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Community Development Funding Cuts Under The New Bush Budget


Last month the Bush Administration released its fiscal year (FY) 2006 budgetand, as expected, it wasn’t particularly kind to many programs that professionals in the community development field hold near and dear.

Facing a projected 2005 federal deficit of $425 billion, the president’s budget proposes to eliminate or reduce funding for 150 federal programs, thereby cutting the deficit by about $20 billion. An additional $196 billion in cuts are proposed for the years 2007 and 2010, although they are not yet detailed.

Inefficiently Run Programs

Using the Program Assessment Rating Tool(PART), a process developed by the Office of Management and Budget to evaluate the effectiveness of federal programs, the administration concluded that many community development institutions “are not getting results, or duplicate current efforts, or do not fulfill essential priorities”.

As a result, the administration’s budget recommended that 18 community development programs, previously housed under Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Agriculture, Treasury, Health and Human Services and the Commerce Department, all be consolidated under a new Commerce Department entity called the “Strengthening America’s Communities (SAC)” (In PDF Format) initiative.

The FY 2006 budget, which begins in October of this year, proposed to fund this initiative at $3.71 billion. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the programs slated for consolidation received a total of $5.3 billion in 2005. Over the next four years, New York State is projected to lose $860.4 million in funds for community development programs.

Denying Entitlement

Across the country, constituencies that have a large stake in the programs targeted by these cuts are lining up to oppose the president, claiming that Strengthening America's Communities is just a smokescreen for Bush’s desire to dismantle what’s currently left of the federal community development support system.

For instance, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the official nonpartisan organization of U.S. cities with populations over 300,00, is protesting Bush’s targeting of the largest community development funding area, the Community Development Block Grant(CDBG).

The Community Development Block Grant, which was created in 1974 to address the community development needs of low-income people and is one of the oldest Housing and Urban Development programs, is a poster child for the sort of “big government” entitlement program that Bush seeks to include in the Commerce Department consolidation. Roughly $4 billion in these funds currently go to cities nation-wide. More than $200 million of that is distributed through 22 different agencies in New York City.

The federal government gives municipalities the discretion to distribute these block-grant funds to broadly defined areas of community development activity. In New York City over half of these funds are designated for “housing” and administered by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). HPD uses these monies mainly to support, improve and protect affordable housing for low-income families.

The city uses the rest of this money to fund a disparate range of programs including subsidized family day care, the administration of public facilities and City Planning. A small amount, no more than three percent, goes towards “economic development” activities like supporting small business development on neighborhood commercial strips.

Molly Wasow Park of the New York City Independent Budget Office, observed that it would be inaccurate to depict the President’s proposal as merely a shuffling around of community programs. “The President’s plan”, says Park, “would effectively eliminate the Community Development Block Grant and replace it with a smaller grant with very different funding priorities”.

Although Park warns that it is much too early to know what those new priorities will be, she speculates that the Bush Administration under Strengthening America's Communities would probably end up shifting block grant monies to “economic development” activities, which right now in New York City takes the form of neighborhood commercial strip revitalization.

In a possible sign of things to come, the Strengthening America’s Communities initiative proposal includes an “Economic Development Challenge Fund”. This fund represents a bonus grant program for low-income “development-ready” communities that, in the Bush administration’s words, “have already taken steps to improve economic conditions by meeting No Child Left Behind goals, reducing regulatory barriers to business creation and housing development and reducing violent crime rates.”

Community Development Lending

Traditional entitlements and war-on-poverty era social programs are not the only items on the president’s chopping block. So too are programs like the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund, which makes investments in institutions such as small, neighborhood-run credit unions, so that they can extend credit, savings products and other financial services to low- and moderate income people. The loan fund is currently run by the Treasury Department and was created by welfare-reform minded Bill Clinton with bipartisan support. Clinton used the fund to help usher in a more market-based, individual asset-building approach to federal anti-poverty programming.

In New York City there are 42 such institutions, which have received $45 million from the fund over the last decade. Mark Pinsky, president of the National Community Capital Association, a network of private-sector community development financial institutions that provides financing, training and advocacy, estimates that these funds have helped leverage an additional $1 billion in funds from other sources.

Pinsky predicts that the cuts in the fund will serve to undermine the community development financial institution infrastructure in NYC. He doesn’t deny that the fund and other programs included in the consolidation could stand to be improved in some ways, but says that the Bush administration’s wholesale claim that these programs are inefficient represents what he calls “popcorn policy. There’s a kernel of truth surrounded by a lot of hot air.”

