With the economy booming, more of the City's residents are employed are than ever. But there is still the nagging question of how well they are doing. We know that those who are employed in the city's Manhattan-based global economy sector are raking it in. But what about New York's rank and file? The evidence here is far from discouraging. A recently opened window on this subject is provided by the 1999 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey. Sponsored by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the NYCHVS has been conducted every three years since 1965 by the US Census Bureau. The survey's sample size, approximately 18,000 housing units, is large enough by the Census's exacting standards to be representative of the City's population and housing stock. According to the HVS, inflation-adjusted median household income in the city increased by 4% between 1995 and 1998 and by 13% from 1992 to 1998. In fact, New York outperformed the nation on this score for the longer period -- 13% versus 9% -- though it did lag in the more recent timespan -- 4% in the City versus 7% nationally. There was also a significant reduction in the poverty rate among the City's households from 21% in 1995 to 18% in 1998.
In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was reluctantly signed into law by President Clinton. PRWORA, welfare reformÕs rightful name, was overwhelmingly endorsed by a conservative Republican congressional majority. These would-be reformers legislated the demise of the federally-financed entitlement program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), enacted in the Great Depression. Given that era's social mores, its original target group, women with children and without husbands, was viewed as being modest in scale.
However by the 1960s this was no longer the case, and the program's numbers began to mount. To further complicate matters, AFDC was fast becoming identified as a minority program that promoted family dissolution. While pundits speculated endlessly about "root " causes of poverty, taxpayers had long concluded that little good would come of AFDC, save for the much-derided culture of dependency. (Also in welfare reformers sights was the much smaller General Assistance program, received largely by single adults, down on their luck. But as a state-financed effort, GA was not within TANFÕs reach.)
With PROWRA's passage, AFDC was out, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) was in. To ease the transition, the feds, through TANF, provided the states with a sum of discretionary money to be used on behalf of their welfare populations over
a five year period. Few parts of the country had bleaker predictions about the success of TANF than New York. Democratic pols, left-liberal academics and think tankers
Tales From the City
Between 1996 and 1999, the number of New Yorkers who received TANF and General Assistance declined by 35%, from 1.1 million to 656,000. As a share of the City's population, they fell from 15% to 9% of the total. This declining trend also occurred in each
of the boroughs and, more remarkably, in each of the City's 59 community districts. Within the overall public assistance population, the ranks of General Assistance recipients fell at a much faster rate
But the decline of the late nineties was not the case throughout the decade; the 1990s saw the City's welfare population literally go up the mountain and then down again. Between 1990 and 1994, public assistance recipients increased by 34% and by the end of that period accounted for one out of six of all New Yorkers. Though this occurred during the Dinkins mayoralty it was hardly due to a policy of padding the welfare rolls. Rather it reflected the local economy's dire straits. A comparable upsurge in welfare took place nationally in the early 1990's, reflecting the halting recovery from the 1990-91 recession. The first two pre-Welfare Reform years of the Giuliani mayoralty coincided with a modest revival in the City's economy and the beginnings of a welfare population rollback. As the local economy picked up speed over the next (post-Welfare Reform) three years, the drop in the rolls intensified.
Taking Stock
What has happened to those who have dropped from the welfare rolls? No one really knows for sure. A considerable number have been picked up by SSI, a federally financed entitlement program which has a growing contingent of non-elderly disabled children and adults. But the safe bet is that most are in paid employment. Are they better off than before? This question is still unanswerable, though there seems to be little evidence of dramatic deterioration. One telltale indicator supporting this position is the post-1996 trend in food stamp usage. Still a federally funded entitlement program, food stamp recipients fell by 28% between 1996 and 1999. Hard times for former welfare recipients would be mean more, not fewer, recipients.
The Mayor and Governor Pataki were supporters of "ending welfare as we know it" from the get-go. But it is impossible to say how much of the ensuing reduction in the public assistance population on their watch is due to their tough-love positions, and how much is simply the result of the strong economy for which they bear little responsibility. And while great progress may have been made in changing the culture of dependency, it is nevertheless all too true that a considerable number of the poor are still with us. As 2000 began, over a million New Yorkers were on some form of public assistance (including SSI recipients), and more than a half a million of the working poor are dependent on Medicaid for health care.
It will soon be that time of the decade again. In Spring 2000, the census enumerators will be making their appointed rounds gathering information needed to gauge the changes in the way we live and work that have taken place in the last ten years. But their findings, scheduled to be released in early 2001 shouldn't come as a complete surprise to New Yorkers or to others. So here's a preview...
New Wine and Old Bottles
The 2000 Census will show that the City's Y2K population will be just under 7.5 million, one to two percent greater than it was in 1990. In other words, another 100,000 to 200,000 residents will have been added to New York's already crowded streets, packed subways and hard-to-grow housing stock.
