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S c o r e W a r s : S , J : h o o l sS c r a m b l e t o B e a t t h e Ne w S t a n d a r d s
Home Remedies
n the mayor's ever-escaLating assauLt on the homeless, the contradictions between the
l
stated goaLs of the city's poLicies and their consequences exist in the same surreaL reaLm
where Pat Buchanan beLieves that the trade embargoes on Cuba vioLate human rights.
ReLying on the private market to take care of housing for peopLe who don't have any money, as
the mayor has, is about as unreaL as it gets. But soon enough, our current mayor will be a sen-
ator; or a Department of Justice chief or charter schooL magnate. The next Leader of New York
City wiLL have to figure out what options we have left to house the homeLess. DeveLoping a
strategy for building and providing more affordabLe housing-for the homeLess, the poor and
the hundreds of thousands New Yorkers who live doubLed up-shouLd be priority number one
for any mayoraL candidate who wants to grab the public compassion for the homeLess that
Giuliani has so kindLy Left as his Legacy. A few suggestions:
Stop selling tax liens. A proLiferation of buiLdings seized from their owners for unpaid
taxes once Led to disaster; as city taxpayers came to own thousands of abandoned buildings.
But they uLtimateLy led to opportunities for affordabLe housing coordinated by nonprofit
deveLopers. Under GiuLiani, the city has been selling off the liens to private buyers as fast as
it can take them. Managed properly, seized buildings are an asset, not a Liability. Use them.
Set aside some spots. The city has LargeLy abandoned reserving pLaces for formerLy
homeless and very Low-income individuaLs and families in city-backed projects. Those need
to be restored. But more than that, set-asides need to pLaya more serious role in efforts to
build housing using city-issued bonds. Those projects currentLy put most of the availabLe
resources into subsidizing Luxury and middLe-income buildings.
Not everyone needs a kitchen. Because of housing codes, no single-room occupancy
residences have been Legally built in the city since the I 950s. Much of the existing stock of
those affordabLe rooms, which kept homeLess single people off the street, has been lost to
conversions to pricier apartments. Their closest equivaLent is rooms illegally chopped out of
homes in the boroughs, but these don't provide stabLe pLaces to Live. In generaL, the rtwre flex-
ibility in the varieties of housing that can be Legally built, the better.
Spend what you've got smarter. The city is Laying out $170 million this year for home-
Less services, the state $150 miLLion. That money represents an enormous potential resource,
some of which couLd be more effectiveLy put to use to beef up tenant Legal representation and
provide emergency rent subsidies to peopLe on the verge of eviction.
Don't forget about public housing. The city's housing authority has responded to
Congress's calls for bringing in higher-income tenants with a commitment to keeping very
Low-income families to just 40 percent of the projects' total popuLation. But because it
aLready has a wider range of incomes than most public housing systems nationally, New York
has the ability to maintain the status quo: 55 percent very Low income, or tens of thousands
of apartments for peopLe who can't find housing on the private market.
And for Pete's sake-if you don't beLieve in public housing, don't live in Gracie Mansion.
Cover photo by Ozier Muhammad; Kamal Muhammad at work in a Broadway newsstand.
ALyssa Katz
Editor
City Limits relies on the generous support of its readers and advertisers. as well as the following funders: The Adco
Foundation. The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. The Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, The Edna
McConnell Clark Foundation. The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation. The Scherman Foundation. The North Star Fund. J.P.
Morgan & Co. Incorporated. The Annie E. Casey Foundation. The New York Community Trust. The New York Foundation. The
Taconic Foundation. Deutsche Bank. M& T Bank. Citibank. and Chase Manhattan Bank.
City Limits
Volume XXV Number 2
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FEBRUARY 2000
FEA.TURES
The Manhattan Project
Teachers at city schools are doing anything they can to make
sure their students pass tough new tests. But by doing little
to offer guidance, the Board of Ed may be setting kids up to fail.
Why aren't school officials listening to the people who wrote
the book on education standards?
Help Wanted
The hype holds that working poor is the thing to be these days.
But a close look at the resources available to low-paid working
families shows that getting people off welfare is a lot more
popular than keeping them off.
Working Riffs
Jobs in New York City aren't all in Silicon Alley. The people
who make the city's service economy run put up with pests,
stress, lost toes and modest wages, all in a day's work.
By JiU Grossman
Six of them tell their stories. By Ron Howell
Photographs by Ozier Muhammad
PIPELINES
Swept Astray
At Bronx Housing Court, a group of janitors who work
for their welfare benefits say they were promised more
than an orange vest-and they're wondering where their jobs are.
Their Own Victims
Even as violence plummets at Rikers Island, suicides
may be increasing, and the city agency that oversees
jails wants to know why.
Remaking the Rent
In March, tenant advocates will face yet another fight to
keep rent regulations intact. But thanks to term limits,
this time around it's the politicians who are sweating it out.
COMMENTA.RY
Review
All Togther How?
Spare Change
Mr. Smith Goes to Centre Street
DEPARTMEMTS
Editorial
2 Ammo
Letters
4
Job Ads
Briefs
5
Professional
Directory
By Tracie McMiUan
By Jarrett Murphy
By Jarrett Murphy
130
By Michael Hirsch
138
29
34-
34
W

LOAM JUSTICE
Your article "The Harlem Shuffle"
(November 1999) falsely portrays Mort-
gage Lending of America, Inc., a licensed
mortgage banker, as having "burned"
nonprofit housing corporations by
renovate the properties, or how such ren-
ovations are performed. These are all the
responsibility of the property ownerlbor-
rower, in this case, Helpline.
LETTERS ~ "promis[ing] them one-stop housing
.......... ..l. rehabs but instead hook[ing] them up
with overpriced buildings and shoddy
construction," leaving the nonprofits
"holding uninhabitable housing and high
mortgages they can't pay."
It is false that "Mortgage Lending of
America invited Helpline to buy homes in
eastern Brooklyn" (or anywhere else, for
that matter). Of the properties that it
financed through Mortgage Lending of
America, Helpline bought seven (two of
which it has since sold at a profit) direct-
ly from HUD, which had foreclosed on
them. Helpline bought the remaining
properties from other sources, also unre-
lated to Mortgage Lending of America.
Helpline, and Helpline alone, is responsi-
ble for its purchases. (Your article mis-
leadingly talks about "flip" transactions
by which developers sell properties to
nonprofit organizations for profit. That is
not what happened in the case of
Helpline, and Mortgage Lending of
America is not in the business of "flip-
ping" or reselling properties.)

This is pure fiction. Unfortunately,
your author appears to have bought-
hook, line and sinker-the false and
defamatory stories about Mortgage Lend-
ing of America spread by Gennie Phillips
of Baldwin, Long Island, who operates
Helpline Soul Rescue Ministries, Inc.
The facts are as follows:
Mortgage Lending of America, Inc.,
is a lender. Its business is to make loans to
qualified borrowers. It is not in the con-
struction business, the real estate broker-
age business, the appraisal business or
any other business. Mortgage Lending of
America, Inc., is not responsible for its
borrowers' purchases of properties, their
contracts with construction companies to
Your article falsely suggests that
Mortgage Lending of America caused
Helpline to enter into a contract with Tri-
Metro. In fact, this was purely Helpline's
choice. Ms. Phillips apparently told your
Specializing in
Community Development Groups,
HDFCs and Non,Profits
Low .. Cost Insurance and Quality Service.
NANCY HARDY
Insurance Broker
Over 20 Years of Experience.
270 North Avenue, New Rochelle, NY 10801
914,654,8667
7
reporter that she signed an agreement
with Tri-Metro whereby that company
paid Helpline $5,000 per building pur-
chased (approximately half a million dol-
lars in all) and she in return agreed not to
"see the buildings before or during con-
struction." Mortgage Lending of America
has no idea whether this is true or not, but
if Ms. Phillips signed such a bizarre con-
tract, she alone is responsible for the con-
sequences. Mortgage Lending of America
was not a party to Helpline's contract
with Tri-Metro.
It is absolutely false that Mortgage
Lending of America "refused to let" Ms.
Phillips "see the appraisal records and
closing documents" for the loans that
Mortgage Lending of America made to
Helpline. Just like any other purchaser of
property who finances his or her purchase
by borrowing from a mortgage lender,
Helpline was provided the appraisals and
purchase and loan documents, at and/or
before the closing.
Of the 105 properties purchased by
Helpline with funds loaned by Mortgage
Lending of America, Helpline completed
repairs on only 29, even though "draw
payments" were available for renovation
work on all of them, in strict compliance
with HUD guidelines. Helpline inexplic-
ably failed to renovate the vast majority
of the properties which it purchased,
even though Mortgage Lending of Amer-
ica escrowed over $1.2 million for this
very purpose. Helpline alone is responsi-
ble for this failure. Ms. Phillips' self-
serving statement, "We were shut out of
the process," is a complete fabrication.
Far from being "shut out," she was
responsible for the process whereby her
organization bought properties, financed
them through Mortgage Lending of
America and/or other lenders, and was
supposed to rehabilitate the properties,
collect the rent and pay the mortgage. It
is indeed a terrible thing for residents of
Helpline-owned buildings and the com-
munity that Helpline did not do what
it was supposed to do. But this is
Helpline's fault alone.
The draw checks that were issued
were made payable jointly to Helpline
and the contractor, as required by HUD
regulations. Helpline, however, negotiat-
ed these checks itself. Apparently as a
result, Helpline has been sued by a com-
pany claiming to be the assignee of
Helpline's contractor.
Helpline defaulted on loans made by
Mortgage Lending of America on approx-
imately 100 properties. Other than these
(continued on page 32)
CITY LIMITS
;
Labor
Fntit Fight
F
or Daniel Lucas, working the picket line
in the cold for six hours a day is a vaca-
tion-literally. During his five years at
the Adinah's Farms greengrocery on the
comer of Avenue C and 2nd Street,
Lucas worked 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a
week making sandwiches and stocking shelves. His
weekly pay: $300, in cash. He got no lunch or din-
ner break, catching a quick nibble in between cus-
tomers and shipments, all for what added up to
$3.60 a hour. No benefits, no overtime. And when
another employee was out, he suddenly had twice
the work. "If someone was off, we had to do the
other job," Lucas says, leaning nonchalantly against
the police barricade set up for the picket.
It was these difficult conditions that pushed this
store's six Mexican workers to pursue union mem-
bership with Local 169 of the Union of Needle-
trades, Industrial and Textile Employees, or UNITE.
But that, in tum, pushed the store's owner to fire
them. So in August they took to the streets, asking
neighbors to pass up the store that passed them over.
FEBRUARY 2000
Outside the store, former patrons of Adinah's
toss supportive phrases at the protesters in English
and Spanisl1, and nearby signs proclaim pro-work-
er and pro-union messages. "I feel for these guys
because they' ve worked here so long, and they go
and throw them out; it's a damn shame," says one
resident. "We try not to let [people] shop here."
In December, the National Labor Relations
Board jumped in, issuing a ruling requiring owner
Grace Lee to recognize the union and rehire the
workers. That has yet to happen, but in the mean-
time the workers survive their indeterminate
unemployment with a little help from the union.
UNITE is hoping for a bigger payday eventually:
If the U.S. Department of Labor proves that Lee's
workers made less than minimum wage, she'll
have to pony up back wages and overtime-a fig-
ure the union puts at $80,000 to $100,000. "I don't
feel so bad," Lucas says of being out of work. "I'm
glad I'm fighting for this."
It's a fight that has lit up the Lower East Side.
With organizing by UNITE, the Mexican Workers
Association, Lower East Side Community Labor
Coalition and other groups, four other greengro-
cers are now haunted daily by pickets: Fuji Apple,
Fruit and Vegetable, and two other stores owned
by Lee, Graceland and Gracefully.
And the store-owners have been hit hard. With
few Lower East Siders willing to cross a picket
line, the greengrocers are under tremendous pres-
sure. "It's affecting us a lot," says Michael Shin,
whose parents have owned Fuji Apple for 20
years. He says that most of his workers were paid
minimum wage. "We're dying," he adds.
The agitation on the Lower East Side has been
bittersweet vindication for UNITE, after a cam-
paign two years ago to unionize grocery workers
in Brighton Beach failed. In that effort, as soon as
organizers got workers interested in improving
their lot, owners divided workers by firing some
and raising the salaries of others, and conquered
by intimidating the rest.
This time, community support has made all the
difference. Idle workers pace restlessly inside Adi-
nah's Farms, and few customers dare come in.
With such solid support, the workers aren't so
much waging a protest as maintaining a presence.
They haven't been vocal for months. Most days
they quietly stand in front of the store, signs draped
over their jackets.
''We don't have to do anything," says Manuel
Guerrero, a union organizer. ''We don't have to chant
anything. The community is already on our side."
-Kemba Johnson
M
Briem .......... ------........ -------------=
$60K
Union Donations
to Democrats Running
for Mayor in 2001
$50
$40
$10K
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Campaigns
Union
Muscle
E
ven with Election Day 2001 nearly two
years away, individual donors and PACs
are already pumping cash into the coffers
of pols planning to run for mayor. Comp-
troller Alan Hevesi leads the pack with
$2.3 million in his purse, followed by Bronx Bor-
ough President Fernando Ferrer with just over a mil-
lion dollars in the tank. Money, however, isn't every-
thing: Witness Reba White Williams, who showered
$1.12 million on her special election City Council
campaign last fall. She broke all the records, only to
lose spectacularly. And in a recent informal survey
by the web site NYVOTE.com, Public Advocate
Mark Green-third in campaign cash with just over

Q;
oct
e
" 0
en
$800,OOO-was voters' top choice.
What may matter more than money is
muscle-people power, in other words, and the
best source of that is labor unions. With thousands
of troops to staff phone banks and pass out palm
cards, the city's unions were widely credited with
getting last fall's charter revision proposal defeat-
ed by a three-to-one margin.
Since candidates that get union money may
also be able to count on union manpower, a quick
look at how organized labor is doling out its cam-
paign cash reveals some interesting trends. While
Hevesi leads in this category, City Council Speak-
er Peter Vallone comes in a close second. Mean-
while, traditional labor-friend Sal Albanese lags
well behind.
Republicans get the brush-off: Former Deputy
Mayor Fran Reiter, Assemblymember John
Ravitz and Councilmember Thomas Ognibene
haven' t registered a cent of union money, accord-
ing to Campaign Finance Board records.
-Jarrett Murphy
Welfare-to-Work
Sports
I
n December, the mayor's office quietly
approved almost $500 million worth of sen-
sitive job training and job placement con-
tracts, completely overhauling New York
City's welfare-to-work system. In all, for-
profit companies walked away with a total of $230
million. The city doled out a whopping $105 mil-
lion to one corporate giant alone, Virginia-based
Maximus, in two of the biggest social services con-
tracts the city has ever granted. (For further details,
see our web site at www.citylirnits.org).
But at an obscure public hearing to approve a
last-minute change to Maximus' employment center
contract-it bumped up the company's take from
$12 million to $47 million-a handful of welfare
watchers raised serious objections about both the
contractors and the secretive contracting process.
For one thing, City limits has found, some of
these companies have less than stellar records. As we
I:eported in November, Maxirnus has had trouble ful-
filling some of its other human services contracts. "If
our community-based groups had as many questions
raised [about their records], they'd be blown out of
the water," says Manhattan City Councilman Bill
Perkins, who presented testimony against the com-
pany at the hearing. And ARBOR, Inc., which is get-
ting $18 million in New York City for skills assess-
ment and job placement, botched a similar job in
Philadelphia last year. City officials there declined to
renew ARBOR's $21 million contract because,
among other things, the company failed to keep track
of clients. ''They fell well below our expectations,"
says Linda Blanchette, director of Greater Philadel-
phia Works, the city's welfare-to-work program.
These 17 contracts, serving poor unemployed
people and welfare recipients, are performance-
based, meaning that companies get paid for each
client they place and keep in a job. But because of
the way New York City's contracts are structured,
City Project associate director Glenn Pasanen points
out, it appears Maxirnus can collect up to 20 percent
of its first-year fees right away, for an up-front take
of nearly $7 million.
Pasanen and Perkins also note that the contract
process wasn't exactly public. The deals were all
arranged through negotiated acquisition, a method
that circumvents open bidding. And although con-
tracts are supposed to be available for inspection
before they go to a public hearing, the documents
available at Human Resources Administration head-
quarters were little more than boilerplate, including
no specifics on dollar figures or subcontracting.
"Is that good government, to be able to change
policy so dramatically, and be able to distribute
that amount of money without a serious process of
review and negotiations to make sure that the com-
munity's interests are being represented?" Perkins
asks. -Kathleen McGowan
CITY LIMITS
...... ----------.... --------------Briem
PrE DOOMSMYCONTINGENCYPlANS
OF THE MAYOR'S EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT TEAM

a
TO PREVENT A StRl0US
CRIPPL1NG Of THE ClTY'S
ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE.,
WF.VE SET UP AN OOENS1VE
NETWORK OF CARRIER
PIGEON ROUTES."
OUR VAPID RESPONSE TASK FORCE
WIU HECKl.E AND HOUND RUDY
CREW UNTIL ItE RESIGNS, THUS
ENABUN6 U51D RESfOR HOPE
1i) A HOPELESS SYSTEM WITH
WE'RE GOING TO FINE MARK
GREEN $ 2 5 . 0 0 0 ~ A DAY
FOR EACH AND EVt:RV POLlCY
RtVERSAL UNTIL THE QUESTION
OF' MAYORAl. SUCCESSION IS
SETTLED BY A FREE AND FAlR.
rn
c
==
A PROTRACTED, EXClTIN6
NEW CAANCELl.OR SEARCH! ELECTION!
BIKE MESsENGER
STRIKE
Protests
Unfunded
'Youth
I
n November, a group of Bushwick organiz-
ers and teens staged a carnival-like protest
in front of Councilmember Martin Malave-
Diliin's office. Their demand: new funding
for a center to provide meals, counseling
and classes for neighborhood teens. Their method:
a lively street party that stopped nearby traffic
with nearly 30 teens dancing to merengue and rap
music. And while they might not have won the
increased funding they were looking for, they did
manage to win the councilmember's attention.
The protest, organized by community group
Make the Road by Walking, comes months after
its study found only 2,000 slots for free youth ser-
vices programs available in a community with a
population of 40,000 teenagers. Protesters want a
crisis center for teens to address the problem of
teen homelessness. "There are young kids out here
going to jail," says Yaritza Mercado, 16, one of the
youth organizers who led the protest. "I think that
if we can get these programs out here in Bush-
wick, there will be less kids out in the street."
Malave-Diliin wasn't around for the protest.
FEBRUARY 2000
RUDY ELECTED
To 'U.S SENATE!
But when he showed up afterward, some reported
that things got ugly. Two protesters, Jesus Gonza-
lez, 14, and Justice Ford, 18, and a volunteer, Sean
Gullette, said that the councilman confronted Gul-
lette for helping to stage the rowdy carnival.
Malave-Dillin denies the accusation. He
reports that $60,000 of his discretionary money,
Foster Care
plus an additional $57,000, goes to youth pro-
grams in his district. "Other elected officials as
well as I are working on the construction of a
youth center not too far away from this organiza-
tion," he says. Youth group members met later
with the councilmember, who promised he would
look into their proposals. -Elizabeth Corona
AGING
DISGRACEFULLY
For kids in foster care, leaving may sometimes be
the hardest trial of all. Young people aging out of the
system get up to S750 in grants, extra public assis-
tance and not much else. Without resources or a
support network, many struggle to pay for basic living expenses; one University of Wiscon-
sin study found that 32 percent of adolescents who had been out of foster care for 12 to 18
months were on some form of public assistance. More than half had no medical insurance.
New federal legislation, however, should improve matters. A bill passed by Congress in
November doubles the amount of federal funds available for independent living programs,
which teach foster kids the skills they need to survive on their own. New York State stands
to receive an additional S2 million a year.
The legislation is designed to give young people between age 14 and 21 who are about to
leave foster care the financial flexibility to continue in school or find suitable jobs. States
can use up to 30 percent of the money to help adolescents pay for room and board, or pro-
vide health insurance up to age 21. The measure also compels states to track what happens
to teens after they leave foster care-something neither the city nor the state does now.
Adapted from a Child Welfare Watch news brief.
-

