Activists Tackle Urban Poverty

David Jones, president of the Community Service Society, gave a stern warning to the academics, public policy-makers, and students assembled at the School of International and Public Affairs on Monday. "New York is on the verge of a permanent caste system," he said.

Jones was one of several experts on urban poverty to convey the urgency of addressing the widening gap between the rich and the poor in global cities, during a forum hosted by former New York City Mayor David Dinkins at SIPA.

During his keynote address, Jones pointed to record-high unemployment and poverty rates in minority neighborhoods around New York, low graduation rates at city high schools, and the city's shrinking middle class as being indicative of a demographic crisis. "Fixing it now will require an investment on the same scale as the problem," he said.

All of the professors, city government officials, and task force leaders that spoke during the afternoon's panel discussions agreed: urban poverty is systemic worldwide, but policy-makers studying cities from New York, New York to Maputo, Mozambique said they are poised to design and implement creative strategies to address it.

Esther Fuchs, SIPA professor and former advisor to the Bloomberg administration, led a panel discussion about how to help New Yorkers move up from the "safety-net" of baseline social services like welfare, by expanding employment incentives, job training, and tax-break programs. Panelists Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, and members of the Mayor's Commission on Economic Opportunity, Lilliam Barrios-Paoli and Diane Baillargeon,listed the four crucial populations New York has chosen to focus on: young children, unemployed, "disconnected" youth, and the working poor.

"This is not welfare as we know it, or charity," Barrios-Paoli said. "It's giving people what they're entitled to."

Jones put an emphatic underline on this point as he responded to a Barnard junior's comment about her mother, who works as a teacher in a low-income school in Oakland, Calif.. Her mother works hard to help the children each day and the school is "good," the student said, but the students' poverty makes it nearly impossible for them to succeed.

"I'm not going to believe that every one of those children can't be helped," Jones bitingly responded, to great applause from the audience. "We've allowed the generalities of where these kids are from to justify withdrawal of resources. We can't tolerate it."

Jones' organization will be hosting conversations with the presidential candidates about urban poverty. In his conversation with the group, former Senator John Edwards announced a plan to create one million transitional jobs. Jones recommended other strategies like a second-chance policy to reach out to high school dropouts, a "nuanced and focused" approach to job training, and a rebirth of unionization.

During the second panel, Columbia professor Smita Srinivas said she approached issues of poverty from a third-world perspective where New York's institutionalized safety net is a "luxury." Trends like informal self-employment, the decline in "Fordist" manufacturing jobs, and the increase in construction jobs are apparent in most global cities, she said.

"How do we socially regulate the global economy?" she asked.

The 12th forum hosted by Dinkins in as many years, Monday's forum was the last overseen by Lisa Anderson, who is stepping down from her post as SIPA's dean at the semester's end after a ten-year tenure.