes. When the sewer line backed up, he
got a sump pump and let it empty into a dumpster in the backyard.
Each floor has four or five rooms. It's just unbelievable."
If Brooklyn
Heights was the
city S first bedroom
'burb, Queens was
its first articula-
tion of suburbia,
Levittown's
godmother.
m
M
Since the city began cracking down on
illegal basement apartments last year,
149 houses have been evacuated.
Until this kind of thing started happening, no one would have
mistaken this section of Queens for the old Lower East Side. Yet,
because low-cost housing is so hard to find in other parts of the
city, Queens is fast becoming a gritty gateway for the city's new
immigrant homeowners and tenants.
To make mortgage payments, immigrant homeowners
throughout the borough pack their modest one- and two-family
houses to the rafters, filling illegal basement and attic apartments
with tenants and rent-paying relatives.
The phenomenon has changed the basic nature of neighbor-
hoods like Richmond Hill, Jamaica, Kew Gardens and Astoria-
practically every comer of the borough. The signs aren't hard to
fmd. Illegal apartments crowd neighborhoods: Sanitation crews
are overwhelmed by thousands of extra garbage bags, front lawns
are enlisted as parking lots, and local school districts are among
the most overcrowded in the city.
But all this wouldn't add up to much without the fires. Over
the last few years, New York City has heard the story too many
times. An electrical fire rips through a Queens frame house,
killing immigrant workers and leaving multiple families home-
less. In almost every case, illicit construction was the cause: faulty
wiring, cheap partitions and no fire protections. The most recent
fatalities were in August, when a Guyanese seamstress and her
daughter died in an illegal attic apartment, trapped in a building
with no frre escapes or smoke detectors.
These tragedies have pushed politicians to attack the problem
with rare vigor. Last year, the state legislature and City Council
passed laws that led to a massive crackdown against owners who
build illegal apartments. In Queens, the result has been almost 150
orders to vacate.
There's only one problem with this vigorous enforcement
strategy. New York needs these apartments, illegal or not. With
affordable home construction stalled and federal housing money
drying up, tenants are desperate for some place to live.
That means a war between homeowners who want Queens to
remain the city's suburbia-with-subways and the new immigrants
who say they have the right to alter the neighborhood to fit their
needs. Right now, Riis' Richmond Hill is the main battleground in
this conflict.
''Ultimately, there's going to have to be a compromise," says
Mary Ann Carey, district manager of the community board in
neighboring Kew Gardens. "Ed Koch used to come out here and
people used to push him to do something about the illegal apart-
ments and he used to say, 'What am I supposed to do, kick all of
these people out on the streets?' I agree with him.
"At some point we're going to have to legalize some of these
places."
T
hat will be a hard sell, as Queens has always been a shrine
dedicated to the sanctity of the one-family home.
Starting in the late 19th century, the utopians saw the
borough as New York's salvation. If Brooklyn Heights
was the nation's frrst actual suburb, Queens was the earliest ver-
sion of modem suburbia-the godmother of Levittown.
It was here that the English "Garden Cities" movement of the
nineteenth century took fmn root, as planners sought to civilize
chaotic city life by imposing the values of a pastoral village.
"Garden City" is what dry-goods magnate A.T. Stewart called his
oak-lined Queens arcadia, built in 1869. The developments that
followed-Sunnyside Gardens, Jackson Heights, Forest Hills
Gardens and Jamaica Estates-were similarly walled, gated, gen-
teelly landscaped and built in uniform architectural style.
Yet behind their physical appearance was an objective that
persists in Queens today: to create a safe anti-city in convenient
commuting proximity to the real city.
"You have two strong strains in Queens-both of them based
on the principal of homeownership," says Queens historian
Jeffrey Kroessler. ''The frrst strain is the existence of model com-
CITY LIMITS
munities in Queens with planned streets, planned housing and the
whole sense of community planned out in advance. The second is
mile upon mile of market rate housing that incorporates very lit-
tle of the community. That's Queens."
The Sunnyside Gardens model town, Kroessler writes in his
chronicle of the borough, represented "a conscious rejection of the
values, disorder and confusion of city life."
Part of that meant keeping the poor outside: the average price
of a Sunnyside cottage was a third higher than prices in the rest of
the borough.
As the nation's economy soared after the fIrst World War,
Queens was the site of a home construction frenzy, the likes of
which will never be seen again in New York-or anywhere else,
for that matter. Between 1924 and 1928, 85,000 new homes were
built in Queens. The spur for the borough's boom-and subse-
quent bust-was a 1922 state law that allowed insurance compa-
nies to put 40 percent of their swelling assets into real estate.
It wasn't apartments that Queens wanted or got. Seventy-fIve
percent of the new buildings were one- and two-famiJy houses,
and that was no accident. Residents who bought houses under the
new law were exempted from having to pay real estate taxes for
ten years.
No such incentive was given for the construction of mid-
priced apartments. By the mid-1920s, during the height of the
housing boom that would more than double the borough's popu-
lation, the city's tenement commissioner chided Queens develop-
ers for failing to increase "the supply of low or moderate rental
apartments. "
That was an understatement. A borough-wide vacancy survey
conducted a short time earlier revealed that there were precisely
two vacant rental apartments in the entirety of Queens.
L
iberty Avenue is the heart of Indo-Caribbean New York, a
bustling working-class commercial strip that cuts through
heavily residential Richmond Hill. It wears the vestments
of the old Irish-Italian neighborhood it once was: candy
stores, taverns with shamrock crests, an Italian pork emporium.
But the language spoken on streetcorners is increasingly Hindi,
and the waitress who brings the extra croutons for your vegetari-
an split pea soup is an Indian girl, albeit an Indian girl with press-
on nails and a Queens accent.
Between cell phone conversations and sips of soup, Chan
lamoona sits in the diner booth and sifts through the mass of
paperwork that identifIes her as president of the United Hindu
Cultural Council. "The community was such a mess before we
came here," says Jamoona, a nurse who was raised in Trinidad. "I
don't understand how anybody can say the quality of life has
dropped here. Before we came, there was no quality of life here."
Most of lamoona's neighbors hail from Trinidad, Jamaica or
Guyana. Many of their ancestors came to the New World in the
19th century as indentured servants for the British. When the
United States liberalized immigration laws in the 1980s, some
73,000 Guyanese, many of them middle-class Indians, moved to
Queens.
Jackson Heights is the city's best known Indian neighborhood,
but Indo-Caribbeans started moving into nearby Richmond Hill in
search of more space and cheaper housing. Many, Jamoona and
her husband among them, were able to muster down payments for
one- and two-family houses.
The houses in the northern part of this neighborhood are, for the
most part, turreted, dormered Victorians. Cataldi's is a seven-bed-
room giant that has retained its lOO-year-old woodwork and stained
glass windows. More than 1,000 of these capacious homes were
DECEMBER 1998
built by Henry Hogaard, a colorful early 20th century architect
who, legend has it, narrowly escaped death when a bullet fIred by a
contractor deflected off the eyeglass case in his pocket. Cataldi's
house, it turns out, was once owned by Hogaard's mother.
But below Jamaica Avenue, into South Richmond Hill, the
houses are smaller-sturdy, unpretentious wood-frames erected
by the thousands during the pre-Depression building boom. There
are very few apartment buildings in the neighborhood.
lamoona and other local leaders claim that most new home-
buyers don' t know the laws that prevent them from carving their
houses into apartments. But the laws are clear on three major
grounds. First, the city forbids the construction of apartments in
wood-frame houses. Second, state law prohibits residentially
zoned houses from being used as apartment bUildings. Third,
many of the units-especially unventilated basements-could
never pass fIre inspections.
Housing inspectors tell City Limits that more than half the
apartments in the neighborhood have illegal apartments-the vast
majority of them in basements. "Basically, they' re everywhere,"
says a buildings department official.
This underground real estate market is fed by local realtors
who advise buyers to pay for their mortgages by renting out
rooms. "If I told you that we didn't tell people about renting out
the basement, I'd be lying to you," says Ed Ahmad, sitting in his
Century 21 office on Liberty Avenue. "When the laws passed, I
restrained my guys from doing that. But people know what they
need to do. They continue to rent their apartments out because
they don't have a choice."
As he talks, a dozen young men in crisp white shirts lean into
their phones, exhorting people to sell their houses. Five years ago,
Ahmad explains, 75 percent of the buyers were struggling fIrst-
time homeowners. Now he estimates that 60 percent of the buy-
ers he deals with are selling off properties for the second, third or
even fourth time. "Some people are making real estate invest-
ments," he says.
Liberty Avenue bears the imprint of the blossoming real estate
trade. Within 10 blocks of Ahmad's storefront office stand no
fewer than 10 realty offices, three mortgage companies and a trio
of insurance brokers.
"Not one of these guys on the avenue isn't making money,"
Ahmad adds.
B
Ut the good times that have made men like Ahmad pros-
perous may be coming to an end, thanks to the city's
crackdown on illegal subdivides.
The turning point was April 20, 1997, when a fue
spread quickly through an illegally wired Maspeth boarding-
house. The 16 occupants, mostly poor Polish day laborers, leapt
from second- and third-story windows to escape the flames. Four
of them, including the building's owner, didn' t make it.
That tragedy, followed by the discovery of dozens of deaf
Mexicans workers enslaved in the basement of a Queens house,
put political momentum behind the demand for stricter building
code enforcement.
Under pressure from Queens Borough President Claire
Shulman, the state quickly passed a "Nail and Mail" law which
allowed inspectors to issue violations even if the building'S owner
wasn't present. More importantly, the city created a special
Buildings Department task force that prowled the neighborhood
on nights and weekends with fIre inspectors. The more aggressive
enforcement effort was strengthened by heavy new fines: an $800
one-time penalty for houses fitted out for more tenants than zon-
ing laws permit, along with a $50 fee for each day the landlord
-
j "In one of the houses on my block, the
i guy'sjust a slumlord," says Richmond Hill
preservationist Nancy Cataldi. ''There
are drug dealers and prostitutes, and
each floor has four or five rooms."
--
failed to correct the condition. Maximum penalties for violations
of safety and fIre codes were raised from $10,000 to $25,000.
The impact, according to officials and neighborhood residents,
has been dramatic. Since last year, the city has issued 7,459 vio-
lations in Queens. In 149 cases, inspectors found conditions dan-
gerous enough to immediately evacuate the building.
The result, depending on who you talk to, was either a
sweeping victory for zoning justice or a witch hunt. "It's not
really fair, " Jamoona says. "People bought their houses with the
understanding that they would be able to generate extra dollars
in income. They were not told that renting out the basements
was illegal. They were not aware that there were so many rules
and regulations. If this continues, people are going to have to
lose their homes. "
Ed Ahmad estimates his business has dropped by one-fourth.
"If this keeps up there will be a real estate collapse in this neigh-
borhood."
I
n the wake of the crackdown, Jamoona, Ahmad and a group of
Indo-Caribbean leaders have been trying to come up with a
plan of their own.
The idea is to create special zoning exemptions in Richmond
Hill that permit subdivisions-as long as owners undertake the
major renovations that will make their buildings safe. "We're not
talking about doing this for those boarding houses with 30 guys
shoved down the basement," Ahmad says. "We' re talking about
making it legal for someone to rent a basement apartment to their
cousin."