Rapid racial and ethnic changes and their consequences have been a constant theme over the past half century in New York, and in all of America's larger, older cities. In the past, racial and ethnic differences were primarily a white and black affair. But while blacks and whites shared a common national birthplace, they possessed radically different perspectives on what their respective rights and entitlements were and what role government might play in securing them. Conflicts over these matters reached a boiling point in the 1960s and 1970s. Though there is continued tension, more recently, new groups have inserted themselves into the City's political order and socio-economic structure. They have created a new demographic reality. Continuing attempts to impose the institutions and approaches developed around the classic black versus white struggles of the Civil Rights era as a framework for dealing with the needs and problems of the newcomers seems less than adequate. New situations require new thinking.
The Way We Look Now By 2000, over 40 percent of the City's population will be either Latino (30%+) or Asian (10%+). Latinos will have surpassed the number and share of (non-Latino) blacks. Though whites still represent the largest of the City's major racial /ethnic groupings, their share is likely to be down to 37% by 2000 (and falling). Demographers note: Latinos are not a racial group, but are defined as having immigrated from a Spanish-speaking country or having a parent or grandparent who at one time did the same.
The emergence of this new demographic reality in New York and in a handful of what are now being called Gateway metros (Chicago, Miami, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco) is the result of the increasing scale and diversity of immigration into the US during the last thirty years. This process was initiated in the mid-1960s as the somewhat unintended result of a major liberalization of the laws governing immigration into the US. There is no gainsaying the role that immigration has come to play in population growth. In the 1950s, immigration accounted for well under 10% of the country's net population growth. Between 1990 and 1998, the comparable figure was just over 30%. And this only measures immigration's direct impact on population growth, without taking into account the disproportionately large contribution of immigrant families to the nation's birth rate. It is also worth noting that once within the US, immigrants still concentrate in only a handful of places, mostly in Gateway metro areas like New York. The tristate New York Metro area represents about 7-8% of the US population, and has attracted 20% of the immigrants entering the country between 1992 and 1997.
The 2000 Census is likely to show that 40% of the City's population is foreign born, up sharply from its 1990 level of just under 30%. In New York's case, the shift from a native born to an increasingly foreign born population is a pervasive one, affecting all the City's major groups. For example, around 30% of the City's whites and blacks are foreign born. The comparable figures at the national level are in the neighborhood of five percent. New York's still substantial foreign born white population consists of two distinctive elements. One of them is an aging, waning cohort of people who arrived as young adults or as children between the 1920s and the 1950s. Another one consists of a growing number of recently arrived Jews from Russia and the newly-independent states of Soviet Union. New York's distinctive and once again fast-growing foreign born black population is drawn from the countries of the Caribbean and includes Haitians and English-speaking Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Guyanese. Over 40 % of the City's Latino community is foreign born. The Latino native born population is still overwhelmingly dominated by persons who were either born in Puerto Rico, and hence automatically became US citizens, or whose parents or grandparents were. But like native born blacks and whites, the ranks of the City's Puerto Rican are being thinned. Last but not least, four-fifths of the City's fast expanding Asian population is foreign born.
However, just looking at the proportion of the population that is foreign born dramatically understates the extent to which immigration in the current period has and is transforming the life and look of the city. If one counts as foreign the children born in the US to a foreign mother or father
Emanuel Sounds Off:
The clock is ticking on the real life drama set in motion by the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. By 2001, strict term limits are to be imposed on the remaining recipients of public assistance. While the City's welfare rolls have indeed plummeted -- a joint function of policy and a very strong local economy -- the specter of what might well be a substantial core of adults, many with children, who are simply unemployable is impossible to wish away. In any case, data indicating what progress is being made in moving this ill-favored group to the ranks of the employed is needed. This is, of course, no easy matter. But from an informational standpoint, it is difficult at this time to tease out the barest facts of what is going on in the controversial world of welfare reform. Evaluations, as they are somewhat generously called, are thick on the ground. For the most part they are carried out by groups heavily invested in opposing or espousing welfare reform's timetable and assumptions. But they add more heat than light to clarifying the issue of exactly has happened. Some plain English narrative would do a world of good at this point. The United Way of New York City used to provide such a narrative. Until 1997, it had been preparing for the City's Human Resources Administration a straight arrow, nonpolitical statistical compendium describing the historical trends in the City's low income population and in their utilization of social services. This effort has been discontinued for reasons which are not altogether clear, but is probably related to the Giuliani administration's penchant for limiting access to information which it believes could be used against it by its critics. That's not only a pity, but short sighted: This data base could provide a useful context against which to judge the consequences of welfare reform. It should be reinstated posthaste.
Andrew A. Beveridge has taught sociology at Queens College since 1981, done demographic analyses for the New York Times since 1993, and provides expert testimony on a range of cases, including housing discrimination. The opinions expressed are his alone.