DeBlasio not popular right now

From the Daily News:

New Yorkers overwhelmingly disapprove of the way Mayor de Blasio is handling homelessness and crime — and think the quality of life in New York City has taken a turn for the worse, according to a poll released Friday.

The new Quinnipiac poll found that 61% of voters disapprove of the way de Blasio is handling poverty and homelessness, which he promised to improve during the 2013 City Hall race.

Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed said they thought the mayor was doing a good job on those issues.

And more than half — 53% — think the city's quality of life is getting worse, not better, the poll found. That's compared to just 14% who think it's getting better.

Fifty-nine percent of voters think the mayor isn't doing a good job stopping crime, compared to 35% who think he's doing a good job, the poll found.

Report actually shows that Queens is in pretty good shape

This came from a press release:

New data released the day before the State of the City reveals a “tale of two children” in Queens. When it comes to economic security, housing stability, educational development, healthcare, and family environment, Queens kids who live just blocks apart have radically different outcomes, and Queens communities rank both the lowest and highest across the city in terms of risks to child well-being.

The new report is a “Community Risk Ranking” from Citizens’ Committee for Children, which ranks the city’s 59 community districts from lowest to highest concentration of risk to the well-being of children. How did Queens stack up? Here are the highlights:

· Bayside is in the top 10 lowest-risk communities in the city (#4); Rego Park/Forest Hills, Sunnyside/Woodside, and Fresh Meadows/Briarwood also rated among the lowest risk.
· Jamaica/St. Albans, Elmhurst/Corona and Jackson Heights are the highest-risk communities in the borough.
· Queens Village and Jamaica/St. Albans are two of the highest-risk communities when it comes to health outcomes and healthcare environment for children.

These findings suggest that, as the Mayor shapes his funding priorities in the Preliminary Budget, resources must be diverted to high-risk Queens communities.

How about giving financial incentives for not having kids instead of the opposite?

Poverty pimps

From the NY Post:

Today, compassion fuels the American political bus. No one can expect to lead the country without proving that he or she feels our pain.

That is a fatuous basis for policy, notes political scholar William Voegeli in a calm and reasoned book that carries the impishly inflammatory title, “The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion.”

Compassion creates a co-dependency between the empathizers and the empathizees: Liberalism is an “alliance of experts and victims,” in the words of Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield.

To top that up to 51% of the voters, says Voegeli, liberals argue that “those who do not recognize the expertise of the experts are stupid, preferring ignorance, and those who do not recognize the victimhood of the victims are wicked, lacking compassion.”

If the empathizees ever disappeared (by, say, having their miseries extinguished) then the empathizers would lose their purpose, the soothing soul balm of caring.

That’s why, no matter how much money gets poured into poverty alleviation ($22 trillion, not including Social Security or Medicare, in the last 50 years), “You will never hear the words “Phew! We cured poverty.”

Indeed, official poverty measures simply leave out anti-poverty benefits. That’s like saying you’re carless if you were forced to accept a Chevy paid for by other taxpayers.

So the poverty rate never really changes — it’s been around 14% or so for the last half-century — even as living standards for today’s poor surpass those of yesterday’s middle class.

Ah, but the poor are less healthy, argue liberals. True. But whose fault is that? Many avoidable illnesses that disproportionately afflict the poor are traceable to ill-advised consumption, not deprivation.

Why do low-income immigrants succeed where low-income native born fail?

Interesting read over at Next City:

What makes certain successful low-income immigrant communities different from pockets of entrenched poverty? There are many reasons why some people get out of poverty and others don’t, and why some people require public assistance more than others. But these are uncomfortable topics, and they’re rarely discussed or given their proper due.

Avoiding an honest look at differences between immigrant neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods is one of the biggest weaknesses of urban planning and policy today. We are at a moment when our cities are experiencing ever-widening inequality, and real social mobility seems ever more fleeting. Meanwhile, we’re avoiding a discussion about how some immigrants have dramatically moved up, and failing to draw any general lessons from their experiences. We’re also trivializing their success by not addressing it.

The article was about the controversy over the Pan Am Hotel, where a predominantly Asian population is protesting the placement of mostly black and Latino families in a pop-up homeless shelter.
Why do Asians succeed?