But even that won' t be easy. Earlier this year, the city's build-
ings commissioner told Newsday that easing enforcement was
"difficult because Richmond Hill is primarily built with wood-
frame houses, which are very dangerous when converted to mul-
tiple-family residences."
The complexities of the law work against any such effort.
Anyone who wants to alter New York's building code has to
change at least six different codes: the state Multiple Dwelling
Law, the state Housing Maintenance Code, the city's "old" and
"new" building codes, and the city's health and fIre safety codes.
The activists will fIrst need to surmount the prohibition on turn-
ing a wood-frame house into anything other than a one- or two-fam-
ily dwelling. In a 1993 analysis of the illegal occupancy problem,
researcher Jill Hamberg reported that most other municipalities in
the country allow multiple dwellings in wood-frame houses.
"Maybe you can alter some of the codes," Hamberg says, "if
you deal with the fIre safety and health conditions. That's the bot-
tom line."
To that end, Ahmad and Jamoona have contacted architect Phil
Augusta, former commissioner of the City'S Board of Standards
and Appeals, which oversees zoning and planning, to work on a
fIreproof template for the typical Richmond Hill basement.
Augusta's basic plan, which he believes will cost the average
homeowner around $10,000, involves creating fireproof partitions
around exposed boilers, replacing old wiring, and installing fIre
sprinklers and detection devices. Since most basements are acces-
sible only from an interior staircase, owners would also have to
install a second exit and staircase leading directly out the side of
the house. "All this can be done if people are willing to be a little
flexible," Augusta says.
But any plan to change codes or zoning is far from reality. The
major players in Queens-Shulman, City Council Speaker Peter
Vallone and Archie Spigner, the chair of the council's housing
committee-oppose sweeping zoning changes.
They do, however, want to give small landlords more breath-
ing room. Shulman has drawn up a City Council bill that would
give owners a four-month reprieve from daily fmes if they prove
that they are making a fair effort to improve safety conditions.
Shulman's office expects the bill to be taken up by the council
later this year.
For the city's Indo-Caribbean community, the concessions are
not enough. The issue is fast becoming a clear indication that they
don't have any power in dealing with established political forces.
Ahmad, who has helped coordinate voter registration drives, is
also working to create a new Democratic club that he hopes will
force local politicians to pay attention to his community. "It's real-
ly our fault, we're not getting power and letting people get away
with persecuting us," he says. "We've got to learn how to fIght for
power."
But Nancy Cataldi isn't thinking about power-she simply
wants her neighborhood to become less chaotic, conflicted, and
crowded. She wants Queens to remain Queens. And, in 1998, that
may be the most radical position of all.
"We would like to see families move into the houses in their
original states," says Nancy Cataldi. "We want to see it a little bit
like what it was like at the beginning of the century."
CITY LIMITS

Dolores (Dee) Solomon in her
newly renovated shop,
Dee's Cards N Wedding Service.
CALL: CHASE COMMUNITY
DEVELOPMENT COMMERCIAL
LENDING 212-622-4248
Moving in the right direction
Happy Renovation Dee!
When Dolores (Dee) Solomon went after a much need-
ed loan to keep her struggling small business compet-
itive, she thought it was a "mission impossible." And it
was. Then Thelma Russell, her long-time branch man-
ager at The Chase Manhattan Bank branch at 125th
Street, connected her to the right people.
Thelma personally introduced Dolores to the business
lending officers of the Chase Community Development
Group. Working one-on-one as a team, they cus-
tomized a loan package for Dolores. They did it with
Chase's flexible "CAN*DO" lending program which
makes special allowances for the credit challenges
facing many community-based businesses .
Dolores got her loan and business has never been bet-
ter. Stop by her shop at 480 Lenox Avenue and see for
or call her at 212-281-5125. It just goes to
show you: success is still all about making the right

L.. ......... ............. .. Community Development Group
CHASE. The right relationship is everything.
SM
C 1997 The Chase Manhattan Bank. Member FDIC.
-
ason's

rain rust
WELFARE CHIEF JASON TURNER HAS BIG PLANS FOR
THE CITY'S POOR. HIS HISTORY-AND HIS HAND-
PICKED ASSISTANTS-SUGGEST THAT NEW YORK'S
WELFARE RECIPIENTS ARE IN FOR A TOUGH RIDE.
n May, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was about to do
something uncharacteristic. He was set to deliver a
speech that would call illegitimacy-not crime,
drugs or cabbies-the single biggest threat to the
future of New York City. It floated on a raft of fig-
ures that showed children of single parents to be
more likely to end up poor or in jail and said the
only healthy family was one with two married het-
erosexual parents. For Giuliani, it was an unusual
foray into family values territory.
But a draft of the speech was leaked to Newsday, and the
paper derided the fatherhood topic as so much Murphy Brown
bashing. Giuliani canceled his talk. When the speech was fmally
delivered in July, the language on parenting had been deleted.
The whole episode was a sign that the new thinkers had
arrived. Hand-wringing over illegitimacy may have been strange
territory for the mayor, but it was old hat for one of the Human
Resources Administration's newest employees, Deputy
Commissioner Andrew Bush. In April, new HRA chief Jason
Turner had hired Bush to head the office of policy and program
analysis. Bush came from the conservative Hudson Institute,
where he had co-written a 1997 paper, "Fathers, Marriage, and
Welfare Reform," that made many of the same charged argu-
ments that the mayor had planned for his speech.
Since Turner arrived at HRA last spring, he has taken a lot of
heat from New York's activists and politicians for everything
from ducking out of City Council testimony to tightening access
to public assistance. But Bush-and a host of others-are right
beside him in the kitchen, cooking up the future of welfare in
New York.
You likely won't see the names or faces of the rest of this
crowd in the papers. But these men have a track record that
includes the tough Wisconsin Works welfare reform program,
better known as W-2. In New York, changes like the transforma-
tion of welfare "income centers" into "job centers" are among the
first signs of emergence of this group's long-held theories on
markets, family structure and state control.
Jason Turner and his new staff may be true believers in ways
that Giuliani is not. The resulting collision between full-blown
ideology and political expedience may well leave the nation's
largest welfare population with Wisconsin's strict rules, but with-
out its attempts to ease the transition from public assistance.
d
ason Turner is a man with a singular vision, one
that's apparent in his most infamous quote. This
June, he told a PBS interviewer that "It's work that
sets you free," apparently not realizing the source of
the slogan: the sign above the gates of Auschwitz.
The phrasing may have been unfortunate, but the sentiment
was vintage Turner. As far as he's concerned, what poor people
need-more than education or child care or even money-is work.
"What liberals have entirely failed to grasp is that social maladies,
By Capl Vogel and Neil deMause
Illustpations by Chaples Senties
CITY LIMITS
I
-
including poverty, are the result of learned behavior in which
enforced idleness is a contributing factor," Turner wrote in 1996 in
Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship, a magazine
published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
fare. "Work is something that is part of treatment. It helps make
you better." He has made the same argument in favor of assign-
ing work to abused women.
"Jason has very strong ideological commitments
regarding the social contract and a very deep faith in
the free market to provide enough jobs and pay
decent benefits," says Julie Kerksick, who, as
executive director of a Milwaukee welfare
"When
But Turner is no hypocrite. Nearly
everyone who knows the new HRA
chief will tell you that he's motivat-
ed by a genuine drive to help the
poor-and that he's a working
dervish himself. "He might
stay all night to work on a reform demonstration project, met with
Turner many times in the early 1990s. (No
HRA employee, including Turner, would
agree to be interviewed for this article.)
Turner doesn't see work just as a sim-
ple source of money, but as an antidote
for a wide array of ills. "Work is not
something that you need to do after
you've received treatment," was how he
put it this spring, as an explanation of
why the city requires individuals in drug
treatment programs to sign up for work-
a single
mother on
welfare gets a
job, her marriage
prospects increase.
Employment
exposes her to more
project," says Jean Rogers,
Turner's Wisconsin boss.
"You could find a fair
number of outfits behind
his office door. "
Michael Wiseman,
a friend of Turner's, and
vice-chair of a Wisc-
onsin W-2 evaluation
committee, says that
when the two went to
Europe last summer, they
spent off hours between
~ ~ ~ marriageable
meetings visiting Cambridge
and the "grimy" parts of
London to see how the Blair
government handles social ser-
vices. "I was amused by the fact
that people go to the beach and muse-
ums and we go to welfare offices," he
says with a laugh.
males."
-Andrew
Bush
Wiseman says that in England, Turner asked a
lot of questions and got into spirited give-and-take with case-
workers at "very soft, touchy-feely programs." Others also
describe Turner as affable, a man who tolerates--even enjoys-
a long policy debate.
Just don't base your argument on existing research. Turner
dismisses most academic studies, saying they aren't relevant.
"The truth is that much of the academic research being done
today has no practical value to those designing programs," he
told an Internet forum earlier this year. "If the times call for
bold or even radical change, then we must move ahead forth-
rightly and responsibly, but perhaps without a full comple-
ment of experimental research to guide us."
Maybe that's why advocates say Turner rarely leaves the
table convinced that he was wrong. "He would say, 'That's real-
ly interesting,' but didn't say one way or another if he would
pursue it," says David Riemer, author of "Prisoners of
Welfare. " Riemer met with Turner numerous times to argue
that W-2 fell far short in accountability, child care provisions
and scope, arguments that he says had no discernible effect
when the program began.
d
ason Turner has recounted on many occasions that
his interest in attacking poverty began with the
November 1, 1965, issue of U.S. News & World
Report.
Alongside "Campus Communism: America's
Time Bomb?" and "Moon Trip Doomed to Disaster?" was a
story that reportedly transformed the l2-year-old Jason as he sat
in a private junior high school classroom in tony Darien,
Connecticut.
The article, "How It Pays To Be Poor In America," warned
that for eight million citizens receiving public assistance, "idle-
CITY LIMITS
ness often turns out to provide almost as good a living as work-
ing at a low wage." An accompanying box listed all the freebies
available to the poor, including welfare checks, food stamps,
public housing, free medical care--even free schooling. The con-
clusion: "RESULT: a growing ' welfare society' in the U.S."
"It just hadn't occurred to me that there were whole classes of
people who didn't work, and who basically existed on govern-
ment charity," Turner would later recall. He immediately set to
work scribbling designs for factories to put these dependents to
work.
When Turner arrived as an undergraduate at Columbia
University, he considered himself a liberal and has even copped
to voting for McGovern in 1972. But as he got older-and he
notes pointedly, after he was robbed twice at gunpoint while
working a summer job in Houston as a cabby-he became more
conservative.
After college, Turner followed his father into advertising. He
used those skills in 1980 to stump for Ronald Reagan and was
rewarded with an appointment to the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development. But he has said that he could-
n't fmd an opening for his ideas in the Reagan administration. He
soon left HUD, and, for the fIrst time, took a job that brought him
face to face with the poor-he became a landlord.
In 1985, Turner bought a handful of Washington, D.C. low-
income apartment buildings, calling his business Czar Realty.
But real estate management in poor neighborhoods wasn't as
easy as he had anticipated. Within three years, Turner says the
buildings were overrun by crack addicts, and he lost his savings.
