(photo: Demetrius Freeman/Mayoral Photography Office)
During a recent budget hearing at the City Council, Council Member Stephen Levin asked Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks about wait-times at Human Resources Administration centers. "Have we seen an increase in wait times?” asked Levin; “How are we monitoring wait-times in light of the Jazmine Headley incident and as we're talking about staffing levels at HRA Centers?”
Confident in tone and content, Commissioner Banks answered: "[I]n SNAP and food stamp centers the wait-time is about 20 minutes because 87% of the applications are done online and 93% of the interviews are done by phone, and there's a reduction of foot traffic by more than 40% in those locations.” He continued, “and in terms of the wait-times in the Job Centers...we're about twice as long in those offices as in the food stamp centers."
Our team has conducted a significant analysis of the underlying data the city uses to calculate and report its wait times. We believe that Commissioner Banks’ response is misleading.
The use of misleading data on this matter is a risk for all poor New York City residents, and takes particular importance given the closure of two SNAP (food stamp) centers last year, and the recently-announced closure of the St. Nicholas SNAP Center in Harlem, which is planned for the end of this month.
A Background to Waiting at HRA
Council Member Levin’s May 22 questions above were referring to an incident in December 2018, captured on a cell phone video that went viral, when police assaulted Jazmine Headley and her infant son at a Brooklyn Public Assistance center. Headley had already waited in the center (otherwise known as a Job Center) for four hours before the situation unnecessarily escalated to police violence.
While the media justifiably focused on the physical violence she experienced, Headley’s story also raised another, less-publicized issue that our clients at Urban Justice Center report to us daily: excessive wait-times at HRA that cause upset children, missed days of work or school, increased tension at centers, and unnecessary interruptions in their lives.
New York City’s welfare and food stamp (SNAP) centers are notorious for using wait-times to prevent or delay benefits access. Under Mayor Koch in the 1980s, the city’s efforts to prevent benefits access were so significant that Community Action Legal Services issued a report entitled The In-Human Resources Administration’s Churning Campaign. Under Mayor Giuliani in the 1990s, those in need of food stamps could not even obtain an application until their second center visit. Under the Bloomberg administration, public assistance recipients continued to be systematically discouraged from accessing cash aid by HRA.
Mayor de Blasio’s administration is undoubtedly more receptive of benefits applicants than those that preceded it; however, our analysis of the city’s wait-time data shows that the client experience at HRA is still unreasonable and unacceptable.
In February of this year, in the wake of the violence experienced by Headley, the City Council held a hearing about the experiences of people at HRA centers. When Council members asked HRA officials why Headley’s attempt to complete a seemingly simple task had taken four hours at one of their centers, they explained that her situation that day was an exception. However, the findings we published in our recent Bureaucracy of Benefits report, based on surveys of over 130 HRA applicants and recipients, found that wait times averaged 3.13 hours at Public Assistance (Job) Centers and 2.78 hours at SNAP centers.
Under a local law passed at the end of 2017, HRA must post the “average” wait times at centers on its website. In January 2019, the reported citywide wait time averages were 50 minutes for Job Centers and 45 minutes for SNAP centers. These are the numbers HRA administrators seemingly refer to when publicly questioned about the centers’ wait times, and presumably provided the rationale for calling Headley’s four hour-long wait an “exception.”
In an effort to determine why the city’s publicized wait times are significantly less than what our surveys reflected and what we hear so often from people who go to the centers, we issued a Freedom of Information (FOIL) request for the breakdown of the center wait-times.
What We Found
Our review found that HRA manipulates the data to make it appear as though people are waiting significantly less time in centers and then putting forward numbers publicly that do not match the reality poor New Yorkers experience each day.
The picture painted by city officials in testimony and in the online data is that visits to HRA Centers are fairly simple and quick experiences. But they are not. Furthermore, there are patterns in the data that show disproportionately heavy delays in the Bronx – the poorest borough and where the city has the highest rates of complaints at Job and SNAP Centers (see Bureaucracy of Benefits report).