Asians value education.
Asians do not drop out of school.
Asians do not get pregnant at 16.
Asians know who their children's fathers are.
Asians generally live in nuclear families and even extended families.
Asians do not worship thug culture.
Asians are willing to work their asses off.

There are several reasons for the difference right there. No sociology degree required. Let's be honest: it's a cultural problem.

Queens: More vibrant, diverse and poor than ever!

From the Daily News:

Poverty in Queens rose the most of all five boroughs in the years after the economic crisis — even as the city as a whole largely rebounded, according to new city data.

The poverty rate in Queens jumped to 22 percent in 2012, up from 16 percent in 2008 — bringing the number of people living under the city poverty line to around 500,000.

“I’ve seen some of the changes with my own eyes,” said Councilman Daniel Dromm, whose district in Jackson Heights is among the poorest in the borough. “We get a huge number of constituents coming in who can’t meet rent, are going to be evicted, or are in illegally converted houses as the only way they can put a roof over their head.”

The study by the city Center for Economic Opportunity spotlighted working families and immigrant communities that have borne the brunt of higher rents and tight jobs market.

An additional 7 percent of the city's Asian population — half of whom live in Queens — fell into poverty, bringing the group's poverty rate to 29 percent. It was the largest increase for any single ethnic group, according to the report.

Bloomberg thinks he's helped the poor

From the Daily News:

Times are tough — but hang in there. 

That was Mayor Bloomberg’s message Friday as he railed at the “bums” in Washington who don’t know how to fix the economy, and faced off criticism that his administration hasn’t done enough to help the poor.

 “You should not be that depressed, we grow out of these things, we have been through these cycles many, many times before,” Bloomberg said. On his weekly radio show, Hizzoner noted that not only the economy — but also the politics will renew. 

“People will get frustrated and they will say this new wave of people who came in, they’re wrong, and you’ll throw the bums out and bring in a new group who are great and wonderful until they become the bums, and they get thrown out.” 

Despite painting a gloomy picture of the nation’s elected officials who “don’t know how business works,” the mayor then sought to reassure New Yorkers it was not all bad. When it came to evaluating his own success at tackling the city’s economy and poverty levels, Bloomberg’s outlook was rather more optimistic despite new figures showing the number of city residents living below the federal poverty line rose to 4.5%, or nearly 1.7 million people, in 2011. 

“The nice thing about New York is we don’t walk away from the poor,” he said.

Widest gap ever between rich and poor

From Gotham Gazette:

In New York City in 1980, the share of all incomes going to the top 1 percent was 12 percent -- more or less in line with the rest of the U.S. But by 1990 the top 1 percent's share in New York City had risen to almost 20 percent, and after a period of extreme concentration in the late 1990s reached nearly 35 percent in 2000. The 2001-2003 recession briefly pushed the top share down, but then it gained at its fastest pace over the past 30 years, climbing to 44 percent in 2007, almost double the historically high national level of 23.5 percent.

New York State is the most polarized among the 50 states, and New York City is the most polarized among the 25 largest cities in the United States.

Today, most experts expect the pace of the nascent recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-09 to remain subdued in large part because of high household debt burdens, stagnant or declining wages, and a bleak job outlook. The recession was triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble and a speculative, excess-prone financial system, but it occurred in an economy with an increasingly shaky foundation characterized by weak job growth, continued export of middle-income jobs and wage growth that failed to keep pace with inflation and the growth in the productivity of labor.

This shaky foundation has a lot to do with the post-1980 hyper-concentration of income. The expansion from 2004 to 2007 was the first in which family incomes and median wages adjusted for inflation did not rise over the cycle to reach the peak of the previous business cycle. Despite economic growth, many Americans never saw their income return to the levels they had reached in 2000. Faced with this, families turned to debt, using credit cards and home equity borrowing to sustain their living standards. The crash of the financial and housing bubbles destroyed trillions of dollars in retirement and college savings that had been accumulated by middle- and low-income Americans, and decimated the value of their homes.

Rebuilding that wealth and economic security and restoring a sense of optimism for the next generation will be doubly difficult given the current polarized system of economic rewards and the bleak outlook for job and economic growth. The broadly shared prosperity that prevailed in the three decades after World War II is a distant memory. Are we destined to grow further apart?