PIPELINE i
,
A group of WEP
workers say
they were given
false hope that
their workfare
assignments at
Bronx Housing
Court would
lead to
real jobs.
:M
Swept Astray
Bronx welfare workers say the city promised them jobs-and then gave them the brush-off.
By Tracie McMillan
"we feel that we are being
used as individuals to work
and clean all courts without
the city paying checks or benefits," read
the letter to the editor of the civil service
newspaper The Chief The signers: 33
Bronx Housing Court "interns" enrolled in
the city's Work Experience Program. It is
hardly a new story; critics of the city's
work-far-welfare program have been mak-
ing the same point for years. These work-
ers, however, have a new complaint-they
insist they were lured into a janitorial train-
ing program by a promise that wasn't kept.
'They told us at the orientation that we
would get a real job. This is not a real job,"
says Terry Boyd, who helped coordinate the
writing and signing of the letter. She has
been a Housing Court WEP intern for two
years. "We're just being used to do work
that city employees used to be paid for and
all we get are our [welfare] benefits," Boyd
adds. 'That doesn't make any sense."
Boyd and about 140 other WEP work-
ers have been assigned to clean Bronx
courts for the Department of Citywide
Administrative Services, which supplies
janitorial staff to public buildings. For their
first eight to 10 weeks on duty, the workers
learn to sweep and clean through the
agency's Custodial Maintenance Training
Program, which is supposed to prepare
them for private employment.
But these trainees say that the official in
charge of DCAS' WEP brigade told them a
job would be waiting after they completed
their training. Workers assumed he meant a
city job. Instead, they are still in their work-
fare assignments, and their supervisors
have said they can't arrange permanent
jobs for the workers.
"[DCAS WEP director] Harris Colon
told us that when we finished the training
and everything, we were going to get a job,"
says Norma Torres, a former Housing Court
WEP worker who now cleans the Bronx
DA's offices. She feels betrayed by the pro-
gram. "Doing this training, getting certifi-
cates-I worked hard. And for nothing."
Torres has been cleaning court buildings for
over two years, often voluntarily working
more than her assigned 32 hours a week.
'They told us we'd get a job," says another
cleaner. "But we've gotten nothing."
So when the Housing Court workers
saw an article about WEP in The Chief,
they felt compelled to draft the letter. "We
figured that if we wrote them, then maybe
they could help us try to get jobs," says
Boyd, who wrote the letter. Over half of the
welfare workers on site signed it.
DCAS insists that the trainees misun-
derstood. "Nobody has ever told the WEP
participants that they could take the test or
training to be assured of a city job," says
DCAS spokesperson Denise Collins. 'The
idea is for them to be prepared for openings
in the private sector. The program is not set
up to provide for city employment."
Nearly 3,000 WEP workers have been
assigned to this training program since it
started in 1997. Most drop out or leave
welfare altogether; so far, only 375 of them
have completed the training. DCAS has
hired just 41.
Meanwhile, fewer than one in seven of
the custodial workers in the Bronx courts
are city employees. Indeed, the number of
salaried janitorial jobs with DCAS has
been slowly dwindling as welfare workers
have arrived. In 1994, just before WEP was
launched, there were 295 full- and part-
time custodial court employees citywide.
By 1997, there were 436---a total of 267
WEP workers and just 167 city employees.
Most city jobs that remain are for "cus-
todians," a low-level supervisory position
that requires more specialized training than
DCAS offers-in boiler maintenance, for
example. With the agency's encourage-
ment, Boyd, Torres and another dozen or so
of their colleagues took the civil service
exam for custodial jobs last May anyway,
along with 1,300 other applicants.
They won't know their results until at
least this spring, and DCAS has not yet
announced how many jobs will be avail-
able. In 1997, the last time the agency hired
WEP workers as employees, just 16 got
jobs. "We have very limited openings and
many more passers for the test than open-
ings," confirms Collins. 'The training that
we do for the certificate is not meant to be
civil service exam training."
The Housing Court trainees know all
too well that openings are limited. "Some of
them get discouraged and just leave," says
Boyd. "But I know maybe eight people that
got jobs after this. Two girls went to work at
K-Mart. One went to work at Macy's.
They're all doing maintenance work."
Others aren't so lucky. Says Torres,
"I'm looking for a job and everything. I
take my newspaper, put applications here,
put applications there. And nothing. It's
hard for me." .
Tracie McMillan is a Brooklyn-based free-
lance writer.
CITY LIMITS
Their Own Victims
An uptick in city jail suicides prompts a probe-and questions about mental health care.
By Jarrett Murphy
L
ittle more is known about Mustafa
Qverterman than when he died,
and where-in a cell at the Conta-
gious Disease Unit in the West Facility on
Rikers Island on Christmas Day, 1998-
and that he killed himself by standing his
bed on end and hanging himself from
its edge.
The Board of Correction, an indepen-
dent agency that oversees the massive
New York City Department of Correction
jail system, is reviewing Qverterman's sui-
cide, along with seven others that occurred
between July 1998 and June 1999. It's a
noticeable uptick: In fiscal years 1997 and
1998 there were five suicides in city jails.
In 1996, there were only three. The
increase comes despite dramatic decreases
in violence at the jails-down 55 percent
in just the last year-and an almost 7 per-
cent decline in the daily jail population
over the past five years.
Every suicide in the city's jail system
is investigated by the Board and Depart-
ment of Correction. ("One is too many
for us," says DOC spokesperson Thomas
Antenen.) But now the Board is taking
an especially close look to see why there
might be an increase in inmates taking
their own lives. Says Board Deputy
Director Kathy Potier, "We're looking at
any trends-any issues that would come
up. It's something we've wanted to do
for a while."
Several issues are ripe for the probe.
With greater rates of mental illness and
suicide than state and federal prisons,
city jails also now host large numbers of
inmates detained for quality-of-life
crimes-people who never contemplated
the possibility of jail time are ending up
behind bars for crimes like public urina-
tion or possession of alcohol.
At the same time, the Department of
Correction has adopted a hard-nosed anti-
violence strategy at the jails. While it has
reduced the number of incidents tremen-
dously, the effort relies on invasive mea-
sures such as regular cell searches, which
were up 38 percent last year alone.
Then there are the usual questions of
whether the staff or the structure of the
prisons may contribute to the problem. A
May suicide reportedly resulted in several
suspensions and transfers of DOC staff,
FEBRUARY 2000
although Antenen insists the moves had to
do with other management problems. And
the structure of the cells themselves may
have helped inmates hide from guards
long enough to take their lives in at least
three cases over the past two years.
But the jails' health and mental health
care, already under fire, is also under the
microscope. Ever since the Department of
Correction and the city's Health and Hos-
pitals Corporation hired private SI. Barn-
abas Hospital to run health services for
Rikers and some of the other jails in Janu-
ary 1998, replacing Montefiore Medical
Center, critics have charged that the hospi-
tal has cut comers on care. The Manhattan
District Attorney and State Attorney Gen-
eral investigated these health services last
year. Two groups of prisoners are suing St.
Barnabas and the city for allegedly subpar
health care. And at a Board of Correction
meeting last year, officials reported that
medical complaints-such as allegations
that health providers weren't paying atten-
tion to sick inmates-have quadrupled
since 1996.
N
ew York City's jail system--{;on-
sisting of 10 facilities on Rikers
and four other jails-locked up
130,000 inmates last year. Rikers hosts
16,000 on any given day. The jails' mostly

PIPELINE i
,
Corrections
officials are
taking a close
look at suicides
in the city's
massive Hikers
Island jail
complex.

[1M
able standards."
transient inmates may be awaiting
trial, biding time until a transfer to a
state prison, or serving a brief sen-
tence. Three-fourths to 95 percent of
the jail population is addicted to alco-
hol or drugs.
After 11 inmates killed themselves
in city jails in 1985, the city imple-
mented a set of minimum standards
for mental heath care. Suicides fell
dramatically, and in fiscal 1993, there
was only one. Antenen calls the stan-
dards a "comprehensive plan" that is
"regularly looked at as a model in the
country."
Today, roughly 25 percent of
inmates get mental health care in the
city's jails. Many mentally ill inmates
can stay in the general prison popula-
tion while they receive psychotropic
drugs and counseling. Some of the
more seriously mentally ill are housed
in Mental Observation Units or Rik-
ers' 24-hour, seven-day-a-week Men-
tal Health Care Center, which offer
medication, individual and group ther-
Board of
Correction
members found
that jail medical
staH had been
underreporting
attempted
suicides and called
for city health
oHicials to develop
a new reporting
procedure.
Other evidence, however, sug-
gests that St. Barnabas still has work
to do. At a July 1999 Board of Cor-
rection meeting, members found that
"medical staff has been under-
reporting attempted suicides," and
called for HHC to develop a new
reporting procedure. At another
meeting, board members expressed
concern that St. Barnabas was using
pills in cases where liquid medica-
tions, while more expensive, would
guarantee that inmates could not
stockpile drugs for suicide attempts.
(All "dangerous drugs," says Mar-
rero, are already dispensed in liquid
form.)
Gerald McKelvey, a spokesper-
son for St. Barnabas, says the hospi-
tal provides "customary and ordi-
nary mental health services to the
extent that it can be rendered in the
setting on Rikers Island."
apy and extensive suicide prevention
measures. Unusually aggressive mentally
ill inmates go to the 24-bed Behavioral
Management Unit in the Bronx, run by St.
Barnabas, and extremely disturbed
inmates are taken to one of the prison
wards at Elmhurst, Bellevue or Kings
County hospitals.
In order to use those services, inmates
must first be diagnosed with some mental
problem. Medical staff are supposed to see
the inmates during the first 24 hours of
confinement and are allowed up to four
hours to test for physical and mental ill-
ness. This intake screening is crucial; cor-
rections experts say it's the initial shock of
imprisonment that often triggers a suicide
attempt.
But the city's correctional facilities
often don't receive inmates until they' ve
spent several hours incarcerated in a
precinct lockup or courthouse holding
pen. In addition, 20 percent of DOC
inmates are in and out of jail within 72
hours, and 50 percent within a week. The
head of the city's correctional health ser-
vices has admitted that not everyone can
be seen by a mental health staffer by the
time they leave-and indeed, the Board of
Correction has received whistleblower
reports that medical staff is too small to
handle the inflow of inmates. Correction
officers union president Norman
Seabroook says his guards echo those
complaints: "I get a sense that there are
more back-ups now," he says.
Responds HHC spokesperson Jane
Zimmerman, "There was a restructuring
of staff, as with any new affiliate. Staffing
needs are assessed on a regular basis." A
1998 HHC report states that jail health
care staff is the same size as it was when
Montefiore handled the contract. But crit-
ics of the St. Barnabas arrangement say
that the way its $340 million, three-year
contract is structured allows the hospital
to scrimp on care, because a portion of
any money that the hospital doesn' t use
for care it can keep. "In general," says
Urban Justice Center lawyer Heather Barr,
an attorney for one of the groups of
inmates suing the city, "the structure in the
contract has created an incentive to pro-
vide lousy services."
HHC officials deny the contract is
flawed, and they point to a set of 35 per-
formance indicators that are supposed to
be reviewed quarterly. But Ernesto Mar-
rero, director of Correctional Health Ser-
vices, could not say exactly how well St.
Barnabas is performing on those indicators
because he is currently reviewing nine
months' worth of data. Zimmerman says
that her impression is "overall, St. Barn-
abas has been meeting medically accept-
A
ntenen insists that the DOC
takes the problem of suicide
very seriously; indeed,
reducing the number of suicides is the sec-
ond of five performance goals for Correc-
tional Health Services. DOC recently
assigned suicide prevention aides-
inmates trained to observe other inmates-
to all three shifts at a Rikers infirmary. And
Antenen said in an early December inter-
view that staff at the prisons was on extra
alert for suicides as the holiday season
began.
Even as the Board's probe proceeds,
guards at Rikers Island patrol the tiers of
cells carrying an instrument called a 911
("nine-eleven") knife. It's a specially
curved blade that can' t be used as a
weapon. Its only purpose is to cut down an
inmate who's hanged himself. Guards in
city jails have carried the knives for over
10 years.
The knives are metallic proof that
depression, fear and suicide are facts of
life in jails. "People killing themselves in
jails and in prisons is nothing new," says
Maddy deLone of the Prisoners Rights
project at the Legal Aid Society. That sui-
cides occur is no scandal; the question is
whether New York City's jails are doing
all that they can to prevent inmates from
taking their own lives. Says deLone: "It's
not just that stuff happens-people just let
it happen at some level."
CITVWoClTS
Remaking the Rent
As rent protections come up for a reckoning, tenant groups court a newly cautious City Council.
By Jarrett Murphy
I
t's a good thing Tony Bennett didn't
leave rus heart in New York. He
would have gotten palpitations in
December, when a group of tenant advo-
cates, armed with a karaoke machine, ser-
enaded the Sheraton New York Hotel
with their own lyrics to Bennett's songs
while the crooner himself performed
inside at a birthday party. "I left my
heartJIn the landJords' pocketIFJ ush with
their cash/l' lJ run for Mayor," they sang
to the 65-year-old guest of honor: Ben-
nett's boyhood friend from Astoria, City
Council speaker Peter Vallone.
The picket, staged by New York State
Tenants & Neighbors Coalition and the
Metropolitan Council on Housing, was a
sign of just how anxious advocates are as
the city's rent regulations head toward
expiration this April 1. Rent control and
stabilization operate under state laws, but
the legislation requires the City Council to
certify every three years that New York
City still needs the regulations. If April
Fools Day comes without such a vote
from the council, the rent regulations-
which limit yearly rent increases on
roughly one million regulated apartments
and protect tenants from harassment-
will disappear.
Tenant organizers are quite worried
that the council will try to weaken rent
protections, as it did in 1994. But they are
also betting that the council they face tills
time around will hesitate before turning
on tenants. Term limits are forcing council
members, many of whom have won their
district races effortlessly for up to 20
years straight, to seek rugher offices-and
to do that, they'll need tenants' votes. At
least 20 current members are thought to
have such aspirations. Vallone, for one, is
running for mayor. Says Tenants & Neigh-
bors Associate Director Michael McKee,
"We think Vallone is going to think better
of tills because he is running for mayor,
and thank goodness. It gives us leverage."
T
he elections, however, may also
work against tenants. The Rent Sta-
blization Association (RSA), a
landlord-backed lobbying group, is eager
to see the council mortally wound the rent
laws-in 1997, when the regulations
came up for renewal in Albany, it doled
out at least $40,000 to city candidates, and
FEBRUARY 2000
over $600,000 to state contenders. Both
RSA and the Real Estate Board of New
York have written members asking them
to donate to Vallone. Tenant sources say
that Vallone has asked the board for $15
million for rus campaign chest.
Even if the council renews the rent
laws, it has the power to wreak heavy
damage to them. Under state law, the City
Council can vote to keep the rent laws as
they are or weaken them, but it cannot
substantially strengthen them. Last time
around, a Vallone-led council voted to
deregulate all apartments when their rents
reach $2,000 a month-a move that has
encouraged landJords to use rent law loop-
holes to bump rents up over the limit. And
the council outraged tenant advocates last
June when it voted 36-15 to limit land-
lords' liability for lead-paint poisoning.
Vallone has publicly promised to renew
the laws. But organizers still fear that the
council will take potshots at the law, vot-
ing again to lower the maximum rent for
regulated apartments or to weaken clauses
that protect tenants from harassment. To
counter landlord clout, says McKee, "we
started strategizing a year and a half ago. "
That's meant nightly phone banks and fre-
quent mailings to tenants in targeted coun-
cil districts, all aimed, says McKee, at
"making sure that the City Council is
going to vote the right way. "
At least a dozen council members,
many from Manhattan, are considered
dependable pro-tenant votes, while some
members with few rent-regulated con-
stituents-including Queens' Arcrue
Spigner and Thomas Ognibene-are sure
friends of landlords. Organizers are aim-
ing at middle-of-the-road council mem-
bers and the leadersrup, asking tenants to
bombard members' offices with phone
calls. The effort has targeted the members
in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens who
cast the swing votes that weakened the
laws in 1994. These include Walter
McCaffrey and John Sabini of Queens,
who both may run for Congress, and
Brooklyn's Annette Robinson, who wants