The President’s budget even drew criticism when he didn’t propose cuts. For instance, although the administration offered an overall 2.4 percent increase for the Small Business Administration over current funding levels, the Microbusiness Journalnoted that close to half of that agency's budget has been cut since Bush took office and quoted the House Small Business Committee Member Nydia Velazquez as saying “What was once a Cabinet level agency that had a seat at the table, a $1 billion budget, and a large role in the decision-making process – has sadly become the shell of an agency.”

Ominous Signs

Theoretically, the president’s budget, for the time being at least, is merely an expression of the administration’s national priorities. It is Congress that will most likely determine the final budgetary outcome. In the past Bush has proposed a series of cuts to community development programs only to have many of them restored, at least in part, by Congress.

But no matter how the budget process progresses over the next few months, many see the president’s budget as an unwelcome sign. Dawn Rivers Baker, editor of the Microbusiness Journal, commented that "President Bush has an interesting way of supporting community development: cutting most of its funding. It's difficult to say at this point how much Congress is going to go along with but it seems pretty clear that community development organizations are going to have to look increasingly to their state and local governments, and to private sector donations, to make up for the federal funding they are likely to lose in the coming years."

It is unclear how New York City in particular, which voted overwhelmingly for Kerry in the last election, figures in the Bush administration’s plans. In an indication that Bush is looking to redistribute funds away from bastions of east coast liberal politics like New York, his Opportunity Zones, a new small business tax incentives program, is aimed at mid-western industrial areas whose economies are “in transition”.

In another ominous sign for New York, a White House description of the Strengthening American Communities, in making the case for dramatic change, complains that under the current system “many communities no longer in need of assistance continue to receive funding.” As a result, Bush’s budget proposes to change the eligibility criteria for community development block grant funds from overcrowding and advanced housing age, to job loss and unemployment, a shift which would most likely favor other areas over New York City.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NYCMap


NYCMap is pronounced "nice map," according to city officials, who have spent $20 million of the taxpayers' money so far on this computerized mapping project. But, though the public paid for it, this really cool map is largely unavailable to the public. Some people think that is not very nice.

Maps are probably older than written language, the first maps dating back at least 5,500 years ago. Maps changed radically some five centuries ago at the onset of the age of exploration, changed again with aerial photography and again with space flight. Over the last 20 years, there has been another revolution in mapping technology, which has changed the way large cities function.

In any large city, every city agency, whether sanitation, or transportation or health, produces whole libraries of maps; how can construction crews lay new wires if they don't know what's there already? Too often, though, the maps used in different corners of the city government haven't quite corresponded with one another, resulting in…municipal chaos.

The new computer-generated "geographic information systems" reside in powerful databases that can hold a unified picture of all of the different layers of geography and infrastructure that make up a major city. That includes everything from bedrock and bodies of water, to gas mains and sewer tunnels, to tax lots and bus routes.

NYCMap is just such a system, one of the most sophisticated in the world. And therein lies the dilemma: How dangerous is it to let the public see the world-class map its tax dollars made possible? Access to NYCMap is tightly regulated, for fear the detailed urban plan could aid a terrorist attack.

Critics think this is wrong.

"Access to NYCMap should be free," said Gary Ostroff, vice president of Community Cartography, at a recent hearing of the City Council's Technology in Government Committee. "We live in a democracy. The government has no business collecting information it doesn't need, and if it does collect it, the information must be made public. … There should not be a monopoly on the holding of that data."

Work on NYCMap began in 1996, using a method of precise aerial photography which places geographic features like pavement edges and building footprints within two feet of their real position. About 7,500 photos were digitally dissected to produce a computerized "base map" of all five boroughs that charts everything from streets and buildings to subway entrances and manhole covers. The first version of NYCMap was completed in 1999. By 2004 the city had spent about $20 million on the project.

NYCMap provides a foundation for plotting and analyzing almost any kind information about the city: census data, demographic trends, crime statistics, school performance, voting patterns, etc. Map users can turn layers of information on or off as needed. For instance, a police department planner might want a neighborhood map that shows precinct lines, hospitals, schools, and crime statistics. A health official worried about West Nile virus in the same neighborhood might hide the precinct lines and crime stats, and show bodies of water instead.

City agencies and approved contractors can access the core NYCMap database to build their own applications on top of it. According to Marsha Kaunitz, director of Citywide GIS at the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, city agencies have created custom applications as diverse as mapping crime statistics, managing construction activities, dispatching emergency responders, and tracking sanitation trucks.

However, average New Yorkers have no direct access to the high-tech map they paid for. The city maintains two public Web sites built on NYCMap: the New York City Map Portal, and a site called My Neighborhood Statistics. Both sites will map an address and display some public information about the area. But neither service lets citizens see the detailed aerial photographs that NYCMap contains.