His rental empire in ruins, Turner returned to the federal pay-
roll in the Bush administration with his flIst welfare job, as the
director of the office of family assistance for the Department of
Health and Human Services. He held the post until Bill Clinton
moved into the White House in 1993.
Soon after, Turner signed up with the Wisconsin Department
of Health and Social Services. There, where welfare tinkering
was already underway, he formed the team and sharpened the
ideas that he would later bring with him to New York.
reputation as a welfare lab
began in 1987, when Republican Tommy
Thompson was elected governor. He cut
a deal with federal officials that allowed
the state to reduce welfare benefIts and
use the money for job search and skill-training programs. The
welfare rolls dropped 17 percent during Thompson's flIst term,
and he continued to spin off experiments, letting ex-welfare
recipients keep health benefIts, penalizing families whose kids
cut school, putting time limits on assistance.
By 1993, Wisconsin's Democratic legislature was sick and
tired of Thompson's pronouncements that he was the only politi-
cian in the state interested in fIxing welfare. They decided to out-
reform him, passing a bill that would make Wisconsin the flIst
state to totally dismantle the federal Aid to Families with
Dependent Children program (AFDC).
But Thompson surprised almost everyone by signing the leg-
islation, using his line-item veto power to reshape the bill and
betting that he would be re-elected to implement the changes. He
won that bet by winning the election. The daunting task his
administration now faced, reinventing welfare from the ground
up, was an opportunity to try out long-held conservative theories.
Enter the Hudson Institute, a hard-right Indianapolis think-
tank that counts Dan Quayle, Lamar Alexander and William
Bennett among its members-the kind of outfIt that recently pub-
lished a cover story in their magazine, American Outlook, enti-
DECEMBER 1998
tied "Global Warming-Boon for Mankind?"
Hudson offered Thompson's administration an outside group
of consultants, and in 1994 they opened a two-person office in
Madison. The institute staffed what became known as the
Welfare 1999 Group, a half dozen welfare officials and think-
tank experts, including Turner, Rogers, John Wagner from the
conservative Wisconsin Policy Institute, and Bush, who had
joined Hudson earler that year.
From 1994 until early the next year, the group held meetings
late into the night in a sixth-floor conference room in Madison,
reportedly staying at times for a solid week. They brought in a
variety of conservative sages and barnstormed around the state,
meeting with activists, legislators and bureaucrats.
The end result was an April 1995 draft which, from the flIst
line, shows Jason Turner's influence: "The welfare system as an
institution is abhorred by society because it separates the receipt
of income from the need to work." From there, it laid out a tough
work-based system. (see "Inside the Works").
Hudson heartily approved of the plan and kept its office open
to consult on implementation. In 1996, a new opportunity arose.
The federal government passed its version of welfare reform, and
suddenly everyone was talking about the end of AFDC. Bush
went to Hudson headquarters in Indianapolis to open their
Welfare Policy Center, which promotes the Wisconsin plan to
other states and cities. He even did some consulting in New York
for Hudson before he was hired by HRA as one of Turner's most
trusted aides.
B
efore Hudson, Bush, a graduate of the exclusive
Irving B. Harris Policy School at the University
of Chicago, spent solid time among powerful
Washington conservatives. He had worked with
Ron Haskins, who would later script the 1996
federal reform bill, on the staff of the House Ways and Means
Committee. He was also a legislative assistant to Senator Pete
Domenici, a Republican with a perfect rating from the Christian
Coalition. Those who have worked with him characterize Bush
as politically savvy and quite willing to work behind the head-
lines.
"He's a pretty fair straight-shooter," says Jennifer Phillips, the
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation program officer for Hudson's
Wisconsin operations. "I'm not saying he's not ideological, or that
I agree with him most of the time. But he's pretty mild-mannered."
If Jason Turner's one-word prescription for the poor is
"work," Andy Bush's is "marriage. " "Effective welfare reform
means encouraging both more work and more marriages," wrote
Bush in the fatherhood and welfare report for the Hudson
Institute.
He and his co-author Wade Hom, president of the National
Fatherhood Initiative, even go so far as to fret over how all these
single moms will be able to meet the man of their dreams. "It is
reasonable to expect," they conclude, "that when a single moth-
er on welfare gets a job, her marriage prospects will increase, pri-
marily because employment exposes her to more marriageable
males."
On the other hand, they observe, these working women might
price themselves out of the marriage market. "One must confront
the reality that women do not like to ' marry down. '"
Welfare critics on both the left and the right complain that the
system denies benefIts to women who are married. Bush and
Horn would tum this on its head, establishing preferences for
married parents in housing, Head Start and welfare benefIts.
They would also require mothers to cooperate with child visita-
tion orders as a condition of receiving welfare and aggressively
-
enforce statutory rape laws, even when both parties are in their
teens (the authors do say that they don't "necessarily advocate
jail terms for offenders").
But their pro-marriage stance goes further-
they believe welfare caseworkers
should be trained to present
adoption as a "loving
alternative" to rais-
ing the child
Inside
the Works
without a
husband.
Politicians from Clinton on down have hailed the
successes of Wisconsin Works, the precursor to the
1996 federal reform.
Unlike many patchwork reforms, W-2 is a complete,
ideologically consistent system, based simply on the idea
that everyone can and should work. It provides child care
and placement support, but is quick to drop those who do
not comply with the rules. W-2 denies additional payments
"Because children who grow up in a loving, adoptive, two-par-
ent home fare better than those reared in single-parent households,
states should promote adoption as the best option for pregnant, sin-
gle women," the report says. "If improving the well-being of chil-
dren is the goal ... states should operate under the principle that
adoption is the first and best option for pregnant, single women
rather than the last."
The paper ends with the theme that almost made it into
Giuliani's speech: "There is no greater single threat to the long-
term well-being of children, our communities and our nation,
than the increasing number of children being raised without a
committed, responsible and loving father."
It's this correlation-single-parent families are bad for Icids-
which academics say is overly simplistic. "That's an example of
really bad statistics-mongering, because they're not controlling
for other factors" such as income or how often a family moves,
says University of Massachusetts economist Nancy Folbre, an
expert on women and poverty.
Princeton University researcher Sara Mclanahan, whose book
"Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps" is
often used to buttress pro-marriage arguments, says that while
children raised by single parents have slightly higher school
to women who have children while receiving welfare. If recipi
ents prove they can't find work in the private sector, they are
supposed to be assigned community service work.
dropout and teen pregnancy rates, forcing people into mar-
riage is not the answer. "Illegitimate" children whose parents
were both present for their childhood, she notes, do just as
well as those whose parents were married at their birth-
and children whose mothers remarry do just as poorly as
those whose mothers remain single.
Bush has more ideas than just marriage, such as "real
world equity." He helped make the concept a tenet of
welfare in Wisconsin. Basically, the theory treats wel-
fare policy as training wheels for the "real world,"
Most of the buzz about Wisconsin's reforms comes from the
sharp decline in the state's welfare rolls, from nearly 230,600
in 1994 to 42,600 this year. Welfare advocates say these fig-
ures don't tell the whole picture. They point to an increase in
people going to homeless shelters and soup kitchens and com-
plain that thousands of women have been cut because of arbi-
trary sanctions or administrative errors.
offering no special breaks or treatment.
When a Milwaukee community coalition suggested
exempting women with children under a year old from
workfare, for example, Bush replied, "In the working
world, you don't get a year off to care for a child."
Advocates point out that his working-world ideals don't
include working-world wages: He has said he's "not a
big believer" in the minimum wage. A study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Employment and Training Institute found that only 34 percent
of the 25,000 Milwaukee welfare recipients dropped from the
rolls in 1996 found full-time jobs. And only one in six of the
families cut off raised its income above the poverty level. A
s Turner and Bush brainstorm new poli-
cies, they'll be assisted by New York
University political science professor
Lawrence Mead, who first met the pair in
Washington, D.C., in the 1980s. As a vis-
iting scholar at the University of Wisconsin's LaFollett
Institute of Public Affairs a few years ago, he evaluated
Wisconsin's programs. For the most part, he loved them, and
now has a similar role in New York, spending each Wednesday
consulting at HRA.
Battered women's advocates worry that these measures
could have dire consequences for women who need
welfare to escape domestic violence. Kitty Kocol of
Milwaukee's Taskforce on Family Violence has noted that,
for the first time in recent memory, Wisconsin
battered-women's shelters are starting to see
decreased enrollment-a trend that she fears is
a result of women staying in abusive
relationships rather than risk
facing W-2. -NdM
--
Mead's 1992 book "New Politics of Poverty" is a treatise on
"how to cope with the poor," noting that "for mysterious reasons,
poor adults no longer work as regularly as they once did." He
calls W-2 "paternalistic" and says it attempts to "control the
lifestyle of the poor." But for him, this is the secret of its success.
Last year, Mead edited "The New Paternalism," which explores
this theme. "Many welfare recipients seem to need pressure from
the outside to achieve their own goals. They seem to be looking for
structure," he writes. "Thus most recipients respond favorably to
oversight. It honors them with the assumption that their behavior
matters. They take it as a form of caring."
All this rings true with the boss. In Policy Review, Turner
CITY LIMITS
wrote, "Interviews indicate that many
AFDC applicants like the idea that
someone is helping them
decide to do what they knew
is certainly not the intention to tum away those who need
"Many
welfare
recipients seem
aid, but rather to make sure that people don't apply for
aid casually."
was right all along. The
point here is that many
trapped inside the sys-
tem are looking for
some kind of moral
to be looking
for structure. It
honors them with
the assumption that
their behavior
matters. They take
it as a form
Turner has explained many times that, despite
the city's relatively high unemployment rate, the
market can handle all the new job seekers leav-
ing welfare rolls. On NBC earlier this year, he
told Gabe Pressman, "Our experience is that
there are tens of thousands, even hundreds of
guidance."
Along with the
standard-bearers of
ideology, Turner
has brought a
troupe of tech-
nocrats to give his
ideas substance,
including new
HRA staff like
press secretary
Debra Sproles,
Turner's assistant
Michael O'Malley
and superbureaucrat
Mark Hoover, a 32-
year veteran of
of caring."
Wisconsin state govern-
ment.
Hoover's specialty is bud-
gets; he is known in Madison as
the master of federal requirements and
payment negotiations with nonprofits.
-Lawrence
Mead
''With Jason, it's a philosophical thing, with Mark
it's a different story," Rogers says. ''Mark is the quintessential
mechanic. He knows how to get things done in government, espe-
cially on the financial side, though I believe he has become a believ-
er in welfare-to-work being the right direction for social reform."
L
OCal advocates have been watching for signs of
New York Works since last winter, but HRA offi-
cials have been tight-lipped and slow-moving,
stonewalling inquisitive City Council members
and revealing only gradual and incremental
changes.
But the first signs indicate that some W-2 provisions are under
way. Wisconsin used to have quotas for its centers-in New York,
the idea has turned into pay bonuses for workers who cut the most
cases. Workfare participants are also being introduced to the simu-
lated work week-20 hours of workfare, plus 15 hours on manda-
tory unpaid job search-another program pioneered in Wisconsin.