PIPEliNE t
,
Tenant advocates ~
offer Speaker ~
Peter Vallone ~
best wishes j
outside a .
December
birthday bash for
the mayoral
hopeful.
s
to go to the statehouse. McCaffrey and
Robinson voted for decontrol in 1994;
Sabini was absent.
Also on the hit list is Brooklyn's Her-
bert Berman, who voted to weaken the
laws in 1994. He is running for Comptrol-
ler in 2001 and needs citywide support.
Ken Fisher will also need broad-based
support for his potential run for mayor or
Brooklyn borough president. Bronx mem-
ber June Eisland, who voted for decontrol
in 1994, is vying for Bronx borough pres-
ident. As valuable as landlord contribu-
tions are, it's votes that count-and a lot
of voters live in rent-regulated apart-
ments. Council members running for
higher offices, believes Jenny Laurie,
executive director of the Met Council,
"will take risks for a real estate contribu-
tion, but they won' t take enormous risks."
Thus, when the callers demand that
council members send letters asserting
their support of rent regs, many comply,
as Sheldon Leffler and Karen
Koslowitz-both possible candidates for
Queens borough president-have already
Asvaluable
as landlord
campaign
contributions
are, it's votes
that count-and
a lot of voters
live in
rent-regulated
apartments.
done. Leffler has been a strong supporter
of. tenants rights, while Koslowitz voted
for the 1999 lead paint bill, but both
thought it important to declare their sym-
pathy with tenants early on.
Tenants are more than wiling to use
of
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F
this new-found leverage. Arnold Levey
heads the tenants association at North
Shore Towers in Little Neck, Queens.
Tenants in the 300 rent regulated apart-
ments there have joined Levey in blitzing
Berman, Fisher and others with calls.
''These people all have political ambi-
tions," says Levey. "We take the position
that as wonderful as they may be, we
couldn't possibly support them if they
don't support the current rent laws."
But the experiences of 1994 and 1999
suggest that regardless of what other
council members want, the speaker will
get whatever law he wants passed. "He
will get his 26 votes one way or another-
what we' re trying to do is surround him
with nervous members," says McKee; the
idea is to lobby councilmebers who will
then lobby the speaker to keep the laws
intact. "U1timately, the decision is going
to be Peter's."
While it may secure votes, the council
blitz is not gaining McKee or Tenants &
Neighbors any friends. "Mike McKee's
group is using this as an organizing tool to
keep their troops interested between the
battles," charges Fisher, who says rent
regulations aren't even on the council's
radar yet. "Nobody had bothered to ask to
sit down with me to discuss this fust-
hand. It's a cheap attempt to scare peo-
ple," and perhaps a ploy to raise money,
Fisher suggests. An equally skeptical
Berman says, "I'm not unconvinced that
the reason tenant advocates have gone to
this extent to traumatize the people is
[because 1 they want to be the heroes"
when rent regs pass unchanged. Fisher
and Berman both say they' ll vote for no
changes.
Rica Rinzler, a s p o ~ e s p e r s o n for Val-
lone, says that "he will renew the rent
laws. There have been no suggestions for
changes." Privately, one council member
refers to claims that Vallone is anti-ten-
ant as "pure unadulterated bullshit."
Apparently, even McKee and Laurie hold
out hope for the speaker. Teaming with
Councilmember Stanley Michels, they
are drafting a bill that will strengthen
protections (or city tenants by requiring
better maintenance of regulated apart-
ments or funding more subsidies for
renters.
Even as they remind Vallone and vot-
ers of the speaker's past betrayals,
they're counting on him to play the hero
this time around .
CITVLlMITS
FEBRUARY 2000
-
-
L
aura Koster kicks off the holiday season in her fourth
grade class with a lesson on money. "What standard
are we using today?" she asks her 30 students, all of
them dressed in interpretations of Commurnty Ele-
mentary School 35's navy-blue uniforms. The morn-
ing's exercise at the school, a few blocks east of Yankee Stadium,
focuses on how to add and subtract coins to pay for gifts. But it's
about more than that, too. For these fourth graders, another occa-
sion is fast approaching-their standardized state tests. English
Language Arts is first, on January 31, followed by math in June.
"Mle," answers a girl with her hand raised, demonstrating her
mastery of one of the lesson numbers outlined in a handbook on
Koster's shelf. "The New Standards" offers detailed explanations
of the kind and quality of work a teacher should require of stu-
dents, and they reflect the material that will be on the test. They
will also decide whether Koster's class, and 78,280 other fourth
graders around the city, will move into the fifth grade in the fall.
Koster, who has taught in Bronx Community School District 9
for seven years, posts the standards on the classroom walls exact-
ly as they are written in her city-issued handbook. "Read aloud
fluently," reads one. "Divide fractions," exhorts another.
Next to them are posted the urnt numbers that correspond
with them, and Koster asks her students to memorize all of
the standards and their unit codes.
Koster isn' t the only teacher at C.E.S. 35 who has
realigned her teaching with the new standards. Across the
hall, fourth grade teacher Fran Guber has labeled con-
struction paper turkeys and "What I am thankful for" state-
ments hanging outside her classroom "ELA standards E2c
and E4a,b." That means Guber's students have learned
how to write a narrative, understand basic grammar and
analyze and revise their work. "Students should know
what is expected of them," says Fran Lawlor, who coordi-
nates District 9's teacher training and curriculum in litera-
cy. The district expects all teachers in District 9 to post
standards for math and English wherever they can. "It's
hard to hold someone accountable for something they
don't understand," says Lawlor.
For the three mornings following their math lesson,
Koster's students, along with the rest of the district's
fourth graders, will pore over a simulated reading and
writing test in preparation for the English Language Arts
test on January 31. It's the second time C.E.S. 35's kids
have seen it. Principal Hilda Gutierrez and her staff are
taking extra care to assure there are no surprises when the
students sit down to take the exam, which will ask them to
read and listen to fiction and non-fiction passages, write
short essays on what they have heard and answer questions
on what they've read. "It's important so that when they get
to that time, they'll recogrnze it," says Nathy Nixon, the
school's math staff developer, who shows other instructors
how to teach the subject.
District 9's obsession with the tests may seem unusually
fierce, but it's characteristic of the city's 32 school districts
these days. Starting last year, New York City began to use
the scores on standardized tests to decide whether students
in third through eighth grades will move up. The test scores
are also examined as part of principals' annual reviews, and
determine whether a poorly performing school is placed on
the state's probation list. Last summer, the Board of Education
voted to shut down 14 schools for long records of low scores.
The stakes are higher than ever. Yet when it comes to figuring
out how to make the grade, schools and districts have been left to
their own devices. Elsewhere in the Bronx, District 10 pays for
low-scoring students to get professional test coaching specifically
tailored to the city exams. In a $29 million, five-year initiative in
Brooklyn districts 19 and 23, a private sponsor, the New York City
Partnership, is giving staff cash bonuses at schools that improve
performance-teachers get $2,000, principals $15,000, and dis-
trict superintendents up to twice that. And in Manhattan's District
2, whose students score higher on the tests than those in all but
one other district in the city, adrllirnstrators insist that the way to
beat the tests is to provide creative instruction structured around a
detailed curriculum-in other words, the exact opposite of the test
drills the vast majority of schools are relying on.
Yet with little guidance from the city or state on how to teach
to the New Standards, the race to score well on the high-stakes
tests is taking almost as many shapes as there are Pokernon char-
acters. Many districts, worry teachers and parents, are resorting to
CITY LIMITS

hit-or-miss approaches. ''We're seeing our teachers working very
hard without a clear understanding of what they're supposed to be
doing," says Joseph Colletti, who taught special education for 10
years before going to the city teachers union. There, he's develop-
ing a core curriculum to help teachers make sense of the standards.
District 9, which has a history of poorly performing schools and
administrative corruption, has a long way to go to meet the city's
performance expectations. Last year, only 30 percent of fourth
graders in this district met the new standards; at C.E.S. 35 alone,
13 of 152 fourth graders scored in the lowest quartile of the state
test last year, sending them to summer school. And in December,
teachers at five of the district's elementary schools were accused of
doctoring test answer sheets in an attempt to boost scores.
Officially, District 9 merely orders teachers to hold two hours
of literacy and one hour of math a day, and to give fourth graders
two practice tests throughout the year. But Koster will sprinkle her
daily lessons with test vocabulary until the school year is over. "A
penny is a unit," she explains in her money lesson. "Remember,
on the math test they're going to call it 'units.'"
F
Our miles away in mid-Manhattan, students in District
2 find themselves in a different world. Recently, a class
of second graders toured neighborhood restaurants to
study menus and then returned to the classroom to cre-
ate their own, getting a lesson in reading, writing and
math all at the same time. Throughout the district, kids are expect-
FEBRUARY 2000
ed to read a variety of fiction and non-fiction-25 books a year in
fourth grade, including Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy
Blume and C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In
addition to writing stories, they draft descriptive essays about pro-
cedures, such as how to hook up a VCR.
They are not asked to memorize curriculum codes, or even the
material they're going to be tested on. And they certainly don't
take practice tests.
District administrators claim that's precisely why District 2
has the second-highest test scores in the city: Last year, 80 percent
of its fourth graders scored above standard in reading, and 76 per-
cent above standard in math. "Our approach is completely aligned
with what the assessment is looking to measure," says school
board President Karen Feuer. That "balanced literacy" approach
to teaching kids to read and write-using repetitive lessons of
sounding out letters and words, reading a variety of books, and
writing stories and essays-is exactly what the standards and the
tests are geared for.
It's not entirely accidental that Feuer's district is so far along:
One author of the New Standards has been helping to shape the cur-
riculum there as a literacy consultant. District 2 also has a teacher
training program that's been around for several years. Last year, the
district invested $11.2 million-an unusually high 6 percent of its
budget-in training, immersing teachers in balanced literacy.
Now a team of education scholars and reform advocates is trying
to see whether District 2 has indeed come up with what every pub-
-
-
lic educator in New York has been searching for: the secret to beat-
ing the standardized tests that have come to decide whether students,
their teachers and those teachers' bosses, will flourish or flounder.
''There are lots of different ways for schools and districts to
meet the New Standards," says Dr. Richard Elmore, a professor at
Harvard's Graduate School of Education and a lead researcher in
a series of District 2 studies commissioned by the U.S. Depart-
ment of Education. Since 1994, Elmore has been deploying a
small army of observers in the classrooms, interviewing teachers,
analyzing data and test score patterns, and rating the quality of
teacher performance and training.
Elmore stresses, however, that schools that teach directly to
the test are not guaranteeing success. ''They're trying to out-guess
the test, teaching kids test items," he says. ''That will get you
small short-term gains, but it doesn't hold up in the long-term,
especially with a challenging test like the fourth-grade test."
What makes District 2 work, Elmore believes his research will
prove, is its focus on a clearly defined curriculum, constant
teacher training geared to it, and a stable district leadership that
keeps those priorities straight. Too often, that's precisely what
other districts are lacking, says Elmore. With weak guidance from
both the state and the city, he says, principals and teachers fre-
quently don't know what to do to help kids reach the standards.
Other observers of the city's elementary schools agree with his
assessment. "In low-achieving schools, the planning is not very
good" and is hindered by high teacher turnover, says Noreen Con-
nell, executive director of the Educational Priorities Panel, a non-
profit school policy think tank. Last year, her organization pub-
lished a study exploring how high-achieving schools succeed in
low-income communities. Strong leadership and an alignment of
curriculum, she says, are critical.
Without those elements in place, the pressure falls on teachers,
Elmore points out, with results that shouldn' t be too surprising.
"Teachers don't cheat because they are inherently dishonest," he
says. ''They cheat because they're in a bind."
T
he authors of both the standards and the tests claim they
do not advocate any specific approach to preparing for
them. "We believe in accountability and measuring
results," says Joseph Garcia, a spokesman for the
National Center on Education and the Economy, which
created the New Standards in partnership with the Learning
Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
"If the tests are standards based and the standards are high, teaching
to the test in and of itself is not evil," says Garcia. ''There are some
schools that are going to be better prepared to take this on immedi-
ately, and others that are going to need time to work on that."
New York was one of 26 states that collaborated on develop-
ing the standards. But although the New Standards-trademarked
by NCEE-were designed to be tailored to each school district's
needs, and hundreds of school systems nationwide have made use
of them, New York City's is still the only system to have adopted
the standards outright.
NCEE first got into the standards business as a national leader
in "school-to-work," an approach to education that strives to
bridge the needs of students and the businesses that need to hire
them. The idea was to develop skills that will get students high-
paying and challenging jobs by having them reach standardized
levels of proficiency from kindergarten on up. Both an anti-pover-
ty effort for young people and an initiative to improve U.S. com-
petitiveness in the global economy, school-to-work became an
early favorite of the Clinton administration. It has since fallen out
of favor among educators, particularly for its unrealistic expecta-
tion that schools and businesses would team up.
CITV LlMITS
In a five-year process beginning in 1991, the standards team
aimed to establish a clear set of academic expectations by asking,
"How good is good enough?" Based on those standards, New
York City's Board of Education collected and compared school
work from local students, determined which assignments demon-
strated the widest range of skills, and then declared those to be
samples of standard work. In 1996, the New York State Depart-
ment of Education struck a $5.8 million contract with CfB-
McGraw Hill, one of the nation's largest publishers of standard-
ized achievement tests, to design exams for reading and math
based on the New Standards.
With the District 2 study, Elmore hopes to narrow in on why
students there continue to test so well on the New Standards.
One reason, inescapably, is that the district serves some of the
wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. There are certainly poorly
performing schools there-at the worst, P.S. 33 on West 28th
Street, just 26 percent of fourth-graders passed the exams last
year, compared with 96 percent at the Upper East Side's PS. 6.
Ninety-nine percent of the students at P.S. 33 are poor enough to
qualify for free school lunches. Still, the proportion of children
in poverty who fail the standardized tests in the district is much
lower than it is almost anywhere else in the country, says Dr.
Lauren Resnick of the University of Pittsburgh, who is also co-
director of the New Standards Project and is working with
Elmore on the District 2 study.
Then again, these schools have had a significant head start.
Ten years ago, under the leadership of fonner Schools Chancellor
Anthony Alvarado, District 2 shifted the focus of its literacy
instruction from storybooks with repetitive language for begin-
ning readers to a balanced-literacy curriculum. Teachers are also
pushed to continually identify students' weaknesses, to use a
clearly defined and consistent approach to teaching, and then to
closely analyze how well children are learning the material,
adjusting the curriculum accordingly all the while. Model class-
rooms serve as examples for teachers, as do coaches who have
been teaching for years.
Resnick is quite possibly District 2's number-one fan, calling
its efforts to improve teaching and learning nothing short of "bril-
liant." Resnick has also played no small part in that development,
having worked with District 2 for several years on strengthening
its literacy efforts.
And her stakes go deeper than that. As one of the architects of
the city's education initiative, she has a big chance with the suc-
cess of District 2 to prove th.at the standards can work. Collabo-
rating on the study with Elmore, Resnick wants to find out the
secrets of District 2's success, so that NCEE can encourage
schools elsewhere to replicate what it does right. Giving more
resources to poorer schools, she says, is key to bridging the per-
formance gap. ''That will make it much more attractive for the
good teachers to teach there," she says.
But though fonner Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew brought in
the New Standards with fanfare in 1998, the Board of Education
has since remained quiet on how to bring teaching in line with
them. Elmore has already circulated portions of his research on
District 2 to districts around the city and the country, proposing
that other districts adopt the best of what it does. But regrettably,
he says, "I don' t see much evidence that the Board of Education
is interested." As long as there isn't support and guidance from the
top, he continues, "I think there's a crisis."
FEBRUARY 2000
A
s hard as it has anywhere else in the city, standards
fever has hit District 10 in the Bronx, which covers
both upscale Riverdale and working-class Kings-
bridge and Marble Hill. This year it is one of six
New York City districts working with Resnick and
District 2 to boost training for teachers in reading and writing.
Laura Kotch, the district's director of educational initiatives
for elementary schools, says she's thankful her superintendent
overhauled literacy teaching five years ago, which has meant that
District 10's reading and writing instruction have been in line with
the New Standards from day one. Indeed, 66 percent of District 10
fourth graders scored above standard on the reading exam last
January. In math, however, the district is in serious trouble, with
only 35 percent of fourth graders scoring above standard. Eighth
graders did far worse-just 13 percent passed.
So last year, District 10 took a desperate measure: It hired Stan-
ley Kaplan, the test coaching company, to tutor about 300 eighth
graders who did not meet the standards in math or reading, at about
$200 a head. Deeming the program successful--every student
scored well enough to move on to high school-the district has since
invested another $15,{XX} for the company to provide materials and
train 200 of its teachers and administrators in test-taking strategies.
"At this point, we're just going to make sure our kids are able to
score well," says Kotch. "Student achievement has to be our num-
ber one priority."
Resnick says she sees nothing wrong with test-boosting mea-
sures like the Kaplan coaching as an interim measure. "It's an
obvious idea," she says. It will take time, she believes, for the dis-
trict's teaching to catch up with the New Standards.
Kaplan is taking full advantage of the New Standards market.
Inspired by numerous calls from concerned parents looking for
help for their fourth graders, in November the company released
its first study guide for elementary school students. The Parent's
Guide to the New York State 4th Grade Tests lays out test-taking
skills and strategies, from pacing oneself to guessing answers. A
similar book for eighth graders is expected out in the spring. And
next fall Princeton Review plans to sell in-school and retail ver-
sions of practice tests designed for the New York State test. Now
testing the materials in a pilot program in Texas, where Governor
George W. Bush has made standardized testing a virtual state reli-
gion, the company plans this spring to propose them for use at the
New York City Board of Ed.
While unsure if commercial test prep is the long-tenn answer
to prevailing on the tests, Kotch agrees with Resnick that whatev-
er the ultimate solution, "it's going to take us time." Meanwhile,
her office has mandated that every fourth grader take three prac-
tice tests before the official srate exam is given.
T
OO often when Susan Rust inherits a class of third
graders at Bronx P.S. 109, she says, they arrive
unprepared for the lesson plans she's expected to fol-
low. Rust reports that the second-grade math text-
books her school has been using for years never get
to crucial material students need to know before they can be ready
for the third grade standards.
The fourth grade teachers at her District 9 school run into the
same problems, because the amount of teaching needed to meet
the standards is so intensive that the third-grade teachers are
(Continued on page 31)
-
For politicians and policy geeks alike, work has become the holy grail. Poor people donlt just need
money, goes the thinking. They need structure, self-respect and discipline-and only a job can
provide that. By this measure, the true goal of welfare reform isnlt helping people out of poverty.
Itls about putting as many people to work as quickly as possible, no matter how lousy, poorly paid,
unstable or boring these jobs are.
But there's one big problem. Most of the bottom-drawer jobs in the American economy simply don't pay enough to keep
body and soul together. Just over seven million Americans have left the welfare rolls, but they're not exactly flying high: A
comprehensive survey found that the average yearly income of newly employed families works out to be about $11,640.
The subsidies and programs that are supposed to
help poor people have yet to catch up with this reality.
Many of them are reserved expressly for welfare
recipients, even though it's getting harder and harder
to draw a distinct line between working people and
those on the dole. But instead of bumping up the offi-
cial poverty level (now $13,880 a year for a family of
three), which would be politically nightmarish, most
government benefits programs simply cook the pover-
ty books to suit their needs. Depending on the pro-
gram, poor enough to qualify for help can mean 130
percent of the poverty line, 200 percent of the poverty
line, or 80 percent of "area median income."
It's confusing, which is one of the reasons that
benefits like food stamps are underused. But programs
that help working people tend to be like that: uneven,
contradictory, and hard to find out about. Many of
them also stop far short of the boost that a family
needs to live decently.
"We would never design a 'safety net' that looks any-
thing like this one, whether you were ideologically left
or right," points out welfare maven Liz Krueger of the
Community Food Resource Center. ''But this is what we
got. It was the politics of the moment." And the politics
of this moment say that work makes you free, as city
welfare boss Jason Turner infamously pointed out.
City Limits has tried to make sense of this working
world that so many Americans are getting pushed into,
and analyze just what kind of options people have. In
the first segment, we look at how government has let
working Americans down with a crazy qUilt of assis-
:5 tance programs that often miss the very people that
~ need help the most. And we've excerpted a handful of
;;! stories from Ron Howell and Ozier Muhammad's new
~ book, One Hundred Jobs. Their project takes a broad
=_
i look at working in America, but the stories we've
selected are about people struggling to get by-work-
ing long hours at dangerous or monotonous jobs, often
without pensions, health insurance or benefits. Their
labor helps New York work. So why can't the system
work for them? -Kathleen McGowan
--
CITY LIMITS
Tax credits for the poor are all the rage,but New York City can't get