Most important, private citizens are prohibited from downloading the raw data that would let them invent new uses for NYCMap. A small real-estate broker might want to analyze the data to decide which neighborhoods to invest in, for instance. A senior citizens center might need it to design a program that shows their members the best way to get to public facilities near their homes, taking into account the special transportation needs of the elderly. An academic might hope to study gentrification patterns. Under current rules, none of them have access unless they become licensed as approved vendors to the city.

At the City Council hearing, mapping experts and community advocates agreed that the general public should not be able to see maps of sensitive infrastructure, such as gas mains and the electrical grid. But they said much of the information being held back by the city is not dangerous, and is already available in other public databases or visible to any pedestrian on the street.

"There is a burden to make the case" for restricting each layer of NYCMap, said Alan Leidner, a former director of Citywide GIS, who has been called the father of the city's mapping efforts. "There has got to be a specific reason why that particular layer is considered dangerous and another is not." He also pointed out that the licensing system gives incumbent contractors with access to NYCMap a strong advantage over challengers in designing bids for new work from the city.

Other cities around the world let the public have the kind of information New York City holds back. Residents of both Boston and Philadelphia, in fact, can see detailed aerial photos of their neighborhoods and download the raw data to build their own maps. The State of New York also lets the public download raw map data -- for any county outside of New York City, that is.

"We understand that other cities such as Boston and Philadelphia enjoy less restrictive policies than ours," Marsha Kaunitz testified at the council hearing. "However it is important to note that New York City is unique, both in the specificity of the data contained within our base map and in the level of risk we operate under."

Councilmember Gale Brewer, chair of the Technology in Government Committee, asked Kaunitz to publish a clear policy for what data is available and how interested parties can petition to use it. Later, she promised to keep pursuing the issue of widening access to NYCMap. "We will not let this go away," she said.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Avoiding Eviction; Also, Landlords Lose A Case, Sort Of


Two things happened in the Bronx recently that could affect housing throughout the city.

The first was the launching of a new program to prevent homelessness, focusing on providing tenants an attorney at Housing Court. The second was the end of a contentious lawsuit filed by landlords against tenant organizers.

ANTI-EVICTION PROGRAM

A new effort to prevent homelessness by offering both social and legal services at Housing Court has been launched as a pilot project in the Bronx, the first of its kind in the nation.

“We’re hoping to solve a problem,” said Judge Fern Fisher, the administrative judge of the Civil Court of the City of New York. The problem is the record numbers of homeless people in city shelters. “At some point, some of those people were evicted at Housing Court.”

The new “Housing Help Program” targets the Bronx’s 10451 zip code, which covers much of Mott Haven. About 5,000 people were evicted from their homes in Mott Haven in 2004 of about 23,000 total evictions citywide.

As many as 20 percent of people in city shelters have experienced an eviction. While an eviction may not have been the immediate cause of their homelessness, the fact that so many have had cases in Housing Court makes it a natural place to focus homelessness prevention efforts, Fisher said.

As I wrote in October, the new program is being spearheaded by the United Way of New York City, which is providing about $1 million to finance it, in collaboration with other non-profits and several city agencies.

The program was one recommendation that came from a panel of housing and homelessness experts brought together by the United Way last year. The panel concluded that homelessness had three central interrelated causes 1) a shortage of affordable transitional and supportive housing, 2) economic hardship by NYC’s low-income working families, and 3) unmet needs of highly vulnerable populations.

In the Mott Haven area, people tend not to get help when they face housing problems, in part because social and legal services are limited. The neighborhood was chosen, too, because it sends proportionally more people to homeless shelters than many other neighborhoods. The program expects to assist about 650 families over a year, its collaborators said.

Now, when people from that zip code end up in Housing Court they will have the opportunity to participate in the program as long as their income is less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level (about $34,870 for a family of four).

The residents of 10451 will go through a separate intake process at the court, avoiding the often-long lines that plague Bronx Housing Court. If they decide to participate, their legal and social situations will be assessed. The services will continue outside of court, back in their neighborhood, where the organization Women in Need will follow up offering assistance to address specific problems, like providing job training and referring people for mental health services.

A single judge, Jaya Madhavan, will hear the cases involving residents of 10451 in a special courtroom that has been set up next to the court’s resource center. Madhavan was selected for the one-year assignment because he is a relatively new judge with a small caseload.

Offering more complete services to people at Housing Court will prevent evictions because evictions rarely have just one cause, said representatives from the agencies working on the Housing Help Program.

“There are a lot of things going on for a family that can bring on a housing crisis,” said Jo Gonsalves, director of affordable housing and homelessness programs for the United Way of New York City. Obvious problems that lead to Housing Court cases, like unemployment, often are joined by other issues: domestic violence, mental health problems, substance abuse and others.