Turner's critics have long said that workfare participants
don't leave the rolls for good jobs, but rather are driven off by
severe requirements and bureaucratic capriciousness. That also
seems to be happening in New York, as the application approval
rate has plummeted from 60 percent at the old welfare centers to
less than 10 percent at the job centers. The new city manuals
define "diversion"-moving applicants to jobs, relatives, other
sources of government support-as the primary goal for case
workers. Employment is secondary.
Mead acknowledges that the application process is supposed
to be tough. "Diversion does pose some risks, in terms that there
may be people who don't get aid who should get it," he says. "It
DECEMBER 1998
of jobs
out there for
individuals who
need them." Despite
the official statistics,
said Turner, jobs are
there for the asking. ''What
we've shown to be true in
Milwaukee is that lots of em-
ployers won't even advertise
for a job until they can fill the existing
jobs that they have that are unfilled."
And that's where Turner's
plans may fall apart. Some have
predicted that the methods he used
on Wisconsin's 200,000 welfare
recipients won't work in New York
City, with an unemployment rate of
7.6 percent and nearly one out of IO
welfare cases in the country.
At least one Wisconsin observer sus-
pects that despite Giuliani's brief foray into
right-wing family-values ideology, there's little
love lost between him and his new hired guns.
''Those guys are being used by the Giuliani admin-
istration," says Bill Dempsey, executive director of
Sustainable Milwaukee, a nonprofit involved in
local welfare to work issues. ''They have no political
sophistication. The minute it gets hot and he wants
people to sacrifice with no costs to his administra-
tion, he'll send them packing." .
Neil deMause is a Brooklyn-basedfree-
lance writer. Additional reporting by Aaron Clark.
thousands
...
By Robin Epstein
Evaluations strike fear into the hearts of community
groups for good reason: Evaluators can be ideologi-
cal, arbitrary, and sometimes just plain wrong.
Some practitioners are trying to bring accountability
and grassroots input to the process.
EENAGE GIRLS can avoid getting preg-
nant without swearing off sex. Just ask
any pharmacist.
So the leaders of a New Orleans
community group were shocked to dis-
cover that the local academic they had
hired to evaluate their teen pregnancy
prevention effort had focused on mea-
suring whether teens had stopped having sex.
The St. ThomaslIrish Channel Consortium thought con-
doms-not abstinence-were the best way to help keep kids from
having babies. But it wasn't until midway through the process that
STICC found out that its evaluator was a fundamentalist
Christian, and that his religious views had defined his interpreta-
tion of the project's success. On top of that, he over-reported drug
abuse: His question was so ambiguous that kids thought he was
asking if they'd taken painkillers like aspirin and Tylenol.
"We were socialized to believe 'He must know this stuff. He
has a Ph.D.' He didn't know nothing!" says Barbara Major,
STICC's former chair and the executive director of the St.
Thomas Health Clinic. The organization vowed never again to
leave evaluation up to the experts.
"Neutral," Major says, "doesn't really exist."
Evaluating nonprofits is a big business, and both foundations
and the government pay good money for evaluators to research and
judge the organizations they fund. Major had discovered what
many critics have been saying for years-all too often, evaluators
aren't measuring the right things. Many aren't suited to do the judg-
ing in the first place-and some are arrogant or clueless,
generating reports jammed with useless or inaccurate data.
''There are a lot of people who feel like they've been burned
by evaluators. [Evaluators] get parachuted in, don't have a sense
for the context and are supposed to determine whether some
intervention 'worked, '" says Anne Kubisch, director of the Aspen
Institute's Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives,
a group which studies evaluation. For lots of nonprofits, she says,
the attitude toward evaluations is "your friends don't need 'em,
and your enemies will use 'em against you."
But while many developers, social service providers and com-
munity organizers just hope to survive their evaluations with fund-
ing intact, others are trying to make the process more relevant and
accountable. "Participatory evaluation" may sound like an oxy-
moron. But by encouraging evaluators to consult with local residents
and nonprofit staff, this trend puts social programs in context. You
could even call it a kind of grassroots evaluation, where communi-
ty members have a voice in deciding whether or not community
programs ultimately work.
DECEMBER 1998
It's at the center of a debate about just what an evaluation is
supposed to accomplish, and who it's supposed to serve-and it's
controversial. Explains Heather Weiss, editor of the Harvard Family
Research Center's ''Evaluation Exchange" newsletter: "We are
challenging the purposes, audience and procedures for evaluation."
E
VALUATIONS HAVE BECOME an integral part of the
grantrnaking world. In fact, even smaller grants are
now more likely to require an outside evaluation, once
only a requirement for grants of hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars.
The field has all the trappings expected of a multi-million-
dollar industry: an American Evaluation Association, websites, live-
ly arguments on an e-mail discussion group that boasts more than
1,200 subscribers. About a dozen campuses offer a Ph.D. in evalua-
tion.
An evaluation generally requires about 10 percent of a pro-
ject's budget, though costs can swing from 2 percent to more than
15 percent. Cindy Guy, a senior research associate with the Annie
E. Casey Foundation, estimates that Casey will spend between $3
million to $5 million over eight years just for the evaluation of its
$30 million, six -city Jobs Initiative.
Evaluations are somewhat akin to audits that don't just look at
the books. Funders "who are putting in a fortune have a right to
know from a third party how it's going," says Anita Miller, who
until recently was the executive director of the Comprehensive
Community Revitalization Initiative in the South Bronx.
Some funders just want to know that their money was well-
spent, while others are looking to see if they should proceed with
a project. For example, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
supported a pilot program that funded nurses at five teaching hos-
pitals to serve as liaisons between doctors and grieving families
with terminally ill relatives. The evaluation showed that the ser-
vice was no help, and the foundation decided not to expand the
demonstration project.
An evaluation may be done to generate ammunition that can
be used to change public policy. Others are primarily paper-
work-something for foundation program officers to hand out to
their boards of directors.
No matter why they've been authorized, all too often, evalua-
tors can't win for losing. They are accused both of being too pow-
erful, destroying programs' reputations and devastating their
fundraising, while at the same time being inconsequential, gener-
ating reports nobody sees that are released long after the program
has ended.
In truth, the idea that a grant evaluation can cripple a program
seems to be more fear than reality. While examples of inept eval-
-
uations aren't hard to find, dozens of interviews turned up no sto-
ries of a program actually getting shut down because of one.
Instead, the main danger is that the evaluation will produce lit-
tle return for the hefty price tag.
Unread, unused evaluation reports are so common that they've
become something of a cliche. Jeanne Campbell, founder of an
evaluation firm in St. Paul, Minnesota, says that frustration is dri-
ving her out of the field. After 22 years as an evaluator, she is
completely fed up with funders ignoring her recommendations.
She says she's going to quit the business, and write fiction instead.
"I have not seen many instances in which they apply the lessons
to funding in the future," she says. "It's become frustrating ... to
fight the battle to get people to pay attention to the information.
It's just too taxing."
A
NTI-POVERTY PROGRAM evaluation was born in
the Department of Defense, with President
Lyndon Johnson as its midwife. Enamored of a
strict DOD cost-benefit analysis protocol,
Johnson ordered every federal agency to adopt
the same process. The military system didn't catch on-LBJ mis-
judged the amount of resources and data it required-but the issue
brought evaluation to federally funded social programs.
As the War on Poverty grew, so did governmental evaluations,
and foundations followed suit. Sar Levitan, a George Washington
University professor, estimated that $1.5 billion was spent on
evaluations by government and foundation funders just between
1968 and 1975.
The feds mostly adhered to strict scientific evaluation methods
favored by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chair of the Senate's
finance committee, and the foundations picked up these tech-
niques. Until late in the 1970s, evaluators were usually econo-
mists, and their protocols were taken from the hard sciences. To
see if a program had an effect, they compared individuals who
received a service with a group who had not. This approach gave
rise to the specter of the evaluator as a judgmental number-
cruncher, the funder's spy in a white lab coat.
But the shortcomings of this approach became clear to those
standing on both sides of the clipboard. Experiments were expen-
sive and notoriously hard to conduct. But their most obvious
drawback was that community groups didn't want to intentional-
ly deny services to the "control group," even if it were scientifi-
cally necessary.
The field is no longer dominated by the control-group crowd.
Today, evaluations are also done by for-profit and non-profit
research firms, independent consultants, and university-based
social scientists from disciplines like psychology, sociology, eco-
nomics, anthropology and education. Some are full-time evalua-
tors, others do it as a sideline.
The evaluations themselves are just as diverse. A report can be
so full of charts and graphs that it looks like a statistics textbook.
Another might be purely descriptive, a collection of stories of
neighborhood people.
Most evaluations now follow a basic formula that replaces con-
trol-group comparisons with historical ones. Evaluators create a
neighborhood portrait with demographic data, extensive interviews
with clients, or surveys with residents. The same variables are mea-
sured at the program's end. Variables may be as clear and tangible as
crime rates or school graduations, or as amorphous as neighborhood
pride or political will.
I
N THE ABSTRACf, evaluations seem like a good thing. But
people at every level of the system- local residents, pro-
gram staff, funders, even the evaluators themselves--{;om-
plain about what really goes on.
Clients of social service and community development
programs often feel alienated and judged by the evaluation
process. Strangers come into the community, ask a lot of intimate
questions, and often don' t share their results. Social differences-
class, education, race-between evaluator and evaluatee make the
problem worse.
Program staff-the people who actually make the programs
happen--{;omplain that evaluators' standards and measures aren't
always appropriate or even predictable. For example, an evaluator
trying to measure citizen participation might count heads at a com-
munity meeting. But a simple count misses many factors, like
whether people were really involved in decision-making.
Or an evaluation can simply miss the point altogether. "The
majority of things that community builders care about and think
are being done through their work are not being captured at all in
typical evaluations," says Marty Johnson, executive director of
ISLES, a community development group in Trenton, New Jersey,
that integrates housing development, brownfields restoration and
job training. An evaluator may never notice more difficult-to-
Trenton, New Jersey
Practitioner Evaluation
P
rogram managers may know better than anyone what their goals
are, but they have typically been left out of the evaluation process.
Now, the Success Measures Project is aiming to change that, by
encouraging program staff to think critically about evaluations.
The project, with 400 community-building nonprofits nationwide in
nine regional working groups, is developing ways to evaluate them-
selves and hopes to get evaluators to really understand the trials of run-
ning programs. "If your only way to measure output is through production
units-houses, jobs, community gardens-you're going to go where you
can get the most unit productions for the dollar," says Marty Johnson,
chair of the project and executive director of the community building
group ISLES in Trenton, New Jersey.
If nothing else, the Success Measures Project has given community
group staff a forum to discuss their work without funders looking over
their shoulders. "When your peers are saying, 'Let's look at this and think '"
of how we can improve the way we do business,' that's a whole differ- 1
ent thrust," Johnson says. -RE r
____________________________________________________ ~ 8
CITY LIMITS
measure outcomes---expanded civic participation, improved
school performance, stabilized families, for example.
And evaluators may disappoint funders as well. Some com-
plain that too many evaluations tell them only whether an organi-
zation did exactly what it promised to do, leaving them unable to
determine how and why the program should be replicated.
"Thumbs up or thumbs down doesn' t work for complex prob-
lems," Kubisch says. "Our hope is that you learn both whether
something works or not and why and how it works or not."