E
amed Income Tax Credits are a favored child of both think-tank conserva-
tives and earnest lefties-and have given a huge boost to working people try-
ing to get by. Under the federal version, a worker with two children who
made between $9,540 and $12,460 this year could get up to $3,816 knocked off
Income limit for a family of
three to escape city taxes:
S15,000
Number of poor New York City
households that pay no state
or federal tax, but must pay
city tax:
Roughly 127,000
federal taxes-or get a refund for that
amount. Working parents with two kids
can make up to $30,095 and still get a
small break. Even better, the credit doesn't
count as extra income, so it won't put food
stamps or Medicaid in jeopardy.
About 20 million households claimed
the credit in 1997; the president's Council
of Economic Advisers found that federal
tax credits lift about 4.3 million Americans
out of poverty.
L...-________ ---J New York State has a similar "refund-
able" tax credit program, pegged to the federal one, that hands back a maximum
of $751 for a three-person family. It's one of the most generous in the nation,
and by 2001 it will give back up to $939.
But somehow, New York City keeps failing to fix its punitive income tax
system, which hits the working poor harder than either the state or federal gov-
ernment. According to the city's Independent Budget Office, about 127,000
poor households make too little to pay federal and state tax but get slammed by
the city anyway, paying an average of about $125. Most are single parents, who
can least afford it. And because the city hasn't adjusted the cut-offs in a decade,
and inflation continues to erode the value of deductions for the poor, the num-
ber of people caught in this peculiar problem has quadrupled since 1993.
Unfortunately, proposals to start a tax credit here in New York have stalled,
and the state is mostly to blame. In this year's budget, both the mayor and the
City Council finally agreed to start a city tax credit program that would tack
on up to $188 in rebates for a three-person family, helping more than half a
million New Yorkers reduce their tax burdens. Since it would cost about $48
million each year, city officials planned to tap into the state's welfare surplus
(now at $1 billion) to fund it. The federal government okayed that strategy ear-
lier this year but this plan, like so many other bright ideas, has gotten ham-
strung in Albany. Because it's a change to the tax law, the state has to approve
the measure-but the legislature has yet to do it, and doesn't seem particular-
ly eager to put welfare cash behind the plan. -Kathleen McGowan
Stranded between Medicaid and the private market, working families
W
hen it comes to health care, if you're not dirt poor or well off, then
generally, you're out of luck. Moderately poor people are actually
less likely to have insurance than people that are truly destitute. One-
third of New York's working poor (here measured as people who earn
between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty level) have no health insurance.
A United Hospital Fund study slices it a different way: Nearly three-quar-
ters of the uninsured are employed, and 41 percent of them are actually
employed full-time.
Uninsured poor people who
postpone doctor visits:
51%
New York Medicaid cutoff for
parents after allowances for
certain expenses:
S7,992
In fact, having a job can actually be a
liability when it comes to health insur-
ance. Medicaid has done a great job of
protecting the unemployed-to the point
where poor workers are twice as likely as
the jobless to lack health insurance. But a
parent with two kids and a net income of
only $700 a month still can't get Medicaid
for herself in New York.
Poor workers also don't have much
luck with their bosses. Fewer than half of
working poor New Yorkers get insured through their job. But in the next
bracket up (between 200 and 300 percent of poverty), nearly three-fourths of
workers are privately insured. In addition, many employers are passing on ris-
ing insurance premiums to their workers. And increasingly, they must pay high-
er deductibles.
But when they want to be, New York legislators can be downright adven-
turous on health care. Since 1991, the state's Child Health Plus program has
been insuring the children 'of poor families where Medicaid leaves off-six
years before Congress established a similar national program. Together, Med-
icaid and Child Health Plus covered 1.7 million New York children in 1999.
Enter Family Health Plus, a new plan to spread this success to 500,000
working poor people. But even this smart step leaves many poor workers
behind. The state Assembly hoped to cover parents making up to 200 percent
of the poverty level and childless adults up to 120 percent, but the final com-
FEBRUARY 2000

promise left only parents making up to 150 percent of the poverty line eligi-
ble. And childless adults making $8,200 or more can't participate. For any-
one earning more, the state will kick in about 10 percent toward individual
coverage, costing a staggering $300 or $400 a month. -Kemba Johnson
,
-
Housing programs, once a lifeline for the working poor, are now
mostly for the middle class or the destitute.
N
obody in New York City needs to be told that it's practically impossible to
afford rent on a place fit for a family, but this fact seems to have escaped the
people who hand out housing money. These days, housing subsidies are
mostly devoted to the poorest of the poor or to people approaching middle class.
There's a big hole where housing help for working poor people used to be.
As an analysis from the National Low Income Housing Coalition proves,
the single biggest pot of federal housing money is for mortgage tax breaks,
worth $82 billion in 1999. About two-thirds of all government housing money
winds up in the hands of the richest fifth this way. The next biggest chunk goes
Annual income to adequately
house a three-person family,
according to HUD:
S34,500
Median income of a New York
renter:
S23,600
to the poorest fifth. Meanwhile, people
who make between $22,000 and $30,000
get the shaft, with only 3 percent of total
subsidies.
Much of the money left in federal
housing budgets has been routed into
programs that help the very poorest.
When the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development fmally issued
new housing vouchers in 1998, they
were all reserved for people in the
process of leaving welfare. Tax credits,
the biggest source of federal subsidies for new urban construction, are
designed for people who make less than about $24,000. But a General
Accounting Office study found the average income of a renter in housing
built with tax credits is actually only $13,300.
Locally, the story is no different. Since the 1950s, state Mitchell-Lama
subsidies have built 125,000 cheap apartment UItits (the average income of a
Mitchell-Lama resident in 1998 was around $26,000). But these mid-priced
apartments are vanishing: As with federal programs, many landlords are
deciding to out of the program and charge market rents.
Of course, homeownership isn't practical for a lot of families: About 85
percent of the city's poor people rent. But there's just not much help available
for families getting by on $18,000 a year. The city Housing Development
Corporation, which builds housing by selling tax-exempt bonds, is construct-
ing nearly 1,200 new apartments. Many of the rents, however, approach mar-
ket rate, and family incomes range between $60,000 and $80,000.
There is one silver lining. Public housing provides low-cost homes for
439,000 people in the city. For a three-person family, the upper limit is $35,300;
for federally subsidized private housing under Section 8, it's $22,050.
The problem with these programs is that the waiting lists range from outra-
geous to unendurable. But under federal public housing reform law, working
families now get special preference. Homeless people and victims of domestic
violence have always been able to leapfrog the waitlists; now, working families
can do the same. The idea is to bring up the average rent rolls in the projects.
"A working family still may earn below the poverty level, but the assumption
is that working families will have higher incomes," explains CommUItity Ser-
vice Society housing policy expert Vic Bach. -Kathleen McGowan
Where the City's Housing Money Goes
Homeless
and low income,
up to $27.500
o $27.500-$44.000

:;;

And with city funds, about two-thirds of the new units built recently were
for low-income or homeless people (see chart). At the same time, there are many
smaller-scale city programs that help the middle class, primarily with home-
ownership programs that are out of reach for most New Yorkers. The New York
City Partnership's New Homes project allows people making up to $70,950 to
buy new two- and three-family houses. Prices hover around $200,000; home-
owners' average income is $38,000. With the city's Homeworks and Cityhomes
programs, buyers must make at least $27,000 or $30,000.

Since 1986, two-thirds of the city's housing money has gone to build
__ ...J
While families on the dole get guaranteed day care, working families
wait in a 3tQOO-kid line.
Average yearly cost for
licensed day care for one child:
From S3,650 to S13,7oo
Income cutoff for day
care help:
S28,880 for a family of
three
W
elfare reform has given states a
golden opportunity to make child
care affordable for more working
parents, but New York State has largely
left them to fend for themselves. The
poorest families get free care, but fees for
everyone else range from $1 to $90 or
more a week. While working families
have to wait in line for help, parents who
are receiving welfare benefits or who've
left the rolls in the last year are guaranteed
subsidized care. All in all, about 37,000
children are on city day care waiting lists, more than twice as many as in 1997,
in a system with about 84,000 public slots.
Meanwhile, many families with modest incomes can't get any assistance
at all. It doesn't take much to become totally ineligible for child care subsi-
dies: $29,880 for a family of three. ''The reality is there's not enough child
care to go around," says Gail Nayowith, executive director of the Citizens'
Committee for Children. "We're pitting people on welfare against low-
income working people who are one step away from welfare."
It doesn't have to be this way. In 1996, Congress bulked up child care spend-
ing from $2.3 to $2.9 billion a year, and gave states unprecedented flexibility.
States are now allowed to allocate nearly a third of their total federal welfare
grant to help poor families pay for child care.
New York hasn't taken Congress up on it. The state sits on a $1.4 billion wel-
fare swplus and has yet to payout $200 million from a child care reserve fund.
And much of the child care money the state has spent is tied to welfare reform.
Last year, the state released $64 million in child care funds. About 40 percent
CITY LIMITS
of that will go to parents receiving welfare or recently off the rolls. The rest will
fund about 5,300 new slots and vouchers, which the city can decide to reserve
for welfare recipients or make available to all kinds of poor working families.
Even this subsidy is skewed, since the number of working families who
need help with day care dwarfs the number that are on welfare. As oflast sum-
mer, there were about 123,800 children whose parents need child care in order
to do workfare jobs. But there are nearly twice as many poor New York City
kids with working parents, and they get no guarantees.
Federal rules call for public child care to be available to families making up
to 275 percent of the current poverty line, or $35,771. But while the poverty line
is continually adjusted upward for inflation, New York hasn't raised the income
cut-off for child care subsidies since 1990. Nayowith's organization estimates
that nearly 150,000 city children whose parents want affordable day care are not
getting it. For about one out of every 11, it's because their parents make too
much to qualify.
This drastic shortfall has developed largely unnoticed. One vocal excep-
tion has been unions, which through lobbying and grassroots campaigns have
been calling for fairer access to affordable child care for low- and moderate-
income families. This winter, the New York Union Child Care Coalition will
have parents around the city fill out application forms for child care, even if
they make too much to be eligible. Organizers are hoping that a flood of paper
will show elected officials the profound hidden need for child care. "We're
going to take these forms to the City Council and say, look, this is your vot-
ing constituency, and these people are not eligible for child care," says Sonte
DuCote, the campaign's field organizer. "We need more child care. Right now,
working families are last in line." -Alyssa Katz
A new plan for job training may get lost in the national obsession with
welfare-to-WQrk.
S
tarting this July, states will be given a new chance to offer job training
and placement help to nearly anybody who needs it. Unfortunately, that
doesn't mean they're going to take advantage of the opportunity. Espe-
cially in New York City, the preoccupation with moving people off the wel-
fare rolls is likely to overwhelm, if not destroy outright, the chances for work-
ers to get the training that could help them move out of poverty.
The federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA), which goes into effect this
summer, puts a lot of the responsibility for job training and placement into the
hands of state and local governments. By establishing "One-Stop" career cen-
Percent of working poor and
unemployed who say they need
more job training to get a
better job, according to a
Rutgers University survey:
79%
Percent whose employers will
help pay for job training:
18%
ters to serve all sorts of job seekers, the
law will greatly expand a system that
used to be available only to welfare recip-
ients and certain "displaced" workers.
Under WIA, states can use the cash to
fund everything from resume workshops
to commercial truck driving classes. It
will also provide more job assistance for
the working poor, loosening income
restrictions so that anybody looking for a
job can enroll in a federally funded class.
"The federal government wants to offer
[job training] to everyone and anyone
who needs it," says Andrew Gehr of New York State's Office of Workforce
Development and Training.
But the federal law might play out very differently on the state level, given
the new "work-first" mandate. For one thing, community colleges, which his-
torically have provided vocational training to anyone regardless of income,
are the natural sites for the One-Stops. But under WIA, actual training takes
a back seat to putting people to work as quickly as possible, something com-
munity colleges aren't necessarily prepared to do.
According to a recent report from the American Association of Communi-
ty Colleges, "under WIA .. . training has become the service of last resort." As a
result, traditional job counselors will have to transform the way they do busi-
ness, trading in training programs that teach complex skills for boot-camp
style job placement workshops.
Also, by handing over the reins to localities and states, WIA has given
them the authority to favor welfare-to-work programs over those for the
working poor. The legislation gives states the right to put nearly all these new
resources into getting people off the dole, and there are already strong indi-
cations that New York City will do just that. The city's welfare agency has a
$1.5 million grant from the state to administer the city's One-Stops. And last
summer, the city's job training contracts were abruptly shifted from the
Department of Employment to the Human Resources Administration, essen-
tially putting welfare officials in control of most of the city's work programs.
FEBRUARY 2000
Meanwhile, the shortfall in low-skill jobs is worse in New York City than
anywhere else in the nation, according to a survey by the U.S. Conference of
Mayors. And local unemployment is well above the nationwide average. The
new law was originally written to boost worker training with government-
funded training programs. But HRA's specialty is getting people off the wel-
fare rolls, not training them for careers or helping them find good jobs.
Another possible pitfall of the new law is in how it restructures funding for
youth summer jobs programs. The old job training law specifically ordained a
Summer Youth Employment Program, but WIA leaves it up to states and local
governrnents. So far New York City-with a youth unemployment rate of 27
percent, almost twice the national average-has made no such plans for sum-
mer 2000. As a result, an estimated 23,000 summer jobs for young people
stand to lose federal funding.
So far, WIA mostly seems poised to provide an unfortunate case study in
unintended consequences. But the law's impact on the working poor may not be
entirely bleak. The Consortium for Worker Education, a nonprofit originally
founded by labor unions to access federal funding for job training and re-train-
ing, does a great deal of this sort of work-such as training displaced Chinatown
apparel industry workers in computerized sales and cab drivers in basic com-
puter skills. That organization expects to be, according to one CWE official, in
"a very good position" to get One-Stop funding. -Liza Featherstone
'-
,
-
Moving from welfare to a decent job is like running to stay in place:
I
n theory, there have been worse times to be poor. Adding up tax credits,
food stamps, child care assistance and a small supplement of welfare bene-
fits, a single parent working full-time at minimum wage can now eam
$14,630 a year, according to one estimate, and in most states her children will
still be insured under Medicaid. In 1986, that family would have taken home
just $10,464 (in current dollars) from the same package of benefits, barely
more than it would have earned on welfare.
But while the new policy emphasis on work-backed by more than $50
Poverty rate for working
families with children in 1979:
7.7%
In 1998:
10.9%
billion in federal spending last year-
has made the initial jump from welfare
to full-time work more alluring, the
rewards for working taper off very
quickly. In New York, where public
benefits are relatively generous for peo-
ple on welfare but extremely hard to get
for those who are not, the fillancial
trade-offs for moving from welfare to
work, or from low-wage work to higher-wage work, are among the most
extreme in the country.
Looking solely at New York's welfare, food stamp and tax regulations,
researchers from the Urban Institute, a Washington-based welfare policy
research organization, calculated what a family of three would give up as it
moved from welfare to a minimum wage job, and from there to a full-time job
paying $9 an hour. When a family moves from welfare to a $9-an-hour job, it
loses 84 cents of each new dollar in foregone food stamps, tax breaks and other
benefits. Moving from minimum wage to $9 an hour, a 75 percent increase in
,\
,
I
-
-
--