“We’ve put together a program for families, who are stressed and frustrated and overwhelmed with the prospect of losing their homes,” she said of people who find themselves summoned to Housing Court by their landlords. “We don’t just offer legal services, we offer social services, which are right on site.”

Gonsalves said three principles guide the program:

Accessibility -- providing services right at the court and in the community; Responsiveness -- addressing the “full range of family needs, rather than a single problem at a time”; and, “Continuity of care,” -- helping families until their situations are stabilized.

“We’re very enthusiastic about this program,” said Steven Telzak, the interim project director for Legal Services for New York-Bronx. He said the court-based approach would allow legal service and social service providers to tackle the problems that have led to a Housing Court case. “We’ll leverage that (housing) crisis to help them in other ways,” he said.

Fisher said the collaborative effort that led to the new program reflected a wider view of homelessness than the court sees.

“We should be a full partner in solving societal problems,” she said.

By providing legal representation to people at Housing Court, even if for only one zip code, the program fulfills one long-time wish of many advocates. People who represent themselves in Housing Court, as almost 90 percent of tenants do compared to about 10 percent of landlords, often learn too late what “adversarial” really means when the word is used to describe the American legal system.

While many tenants can and do defend themselves in Housing Court cases, they are pitted against experienced attorneys representing landlords. Many tenants do not learn quickly enough how to defend themselves and an aggressive landlord’s attorney can use the traumatic thought of losing one’s home to good effect against a tenant.

Fisher said the program would reinforce the view that legal representation makes a difference and, if successful, give advocates ammunition to push for replicating it elsewhere and to lobby for a right to counsel at Housing Court.

“We want to show people that this is what works,” Fisher said. “That this is what it takes to prevent homelessness. When we have successes in programs like this” the value of legal representation will be clear.

Advocates in the Bronx reacted positively to the news of the program, but viewed it cautiously.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Andrew Laiosa of the Neighborhood Initiatives Development Corporation, a community-based organization in the Bronx. But he questioned the efficacy of using $1 million to service one area.

“It’s taking a lot of resources to service 650 families, or so,” he said. “It’s a strange strategy given the circumstances,” he added. The circumstances are significant cuts to rent subsidies, the lack of affordable housing and the continued rise in rents across the city, including the Bronx.

LANDLORDS LOSE A CASE – OR DO THEY?

The settlement reached in a lawsuit filed by landlords against tenant organizers who had worked in a building on Woodycrest Avenue in Highbridge also drew mixed reviews from advocates, organizations that support them and the landlords.

Landlords filed the lawsuit in 2003 after tenant organizers had begun working with tenants to compel their landlord to fix the building’s many problems. The landlords alleged that organizers had prevented them from refinancing a mortgage with Washington Mutual bank, had defamed the landlords and had trespassed in the building. The organizers had published and distributed a variety of flyers and met with the building’s tenants several times.

The case brought apparently unwelcome attention to Frank Palazzolo, a landlord who owns dozens of buildings in the Bronx although his financial connections to the buildings are often hidden. The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development launched an investigation of Palazzolo’s control of buildings in the Bronx as a result. The investigation is pending.

The landlords were seeking $1.5 million in damages, but ultimately abandoned all of their claims. The settlement indicates that landlords are withdrawing their suit “with prejudice,” meaning they will not seek to re-file it later. They will post flyers in the building indicating that organizers can come back in the building.

“I think it says that tenants in a neighborhood like Highbridge have powerful and strong advocates on their side in their struggle to make their housing better,” said Edward Phelan, executive director of the Highbridge Community Life Center, one of the community organizations named in the suit.

But Jackie del Valle, the lead organizer, said the settlement might simply encourage other landlords to file similar suits in the future.

The landlords “were clearly not able to get a victory out of this,” del Valle said. “They spent a lot of time and money on this court case, which they could have used for the building. However, they did hold up organizing work and compromised Highbridge’s mission.

“Organizers prevailed, but I don’t think that they prevailed as strongly as they could have.”

A woman who answered the telephone number indicated on the flyers that announce the settlement to tenants but who refused to identify herself said the settlement was a fair resolution but did not signal a defeat for the landlords.

“We were working with the tenants,” the woman said. “The building was already in the process of being repaired. We felt we had no choice but to” file the lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed as a way to impede organizers’ efforts, the woman said, because those efforts were preventing the landlords from making repairs. She did not indicate what exactly organizers were doing to prevent the repairs.

“We felt we needed the opportunity to finish the repairs in the building,” she said. “They were interfering too much. So we felt we needed them to back off so we could complete the repairs.”

Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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