The problem is that evaluating anything as unscientific as a
community-based program is, by its nature, a subjective and
messy business. One evaluator might say a workfare program that
limits welfare rolls is great. Another would say it's irresponsible,
because participants are not gaining useful job skills. Neither
could really be called impartial.
"People like me have come to believe that every social science
study advocates some values and not others, serves somebody's
interests and not others," says lennifer Greene, a professor of policy
analysis and management at Cornell University. Too often, she says,
the interests of funders, policymakers and academics come first.
S
!NeE THEIR BRUSH with fundamentalism, New Orleans'
STICC has made some changes. Nowadays, they have
an evaluation committee that interrogates anyone who
wants to do research at St. Thomas, and they extract
promises that might make traditional evaluators fear
for their professional credibility. Researchers must agree to attend
a two-and-a-half-day workshop on racism, share ownership of
their data, and allow the group to review their evaluation design
and determine how results are used.
Major says community members are fed up with social science
researchers who reduce complex community dynamics to charts
and graphs. "I want to count and measure, but I realize that's not
the whole story," she explains. "Evaluators bring some knowledge
and some skills, and we want to learn those skills and understand
that knowledge. But the community has something to teach."
Major hopes that funders and evaluators will incorporate the
processes they develop with STICC into their work elsewhere.
"Evaluators have a hard time with this nationally," she says.
"They think we' ve gone much too far, that the information may be
tainted. [But] we're proud to be part of the new cutting edge
group. I don't have much love for evaluators, but that don't mean
that we don't need them."
Many of the fundamentals of the STICC plan--data sharing,
community input, dialogue-resonate with the general idea of par-
ticipatory evaluation, the notion that the people being studied
should have a say. These themes are widespread in Third World
countries, but have started to catch on only more recently in the
U.S. More ally than auditor, these new-style collaborative evalua-
tors offer technical expertise, but don't run the show.
For funders who want to encourage civic engagement, partic-
ipatory evaluation often makes more sense, since it gives more
weight to the racial, economic and social contexts in which pro-
grams operate (see "Theories of Change"). "For me, it's the only
way to do it credibly and come up with recommendations that are
useful," says David Fetterman, a past president of the American
Evaluation Association.
The participatory approach also allows evaluators to come in
on the ground floor and influence programs as they unfold. In
Trenton, ISLES decided to judge its job training program with
nontraditional indicators, such as whether participants had decent
housing and could manage crises in their lives (see "Practitioner
Evaluation"). Since ISLES staff understood that they would be
evaluated on these nontraditional criteria, they rethought their
techniques, connecting people to housing specialists or crisis
DECEMBER 1998
Los Angeles, California
Empowerment Evaluation
K
aren Bass was organizing against substance abuse. and she need-
ed an evaluator to report on her program. But when she asked can-
didates to go door-to-door asking questions in South Central Los
Angeles in the early 1990s. she recalls. "the majority of them looked at
me like I had a second head."
The exception: Cheryl Grills and her evaluation firm Imoyase. An
African-American who has done evaluations with Latino. Asian. Pacific
Islander and Alaskan groups. Grills emphasizes that working with peo-
ple of different backgrounds always means first doing your homework.
"You have to be a good organizer." she says.
One of her biggest successes was helping Los Angeles student lead-
ers document inequity in the distribution of a $2.4 billion school repair
bond. Imoyase helped teens design focus groups along with a needs and
assets survey-standard evaluation tools-to characterize community
concerns. They also researched who made decisions about bond expen-
ditures and where the money was heading.
Grills taught the teens how to use statistical research software that
summarized the data. building in pie charts and bar graphs. "They want-
ed to assess community interests in a way that would not be open to
challenge by someone saying. This is biased. this is not scientific. you
really don't have a handle on the sentiments of the community ... she
says. Their report eventually helped redirect $199 million toward
schools in low-income. minority neighborhoods. -RE
Evaluation leads
counselors. "Once they knew we were measuring such a broad .g
number of indicators," says l ohnson, "they knew they had to roin- ~
ister to the whole person." .g
P
~
articipatory evaluation may also simply be a better tool to E
<3
assess advocacy, public policy work and organizing, says Anne i
Romasco, executive director of the lames C. Penney Foundation. 5
She points out that many foundations have shied away from funding U
these programs because their results are more difficult to identify.
Greene estimates that 10 to 15 percent of the evaluators in the
U.S. are now trying out participatory approaches. Fetterman says that
about half tolerate the new approach and a quarter "really hate it."
Certainly, it has its critics. "First, evaluation at its best is a
highly technical business, and these are skills that are not easily
found among lay persons," says Peter Rossi, professor emeritus of
sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a
-
-
congenial skeptic of the trend. "You have to be skilled at handling
numbers, at measuring social variables. The second objection is
that the participants in a program are not necessarily the best per-
sons to take an impartial and outside view of one's own interest in
a program .... The participatory evaluations that I've seen end up
with everyone feeling very nice about each other but not neces-
sarily having evaluated the program."
Defenders of the participatory approach counter that old-style
evaluators don't like it because it gives community residents the
power to defme what they want to get out of the study and deter-
mine the best ways to measure success. ''Power issues and conflict
issues really emerge quickly," says John Gaventa, one of the
field's gurus. ''That is different from asking people to fit their
action into pre-defined defmitions of success."
And supporters say participatory evaluations can also bring in
truer results. The OMG Center for Collaborative Learning, which
helps nonprofits with evaluation and management, added partic-
ipatory evaluation methods when it realized that those surveys got
a much better response, says research director Manuel Gutierrez.
"We were very pleased with the data. It was very solid," he says,
adding that he thinks more people responded when the interviews
were conducted by community members.
The process-with multiple meetings and conferences-tends
to be more expensive, but Fetterman argues that participatory eval-
uations are worth the extra cost, because they teach organizations
how to evaluate themselves. "It involves more time and more ener-
gy," Gutierrez admits, "but in the end there's a bigger payoff."
T
HE INFLUENCE OF participation evaluation can be
modest: One sexuality survey included communi-
ty-suggested, informal synonyms for sex like
"making love," "going all the way" and "getting
booty." But Cheryl Grills doesn't consider such
minor modifications to evaluator-formulated surveys to be suffi-
cient. Her evaluation company, !moyase, practices what's known
as "empowerment" evaluation.
"To me, participation means that, out of the gate, you're
involving the community in the design of the evaluation, the cre-
ation of instruments, the sampling procedure decisions, the col-
lection of the data and the interpretation of the data," she says.
In one study, Grills' crew found that teen pregnancy rates among
Latinas in one neighborhood were higher then elsewhere in the city.
For an outsider, it was a mystery. But the Mexican-American immi-
grants on the evaluation team had a simple explanation.
They said that people in that neighborhood were from a region
of Mexico where early childbearing is the norm. They also
explained that dropping out of school isn't just a matter of gang
life or academic pressure, but economics: To help support their
families, kids had to start making money at an early age. As a
result, the community group had a much better idea of where to
put its resources and energy.
Grills admits that, on occasion, she's had to bend to views she
didn't agree with. When residents on one team shrunk from
including explicit questions about sexuality and drug use on a
survey, she went along with them-even though her experience
told her that most people will answer those questions. "I had to
walk my talk," she says. "It takes you out of the realm of being
in total control."
Grills' approach-putting the community in charge, listening
rather than telling, using data to effect change-in a sense trans-
forms the whole purpose of evaluation by turning evaluators into
community-builders in their own right, and using evaluation
money to accomplish program goals. And that, some say, is just
what the field needs .
Cleveland, Ohio
Theories of Change
T
he Cleveland Community ~ u ~ l d i ~ ~ .Initiative is
facing two tough tasks: bUlldmg Village coun-
cils" to fight persistent poverty, and finding a
way to assess their hard-to-measure work.
CCBI is part of a movement called comprehensive
community initiatives (CCls), which aim to revitalize
poor neighborhoods by integrating organizing, com-
munity development and social service reform. Like
many CCls, the Cleveland group has begun by build-
ing relationships among people who haven't worked
together before.
"The traditional evaluation community might say
[CCls] are not evaluable," says Prudence Brown,
associate director of the Chapin Hall Center for
Children at the University of Chicago, who has
designed, funded and evaluated such programs.
"Certainly CCls have not been able to take tradition-
al evaluation approaches, so they're looking for
alternatives. "
Instead, Cleveland is trying a new approach
called theories of change. Evaluators cooperate with
everyone on the councils-funders, program staff,
local residents and business people from outside the
neighborhood-to help them clarify how they plan to
solve the neighborhoods' problems and identify signs
of progress along the way.
They set short-term benchmarks such as identify-
ing community strengths, forming an agenda and
increasing community collaboration, says Sharon
Milligan, an evaluator and Case Western Reserve
University professor. In the long term, they plan to
measure bigger goals like safety, economic opportu-
nity and neighborhood pride.
She admits that theories of change has yet to
prove itself, but adds: "There's a lot of interest among
foundations and other evaluators about how this
approach benefits our understanding of how neigh-
borhood change takes place." -RE
CITY LIMITS
....... --" ....... -
Marsh of Progress
ing one brother 's
attempts to [md a wife
by distributing love
letters to random
By Paul Parkhill
"The Meadowlands: Wilderness
Adventures at the Edge of a City,"
by Robert Sullivan, Scribner, 1998,
220 pages, $23
T
here lives among us a small band of eccentrics
whose obsession with the history of toxic ter-
rain drives them to strange acts of public devo-
tion. I've indulged my own, over the last year
or so, as co-director of a Gowanus Canal pub-
lic history project. In September, we fInished the project:
ten steel viewing boxes bracketed onto the Union Street
bridge railings above the slick waters of the canal, each con-
taining old pictures of the waterway during its industrial hey-
day. Describing the Gowanus project to friends, relatives,
enthusiastic community board members and suspicious city
transportation officials over the past year, I've found it hard to
understand why so many lack sympathy for this fetid spine of
South Brooklyn, why its compelling past doesn't fill their
hearts like it does mine.
As I found out, I'm not totally alone. It was with joy and a
sense of relief that I picked up 'The Meadowlands: Wilderness
Adventures at the Edge of a City," Robert Sullivan's manifesto of
post-industrial appreciation. Part history, part adventure story, part
essay on 1990s environmental politics, Sullivan's exploration of
the Meadowlands-New Jersey's famous noisome bog-is as
much a personal testimony as it is an ecological biography. With
grace and humor rarely found in the literature of landscapes,
Sullivan observes the Meadowlands as a native returned.
Describing his new home in Oregon, he writes, "I would walk into
the woods outside of [portland] and see beautiful trees and huge
mountains topped with spectacular glaciers that altogether only
made me miss the world's greatest industrial swamp."
Sullivan structures 'The Meadowlands" loosely, illustrating
the landscape primarily through a series of anecdotal digres-
sions. His explorations involve climbing up garbage mounds
with dump administrators, canoeing in the shadow of the New
Jersey Turnpike, hunting for pirate treasure with an elderly
local and digging for the remains of the Meadowlands' two
most famous corpses: Jimmy Hoffa and Penn Station. He never
fmds Hoffa, but he does unearth a fractured granite column,
part of the rubble from the former railroad station.