cash eamings, the family would gain only 6 percent in total income.
Those figures, of course, assume that a family is actually receiving all the
benefits that it can. Working people are eligible for food stamps if they earn
less than 130 percent of the federal poverty line, or $8.53 an hour for a fami-
ly of three (though because food stamp regulations compensate for high hous-
ing prices, many New Yorkers who make slightly more are still eligible).
But as both a federal court and an investigation from the U.S. Department
of Agriculture have concluded, applicants who aren't on welfare have a hard
time getting food stamps in New York City. The number of city residents
receiving food stamps has shrunk by 392,000 since September 1996, down to
950,000; during the same period, fewer people-330,333-left welfare.
Nationwide, one Urban Institute survey found, two-thirds of the people who
were no longer getting food stamps after they left welfare were still poor
enough to qualify.
The biggest reason working New Yorkers lose so much even as they earn
more, says Ellen Amstutz, director of the Community Service Society's Pub-
lic Benefits Resource Center, is that there are few ways to find out the details
on benefit programs, and no coordination between income-support efforts.
Nearly all benefits specialists, who do little else but help people connect to
programs that can assist them, rely on CSS' 550-page benefits manual to
untangle the complex and contradictory eligibility requirements. Without a
dedicated caseworker, "you're lucky to get one or two," says Amstutz, "but
no one could get them all ." And when you're working 35 hours a week at a
low-wage job and trying to raise a family, navigating the complex bureau-
cracy is just one more time-consuriling burden. Says Amstutz: "It would be
a full-time job." -Alyssa Katz
CITY LIMITS
Of the 3.5 million jobs in New York City, writer Ron Howell and photographer Ozier Muhammad
chose 100, asking the people who make the city work to explain what they do every day. They got
answers ranging from "make twice as much money as you do" (headwaiter) to ' ~ u s t pray you get
through the day" (sanitation worker) and "play music really loud" (tattoo artist). For these six,
the paychecks are no match for rats, thieves, corpses and repetitive stress.
Newsstand
Clerk
Salary:
Less than $13,000 a year
Hours:
8 a day, 6 days a week
Benefits:
None
Union:
No
Training:
On-the-job training
Use computer:
No
Workplace:
A five-foot by three-foot
enclosure
Risks:
Getting into confrontations
with thieves
K
amal Muhammad can stand, sit and move his arms, but not much else.
He sells newspapers, magazines, candy and cigarettes in the confining
space of a roofed sheet metal newsstand, at the bustling northwest cor-
ner of 82nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan.
Most of the time, he doesn't have to say anything. People just reach out,
take what they want and pay him. The newspapers are in front of the news-
stand and the magazines are to the left and to the right. Candy and other junk
food is lined up above the newspapers, just within Muhammad's reach.
Muhammad says that his main problem is that some youngsters like to
help themselves, free of charge, to a fistful of anything within easy reach.
This is the potentially dangerous part of this work. Being short on inventory
or cash is not good for job tenure. When the boss comes around, he doesn't
want to hear about missing money or cigarettes. Besides, Muhammad has his
sense of right and wrong, and despite his very evident frailness, he doesn't
FEBRUARY 2000
like to be pushed around. So he spends a portion of his days yelling at young
adults who pilfer items from him. Sometimes he leaves his booth and runs to
chase them. Limited in his English and in any sense of American political
correctness, he admits to bearing a well of anger against some young blacks.
"Black people is a problem," he tells his interviewer, an African American. ''1
chase. It's dangerous." The 32-year-old immigrant from India works on the
West Side. His customers are generally white and fashionably dressed.
When he has to go to the bathroom, Muhammad closes down for several
minutes and has a friend from a nearby store keep his eyes on the newsstand.
He generally uses the restroom at Barnes & Noble. Living in an inexpensive
two-room apartment in Manhattan that he shares with two other immigrants,
Muhammad says he would like to return to India someday, to settle down and
build a house. But earning the money he does now, that may take quite some
time, he says.
-
Exterminator
Salary:
About $31,720 a year
Hours:
40aweek
Benefits:
Health, pension, vacation
Union:
Yes
Training:
On-the-job training
Use computer:
No
Workplace:
Basements, kitchens, yards
Risks:
Bites and fumes
--
W
illiam Diaz loves when his clients look relieved to
see him. At these moments, he is their conquering
hero, the man who rescues them. The villains are
mostly rats and roaches. Diaz, 33 years old, is a "service
technician" with Acme Exterminating. For his company's
clients throughout Manhattan, he inspects cracks and
crevices, lays down traps, and uses chemicals to kill
insects and rodents. Occasionally, he's chanced upon
frightened rats that leaped on him. Once, he was putting
his hand into a garbage can, inspecting bait he had laid
down, "and when I went down to reach it [the rat] jumped
on my arm. I tried to shake it off," says Diaz, who used to
wrestle professionally years ago under the nickname
Swan. "I was in mortal combat." He was bitten, and final-
ly had to kill it "the old-fashioned way. I took a stick and
put it to his throat." Reflecting on that occasion he recalls,
"I wanted to quit right then and there."
Diaz's days are generally more routine than that. He
carries 16 pounds of materials and equipment in his
knapsack, and travels around town by public transporta-
tion, which he also uses to get to work from his home in
Brooklyn. One day finds him at a day care center in East
Harlem, one of Acme's clients. Diaz goes through the
kitchen and inspects previously laid insect strips, to see
if there were any bugs on it. (There are seven flies.) He
puts down other strips. Into areas around the sink and
stove he releases a "fogger," which creates a mist and
draws insects out. He also has at his disposal quick
killers such as PT 270 and "residual" pesticides, like
Dursban, which works for weeks but does not have quite
the same zapping effect as PT 270. The strongest killer in
his arsenal is BP 300, which he uses only as a last resort.
"It always gives me a headache," he says. "It's a very
rare thing that it's used ... but it's a fantastic tool."
Despite having so many chemicals, Diaz says his
company is into IPM, which stands for integrated pest
management. He encourages his clients to keep a clean
environment and to use baits and traps rather than poten-
tially dangerous chemicals. He particularly avoids strong
pest killers at the day care center. There are times when
the ebullient Diaz becomes a bit dejected on the job. On
occasion, he's heard insensitive clients refer to him as "rat
boy" or "bug man." "It bothers me."
Diaz knows his business. Listening to him talk about
rats, for instance, is like reading from a pet encyclopedia.
"Rats don't have good vision, and so they feel safer having
their whiskers pass near the base of a wall," he says. ''Rats
are also nea-phobic, which is the fear of something new. If
you place bait stations down, a rat senses a change in the
environment. I've seen places where that [a bait station]
was enough to scare off the rats .... The rat sensed a rat."
Diaz can also explain the chemical bases and effects of
chemicals he uses. He's personable and well-spoken, and
th.e clients like him. A high school dropout who later went
back to earn an equivalency diploma, he is a member of
Local 32B-321 of the Service Employees International
Union. Diaz likes to believe he's helping people and help-
ing the environment. He also helps himself by wearing
plastic gloves, when necessary, and by trying to be careful.
"You always have to be careful, because when you put
bait in a hole, you never know if there's gonna be a rat
popping out."
CITY LIMITS
D
enise Durant has been working 16 years for Bell
Atlantic, the local phone company that spun off
from AT&T. She is an administrative assistant now,
and she describes the work as easy. Filing and photo-
copying mostly. But for 13 years she was a telephone
operator. "Nobody should be an operator after 10 years,
because you get burnt out on that job," the 39-year-old
Durant says. "Operating is very strict. You get 30 min-
utes lunch. Two IS-minute breaks. You have to raise
your hand to go to the bathroom. They sign your name
on a board and when they come to you, it's your tum and
you can't be gone more than five minutes."
The average Bell Atlantic operator takes about 2,000
calls a day, and their employer rates their performance in
part on what's called AWT, or "average work time." When
the average working time is 21.5 seconds, an operator is
expected not to spend more than that amount of time talk-
ing with a caller, Durant says. Typically, about 80 to 100
operators are in an area together. Sitting in little quadrants
with partitions, they wear headsets and spend most of their
time typing names of people and businesses into a com-
puter. 'The average operator sits at the board two and a
half hours before you get a break. They let you bring water
[to the workstation], but no eating." Some operators com-
plain of repetitive stress injury, caused by the continual
FEBRUARY 2000
punching of names into the computers.
By Durant's estimate, the ratio of women to men is
about eight to one. As an operator, Durant particularly
disliked the night shift, even though there is some extra
pay for it. Night operators wind up overburdened because
there are fewer operators with whom to share the load.
Furthermore, they worry about returning safely home on
public transportation. 'Those who lived in Brooklyn, we
would 'buddy up' and all ride together on the train," says
Durant. And last, but not least, they had the problem of
finding baby-sitters to care for their children at night.
Being an active member of her union, the Communi-
cations Workers of America, Durant is angered by Bell
Atlantic's efforts to downsize its staff. She says the com-
pany has been recruiting non-union people to work out-
side New York State and paying them $5 to $7 per hour,
about a third of what operators in New York City get. She
says she hopes to leave Bell Atlantic within several years
and start her own business, perhaps a child care center. "I
want to open an overnight day care. I remember working
nights and never being able to find day care. I want to
service correction officers, postal workers, nurses, con-
ductors, transit workers," she says. ''It's a moneymaker,
too. I'm going to make a lot of money because I'll be the
only one doing it at night."
Telephone
Company
Worker
Salary:
About $40,000 a year
Hours:
35 a week
Benefits:
Health, pension, vacation
Union:
Yes
Requirements:
A written test
Use computer:
Yes
Workplace:
0fT'1Ce
--
Security
Guard
Salary:
About $15,550 a year
Hours:
35 a week
Benefits:
Vacation
Union:
No
Use computer:
No
Workplace:
A homeless shelter
J
ames Johnson works the 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift at the
Brooklyn Atlantic Men's Shelter. He spends part of the
day patrolling the perimeters of the facility, a convert-
ed armory that takes up the better part of a city block and
is the temporary residence of 200 homeless men, many of
whom have drug problems. Johnson's job is to make sure
that only registered residents are allowed into the building
and that house rules against sex, drugs and fighting are
obeyed. He is part of a force of 24 security guards who
earn just above minimum wage.
As far as he is concerned, his low salary does not
obligate him to take the risks of a cop on a dangerous beat.
Arguments between the clients inevitably fizzle out on
their own and whatever drug use occurs, he says, he never
sees. "You don' t see it, you can't tell," he says, referring
to drug activity.
The shelter is run by the city, but the 48-year-old John-
son is hired by a private security firm, FIC Securities, Inc.,
which pays him "a couple of dollars" above the $5.40 an
hour that guards working at commercial sites receive.
Asked why the guards at public sites receive more money,
he grins and nods toward a group of homeless men who
are milling around, as if to say, "There's your answer." But
the fact is that government contracts generally require
employees to be paid close to union wages, even though
Johnson is not in a union. As is true with guards at other
security companies, he gets no pension and no health
insurance, but he does receive two weeks' paid vacation.
Some people find the men menacing. But Johnson
doesn' t regard them as threatening at all. They could be his
neighbors, he says. In fact, they are. Johnson lives just sev-
eral blocks away in the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant, and
he walks to work. Clients ask him for money all the time.
And he gives them some-a little, anyway. "Quarters,
nickels, dimes. There ain' t no dollars and stuff like that.
They want a quarter, I give 'em a quarter. It ain't nothing
but a quarter."
Johnson says that not having medical insurance doesn't
bother him. He served in the military in Vietnam, where he
saw combat from 1969 to 1971, and he would go to the
veterans hospital if he fell ill. "But I ain't never got sick,"
he says.
Do men often violate the rules inside the shelter? John-
son shrugs inconclusively, but his partner Mervyn Ettienne
says that the guards often see men sleeping together, which
is a violation. The guards mostly ignore it. ''If you walk in
on them in the morning, you just put on the lights and say
it's time to go, and that's it," Etienne says. Johnson says
the best thing about his job is that it ends when the shift is
over. "When I go home, that's it," he says, adding that he
doesn't think about it again until be arrives the next day.
CITY LIMITS
A
dim sum woman pushes her wheeled cart filled with
tasty-looking appetizers, winding her way through
the Chinese restaurant as customers look and
choose. On her tray are specialties such as har kow
(shrimp dumplings) and siu mai (pork dumplings). For
several years, until 1997, 40-year-old Fung Chew was a
dim sum worker with the Silver Palace Restaurant on the
Bowery in Chinatown. Of the scores of local eating
places that attract tens of thousands of diners a week, the
Silver Palace was the only one that had a union staff,
according to Chew and organizers at the Restaurant
Workers Union on Catherine Street in Chinatown. The
working conditions there were relatively good. She and
coworkers did not have to follow the custom of paying
their bosses for their jobs. And she was not forced to
work out of her job classification.
But in May 1997 the restaurant closed. A new owner
reopened it in August and would not permit his employ-
ees to be members of the union. Employees at first did
not know how to respond. Chew explains through a
translator: "Had I gone up there, the job would have been
one without security. How would I raise a family? I am a
single mother, with two little kids. That kind of working
condition is not for humans." So she and her coworkers
met and complained to the owner, and they were eventu-
FEBRUARY 2000
ally locked out. They have been regularly picketing the
closed restaurant for months.
Chew has tried to work at other restaurants in the
area-those that were willing to hire striking Silver
Palace workers. But the work was more difficult than
what she was used to. In addition to doing dim sum
work, she had to "clean the place and wash pans and
dishes." She earned about $850 a month and got no tips,
compared to the $1,200 a month she was getting back at
the Silver Palace. She eventually stopped working at the
non-union places and began collecting unemployment
compensation until she exhausted those payments; by the
end of the summer of 1998 she was receiving strike ben-
efits of about $800 a month from her union.
Women are accepted as dim sum workers but gener-
ally not as waiters. In 1994, Chew says, a dim sum
woman was promoted to waitress at the Silver Palace,
and there was a huge uproar. All the men complained.
She laughs at the tale. Asked why there are no dim sum
men, she smiles and shrugs. That's the way it is. In the
garment business, the men tend to do the buttons and
press the garments, she points out. All she cares about is
fair pay and decent treatment, says Chew, who immi-
grated to New York from the People's Republic of China
in 1979.
Salary:
$10,200 a year
Hours:
40 a week, when employed
Benefits:
Strike benefrts
Union:
Yes
Training:
Years on the job
Use computer:
No
Workplace:
Restaurants
-
Gravedil&e
r
Salary:
About $35,000 to $40,000 a year
Hours:
8 hours a day
Benefits:
Health, pension, vacation
Union:
Yes
Training:
No
Use computer:
No
Workplace:
Cemeteries
-
~
t e r Plonski is preparing the grave of someone to be
buried the following day. The dead person will be
the third member of the Dean family to go into this
plot. The previous family members died in 1978 and 1975.
But these particulars mean nothing to Plonski. He has been
working as a gravedigger at Cypress Hills Cemetery for 28
years. And by his own description, he does not have a
heart that goes soft at the singing of burial chants, or even,
anymore, at the wailing of grieving widows. At funerals,
before the praying is done and it's time to lower the casket
into the ground, Plonski and his colleagues stand respect-
fully off to the side. Then, when the ceremony is over, they
put dirt back on the grave and pat it down. "We're tough
here," he says. "Anything they bring, we bury." But then,
as if pricked by a sudden recollection, he admits that he
does in fact get choked up at times, like at the interment of
babies. "You think they might be your own," he says, with
a softness that belies his practiced flippancy.
As part of the team that digs graves, Plonski operates
a backhoe. Sitting in the cabin of the machine and
maneuvering its levers, he piles the dirt onto a "pug," a
tiny dump truck. The operator of the pug then drives
away to empty the load, weaving in and out of the rows
of tombstones. Soon the driver returns so that he and
Plonski can continue the process, until the grave is dug.
Normally, Plonski doesn' t chat much with anyone, espe-
cially when he's in the backhoe with the engine running.
Except for late at night, when beer-swigging teens or
voodoo practitioners might enter, cemeteries radiate the
sweet silence of a botanical garden.
There are, to be sure, certain dangers associated with
grave-digging. Earlier today, another worker "stepped
crooked" into a plot and twisted his ankle, seriously
injuring it. And then there are the normal risks that go
with moving heavy objects, such as tombstones, which
can weigh more than 200 pounds, or with using grounds-
keeping tools. "I lost a piece of a toe with a grass-cutting
machine, in about 1971," says union rep James Confes-
sore, who works at the cemetery and is listening in on the
conversation with Plonski.
The 43-year-old Plonski started out at Cypress Hills in
1969 as a grass cutter, when he was 14 years old. ''1 never
finished high school," he says. 'That's why I ended up here,
digging graves." Despite the lingering sense of being an
underachiever, Plonski, who drives in from his home in
Smithtown, in Long Island, likes his work well enough. And
he likes the union that stands behind him. Several times over
the past 30 years, the gravediggers union flexed its muscle
by shutting down cemeteries in New York. ''We had over
500 bodies stacked up," Confessore said, speaking with a
measure of pride as he recalled a strike in the early 1970s.
Plonski compares his job to that of a mailman who
works in any kind of weather. "We're here in snow, ice,
rain." Then his mind reels back to the winter days when
he and his coworkers strained to dig up earth that was
rock-hard from the bitter cold. ''No,'' he says. "This is
rougher than being a mailman."
From One Hundred Jobs: A Panorama of Work in the
American City, published by the New Press this month.
CITY LIMITS
Unhealthy, Unwealthy and Unwise
F
or states looking to safeguard their federal welfare aid,
the clock is ticking to avoid a health care scare. In the
wake of welfare reform, states can keep a mere frfth of
their welfare population on the rolls after recipients have hit
their frve-year deadlines. But the number of them with serious
health problems that prevent them from working probably
exceeds that limit, concludes a new National Governors'
Association report.
Finding a way to deal with the health care issues of those
who have recently left the rolls-and those who remain-is a
crucial next step in the evolution of public assistance, says the
report.
Welfare reform and a roaring economy have moved rnillions
off welfare and into jobs. But former recipients usually gradu-
ate into the ranks of the working poor, where health insurance is
scarce. In fact, poor workers are twice as likely to be uninsured
as nonworkers: In 1997,46 percent of working poor lacked cov-
erage, compared with 23 percent of unemployed people. One
possible explanation of that gap is that, once off the rolls, many
poor people have exhausted their transitional Medicaid benefrts
or earn too much to qualify.
As healthier people leave welfare for jobs, the lack of
health care for poor workers could keep less-healthy recipients
on the rolls. Ten to 20 percent of welfare recipients have sub-
stance abuse problems; some are addicted and/or mentally ill.
These cases will likely become the majority of those left on
welfare, since it will be harder for them to get work. But even
if they fmd jobs, it's unlikely that these new workers could
stay off the rolls for long periods of time without a dependable
source of health coverage.
The report suggests that states identify the health needs of
welfare recipients and the working poor, create a system to
cover people on and off the rolls, and encourage employers of
former recipients to provide health insurance benefits.
"Understanding Health Care Barriers that Hinder the
Transition from Welfare to Work," free on web site, $15 hard
copy, National Governors' Association, 202-624-5300,
www.nga.org.
Counting Off . AM M 0
W
hen census counters try to improve their .
batting average this year, they'd better .
start with the country's youngest citizens. According
to a new report, more than half of the population missed in the
1990 census was under 18.
Kids slip through the cracks because they need others to
count them. Younger children and kids in temporary living
arrangements are even more likely to be missed.
This undercount is particularly acute in cities. In New York
City, an estimated 4.3 percent of kids-or 77,000 children-
were missed in 1990, compared with 3.2 percent of children
nationwide. Lower census numbers can mean losing out on
some of the estimated $185 billion in federal grants based on
population frgures. With 7.2 percent of kids missed in the 1998
pre-census count, the future doesn't look too promising, either.
"The Overlooked Undercount: Children Missed in the
Decennial Census," free on web site, Annie E. Casey
Foundation, 410-547-6600, www.aecforg.
Part-time Capsule
O
n the surface, it appears that the third of the workforce
that works part-time and for themselves is miserable,
underpaid, and underinsured. But a new report suggests
the picture isn't quite so uniform.
Adjusted for education and other similar characteristics, pay
for full-time work beats nontraditional work-by 20 percent for
women and 27 percent for men. But it's women and people of
color who typically have the jobs with low wages and no benefits.
Life out of the office isn't all bad. Self-employed workers and
independent contractors overwhelmingly favor this arrangement.
But more than half of temps and on-call workers would prefer
being settled. The choice often has to do with time constraints-
of those who prefer part-time work, three-fourths of men do it to
leave more time for school and 44 percent of women for family.
"No Shortage of Nonstandard Jobs," $5, Economic Policy
Institute, 202-775-8810, http://epinet.org.
Less to
Lose
Average Hourly Wages by Work Arrangement and Sex (1997)
Although women have lower wages
in full-time work, they lose less
when working part-time-about
53 an hour compared with men's
56 loss. But on the higher end,
when workers are self-employed
or independent contractors, men
gain more than women do.
FEBRUARY 2000
$20
Men
Women
$15
$10
$5
0---
Regular Temporary Self Independent Regular
Part-Time Help Agency Employed Contractor FUll-Time
--_ ... --.-: ....... -
REVIEW
....... ........ _.
All Together
HoW?
By Michael Hirsch
"The Bridge Over The Racial Divide, "
by William Julius Wilson,
University of California PresslRussell Sage
Foundation, 163 pages, $19.95
U
nless you count the pretend populism of Pat Buchanan,
the labor and environmental demonstrators who assailed
corporate-dominated policy at the World Trade
Organization talks in Seattle have no reflection in national elec-
toral politics. How distant this grim reality seems from the
hopes that Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson expresses
in The Bridge Over The Racial Divide. He yeams for "a pro-
gressive, multiracial political coa1ition" with a broadly support-
ed economic agenda "to put pressure, including voting pressure,
on both Democratic and Republican leaders to pursue and adopt
policies that reflect the interests of ordinary families."
Such a coa1ition, in Wilson's view, could take on the crisis
of the moment: the most extreme gap between the family
income of rich and poor since the census began tracking it in
1947. For Wilson, bridging that gulf means abandoning the
shopworn strategy of demanding what he calls "race specific
remedies." These solutions may be popular with some minority
community leaders, says Wilson, but in the process, they pre-
empt a more inclusive class-based politics.
National economic policy operates without regard for the
needs of most Americans, black or white, he points out. In what
amounts to a manifesto for taking back the helm of government
and social policy from free marketeers, Wilson shapes this slim
volume around the deceptively simple claim that all can win if
everyone works together. With globa1ism and technology
destroying jobs, urban sprawl compromising the environment,
and conservative economic policies widening social inequality,
why not put the posturing aside and try to meet "the needs of
ordinary, working Americans" through "multiracial, broad-
based coalitions"? Since we are all in the same sinking boat,
why quibble about accommodations?
As an example of what such a coa1ition could accomplish,
WIlson takes Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan's efforts to
control inflation by raising interest rates and forcing unemploy-
ment up. A multiracial alliance, in WIlson's view, could hammer on
this issue and Greenspan's legions of supporters, too. It could insist
that a living wage is not a prod to inflation, and that it is an increase
in productivity, not forced unemployment, that has fueled today's
economic growth. It could
win a following by insisting,
in clear language, that
secure jobs do not threaten
prosperity but help spread
its largesse. Race-based
appeals cannot do that.
Wilson's guiding
lights are such exam-
ples of common
purpose as the auto
and steel worker
struggles of the
Depression, the
promising if
still tentative
living-wage campaigns
that have emerged nationwide, and
the successes of Saul Alinsky's pioneering
Industrial Areas Foundation, whose descendants are securing
infrastructural improvements for neighborhoods in more than a
dozen cities today.
Wilson's ideas are far from a revelation. The rhetoric of coa1i-
tion-building has been a staple of Jesse Jackson's politics since
1984; the year before, it was the backbone of Harold Washington's
Chicago mayoral victory. Far earlier, in the 196Os, it was the brain-
child of then-militant civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, to whom
this book is dedicated. Wilson himself has sketched it out in pre-
vious work. But that elusive vision of a transracial coa1ition is at
last a real possibility today. Ironically, that's largely because suc-
cessful assaults from the right on race-based politics, and on affir-
mative action in particular, have sent political leaders who had
made racial inequa1ity their central issue hunting for a new strate-
gy. IT some of our leading race men now sound more like Wilson,
it is because they have run out of options.
Yet Wilson's dismissal of race-based politics has allowed
some academics to dismiss him-such as Queens College soci-
ologist Stephen Steinberg, who has charged that Wilson's repeat-
ed emphasis on class never "[advanced] a radical theory that
challenged structures of inequality, or that envisioned a radical
restructuring of major political and economic institutions. All
[Wilson] meant was that lower class blacks needed to acquire the
education and skills that are a prerequisite for mobility."
Steinberg is not altogether wrong. Wilson is no radical. He
wants to make the entry into America's elite color-blind, and at
the same time one in which inherited social disadvantages are
compensated for. While critics may think that embracing a more
porous but no less privileged technocracy is settling too cheap-
ly, Wilson's call for enabling greater access-what he calls
"affirmative opportunity"-is shared by many parents who are
happy to embrace better economic prospects for their children.
Such aspirations cannot and should not be brushed aside.
Having that fight over "how" rather than "who" is the more
productive debate, and Wilson charts a way to tum common
rage against inequa1ity into a political and electoral fight. Those
who want more could have a place of pride in his coa1ition .
CITY LIMITS
MANHATTAN PROJECT
(Continuedfrom page 17)
unable to get through more than half of them by
year's end. And with a weighty focus on literacy
and math, Rust does not have much time for sci-
ence and social studies lessons. By the time she
gets through the required morning literacy lesson,
and just gets started on the math, it's time for
lunch, she says. Getting the kids settled back into
their seats after an hour in the cafeteria takes 15
minutes or so, and they then delve into finishing
up and reviewing the morning's math problems.
But for fear of falling behind, the directive
from the district is to push on. "A lot of it is time
management, and it's not easy," says Lawlor,
Rust's district literacy director. Declaring her faith
in the New Standards, Lawlor says that "we're
simply following a standard and good instruction-
al practice with a strong basis in research."
In Rust's experience, though, educational
standards alone can't do the job for students who
live in poverty. She's particularly concerned for
children who do not have books at home, whose
parents are often not around and who are often
left to take care of younger siblings. "They're
fighting an uphill battle," she says. "There's no
parent involvement." As for the standards them-
selves, she doesn't believe that the two days of
training she and other District 9 teachers received
were enough to help them implement the guide-
lines effectively.
Teachers have become the last line of defense in
the school testing crisis, and the pressure on them is
intense. With its members' jobs and morale both
vulnerable, the city's teachers union is investing $2
million to design a core curriculum for every school
in the city. While the union cannot mandate the cur-
r i c u u m , it will act as a guide, outlining lesson plans
and core concepts.
"As teachers, we must know not only where
we're going, but how we're going to get there,"
Randi Weingarten, president of the United
Federation of Teachers, told her union's conference
last year. She lamented the passing of the city's core
curriculum, gone in the days after the city's school
system was decentralized in the I 970s. With the
shift in power and the creation of school boards 30
years ago, the responsibility of creating curriculum
fell to the local boards and superintendents. The
shift in responsibility to the local level intensified 10
years ago when the state and then the city eliminat-
ed curriculum development departments.
Districts have to take their own initiative. Last
summer, Lawlor worked with teachers and admin-
istrators in District 9 to develop a guide for instruc-
tion in writing. As for professional development,
the district runs some programs, but schools are
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FEBRUARY 2000