The data shows that HRA, which is the nation’s largest social service agency and which claims its role is the “effective and efficient administration of more than 12 major public benefits programs, which reflects this Administration's priority of addressing poverty and income inequality,” routinely makes New Yorkers wait several hours at its offices for any and all needs. Our analysis confirms that Headley’s experience with waiting was far more common than officials admitted and resonated closely with what our clients tell us everyday.
1. Ticket-stacking: HRA’s data is compiled by tracking the amount of time that it takes for an individual to be called for a “ticket,” which individuals are given when they go into a center (for the purpose of our analysis, “ticket” refers to the tracking system HRA uses to delineate the reasons for a person’s visit to the center). However, when an individual goes to the center, they frequently need more than one ticket to accomplish a particular task. Sometimes they get multiple tickets upon entering, and sometimes they will be given additional tickets successively, either because the first person they met with was not able to help them or because there are multiple steps to a particular task.
For example, in order to apply for a new Public Assistance case, an individual must fill out a lengthy application and then also complete an application interview. These are each individual tickets. HRA is averaging the data as if each of these is a singular experience for which an individual might visit a center, when in reality, applicants are doing both in one trip. The citywide average wait time in September 2018 for an application was 17 minutes, but the average wait time for an interview was 1 hour and 34 minutes. HRA is averaging these two numbers together in calculating overall wait-time averages, when in fact they should be combined to get a complete picture of the applicant’s wait time.
2. Unweighted data: HRA’s data seemingly does not account for ticket volume by center. For instance, in September 2018, HRA calculates the citywide average wait time for those presenting to resolve a Cash Assistance (CA) missed appointment at 45 minutes. When we calculated the data weighting the amount of time against the amount of tickets for missed CA appointments, we calculated an average wait time of 1 hour and 37 minutes, more than doubling the city’s reported figure.
3. Averaging-in zeros: According to the data, not all centers give out every ticket type in any given month. It is unclear if this is because each center employs its own practices of assigning tickets, or if some centers simply do not see certain needs in a given month. Regardless, the fact that HRA includes the tickets without any data (and therefore zero-minute wait-times) in their overall averaging provides a highly skewed presentation of what is actually happening. For instance, HRA reported (in response to our FOIL request) that the citywide average wait time to see a supervisor was 30 minutes in September. However, five centers did not report any tickets given for waiting to see a supervisor. HRA is including zero-minute waits from these five centers, which skews the citywide average.
4. Exceptional waits for Bronx residents: Repeatedly, Bronx Centers had the highest wait times reported. In September 2018, the Citywide Average Wait time for a supervisor was 30 minutes. However, at Concourse Center in the Bronx, wait-time to speak with a supervisor was 1 hour and 16 minutes. Bronx Centers had the highest (or second highest) wait times for almost every issue area we reviewed, including childcare, cash assistance application interviews, cash assistance recertifications, cash assistance reopenings, cash assistance missed appointments, and cash assistance mandatory dispute resolutions, among other appointment types.
5. Excluding service times: The publicly posted wait-time data fails to capture the additional time that individuals spend in the Center actually completing the services they came for, or the “service-time data,” which can be hours.
For the application interview, the citywide service time average in September 2018 was 47 minutes. Combined with the average service time for the application itself (5 minutes) and the wait times for both the application and application interview, an individual who needed to apply for Public Assistance in September 2018 was spending, on average, over 2.5 hours at the center. If they requested to speak to a supervisor for any reason, the overall time would go up to over 3 hours and 20 minutes. In cases where someone is waiting for multiple appointments in one visit, it is likely they will spend the majority of their day at the Center.
The extensive wait-times for benefits is yet another example of how New York City punishes people for poverty. Available data shows that people of color are disproportionately forced to rely on benefits to survive, and that women are disproportionately the “heads of household” for a family’s benefits case. To make matters worse, almost none of the mandatory services for Public Assistance applicants or recipients can be done online or over the phone. That means that in order to receive Public Assistance benefits, one must be prepared to wait – for hours and repeatedly.
While Commissioner Banks says improvements are coming through technology – and we have already seen some of the city’s technological developments unfold for SNAP-only cases – we remain very concerned that there is a significant need for increasing staff at the centers rather than simply focusing on robotic solutions.