The book is classifIed as "natural history" in bookstores, but
those expecting an environmentalist screed or a righteous moral
condenmation of pollution will be disappointed. The ecology of
the Meadowlands interests Sullivan primarily as a crucible for
three centuries of bizarre stories. Recounting the early nine-
teenth century efforts of three brothers to transform the
Meadowlands into a giant dairy farm, Sullivan winds up detail-
DECEMBER 1998
women in the streets of
New York. In another
chapter, dedicated to mosqui-
toes in the Meadowlands,
Sullivan neglects entomology,
preferring to concentrate on
the history of pest control.
Anxious to pay homage
to literary history, Sullivan
and a friend spend one sum-
mer day canoeing down a
mercury-laden creek to an
area of the Meadowlands
named Walden Swamp.
Hoping to disembark and
contemplate nature, they
are disappointed to [md
that the shore of Walden
Swamp is a "giant mat of phragrnites," the ubiquitous marsh
reed found throughout the wetlands. "The stagnant water was
brown and marbleized with green and white and dotted with
tapioca bread-like bits of wading Styrofoam," Sullivan marvels.
"We passed a small school of giant plastic soda bottles."
His failed Thoreauvian jaunt establishes the central point of
the book: the tension between those who see human influence
as a rightful part of natural landscapes, and those who view
wilderness and development as irreconcilable enemies.
The argument reaches a head in one of the [mal chapters,
"The Trapper and the Fisherman," when Sullivan sets up a
meeting between two rival environmentalists. The trapper
works for a state environmental remediation commission; the
fIsherman is from an anti-development naturalist group.
Although he gives both sides equal say, Sullivan seems less
convinced by the fIsherman, whose desire to see the
Meadowlands return to wilderness simply strikes Sullivan as
improbable and, one suspects, basically undesirable.
Sullivan cannot help but wax euphoric about the volatile
and strange results of humanity's encounter with wilderness.
But his understanding of the Meadowlands goes beyond post-
industrial chic or a knee-jerk love of industry. He sees in the
swamp a residue of history. Nature in the Meadowlands isn' t a
neutral stage or a garden of Eden despoiled by human wicked-
ness. Instead, the swamp is where nature and civilization col-
lide. Its junk and pollution are the disturbing renmants of a
confrontation.
At the end of the book, Sullivan offers a plaintive series of
questions about the future of this ever-changing place. "Oh,
Meadowlands," he writes, "what will become of you if your
reeds eventually lift you up and dry you and shake off your
remaining swampness and transform you into yet another kind
of meadow? (And what will we call you then?)" For Sullivan,
besotted, the answer is not especially important. He will con-
tinue his rhapsody to his beloved .
Paul Parkhill is a housing developer for Common Ground and
co-director of Place in History, a public history organization.
REVIEW
-
... _IM! ......... -.., ... ".-
CITYVIEW
'-'" ...-.; ........
Vacant Scare
By Michael McKee
Michael McKee
is associate
director of the
New York State
Tenants &
Neighbors
Coalition.
I
t'S been only a year and a half since rent regulations were
renewed in Albany, and tenant leaders are scrambling to
figure out if the system they just saved is already back in
jeopardy.
The threat this time comes in the form of a frightening
number: 5 percent.
State law requires the city to conduct a Housing and Vacancy
Survey (HVS) once every three years to determine how many
empty apartments there are in New York. The next survey is due
to come out late next year. If the city's vacancy rate regis-
ters lower than the 5 percent threshold used to define a
"housing emergency," the rent regulation laws can be
extended for another three years. If the vacancy rate
exceeds that magic number, the City Council would be
forced to phase out tenant protections.
It's a scary thought. The 1996 housing survey
found that 4 percent of the city's apartments were
vacant-the highest percentage recorded since the
surveys began in the 1960s.
Just how the vacancy rate would get pushed
over 5 percent isn't clear. But worrying too
much about it may be a classic case of fretting
about the wrong thing. All the evidence actu-
ally suggests that the vacancy rate will be
lower when the results are calculated in 1999.
Despite Wall Street's jitters, the housing market is tighter
now than it has been in years, asking prices on apartments are
still high and vacant apartments don't sit empty for long.
Some people have suggested that demand in the lUXUry mar-
ket will collapse, opening up thousands of vacant apartments
that would then be warehoused by greedy landlords. The
assumption is that if the high-end market turns soft, individual
landlords will keep units empty, hoping to wait out the lull
before reducing rents.
But that notion is confounded by history. The last time the
lUXUry market faltered, during the late 1980s, owners slashed
rents so that they could fill vacant units. And there's no reason
to think things would be much different this time if the market
tanks. In the October 14 Real Estate Weekly, commercial real
estate executive William G. Cohen gave the following advice to
market-spooked landlords: "If you are concerned about the
market, you give a concession [to tenants]."
So where are all these vacant apartments coming from?
Believe it or not, the lower end of the market. In a new and
puzzling phenomenon, low- to middle-rent vacancies have
risen at rates far outpacing those in the lUXUry market. This
doesn't seem to make any sense. New York is in the grip of a
long-term low-income housing shortage and poor people,
unable to pay even regulated rent, are doubling and tripling up
just to keep a roof over their heads.
Logical or not, the spike is dramatic. In the 1996 HVS,
vacancy rates for apartments renting between $400 and $500
doubled to 3.2 percent. Vacancies in apartments at the $600 to
$900 range jumped well above the 5 percent rate.
Nobody's really sure why this is happening, but there are
some theories. Apartment warehousing in fast-gentrifying
neighborhoods like Harlem may well have something to do
with it. Ditto the possibility that the city's policy of not taking
over tax-delinquent apartment buildings has led to such deteri-
oration in some neighborhoods that tenants would rather double
up than live in a dump-no matter how cheap that dump hap-
pens to be. And there is no doubt that the mayor's purging of
the welfare rolls has forced former recipients-who can't pay
even low rents without benefits--out of their apartments.
But perhaps the most plausible theory is that landlords in
poor neighborhoods, buoyed by the city's boom, have begun to
jack up rents on tenants whose income can't support the
increases. The numbers seem to support that theory: The bor-
oughwide vacancy rate in the Bronx, the city's poorest borough,
shot up from just under 4 percent in 1993 to 5.4 percent in 1996.
What is going on in these neighborhoods is fundamentally
important for tracking the city's worsening affordable housing
crisis. But before tenants lobby to redefme what vacancy rate
constitutes a housing emergency, we should weigh the strategic
implications.
Lobbying state legislators to change the vacancy threshold
will divert valuable resources needed to fight off the landlords'
next attempts to weaken rent regulation. In the past, landlords
have attempted to put this issue on the table for negotiation, try-
ing to force use of the "gross" vacancy rate-because that rate
often exceeds 5 percent. The net vacancy rate, which excludes
dilapidated and warehoused units, has never exceeded 4 per-
cent, and is the accepted standard.
Instead of spending our time watching the percentages, our
real worry should be term limits in the City Council, which will
prohibit 38 of the council's 51 members from running again.
For years, landlord lobbyists with close ties to the council have
tried to force through amendments that weaken tenant protec-
tions. The confusion of the wholesale turnover on the council
could create new opportunities for landlords to weaken rent
control and rent stabilization laws when they come up for
renewal in March, 2000.
. In order to keep the city affordable for low- and middle-
income New Yorkers, we need to be vigilant. We don't need to
be chasing phantoms .
CITY LIMITS
------""' ... .,.-
Under Coverage
F
or New Yorkers, having a job is no guarantee of health
benefits. In fact, it can be a liability. A report by the
United Hospital Fund found that the number of unin-
sured New York State residents grew by 40 percent between
1991 and 1996. And because only the poorest are eligible for
public health insurance, the unemployed are actually more like-
ly to have health benefits than people with part-time jobs.
Nationwide, 17.6 percent of Americans are uninsured. In
New York State, the number is closer to 20 percent and in New
York City the figure rises to 30 percent-partially because of
the large size of New York's immigrant population, 46 percent
of whom lack health insurance.
The report notes, predictably, that employers and increased
insurance costs are largely responsible for this trend. Nearly
three-fourths of uninsured adult New Yorkers are working,
many of them full-time. Bosses, faced with rising premiums,
offer insurance to fewer employees or refuse to cover their fam-
ilies. Small companies have especially tight purse strings. Only
60 percent of workers at companies with fewer than 24 employ-
ees have insurance. Many low-wage jobs don't offer insurance
at all.
Recent policy shifts are likely to make the trend worse.
Managed care and payment caps, with tighter budgets and
stricter accountability, are expected to further hobble private
hospitals that used to subsidize care for the poor and uninsured
by charging higher rates to the insured.
"Taking Steps, Losing Ground: The Challenge of New
Yorkers Without Health Insurance," $25, United Hospital
Fund, (212) 494-0700, www.uhfnyc.org.
Mergers and Requisitions
I
n 1997, the inquisitive folks at the Urban Institute sat down with
executives from 17 New York hospitals to check the industry's
vital signs in the wake of hospital rate deregulation. The exec-
utives reported that hospital mergers and networks have saved their
industry, but the report's authors see these trends as potential
threats to quality care for low-income New Yorkers.
Manage With Care
y:
e Commonwealth Fund polled Medicaid recipi-
ents who signed up for managed care and
compared their experiences to those who chose
to stick with Medicaid's traditional fee-for-service
arrangement. They found that the latter group,
perhaps fearful of moving away from the security of
their CUlTent plan, tended to have more serious ill-
nesses. Nearty seven times as many fee-for-service
beneficiaries had heart disease than those in man-
aged care. These results don't bode well for this
year's shift to mandatory managed care. Sicker
fee-for-service patients are expected to see doc-
tors more often for more serious problems-thus
dramatically increasing the cost of the program.
New York City hospitals are heavily dependent on
public money: Medicaid pays for 40 percent of in-
patient stays here in the city compared with a 14 percent pay-
ment rate nationwide. But in this newly competitive environ-
ment, many hospitals are merging, cutting back staff and lim-
iting the money they spend on charity cases. One facility-
which now sees 25 to 30 percent of its patients for free or at
reduced cost--expects to cut charity care to 15 percent. The
report also warns that merged hospitals could lure wealthy and
well-insured patients away from community health clinics and
public hospitals, reducing their ability to care for the remain-
ing uninsured and Medicaid patients.
"Health Care in New York City: Service Providers'
Response to an Emerging Market," free, The Urban Institute,
(202) 974-2231, www.urban.org.
Medicaid Emergency
W
ith Medicaid shifting to managed care this winter,
New York City's public Health and Hospitals
Corporation should brace for an irnrninent cash
crunch. A recent report by State Comptroller H. Carl McCall
predicts that HHC, which now has a $3 billion budget, will be
deep in the red by 2002, after losing some $600 million in fee-
for-service payments. Medicaid payments now account for
two-thirds of HHC's revenues, but the corporation expects
these payments to decline by 30 percent when the conversion
from fee-for-service to managed care is complete in 2002.
The comptroller's report adds that even this may be an under-
estimation of HHC's financial woes because the agency is likely
to lose patients to other hospitals as managed care kicks in. Under
voluntary Medicaid managed care, only 19 percent of patients
chose HHC over other hospitals. HHC has a poor reputation,
McCall says, which is only partially deserved. He recommends
that the corporation be more open to public scrutiny, in order to
"counter charges of inferior services" and attract customers.