expected to do a lot on their own. Lawlor knows
from her own experience, both in District 9 and
developing a literacy program called Project Read
for the Board of Ed, that districts too often lack
administrators with experience in curriculum devel-
opment. ''Whether these changes are good depends
on the district office," says Lawlor. "Our district
had seasoned people. But we' re a dying breed."
Of course, lack of experienced leaders is just one
of the many resources schools don't have. The Board
of Education has allocated $l09 million to reduce
class sizes this year as part of a two-year, $653 mil-
lion package for meeting the New Standards; the rest
is going to test-boosting measures like summer
school and intervention for students who are at risk
of failing the exams. But that money doesn't begin to
cover many schools' basic needs.
"I hope with the media frenzy we can get new
buildings," says C.E.S. 35 Principal Gutierrez,
quite earnestly. In her building built for 600 kids,
she has 752. Some students attend class in con-
verted closets, and 56 kindergardeners are bused
daily to a neighboring school for lack of space.
"I don't have any problems with high stan-
dards," says Guttierez. "But class sizes, space,
resources, new teachers ... consider those things
before you make standards the panacea."
Jill Grossman is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer.
Lawyers Alliance
for New York
330 Seventh Avenue
New York, NY 10001
www.bmy.org
-

Letters
(Continued from page 4)
defaults, Mortgage Lending of America has had
only a handful of defaults on 203k loans-and
none on 203k loans made to nonprofit organiza-
tions. Helpline's irresponsible practice of
defaulting on nearly every loan that Mortgage
Lending of America made to it caused our com-
pany earlier this year to sustain, for the first time,
a high default rate. Helpline's massive defaults in
turn led HUD to terminate Mortgage Lending of
America's main branch from originating loans in
the FHAl203k program. (It is not true that
Mortgage Lending of America is barred from all
FHA loans, as your article suggests.)
When Helpline defaulted on its loans earlier
this year, Mortgage Lending of America made
several efforts to assist Helpline in selling the
loans to qualified buyers for the mortgage bal-
ances less the unpaid escrowed balances avail-
able for rehabilitation. This would have taken the
properties out of arrears. Helpline, however,
dragged its feet in selling the defaulted properties
and refused at one point to do so unless Mortgage
Lending of America agreed to pay it hundreds of
thousands of dollars-a demand which Mortgage
Lending of America rejected.
I have recently heard that Helpline (instead
of selling its defaulted properties) has trans-
ferred, or is about to transfer, the deeds to the
majority of those properties to HUD, without
recourse. Ms. Phillips and Helpline are off the
hook, despite their irresponsible behavior.
You refer to Channel 9 conducting an "inves-
tigation," but in fact that station merely aired a
one-sided piece. Channel 9 showed an apartment
at 2197 Bergen Street (one of the Helpline-
owned buildings) as not having been renovated,
and blamed Mortgage Lending of America for its
condition. In fact, Mortgage Lending of America
made all required draw payments for the renova-
tions of that building, and photographs show that
the renovations were done. In addition, Mortgage
Lending of America has been furnished a written
statement by the tenant of the premises shown by
Channel 9 to the effect that her apartment indeed
had been renovated but was then ripped apart by
a contractor shortly before the camera crews
arrived. Some "investigation"!
An unbiased investigation-rather than a
hatchet job-would have revealed that Helpline is
anything but the responsible commuruty-based
nonprofit that your article depicts. While the buck-
passing Ms. Phillips portrays Mortgage Lending
of America as a villain, in fact it is the victim sev-
eral times over- the victim of Helpline's approxi-
mately 100 defaults, of Helpline's efforts to
demand payment, of Ms. Phillips' campaign of
defamation, and now of the "hit and run" journal-
ism represented by your recent article. You owe
your readers, as well as Mortgage Lending of
America, a correction and an apology.
Nora E. Petsche
President
Mortgage Lending of America, Inc.
Kemba Johnson responds:
Some of the information Ms. Petsche provides
could have been extremely useful in helping City
Limits understand the full extent of the circum-
stances surrounding Helpline's defaults on its
FHA-backed loans. But I did not have the oppor-
tunity to hear it before publication because
Mortgage Lending of America failed to return
phone calls seeking an interview. I therefore had
to rely on information from sources close to the
HUD investigation, the nonprofit's executive
director, Gennie Phillips, and to a smaller extent
earlier reporting by UPN News. (HUD
spokesman Lamar Wooley confirms that the
agency terminated Mortgage Lending of
America's origination approval agreement in
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-
CITY LIMITS
September, barring the lender from making FHA-
insured single-family home loans.} As for "flip-
ping, " that subject was never discussed in the
context of Helpline. I stand by my reporting on
Helpline Soul Rescue Ministries.
It is true that Helpline is responsible for the
rehabilitation of its properties, and for their con-
dition. But in the HUD program, responsibility
also falls on the mortgage lender to make sure a
loan applicant isn't in over its head. In the span
of about a year, Helpline, a nonprofit with slim
housing experience, was able to secure about
100 mortgages for properties.
The article does not suggest that Mortgage
Lending of America caused Helpline to enter into
a contract with Tri-Metro, but merely that the
lender introduced Helpline to the realtor. And
while Helpline was indeed shown purchase and
loan documents, Phillips asserts the paperwork
was frequently incomplete, with appraisal infor-
mation often arriving long after sales were com-
pleted. It was that lack of access that Phillips
says prompted her to break off Helpline's rela-
tionship with Tri-Metro.
As for why Helpline did not complete all the
renovations, or on what terms the organization
decided to dispose of the properties, only she and
her mortgage lender can answer that definitively.
Phillips, for her part, claims that money for the
renovation escrow account consistently arrived
months late, leaving Helpline unable to pay con-
tractors; that it was Mortgage Lending of America
that offered to buy Helpline out for $400,000, in
exchange for which the nonprofit was supposed to
pay outstanding fines for violations that dated
back to the purchase of the properties; and that the
prospective buyer of the properties-another non-
profit qualified for 203(k)-balked at high sale
prices for homes in poor condition.
It is indeed unfortunate that HUD may be
stuck with so many homes in such horrible shape.
But Mortgage Lending of America was as irre-
sponsible in making so many of these loans as
Helpline was in taking them.
BID-DIMC MICM
I am writing in reference to an article in the
November issue of City Limits. Its depiction of
the Pitkin Avenue BID was so inaccurate and in
some cases pure fabrication that I felt it necessary
to respond. I hope that this letter would make it
apparent to any reasonable person that the author
of the article had many preconceptions regarding
the BID and abrogated her trust as a responsible
journalist. This is to set the record straight!
The Pitkin Avenue BID was established in
1993 after existing nearly 10 years as the Pitkin
Avenue Merchants Association. It is a relatively
small BID, comprising 185 stores, 125 property
owners and an annual budget of $125,403. The
shoppers, merchants and property owners are pre-
dominantly African-American, Haitian, Jamaican,
FEBRUARY 2000
Hispanic, Korean and Jewish. It is a great chal-
lenge to try and serve such a diverse community.
The Board of Directors hired me in March
1998. Prior to my tenure the BID administered a
very successful security program, a building sig-
nage and lighting program, promotional activi-
ties such as newsletters and radio advertising,
and installed street banners along the sidewalks.
When the BID was frrst initiated the member-
ship addressed crime as its frrst priority. A
Security Radio Network Program was estab-
lished with the assistance of the NYPD. The inci-
dence of crime during the four-year period of the
program was reduced by 70 percent.
But business on Pitkin Avenue remained stag-
nant and shoppers complained that there were too
many cheap variety stores and not enough shops
with quality merchandise at reasonable prices. As
new housing was built in the surrounding neigh-
borhoods a great deal of the business generated
by these new residents was lost to the newer
national and regional retailers in other sections of
Brooklyn and nearby Nassau County.
At its Annual Meeting in 1998, the Board of
Directors initiated a new effort, which directed its
resources to improving the appearance and clean-
liness of the shopping environment. It had
become apparent that the unsightly conditions on
Pitkin Avenue had contributed to the public's
reluctance to use the area. The adoption of this
new policy was also instituted as a response to a
survey of its members, which was conducted by
the BID in April, 1998. The results indicated that
the members wanted more national and/or region-
al retailers, public parking lots and improvement
to the overall appearance of the shopping area.
As a response to the Board's new policy:
A graffiti removal and maintenance program
was instituted. The district is virtually a graffiti-
and poster-free zone.
The Brooklyn Borough President's office
approved two programs: one to plant an addi-
tional 20 trees, and another to increase the
wattage of the 46 street lights in the district from
250 to 400 watts.
Keyspan recently approved its participation
in a new Building Facade Program, which it will
jointly fund with property owners and the BID.
For the past year the BID has been a partic-
ipant in the Mayor's Clean Buildings and Clean
Streets Program, which provides a street cleanup
crew. Since its cutback, the BID is now explor-
ing hiring a nonprofit group to provide extra
street and sidewalk cleaning.
The old and worn street banners will be
replaced with new and more banners.
An application was submitted to the Depart-
ment of Transportation for $500,000 in sidewalk
improvements, street lighting and other aesthetic
improvements.
The BID has been negotiating with city agen-
cies to obtain a lot to be used for public parking.