And we are very concerned about HRA’s closure of a third SNAP Center this coming month. Of note, that closure will push SNAP recipients assigned to the St. Nicholas Center in Central Harlem to the East End Center in East Harlem, which is already known by advocates to struggle with caseload requirements that lead to long waits and often very serious case errors.
The waiting imposed on poor New Yorkers is long-standing and punitive but is it not inevitable. Increasing staff at HRA centers, increasing the number of benefits centers in each borough, and making it easier for New Yorkers to resolve problems and complete needed actions over the phone and online would all help significantly. Halting the closure of SNAP centers is another immediate step that can be taken to prevent excessive waits and pervasive errors in people’s cases.
Different decisions about allocating resources can be made that would reduce the notoriously frustrating length of time poor people spend waiting for and interacting with the city’s benefits bureaucracy. The question is whether our city is willing to do so.
***
by Kiana Davis, Isabel Hellman, Craig Hughes, Khadija Hussain & Helen Strom of the Urban Justice Center – Safety Net Project. On Twitter @SafetyNetUJC.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
(photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photography Office)
As Benjamin Franklin famously wrote, "in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." This is true for property owners who maintain their buildings and pay their property taxes in full each year, but for the few who do not, there can be consequences, including foreclosure.
Often, the failure to pay taxes is indicative of a litany of issues, such as physical deterioration of the building. Imagine being a resident of a tax-delinquent building: you've worked hard to pay your rent, and you learn that your landlord hasn't paid their taxes, and now, on top of caring for your family, you’re terrified of losing your home, uprooting your kids' lives. Or you are a renter in a struggling co-op who sees your rent go up dramatically even while conditions in the building worsen. What if you can’t find another affordable place to live? Do you have to leave New York City? How is it fair that you've played by the rules and now have to bear the brunt of your building owner’s actions?
Decades ago, the City launched the Third Party Transfer (TPT) program, which is one of the ways that we hold building owners accountable while protecting residents by transferring tax-delinquent properties to an affordable housing developer to keep people in their homes with robust rent stabilization and other affordability protections. And it works: since 1996, we've provided stability and improved living conditions for nearly 15,000 New Yorkers.
The de Blasio Administration has spent five years marshaling resources to build and preserve affordable housing across the city, and increase enforcement and other protections to keep residents in their homes. We believe that anyone who wants to raise a family and work in the city should be able to live here.
I want to be very clear because there has been rampant speculation and misinformation about the Third Party Transfer program. Ownership creates stability for families and neighborhoods, and the opportunity to build equity that can be passed along to future generations. Our primary goal is to assist struggling owners with repairs and unpaid taxes and violations, which is why we do significant outreach over several years and offer numerous resources to help. More than 80% of the 420 properties included in the last round of Third Party Transfer successfully addressed their municipal arrears and were removed from the foreclosure action.
As an administration, we can look the other way and allow buildings to fall further into debt and eventually disrepair or we can proactively work with owners to keep their hard-earned slice of the city. So we’re going to do more to find new ways to address how the city's housing landscape has changed over the past 20 years. Working with City Council Member Robert Cornegy, the chair of the Council's Housing and Buildings Committee, and other stakeholders, we are launching a new working group to recommend changes to address concerns and make the program better.
The City is committed to making the process as transparent and effective as possible and helping homeowners avoid the spiral of financial and physical deterioration that puts properties at risk in the first place. But as New Yorkers face ever-rising rents and become more vulnerable to displacement, ending the program outright would be a disservice to tenants left to suffer the consequences when building owners can't or won’t address their financial issues.
***
Louise Carroll is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. On Twitter @NYCHousing.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
(photo: William Alatriste/City Council)
We are in a unique moment in history. New York City is embroiled in a process to build new jails -- the aftershock of a grassroots campaign to shut down the human rights catastrophe at Rikers Island. New York State recently passed bail reform, which must be implemented in every county on or before January 1, 2020, and across the country “criminal justice reform” and “ending mass incarceration” have become mainstream conversations -- an unthinkable reality just ten years ago. It’s a moment that carries monumental opportunities and tremendous risks.