"Challenges Facing New York City's Public Hospital
System," free, Office of the State Comptroller, (212) 417-5442.
AMMO
46.2%
Health Status of Medicaid
Beneficiaries in Managed
Care and Fee-for-Service
Fair/Poor
Health
Serious
Illness
Fee-for-service
Managed care
1.7%
Heart
Disease
co
Z
:::0
...
:z:
!:;
c
...
z
co
::I!
::I!
co
~
...
:z:
...
...
~
...
:::0
co
~ ____________________________________________________________________________________ "'0
DECEMBER 1998
-
C ONSULTANI SERVICES
Proposals/GnDt Writing
HUD Granu/Govt. RFP.
MI(HA(L 6. BU((I
Housmg,IPrognm Development
Real Estate Sales/Rentat.
CONSULTANT
Technical AMistance
Employment Programs
Capacity Building
Community Relations
HOUSING, DEVELOPMENT & FUNDRAISING
451 WEST 48th STREET, SUITE 2E
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10036-1298
IMl 6'=
===SUcc:NS====--
K*yn AIbrIIDn

_ PIoIpedPlia .....
IIiaaII\ NY 11m
7'IIJI3..W44 lID & l1li

UItIIn PIIrWng
===:
Special Events
Marketing Plans
Media Relations
EE, ... rn
DEBRA BECHTEL - Attorney
Concentrating in Real Estate & Non-profit Law
Title and loan closings 0 All city housing programs
Mutual housing associations 0 Cooperative conversions
Advice to low income co-op boards of directors
313 Hicks Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201,
(718) 780-7994 (718) 624-6850
F &. D Consult:ing
Specializing in Organizing Tenant Associations
.Does your apartment or building need repairs?
Are you beingovercharged rent?
Are you paying unlawful fees?
For $4 per person, per meeting, we conduct informative monthly meetings,
produce newsletters, write correspondence, complete complaint forms and help
you improve the quality of your tenancy.
(Also, ask about our Eldercare Planning homevisits)
For Information: 212.591.1167
NesoH Associates
management solutions for non-profits
Providing a full range of management support services for
non-profit organizations
management development & strategic planning
board and staff development & training
program design, implementation & evaluation
proposal and report writing
Box 130 75A Lake Road Congers, NY 10920 tellfax (914) 268-6315
--
SPECIALIZING IN REAL ESTATE
J-51 Tax Abatement/Exemption. 421A and 421B
Applications. 501 (c) (3) Federal Tax Exemptions. All forms
of government-assisted hOUSing, including LISC/ Enterprise,
Section 202, State Turnkey and NYC Partnership Homes
KOURAKOS & KOURAKOS
Attorneys at Law
Bronx, N.Y. New York, N.Y.
(718) 585-3187 (212) 551-7809
Does your nonprofit need corporate. real estate.
tax or other business legal services?
Lawyers Alliance for New York has a staff of skilled lawyers
and a roster of 400 volunteer attorneys from leading NY firms.
We specialize in providing free or low-cost legal services to
nonprofit corporations. We also offer helpful publ ications and
workshops on many nonprofit legal issues.
To find out if we can help your nonprofit. call 212219-1800
Lawyers Alliance
99 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013 for New York
Committed to the development of affordable housing
GEORGE C. DELLAPA, ATTORNEY AT LAW
15 Malden Lane, Suite 1800
New York, NY 10038
212-732-2700 FAX: 212-732-2773
Low-income housing tax credit syndication. Public and private
financing. HDFCs and not-f or-profit corporations. Condos and co-ops.
I-51 Tax abatement/exemptions. Lending f or Historic Properties.
LAWRENCE H. McGAUGHEY
Attorney at Law
Meeting the challenges of affordable housing for 20 years .
Providing legal services in the areas of General Real Estate,
Business, Trust & Estates, and Elder Law.
217 Broadway, Suite 610
New York, NY 10007
(212) 513-0981
COMPUTER SERVICES
Hardware Sales:
IBM Compatible Computers
Okidata Printers
Lantastic Networks
Software Sales:
NetworkslDatabase
Accounting
Suites/Applications
Services: Network/Hardware/Software Installation,
Training, Custom Software, Hand Holding
Morris Kornbluth 718-857-9157
Working Today, a national nonprofit membership organization that promotes the
interest of independent workers, is looking for a full-time MEMBER SERVICES
ASSOCIATE with excellent communication and organizational skills. On a daily
basis, the member services associate will be responsible for fielding member
inquiries, providing customer service for our member health insurance plan,
updating our growing membership database, writing to members, handling regu-
lar mailings and providing administrative support to other staff working on mem-
ber outreach or service projects. In addition, the member services associate will
contribute to the development of Working Today's broader approach of serving
people who work on their own by advising senior staff about the needs of mem-
bers, helping develop and troubleshoot new services, surveying members about
their interests and developing resource lists based on common problems and
questions. Qualified candidates should have a bachelor's degree and some
experience in customer service, organizing, direct service or communications.
Send letter with your salary requirements and resume to the attention of Julia
Rabig, Special Assistant, Working Today, P.O. Box 1261, Old Chelsea Box
Station, New York, NY 10113.
POlICY ASSOCIATE and POlICY WRITER. The Center for an Urban Future (CUF), a
New York-based policy think tank (the sister organization of City Limits maga-
zine), seeks two positions. A policy associate will assist in research and report-
ing on economic development and public higher education issues. Duties
include research, writing, government relations and community outreach. A pol-
icy writer will help report, write and edit the Center's publications and work with
the media to promote the work of the Center and City Limits. City Limits and the
Center for an Urban Future have a collegial work environment and an energetic
staff addicted to New York pol itics and grassroots organizing. We seek like-mind-
ed candidates. People of color strongly encouraged to apply. Please review web
site at www.citylimits.org/cufformorebackgroundonCUF.Maii cover letter,
resume, writing samples/clips and salary requirements to: Neil Kleiman,
Director, Center for an Urban Future, 120 Wall Street, 20th Floor, NYC 10005.
Or fax to: 212-344-6457.
Community Organization/Outreach $27,000. Center with special outreach to
lesbian & Gay Seniors seeking a FIT OUTREACH WORKER/ASSISTAHT DIRECTOR.
Community organizing experience with l&G seniors essential. Send resume:
SAGE/Queens of FHCH, 46-09 31st Ave., Astoria, NY 11103. Equal Opportunity
Employer.
implement leadership development, athletics, recreation, academic and arts activ-
ities. Salary range: $10 to $18/hour; full-time positions are $21,189 for 3(}hour
week. Please send resume to: Susan Matloff, Forest Hills Community House, 108-
25 62nd Drive, Forest Hills, NY 11375.
The low Income Housing Fund is seeking a LOAN OFFICER for the New York office.
Applicants must be experienced in community development lending with strong ana-
lytic skills, able to underwrite complex real estate loans, package financing, and
structure transactions with nonprofit developers and service providers, third party
lenders, etc. Requires excellent financial analysis, writing and communication
skills, and the ability to manage multiple projects. Minimum two years' experience
and knowledge of New York market preferred. Salary competitive. UHF recognizes
the value of diversity. Please submit resume with cover letter and writing sample to:
Jeffrey Ewing, low Income Housing Fund, 55 John St., 10th Aoor, New York, NY
10038. Applications may also be submitted via e-mail to Jeff@ny.lihf.org. No calls
please.
Chicago Mutual Housing Network seeks EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. Network is a federa-
tion of affordable housing co-ops and condos. We provide training and technical
assistance for more mutual housing. Ideal candidates has experience with cooper-
atives, housing development, resident training, fundraising and nonprofit manage-
ment. Salary mid $40s. Write: Search, CMHN, 2418 W. Bloomingdale Ave.,
Chicago, Il 60647 for full job description. Fax: 773-278-9209. cmhn@cnt.org.
Committee for Hispanic Children & Families seeks an OUTREACH COORDINATORIPAR
ENT ADVOCATL Responsibilities: Oversee day-to-day operation of Family Day Care
Center Resource and Referral Program; supervise information and referral as well
as training activities; plan outreach events; recruit and train prospective family day
care providers; provide policy analysis and research childcare and family issues;
prepare reports. Qualifications: Must have master's degree and two years' experi-
ence or bachelor's degree and five years' experience in human services and/or
education; knowledge of early childhood development; familiar with child care and
family issues; some supervising experience; excellent writing and communication
skills; experience training/adult education; English/Spanish; computer skills.
Salary mid $30Ks. Send cover letter and resume to: Ruth Rodriguez, Committee for
Hispanic Children & Families, 140 West 22nd St., Suite 301, NY, NY 10011. Fax:
212-206-8093. (continued on page 35)
ESIC seeks ASSET MANAGER to assess project perfor-
mance and tax credit compliance, work with groups,
review condition of financials and properties. MA plus
experience in community development or finance pre-
ferred. Travel in NE. Salary commensurate with experi-
ence. ESIC, 80 Fifth Ave., 6th Floor, NYC 10011. Or fax
to: 212-262-9635.
Holistic, mUlti-service agency for adolescents is seek-
ing an experienced GROUP WORKER with focus on youth
leadership skills. Must have excellent oral communica-
tion and experience with inner-<:ity adolescents.
Minimum 5 years' experience, salary commensurate
with experience. Please respond to l. Brown. Fax: 212-
941-0714.
Specializing in
Community Development Groups,
HDFCs and Non .. Profits
An innovative Washington Heights-based welfare-to-
work initiative seeks job candidates for the following
positions: OFFICE MANAGER. Bilingual person with
strong written and verbal communications skills, profi-
cient in computer programs/management information
systems. JOB DEVB.OPER. Bilingual, knowledge of busi-
nesses and nonprofit agencies. Strong communication
skills. Resume to Julie levine, NMIC, 76 Wadsworth
Avenue, NYC 10033. Fax: 212-928-4180.
Bronx nonprofit agency needs a FUUnME COMP11lOl.
LER. Salary commensurate with experience with excel-
lent benefits. Please fax your resume and cover letter
to 718-665-2464, attn. Medina Sadiq, Executive
Director.
New Beacon School Program run by progressive settle-
ment house in Queens seeks PROGRAM DIRECTOR and
YOUTH WORKERS. Program emphasis is leadership
development for youth ages 10 to 14, from a
youth/community development model. Director over-
sees program, supervises staff and facility, and devel-
ops and maintains community and school relations.
Salary: $35,400. Youth Workers (full- and part-time)
DECEMBER 1998
Low ... Cost Insurance and Quality Service.
NANCY HARDY
Insurance Broker
Over 20 Years of Experience.
270 North Avenue, New Rochelle, NY 10801
914,654,8667
-
Council Manic
By Carl Vogel and Glenn Thrush
9:30 a.m. There it is. City Hall. The seat of government
for the Greatest City in the World. I am so glad I left Cedar
Rapids for Gotham.
Boy, I pity the terrorist who'd try to get past these concrete
barriers. I can barely climb over and I'm not laden with plastic
explosives.
Dang. I hope that rip doesn't show while I'm up there testi-
fying in front of the City Council of the City of New York. Mom
would be so upset. Oh, here's a guard, better look sharp.