The BID is presently attempting to create a
balanced retail community comprised of "mom
and pop" stores, small businesses and regional
and national chains. Through this balance it is
believed that the shopping demands of the neigh-
borhood residents can be met.
The city's Department of Business Services
has oversight over all BIDs. The Pitkin BID
presently complies with their administrative reg-
ulations, including a recent audit review by the
Citywide Audit Review Committee.
There are so many blatant inaccuracies and
fabrications in the article that I will not be able to
address them all. The following, however is an
attempt to attend to the most transparent:
The article perpetuates old urban myths like
the statement that "the BID is run by a group of real
estate owners who hold entire blocks of the neigh-
borhood." This is false and cannot be substantiated.
Or referring to Jack Dushey, the President of the
Board as a "Brownsville power broker." The fact is
Mr. Dushey owns three buildings within the district
and his family has operated the Pitkin Bargain
Center for over 30 years. Actually, six of the
Property Owner members of the Board of
Directors also operate small businesses out of their
buildings. There are no "fat cats" imposing their
will upon the small businessmen.
The BID assessment is calculated on a prop-
erty street frontage basis and not on square footage
as is indicated in the article. Since the assessment
is $24 per foot, the typical annual payment is
$480, not $700 as stated in the article. In addition,
there are many cases where the property owner
and not the tenant pay the assessment.
Robert Rivera, a member of the Board, told
me that he never said that the BID is being run
"by a tiny cadre of wealthy guys." He insists that
this accusation was made by the author in order
to convince him to make the statement.
George Wollinsky, also a Board member, told
me that "the statements attributed to him are so
misquoted as to make the whole piece false."
Marshall Rose has been the manager of the
Pitkin Bargain Center for 16 years. He has hereto-
fore had no role in managing the affairs of the BID.
He employs over 50 people mostly from the com-
munity and participates in vocational programs
sponsored by the Board of Education.
The Pitkin Avenue BID is on track in taking
the proper actions to improve the business envi-
ronment. It is a long-term commitment, which in
the short term has had some successes and some
shortcomings. It is a sham.e that an irresponsible
reporter has been given a platform to manipulate
the facts and betray the trust of the many people
who are attempting to rejuvenate one of the older
historic retail districts in Brooklyn.
Alan B. Schuman
Executive Director
Pitkin Avenue BID
-
STAFF ASSISTANTJSCHEDULER. Responsible for answering phones and greet-
ing guests in Manhattan Congressional office. Provide administrative
assistance to member and colleagues. Maintain office files. Coordinate
and maintain Member's busy NY schedule. Entry level position, opportu-
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910, New York, NY 10013. Fax: 212-334-5259.
Health Force, an award-winning peer education and preventive health
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PROGRAM ASSISTANT. NMIC seeks a Program Assistant for the JTPA Program.
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working in a social service setting, perform administrative tasks, input data
into Automated Case Management System (ACMS), administer customer
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Attorney at Law
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AMS (Automated Case Management System). Salary commensurate with
experience. Send resumes to Michael Corbin, NMIC, 76 Wadsworth Ave.,
NY, NY 10033. Phone 212-822-8344. Fax 212-568-9169.
WRITERIEDITOR needed to help develop and produce quarterly newsletter
with national audience. Ideal candidate has significant reporting experi-
ence, working knowledge of grassroots organizing and/or K-12 education
reform and strong commitment to racial and economic justice. Work either
as PT staff or consultant with possibility of FT work on other projects.
Please send resume and clippings to Sally Covington, National Center for
Schools and Communities, 33 West 60th Street, 8th Aoor, NYC 10023.
The Affordable Housing Network of New Jersey seeks a PUBlIC RElA-
T1ONSIDEVE1..OPMENT COORDINATOR to join our growing staff. Responsibilities
include: developing opportunities for media coverage to increase the visibil-
ity of the work of the community development sector; helping develop and
implement a targeted public relations strategy around specific public policy
campaigns; coordinating production of our bimonthly newsletter; writing
grant proposals; conducting research on new grant sources; and developing
promotional and educational materials. Qualifications include: strong writing
and communication skills and experience in developing successful public
relations strategies. Grant writing experience and familiarity with community
DEBRA BECHTEL - Attorney
Concentrating in Real Estate & Non-profit Law
Title and loan closings 0 All city housing programs
Mutual housing associations 0 Cooperative conversions
Advice to low income co-op boards of directors
313 Hicks Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201,
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CITY LIMITS
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NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10036-1298
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Lawyers Alliance
99 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013 for New York
Committed to the development of affordable housing
GEORGE C. DELLAPA, ATIORNEY AT LAW
15 Maiden lane, Suite 1800
New York, NY 10038
212-732-2700 FAX: 212-732-2n3
Lowincome housing tax credit syndication. Public and private
financing. HDFCs and not-forprofit corporations. Condos and co-ops.
J51 Tax abatement/exemptions. Lending for historic properties.
FEBRUARY 2000
development/advocacy preferred. Please submit resume and cover letter to:
Diane Sterner, Executive Director, Affordable Housing Network of New Jersey,
PO Box 1746, Trenton, NJ 08607. Competitive salary and benefits package.
Persons of color and women encouraged to apply.
Harlem Economic Justice Project seeks a PROJECT COORDINATOR to help
develop Harlem's first community-based Credit Union. Individual must be a
selfstarter with at least 3 years' community organizing experience, have
knowledge of Harlem community and its diversity, and some knowledge of
credit unions or banking institutions. Bilingual English/Spanish a plus.
Available immediately. Salary commensurate with experience. Send cover let
ter and resume to HEJP, c/o TYLER, 1580 Amsterdam Ave. # 76, New York,
NY 10031. No calls please.
CONTRACTS MANAGER. A dynamic new managed services organization (MSO)
providing fiscal management services for New York City notforprofit agen-
cies seeks a contracts manager to work with the MSO's client agencies in
managing city, state and federal government contracts. Will work with fiscal
and program staff on: budgeting, development of funding applications, con
tract vouchers, ongoing variance analysis, proposed budget modifications,
continuing funding applications, and other aspects of contract management.
Salary commensurate with experience. Send resume and cover letter indio
cating salary requirements to Burchman Terrio Gebhardt & Quist, 180 Varick
Street, 16th Roor, NY, NY 10014. Fax: 212-6279247 .
Progressive consumer advice group working for better nursing home
care/more responsible public policy seeks PROJECT DIRECTOR to organize fam-
ily councils. Responsibilities include leadership development, technical assis-
tance, outreach, consumer education, advocacy. Bilingual English/Spanish a
must. BA +3 years organizing/advocacy experience preferred. Salary $30K +
benefits. OFFICE MANAGER. Responsibilities include administrative support for
director, database management, publications marketing, website mainte-
nance (will train). Bilingual English/Spanish preferred. Excellent computer
skills, organized, flexible. Salary $25K + benefits. Resume/cover letter to
FRIA, 11 John St., Suite 601, NY, NY 10038. Fax 212732-6945.
CASEPlANNER position available in dynamic private, nonprofit child welfare
program located in a middle school in East Harlem. We are committed to
preventing foster care placement, offering family support services, pro-
moting client empowerment and engaging in community advocacy. Ideal for
individual with little experience in human services-we will train you.
Opportunities for growth are available. BA required; computer literate and
bilingual Spanish a must. $26,000-$30,000 DOE for 35 hour week, full
benefits package. Fax resume to: 212-410-4885.
INTENSM CASE MANAGER. A growing nonprofit social service agency seeks an
Intensive Case Manager to work on an interdisciplinary team serving HIV+
homeless individuals and families at outreach sites in the Bronx. Heavy field
work. Experience required. MSW/MA preferred. Excellent benefits.
EOE/minorities encouraged to apply. Send resume to: G. Matusewitch, Care
for the Homeless, 12 West 21st Street, 8th Roor, New York, NY 10010-6902.
HOUSING PMAI.GAl.. Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation is seeking
a bilingual paralegal experienced in housing matters. Duties include assisting
clients in resolving housing problems and emergencies by providing advocacy
and representation prior to eviction proceedings. Focus on resolution of hous-
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recourse to eviction, litigation or illegal evictions and lockouts. Resolves public
assistance problems including Jiggetts and benefit issues. Gives Pro-Se advice
and prepares Pro-Se papers for housing court proceedings, as per consultation
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by preparation of documents, investigation and research. BA degree, experi-
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to Executive Director, NMIC, 76 Wadsworth Avenue, NY, NY, 2129284180.
Good Jobs Rrst, Rscal Policy Institute seek NYC ORGANIZER/PROJECT
DIRECTOR. GJF, national clearinghouse promoting corporate accountability
on economic development subsidies. FPI, leading center on tax, budget, eco-
nomic policy. GJNY = research/policy clearinghouse for grassroots NYC
groups concerned about economic development, costly retention deals. ISO
justice commitment, organizer's personality, strong communicator, grass-
roots experience. Women, people of color encouraged to apply. Resumes:
GJF, 1311 L Street NW, Washington, DC 20005, fax 202-638-3486.
City agency seeks focused, detail oriented entry level ASSISTANT with
strong interest in criminal justice policy, to work on ground breaking project.
Ability to conceptualize larger issues while devoting close attention to
detailed nuances needed. BA and research experience required. Mail or fax
cover letter, resume and writing sample to Emily West at: 1 Centre Street.
15th Roor. NY, NY 10007. FAX: 212-669-4701.
(continued on page 36)
--
(continued from page 35)
DEVnOPMENT OIRCTOR. The Low Income Housing Fund (UHF), a $40 mil-
lion national community development loan fund with a $4.5 million budget
and offices in SF, LA and NY seeks an experienced and dynamic develop-
ment professional to build its development function and diversify its sup-
port base. A hands-on pro will establish annual fundraising goals, develop
fund raising strategy, supervise staff and identify and nurture donor rela-
tionships. The DO will position and support the president, Board and
Advisory Committees and staff in their fundraising activities. The success-
ful candidate will be interested in attracting and leveraging greater invest-
ment in the nation's distressed communities, enabling all people to partic-
ipate in this country's "new economy." UHF offers a competitive compen-
sation package commensurate with demonstrated leadership and proven
results. Please send cover letter and resume to: Low Income Housing Fund,
74 New Montgomery Street, Suite 250, San Francisco, CA 94105.
The New York City Partnership is seeking a PROGRAM DEVnOPMENT
ASSISTANT to provide full administrative support to the Director, Program
Development in the Development & Marketing department. Prepare fund-
raising reports, research and assist in drafting foundation grant proposals.
Handle telephones, correspondence, update Raiser's Edge for various cam-
paigns, meeting planning, files, mail, and competence in Internet research.
Knowledge of Microsoft Office, Excel and Word a must; PowerPoint and
Raiser's Edge a plus. Must be organized and detail oriented. College degree
plus related work experience. Fax resume, cover letter and 2-3 page writ-
ing sample to Michelle Robinson, VP Human Resources at 212-493-7542.
LGAL SERVICES OIRCTOR. Exciting opportunity for J.D. to head legal ser-
vices clinic of acclaimed youth services agency. Supervise legal staff,
including attorneys and interns, counseling and representing youth in civil
matters and advocacy issues. Plan interdisciplinary education and advoca-
cy activities. Must be admitted to the NY Bar, and have a minimum of 3
years experience in public interest law, including supervisory experience, as
well as experience working with inner-<:ity adolescents. Fundraising experi-
ence a plus. Spanish speaking a plus. Interested candidates should send
their resume and cover letter to: M. Chu, The Door, 121 6th Avenue, New
York, New York, 10013. People of color and women encouraged to apply.
The Door Seeks STAFF ATTORNEY. Staff attorney needed for acclaimed
youth legal services center. Will represent youth, 12-21, in civil matters
and advocacy issues primarily in the area of immigration. Two years of
immigration law experience required. Experience with Special Immigrant
Juvenile Status, foster care, family law or public benefits a plus. Spanish
or Chinese speaking a plus. Interested candidates should send their
resume and cover letter to: M. Chu, The Door, 121 6th Avenue, New York,
New York, 10013. People of color and women encouraged to apply.
MORTGAGE OFFICER. The Community Preservation Corporation, a leading
affordable housing lender, seeks two Mortgage Officers-one for their
Bronx office, the other for their Brooklyn Office. Responsibilities will
include all aspects of loan origination and underwriting for permanent and
construction lending. The qualified candidate will have knowledge of gov-
ernment subsidy, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae programs; strong writing, finan-
cial and computer skills. Knowledge of New York City neighborhoods would
be helpful and bilingual Spanish/English is a plus. Competitive salary and
excellent benefits. Please fax resume, with salary requirements, to 212-
719-9374, Attn: Human Resources. Please do not call.
Jennie A. Clarke Residence, Hope Community's Tier II shelter for homeless
families, combines transitional housing with onsite social services to pre-
pare its 73 resident families for productive, independent lives. IfOUSING
SPECIALIST to serve clients in Tier II shelter. Must be familiar with
EARP/Section 8/SIP and Alternate Housing. Computer literate a plus. Good
interpersonal skills and strong writing skills. Able to communicate and advo-
cate for clients in city and state agencies. Must assist clients with lease
signings and field apartme.nt inspection on an as needed basis.
Requirements: A college degree preferred. Salary commensurate with expe-
rience. Excellent Employee benefit package. Send cover letter and resume
to: L. Lorenzo Williams, Deputy Director, Jennie A. Clarke, 183 A East 100th
Street, New York, New York, 10029 or fax: 212-360-5494. No phone calls!
National Lawyers Guild seeks MEMBERSHIP COORDINATOR to oversee mem-
bership activities nationally. Liaise with chapters and committees, assist
with annual convention, handle dues billings, coordinate summer projects,
develop printed materials and provide support to chapters. Commitment
to progressive issues important. Excellent interpersonal, written and com-
puter skills, including Access. $30,000, excellent benefits. Women and
persons of color encouraged to apply. Resume and letter to Heidi
Boghosian, National Lawyers Guild, 126 University Place, 5th Floor, New
York, NY 10003. Fax: 212-627-2404.
The Center for Urban Community Services, Inc. (CUCS), an innovative not-for-
profit organization, has the following positions available at the Prince
George, a permanent supportive housing residence for 416 low income ten-
ants, many of whom have histories of mental illness, homelessness, sub-
stance abuse and/ or HIV/AIDS. REHABlUTA110N SPECIALIST (two positions).
This position is responsible for providing a full range of direct services to
clients, assisting in programming planning, development and implementa-
tion of group services with a particular emphasis on mental health and
chemical dependent services. Additionally, this person will coordinate with
agency and community collateral and provide training and clinical support to
all on-site staff. Requirements: Bachelor's degree and 2 years experience
providing direct services to the specifiC populations to be served; or an
Associate degree and 5 years experience providing direct services to the
specific population(s) to be served; or a High School diploma and 7 years
experience providing direct services to the population(s) to be served. Also
required is the demonstrated ability to service a specialized population or
address a special need of the program, good writing and verbal communica-
tion skills, and computer literacy. Bilingual Spanish preferred. Salary:
$30,022 plus competitive benefits including $65 in monthly transit checks.
Send cover letter and resume to Sarena Lewit. CASE MANAGER (five posi-
tions). This position is responsible for individual and group services, crisis
intervention, coordination or program activities, and work with team mem-
bers to develop treatment plans and interventions. Reqs: High School diplo-
ma. A bachelor's degree and experience working with mentally ill, homeless
individuals are preferred. Salary: $25,018 plus competitive benefits includ-
ing $65 in monthly transit checks. Send cover letter and resume to Eileen
Littrell. CUCS-The Prince George, 14 East 28th Street, New York, NY 10016.
CUCS is committed to workforce diversity. EEO.
The Puerto Rican Family Institute seeks FACILITATID ENROLLERS to help
families enroll children in Child Health Plus/Medicaid. BA with 2 years
experience, bilingual English/Spanish required, culturally sensitive, detail-
oriented, knowledge of CHIP/Medicaid requirements, good communication
and organizational skills. Please send cover letter and resume to Heather
Nahas, PRFI, 145 West 15 Street, NYC 10011. Fax: 212-691-5635.
The Center for Urban Community Services, Inc., a growing not-for-profit orga-
nization whose mission is to improve the quality of life for homeless and
low-income individuals, has the following positions open at the Prince
George, a permanent supportive housing residence for 416 low income ten-
ants, many of whom have histories of mental illness, homelessness, sub-
stance abuse and/or HIV/AIDS. SENIOR SOCIAL WORK CLINICIAN. The pri-
mary responsibility of this position will be to direct client care, group work,
and program development on a core services team. Additionally, this pOSi-
tion will provide clinical support to para-professionals, partiCipate in the
design and provision of in-service trainings, and assist the clinical coordi-
nator in reviewing core plans to meet agency standards. Reqs: CSW; 2
years of applicable post-master's direct service experience with popula-
tions served by the program; 2 years of applicable pre-master's degree
experience may be substituted for no more than 1 year of post-master's
experience; good writing and verbal communication skills; computer litera-
cy. Bilingual Spanish/English is preferred. Salary: $39K + competitive ben-
efits including $65 in monthly transit checks. Send cover letter and resume