For New York City to make the most of this movement, we must reconsider how we think about criminal justice reform and reset the dial towards progress and equity outside the system.
Actions and planning cannot be narrowly focused; instead our elected officials must be prepared to fight for the fundamental needs of the communities from which city jails draw their populations. This must include massive investments -- billions of dollars -- to fund what communities have long been starved for: healthcare, housing, education, and other fundamental resources.
Recently in Manhattan, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice presented at the last of four community board hearings on the city’s new jails plan. Just after, the City Council held its first hearing on the implementation of statewide reforms to bail and discovery rules. Just before, Council Speaker Corey Johnson unveiled his own plans for criminal justice reform in New York City.
Each of these presentations were standard: they focused on prosecutors, public defenders, courts, police, infrastructure, land use, and “off-ramps” for people already caught up in the system. This is typical criminal justice reform rhetoric. But they also mirror “reforms” across the country which have (unwittingly or not) ended up expanding the reach of the carceral system rather than shrinking it.
New York State has reached a tipping point, and could serve as a model for the rest of the country by calling for a dramatic expansion in the scope of what would be required to truly take on “mass incarceration.” We must get away from the old-fashioned notion that crime is a result of moral or personal failures that can be cured one case at at time, instead of a socio-political problem dictated by structural inequality, poverty, race and politics. We must acknowledge and act on the reality that criminal justice reform will never be successful or sustainable when it is siloed off from other crucial social issues that impact our society’s most marginalized.
Jails have long served as the catchall way to manage New York City’s most pressing crises: record homelessness, unmet mental and behavioral health needs, substance use disorders (SUD), joblessness, and poverty. (The same is true across the country.)
In general jail populations are symptoms of failed social policies and the politics of mass incarceration. According to reports, 16% of the daily jail population in New York is people who have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness, and 75% have a substance use disorder. These numbers are similar to incarcerated populations across the country.
New jails cannot address record high homelessness, record high overdose deaths (which remains the leading cause of death in New York City shelters), joblessness, and poverty. Nor can they address the shameful history of racial discrimination and divestment from our communities. Bail reform—which should reduce the jail population—can’t address these issues either if implementation focuses solely on city government’s new legal responsibilities under the law.
At the most recent hearing on the city’s response to statewide reforms, City Council members and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOC-J) both listed as their partners in implementation the local district attorneys, the office of court administration, public defenders, and the police department. Implementation would only be successful, testimony suggested, if millions of dollars were poured into prosecutor offices. But there was no mention of Health + Hospitals, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, or the Department of Social Services in this conversation. No one raised the fact that jails operate as one of the city’s largest homeless shelters, and neither the Department of Homeless Services or the Department of Housing Preservation and Development were invited.
The city risks missing the point here. Omitting the fundamental needs of the community means more overdose deaths, homelessness, joblessness, and poverty. It ultimately means, more incarceration and criminalization. As the jail population drops, what resources are we giving directly to communities in order to keep them safe, thriving, and able to manage inevitable conflicts and tensions without relying on a criminal punishment system that has historically failed to resolve any social problem? Why isn’t Steve Banks -- the Department of Social Services commissioner -- leading this work, instead of a thin MOCJ task force?
The city is preparing to spend $8.7 billion to construct four new jails over the next several years as part of a plan to close the Rikers Island complex. That plan does not include ANY investment into marginalized communities impacted by incarceration -- despite research that these investments can credibly decrease incarceration, which is, after all, the city’s stated goal. The City Council’s first stab at bail reform implementation also appears headed towards massive investments into the system, while ignoring community investments.
New York City has a tremendous opportunity to reinvest in communities to help them thrive and to make them safer. To get there, we must expand the scope of this discussion and address the root causes of the social problems that we have tried and failed to address through mass incarceration, policing, and criminalization while stigmatizing generations of our fellow New Yorkers.
***
Nick Encalada-Malinowski is the Civil Rights Campaign Director at VOCAL-NY. On Twitter @nwmalinowski.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.