"Hello, sir."
"Yes sir, I will place my hands firmly behind my head."
"No, I most certainly am not a wiseass. "
Whoops. I never realized you need special clearance just to
walk up the steps of City Hall. He sure used a lot of foul lan-
guage just to say I should go around back.
9:"5 a.m. Let's see .. . City Council chambers .. . here's the
room. Huh, not quite as impressive as it looks on "Crosswalks."
Maybe it's all the empty chairs.
Ohmygod I totally screwed up!
No, I guess I didn't. It does say 10 a.m. I hope they didn't
move it on me. I'll just wait here in the front row.
10:30 a.m. Well, if they' re going to be late I guess they'll
be really efficient, so maybe I'll put my testimony on each of
their chairs.
This chart is really going to wow them. How can they con-
tinue these anti-poor policies when they see such evidence? I
just know this is going to make a big difference.
Just remember, if I get nervous I can always picture them in
their underwear. Don't forget to speak clearly and slowly. The
rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. Ahem. The mayor can
stare at a chair until it quails.
1:30 p.m. Getting hungry.
Z:"5 p.m .. All right, here we go, here comes the commit-
tee. Boy, they sure look less imposing than they do on TV.
Uncle Morty had a suit like that-it was the one they buried
him in. How'd the Councilmember know where to dig him up?
He probably has people who do that sort of thing for him.
That's awful. I can't believe I thought that.
First testimony. Here we go. Well, she's not too bad. But I
know that my speech doesn' t have so many dangling partici-
ples.
3:30 p.m. Damn, there's a lot of testimony today. I never
realized there were so many different ways to say "poor. "
But still, can't the committee pay some attention? That one
on the end, the skinny one with the dyejob, she's just throwing a
pencil in the air over and over again. It would be pretty funny if
it fell into the mouth of the guy sleeping in the chair next to her.
And that one, the guy who's been paying his bills. Is he just
going to get up and leave? Can he do that?
At least that one big guy-I think he's from Staten Island-
he seems to be listening. He cares. Hey, look at that, he's got my
testimony right there in front of him.
I like the way that young aide leans over and talks to him.
Just like Congress, the Robert Bork hearings. Okay now the
aide is coming over with a briefcase. Must be some important
documents. What's that he's pulling out of his briefcase?
Holy cow. How'd he get an entire roasted chicken in there?
Have to hand it to him, for a big guy he's very nimble. The
way he's gnawing on the thigh while continuing to nod his head
in agreement.
Oh, great, he's putting the bones on my testimony.
I don' t think its going to be a good idea to picture anyone in
their underwear.
":15 p.m .. Toupee.
Not toupee.
That one, over there. Toupee.
I think. Maybe it's just a comb-over.
Nope, he moved his head and it didn't budge. Definitely a toupee.
":30 p.m. The chair is really going on and on about this.
I'm not quite sure what we're supposed to learn from this story
about his childhood home in Brooklyn and the fun they had
back then.
5: 10 p.m. Hey, finally, my tum. Only a few councilmem-
bers left, but I've been waiting too friggin' long not to go now.
As soon as that guy on the end gets off his cell phone, we'll start.
5:Z0 p.m. Okay, we'll start while he's on the cell phone.
"Ladles and gentlemen, Councilmembers, esteemed
guests ... "
"No, I know your time is valuable."
"Well, if you have to adjourn, I suppose you could just read
it. I've got clean copies if anyone's is too .. . greasy."
5:30 p.m. "Hello, is this U-Haul?
"How much for a one-way to Cedar Rapids?"
CITVLlMITS
(cOlltilllledfrolll page 33)
EXECUTlVE DIRECTOR. The Mount Morris Park Community Improvement Association
(MMPCIA), a nonprofit organization in the Mount Morris Park historic district in cen-
tral Harlem has reopened its search for an Executive Director. The successful can-
didate must be able to fundraise, manage major development projects, administer
the office and work well with people. The salary is competitive and commensurate
with experience. Please send letter and resume to MMPCIA c/o Search Committee,
74 West 124th St., NY, NY 10027.
Help people learn about government as an AIDE in a Manhattan legislator's district
office. Duties include casework on various state and city issues, including housing,
entitlements, etc. Work some evenings. Flexibility a must. Experience helpful but
not essential. Salary low $20s with possibility for advancement. Fax resume to
212-312-1494.
SOCIAL WORKER for Women in Self Help (WISH) Displaced Homemaker Center, locat-
ed in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Provide short-term counseling and crisis intervention
services to participants and graduates of adult employment training programs.
Assist and support participants in job search and job retention. Three years' coun-
seling experience necessary. Experience in employment or women's program pre-
ferred. MSW or related master's. Bi-lingual English/ Spanish a plus. Resume and
cover letter to: C Marsh, WISH, 503 5th Ave. , 4th Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11215. EOE.
HOUSING ATTORNEY. Legal services organization seeks housing attorney to represent
individuals and groups, and handle appeals and complex litigation, including fair hous-
ing issues. Community outreach also is a priority. Litigation experience and Spanish
fluency desirable. Salary DOE, with excellent benefits. Send resume to: Arnold S.
Cohen, Queens Legal Services, 89-00 Sutphin Blvd. , Jamaica, NY 11435. AA/ EOE.
EVICTION PREVENTlON CASE MANAGERS. CFRC is hiring Case Managers for our evic-
tion prevention project. Budget/housing reviews, resolve evictions, make referrals.
Qualifications: familiarity with welfare benefits, housing issues. Must have 2 years'
experience serving poor. Housing experience preferred. Writing required. Salary:
$27,500, full medical, dental, family coverage. Affirmative Action Employer.
Resume to: CFRC, attn: German Tejeda, 90 Washington St. , 27th Flo, NYC 10006.
Fax: 212-344-1422.
SOCIAL WORK CONSULTANT. South Brooklyn Legal Services HIV Project seeks MSW
for part-time work with families on custody planning issues. Spanish/ Creole speak-
ers preferred. EOE. Fax or mail resume and cover letter to: Cathy Bowman, SBLS,
105 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201. Fax: 718-855-4189.
DEPUTY EXECunVE DIRECTOR. This executive level position in a historic Harlem-
based children and family services organization is responsible for the overall man-
agement and delivery of the highest quality care to the diverse NYC population. The
scope of responsibilities include management of Foster Care, Therapeutic
Placement Services, Specialized Services, Medical Services, Quality Assurance,
Intake, Support Services and linkage to other service providers as appropriate. The
ideal candidate must have a master's degree in Social Work or a related field with
a minimum of seven years of proven upper management and administrative level
supervisory experience in child welfare or the human services environment.
Knowledge and understanding of social services as they are affected by social,
political and economic influences. Excellent communication skills, outstanding pub-
lic speaking abilities, computer literacy and substantial experience working with
nonprofit Boards essential. We offer competitive salaries with a comprehensive
benefits package. Please send resume and cover letter stating position to: HR
Dept. , Harlem Dowling-West Side Center for Children and Family Services, 2090
Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Blvd. , NY, NY 10027. Fax: 212-7494735/ 5615. No calls
please. An EOE, M/ F/ DjV.
GRANTS DIRECTOR. The Funding Exchange, a progressive foundation, seeks a Grants
Director. Responsibilities include: managing, directing and supervising all aspects
of a national grantmaking program, including staffing, donor/ board relations and
grantee contact. Experience in administration and supervision areas a must.
Previous grantmaking program experience a plus. Salary $45K+ commensurate
with experience. Excellent benefits. Submit resume to Search Committee/ Grants
Director, Funding Exchange, 666 Broadway, Suite 500, NY, NY 10012. EOE, les-
bian, gay and people of color encouraged to apply.
COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS. The Training Institute for Careers in Organizing seeks peo-
ple eager to fight for social justice on issues such as affordable housing, living wage
jobs, environmental justice and public education. Paid, 12-week apprenticeship pro-
viding field and classroom experience, followed by permanent positions at end of
program. Starts in January and June. Call TICO immediately at 718-584-0515.
National loan fund for nonprofit organization seeks multi-talented SENIOR PROGRAM
ASSOCIATE for NY program. Qualifications include: 5+ years' management experi-
ence, preferably social services-related; consulting ability; understanding of bud-
gets and financial statements; familiarity with nonprofit planning and development;
and interest in the arts. Credit experience a plus. Responsibilities include client
relations, advice and referrals, workshops, and general program coordination.
Initiative, imagination, flexibility and sense of humor essential. Salary: $40s,
depending on experience, plus benefits. Send, fax or e-mail resume and cover let-
ter to: ChriS Jenkins, Nonprofit Facilities Fund, 70 W. 36th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY
10018. Fax: 212-268-8653. E-mail : chris.jenkins@nffny.org. EOE. No phone calls.
GRANT WRITER. Progressive advocacy and direct service nonprofit seeks energetic,
self-starter with track record raising funds from public and private institutions.
Excellent writing and research skills. BA/ BS and some experience preferred.
Salary: low to mid $30s. EOE. Send resume, cover letter and writing sample to:
Development Director, Coalition for the Homeless, 89 Chambers St., NY, NY
10007. No faxes please.
NYC Organizing Support Center seeks temporary OFFICE SPACE for two staff while
we find a permanent home. Ideal situation would include phonelines, desks and
access to fax, copier and meeting space in progressive organization. Near to pub-
lic transportation, accessible to disabled people preferred. Rent and term nego-
tiable. Please contact Brad Lander at 718-857-2990, ext. 16.
LET US DO A FREE EVALUATION
OF YOUR INSURANCE NEEDS
DECEMBER 1998
We have been providing low-cost insurance programs and
quality service for HDFCs, TENANTS, COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT
and other NONPROFIT organizations for over 15 years.
We Offer:
SPECIAL BUILDING PACKAGES
FIRE LIABILITY BONDS
DIRECTOR' S & OFFICERS' LlABILTY
GROUP LIFE & HEALTH
"Tailored Payment Plans"
ASHKAR CORPORATION
146 West 29th Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10001
(212) 279-8300 FAX 714-2161 Ask for : Bolo Ramanathan
-.liiiif __

Construction loan
Development Of Supermarket
Harlem Community
An investment
13,195,000
f mancinq For Renovation
156 HouSln9 Units
Hunts POint
Bronx Community
!AB.
!AB.
with invaluable
returns.
\
At EAB Community Development Corporation, we' re constantl y
working with private and public entities to turn limited resources into
powerful tools for improving communities in ew York City. And so far it's
working. Tluough partnerships with organizations such as the New York City
Housing Partnership, Neighborhood Housing Services of New York City and
Abyssinnian Development Corporation, EAB Community Development
Corporation has provided moderate income New Yorkers with affordable
housing opportunities, as well as economic development for communities as a
whole. To find out what else is possible with EAB's Community Development
Corporation, call Diane Borradaile at 212-370-8547.
Member ABN AMRO Group

--
I

"
Financinq for Renovation
165 Housinq Units
Bedford -Stuyvesa nt
Brooklyn Community
!AB.
..
000, 000
... "-
Construetion loan
112: Senior Clhzen Housing Umts
Day Care Facility
Hempstead Commumty
!AB.
There's a reason people bank
1998 EAB Member FDIC. Equal Opportunity Lender.