to Michael Hornsby, CUCS-The Prince George, 14 East 28th Street, New
York, NY 10016. CUCS is committed to workforce diversity. EEO.
The Center for Urban Community Services, Inc., a growing not-for-profit orga-
nization whose mission is to improve the quality of life for homeless and
low-income individuals has the following positions open at the Times
Square Program, a permanent supportive housing residence for 650 low-
income tenants, many of whom have a history of mental illness, home-
lessness, substance abuse and/or H IV/AI OS. CLINICAL COORDINATOR.
Supervision and direct oversight of a core services term. Requirements:
CSW, 4 years post-master experience. Computer literacy, bilingual
Spanish/English preferred. $45K plus competitive benefits. SENIOR SOCIAL
WORK CLiNICAN. Provide direct client care, group work, and program devel-
opment on a core services team. Requirements: CSW; 2 years of post-mas-
ter's experience or equivalent. $39K + competitive benefits. SUBSTANCE
ABUSE SPECIALIST. Work as part of an interdisciplinary team educating staff
and clients around harm reduction and sobriety models of treatment.
Counseling, training, case management. Experience with MCIS and PLWA
populations, CASAC and/or BA preferred. 2 years relevant experience.
$30K plus competitive benefits. CASE MANAGER. As a member of a core
services treatment team provide case management. Crises intervention
and coordination of program activities. BA and experience with population
preferred. $25K plus competitive benefits. Send cover letter and resume to
Susan Maye, CUCS-Times Square, 255 West 43rd Street, NY, NY, 10036.
Fax: 212-391-5991. CUCS is committed to workforce diversity. EEO.
CITY LIMITS
CASES, a major nonprofit agency dedicated to assuring better Mures for
court-involved defendants, seeks a DEVElOPMENT ASSOCUOE and UNlT ASSlS-
TANT. Development Associate-will assist in generating support for new and
exciting programs; research potential funders; develop and maintain database
and tracking system; write and edit proposals and other correspondence; and
collaborate with other staff on creation of public information materials. College
degree required; excellent writing, communication and organizational skills are
essential; and a team player who takes initiative. Growth potential. Salary to
mid-$30,OOOs. UNIT ASSISTANT-responsibilities include maintaining files;
copying; faxing; basic word processing; making and following up on phone
inquiries; scheduling appointments; coordinating meetings; and other general
support functions. Two years previous office experience necessary; solid com-
puter skills; professional manner; and basic writing ability necessary. Salary
range $25,00028,000. Send cover letter/resume to Director of Personnel,
CASES, 346 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10013. Fax: 212-571-0292.
University Settlement seeks two full-time workers for comprehensive employ-
ment program. The Community JOBS Network provides job preparation and
placement services to low-income people/welfare consumers. Flexible, asset-
based, family-centered program with a strong retention and social service
component. The TRAINER will develop and implement employment readiness
activities, teach classes (basic computer, office, soft skills), facilitate peer
groups. The JOB DEVELOPER will work with corporate partners, and develop
additional resources in the for-profit sector. Both will be responsible for small
case management caseloads and work with a dynamic team. Qualifications:
BA; excellent communication skills; strong organization and follow-through;
experience faCilitating groups; knowledge of social welfare systems; tena-
cious advocacy skills, entrepreneurial energy; bilingual preferred (Spanish or
Chinese); a sense of humor! Salary: mid-20s, excellent benefits. Resume,
cover letter to: Susan Kingsland. Fax: 212-614-0074. Tel.: 212-505-1995.
ORGANIlER.1:OMMUNnY EDUCATORS. Organizing and outreach positions with
state's largest consumer watchdog coalition. Excellent public speaking, com-
puter and phone skills necessary, car req. Experienced political organizer,
Salary $30Ks. F u l ~ and part-time community educators, entry level salary.
Great benefits. Fax letter, resume to NJ Citizen Action, 732-214-8385.
VOCA11ONAl. SERVICES SPECIALISTTRAlNING SPECIALIST. CUCS' Job Training
and Employment Program provides vocational counseling, job training and
job placement services to tenants of supportive housing throughout New
York City. The Training Specialist is responsible for conducting on-site coach-
ing and training in both internal and external training sites developed for the
program. This individual will also research and develop methods of training
participants with multiple barriers to employment, conduct task analysis at
training sites to assess their skill level, conduct regular job coaching visits,
and communicate regularly with vocational counselors regarding participant
needs and progress. Requirements: BA plus three years applicable direct
service experience to indicated populations or Associate's degree (60 col-
lege credits) plus six years applicable direct service experience to indicated
populations. At least half of the minimum required experience must be in the
provision of vocational services. This individual should possess the ability to
train adult populations with multiple barriers to employment and have strong
written and verbal communication skills. Computer literacy and bilingual
Spanish/English a plus. The salary for this position is $30K plus competi-
tive benefits, including $65 in monthly transit checks. Send cover letter and
resume ASAP to Amy Landesman, CUCS-The Times Square, 255 West 43rd
Street, New York, NY 10036. CUCS is committed to workplace diversity. EEO.
Social Services: Brooklyn-based non-profit agency seeks ACCOUNTS
PAYABLE ADMINIsmtATOR (must have good organizational skills and knowl-
edge of Lotus 123. Fax cover letter/resume to Maritza Peralta at 718-439-
3965 or mail to Discipleship Outreach Ministries, Inc., 5220 4th Ave.,
Brooklyn, NY 11220. No phone calls please!
DIRECTOR OF PROGRAM SERVICES: Bronx Older Adult Social Service agency
seeks MSW to administer programs for minority elderly. Clinical and group
experience . required, preferably with older adult population.
Responsibilities: supervise staff, volunteers; plan, monitor and evaluate
program; budget, grant writing. Bilingual (Eng/Span) helpful. Competitive
salary and benefits. Fax resume to: 718-542-0006, Attn: E.D.
COMMUNnY DEVnOPMEHT ASSOCIATE. The Cypress Hills Local Development
Corporation (CHLDC) is a multi-faceted not-for-profit community develop-
ment organization serving the "northside" of East New York. CHLDC seeks
to plan and implement several community development initiatives which
include developing permanent space for the Cypress Hills Community
School, a New Visions public elementary school; plan and implement the
organization's housing and community development activities to address
FEBRUARY 2000
the needs of an extended catchment area and identify & prioritize potential
development projects; work with Family Day Care Network &
Homeownership Counselor to design an on-going homebuyers counsel-
ing/seminar series to meet the needs of network providers. Ideal candidate
is a well organized, highly motivated self starter able to work both inde-
pendently and as a part of the agency's development team; graduate
degree in nonprofit community development and planning (or related field),
plus 3-5 years experience (or related work and eductaional experience);
familiarity with word processing, databases, on-line searches and mapping
software; excellent written and oral communication skills. Salary low- to
mid-$30s, based on experience; plus health & dental benefits. Resume and
cover letter to: Michelle Neugebauer, Executive Director, CHLDC, 625
Jamaica Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11208 or fax to 718-647-2805.
LITERACY INSllIUCTOR. Part-time literacy instructor needed to work with chil-
dren ages 9-12 in Queens-based after-school program. Responsibilities
include creation of daily lesson plans, facilitating reading group discussion,
planning and implementing remedial reading sessions, and co-facilitation
with computer and art specialist in our educational collaborative.
Requirements: Must be energetiC and creative with a love of children and
literature. At least two years of college (AA or BA preferred) and experience
working with children in an after school/educational setting. Salary: $15.00
an hour, 25 hours per week. Equal Opportunity Employer. Please send
resume and cover letter to the attention of Keith Mitchell, Education
Coordinator, Jacob A. Riis Settlement House, 10-25 41st Avenue, Long
Island City, NY 11101 or fax 718-784-3055. No phone calls, please.
TUTOR: Tutor needed to work with children ages 9-12 in Queens-based after
school program. Responsibil ities include homework assistance, supporting
literacy instructor doing literacy sessions, and working with children in our
remedial reading program. Requirements: Must be energetic and creative
with a love of children and literature (some college preferred) and some
experience working with children in an after school setting. Salary: $8/hr. for
25 hours a week. Equal Opportunity Employer. Please send resume and
cover letter to the attention of Keith Mitchell, Education Coordinator, Jacob
A. Riis Settlement House, 10-25 41st Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101
or fax 718-784-3055. No phone calls, please.
PARAI..EGAl. . Public interest law firm seeks paralegal to work in disability law.
Strong communication, org. skills req'd. Sal. $20-35K, neg. dep. on expo
Send resume ASAP to NYLPI, 151 W. 30th St., 11th Fl., NYC 10001.
Mothers on the Move, a direct action membership organization, seeks
COMMUNnY ORGANIZER. Develop neighborhood organizing campaigns;
door-to-door recruitment; leadership development. 2 years organizing expe-
rience; commitment to organizing as a means to build power; bilingual
English/Spanish. Salary based on experience. OFFICE ADMINISTRATOR
(PIT). Office management; basic accounting; newsletter layout and data-
base maintenance. Familiarity with Access and Excel helpful. Spanish big
plus. Flexibility and commitment to our mission a must. 20 hours/week,
$15,000/year plus health benefits. Resume and letter: MOM, 928
Intervale Avenue, Bronx, NY 10459. Fax: 718-842-2665.
POlITICAL ORGANIZERS. The Working Families Party is an independent,
multi-racial progressive political party working through elections and leg-
islative campaigns to advance the work of community organizations and
labor unions. The WFO is seeking committed staff persons to organize
local, grassroots political organizations in low- and moderate-income neigh-
borhoods. EOE. Call Bill at 718-222-3796.
DIRECTOR OF MARKETlNG needed to oversee the sale of over 200 limited equi-
ty cooperative apartments in Harlem. Responsibilities include supervision
and coordination of sales staff, attending community sales presentations
and workshops, interaction with public agencies, assisting prospective apart-
ment owners with completing applications, and coordinating contract clos-
ings and move-ins. We are looking for a talented, self-starting individual with
solid organizational skills and the ability to deal patiently and professionally
with the public. Fax resume and cover letter to 718-224-4983.
CASES, a major nonprofit dedicated to assuring better futures for court-
involved defendants, seeks a Program Coordinator and Unit Assistant. PR0-
GRAM COORDIUOOR. Responsible for the overall coordination and administra-
tion of the Training and TA Unit's multiple projects; securing trainers for exter-
nal local and statewide training initiatives; and researching and obtaining infor-
mation for potential projects. BA required; exceptional organizational skills;
and Intemet research, desktop, and PowerPoint are plusses. Salary: $28,000
plus excellent benefits. Salary $21,000 plus excellent benefits. Send resumes
and cover letters to: Director of Personnel, CASES, 346 Broadway, 3rd Floor
West, New York, New York, 10013. Cases is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
(continued on page 39)
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Centre Street
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In accordance with Section t 05 of the Uniform Rules and Regulations for All City Agencies
Pe.ttailUna to the Administration of the Freedom oflnfonnation LIw ("FOU-"), 14611 RCNY, tt.
seq. (the "Rulcs',), this is to advise you that your FOIL request has been completed. The
infonnation consists of7 pages and at S.25 a pap your cost will be $1.75.
You may pi" up your request by .tim going to Hal Matcovsky (669-7020). Audits and Accounts.
on the 17th Floor North of tile MUDieipai Building, I Centre Street. You II\USt pay your fee by
bank chcdt, money order, corporate check or a cbeck from a law firm _ obtain a receipt. Once
you have your receipt. you then proceed to 2 Lafayette Street, Sun. N1414A between the hours af
9:30AM and 12:30PMlt iutrongly recommended that you call this office at (212) 4421511 to
set up an appointment before comiog to this omc:e to pi" up your mllCriel. You mUJt briDs this
letter, valid identifieation and your rocelpt in order to obtain your request.
There are DO eXcepOOIll for fee payment and neither personal chcc:b nor euh will be ac:c:epted.
V7; truly yo
t;:;;; M.
Records Access Officer
CITY LIMITS
(continued from page 37)
ORGANIZER, Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition. To direct local
affiliate. Issues include: housing, school overcrowding, vacant land.
Musts: BA, 2 years experience in high pressure job, Spanish, computer
skills, willingness to learn & practice our organizing model, 10-12 hour
days-including 3 nights per week & frequent Saturdays-no students!!
Salary: $26-30K health, life, 403b. 718-584-0515. Email resume:
NWBCCC@IRC.ORG.
QUEENS COORDINATOR, BIQ MINORITY BUSINESS OPPORTUNIlY CENTER. BIQ,
the Brooklyn Queens Minority Business Opportunity Center (MBOC), is a jOint
project of the Queens County & Brooklyn Economic Development
Corporations. B/ Q is seeking a professional to coordinate outreach & imple-
ment a new federally-funded program to increase business opportunities for
minority business enterprises in Brooklyn and Queens. The applicant must
be a self-starter, have strong administrative support skills. Responsibilities:
database management, client outreach, and technical assistance (including
site visits); developing contract resources; financing & training. Strong writ-
ten & verbal skills required. Experience in production of brochures and out-
reach materials a plus. Evening, weekend hours may be required, driver's
license preferred. Microsoft Office experience required. Able to work on
deadline, manage multiple tasks, and thrive in a team-oriented atmosphere.
Minimum qualifications: bachelor's degree, or equivalent experience in com-
munity economic development or small business. Bilingual capability is crit-
ical (Spanish, Chinese, Korean). Salary commensurate with experience.
Reply with cover letter, resume and salary requirements to fax 718-263-
0594, attention MBOC Director. QCOEDC is an equal opportunity employer.
DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR. The Labor Research Association, a non-profit
labor-oriented research and educational group needs a highly motivated
Director of Development and Administration. The ideal candidate will
have passion about the labor movement and progressive politics, be a
self-starter, have experience in fundraising, event management, pub-
lishing and subscription development, marketing, and administration;
will be a good writer, computer literate and have excellent verbal com-
munications skills. The position is an exciting opportunity for someone
who wants to work for social change. Position reports to the Executive
Director and Board of Directors. Minorities and women are encouraged
to apply. Excellent benefits. Please send cover letter, resume and salary
requirements to: Attn: Ron Bigler, Labor Research Association, 145 W.
28th St. 6th Fl., New York, NY 10001. Fax: 212-714 1674. E-mail :
ron@lra-ny.com
TENANT RELATIONS SPECIALIST. Cooper Square Mutual Housing
Association, manager of low income housing, seeks TRS to manage build-
ings, coordinate tenant relocation, prepare tenants for cooperative owner-
ship. Requirement: 2-3 years organizing or housing management experi -
ence, Bilingual (Spanish/ English), computer literate preferred. Salary: mid-
to high- twenties. Resume: Cooper Square MHA, 69-61 East 4th Street,
3rd Floor, New York, NY 10003. Fax: 212-477-9328.
CAB, a Bronx-based CBO seeks a PROGRAM COORDINATOR to start-up and
direct employment placement program for TANF recipients. Experience with
employment programs, job development and supervision required. BA
required, Master's preferred. Fax cover letter and resumes to D. Straka at 718-
993-8089 or mail to 391 E. 149th St., Suite 520, Bronx, NY 10455. EOE.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Urban Issues Group, a center conducting studies from
the perspectives of New Yorkers of African descent, seeks a dynamic social
researcher to lead its programs of research, policy analysis, public informa-
tion, and development of minority policy analysts. In conformance with Board
policies, plans and implements programs; has overall budgetary
ity; develops research and policy agenda; supervises small staff; prepares
publications, policy papers, and research reports; and directs research stud-
ies. Current major foster care study requires developing and using interview-
ing and survey instruments; conducting interviews and focus groups; collect-
ing and analyzing data; and using knowledge of local communities, child
fare and other NYC human service systems. Requires strong methodological ,
qualitative and quantitative skills and related program experience; interest in
policy; excellent written and oral communication skills; computer literacy. The
successful candidate will be energetic, self-motivated, with demonstrated
leadership ability, able to work independently to forge links among research,
policy, and advocacy for social change. Graduate degree in relevant field
(MSW, MA, PhD) plus three to five years experience. Competitive salary and
benefits. Resume and cover letter to: Urban Issues Group, 3 Park Avenue,
37th Roor, New York, NY 10016 or Fax to 212-316-0716.
The Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation seeks a
BOOKEEPINGfADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT for its Manhattan office to assist
with bookkeeping and clerical work. Requirements: College degree (mini-
mum of ASSOCiate's) in accounting, bookkeeping, finance or a related field;
at least one year of experience performing computerized bookkeeping
functions; proficiency in spreadsheet software. Salary: low to mid $20Ks,
generous benefits package. Send cover letter/ resume: Rachel Miller, Vice
President for Operations and Fiscal Affairs, fax: 212-255-8722.
PROGRAM OFACER for national community development intermediary with
offices in Trenton, NJ. Provide loans, grants, technical assistance to economic
development, child care and housing projects. BA in Business, Public Admin.,
or related field required. Minimum 5 years experience in community develop-
ment lending. Strong financial and organizational analysis skills essential.
Knowledge of New Jersey urban communities and subsidy funding sources,
excellent computer and communication skills strongly desired. Salary $50s,
bonus and excellent benefits (health, dental , 401(k), 403(b)). Fax or mail
resume to L1SC, 609-392-8040, 225 E. State Street, Trenton, NJ 08608.
NOTICE OF FUNDING AVAILABILIlY. NYS OTDA will make available funds
under a 1999-2000 RFP for the HHAP. To receive a copy write: Bureau of
Housing Services, 40 N. Pearl Street, Albany, NY, 12243 or fax to 518-
486-7068, Attention: Michael Asbury.
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City Limits, 120 Wall Street, 20th floor,
New York, NY 10005.
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