New York City to Reward Poor for Doing Right Thing

[Jularc]

New York City to Reward Poor for Doing Right Thing


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/29/nyregion/29bloo650.jpg
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at a news conference Thursday.


By DIANE CARDWELL
Published: March 30, 2007

Seeking new solutions to New York’s vexingly high poverty rates, the city is moving ahead with an ambitious experiment that will pay poor families up to $5,000 a year to meet goals like attending parent-teacher conferences, going for a medical checkup or holding down a full-time job, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday.

Under the program, which is based on a similar effort in Mexico, parents would receive payments every two months for family members meeting any of a series of criteria. The payments could range from $25 for exemplary attendance in elementary school to $300 for a high score on an important exam, city officials said.

The officials said the program was the first of its kind in the country.

The project, first announced in the fall. was scheduled to begin as a pilot program in September with 2,500 randomly selected families whose progress will be tracked against another 2,500 randomly selected families who will not get the rewards. Officials planned to draw the families from six of the poorest communities in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

To be eligible, families must have at least one child entering fourth, seventh or ninth grade and a household income of 130 percent or less of the federal poverty level, which equals roughly $20,000 for a single parent with two children.

The city has already raised $42 million of the $50 million needed to cover the initial program’s cost from private sources, including Mr. Bloomberg. If it proves successful, the mayor said, the city will attempt to create a permanent program financed by the government.

Likening the payments, known as conditional cash transfers, to tax incentives that steer people of greater means toward property ownership, Mr. Bloomberg said that the approach was intended to help struggling families who often focus on basic daily survival make better long-term decisions and break generational cycles of poverty and dependence.

“In the private sector, financial incentives encourage actions that are good for the company: working harder, hitting sales targets or landing more clients,” the mayor said in an announcement at a health services center in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

“In the public sector, we believe that financial incentives will encourage actions that are good for the city and its families: higher attendance in schools, more parental involvement in education and better career skills.”

Since Mr. Bloomberg outlined the plan last fall, reaction among antipoverty experts and advocates has been mixed, with some hailing it as an innovative approach that could become a powerful model for the rest of the country and ultimately win the support of the federal government.

Indeed, the program is being financed by several high-profile organizations, including the Rockefeller, Starr and Robin Hood Foundations, as well as the Open Society Institute and the insurance and financial firm American International Group.

The Rockefeller and Starr Foundations are donating $10 million each, while the Open Society Institute is giving $5 million and A.I.G. is donating $2 million. A spokeswoman for the Robin Hood Foundation did not return calls or an e-mail message, and Mr. Bloomberg’s spokesman, Stu Loeser, declined to say how much the mayor contributed.

Some antipoverty advocates have bristled at what they see as the condescending notion that poor people need to be told how to raise their families. Others have focused on the broader economic issues at play.

“It is encouraging that the mayor believes there’s a public role for addressing intergenerational poverty, inequality and economic mobility,” said Margy Waller, a former Clinton administration adviser who is a co-founder of Inclusion, a research and policy group based in Washington.

“What is troubling is the focus on personal behavior as the solution to what is at least in part a problem of the economy,” she said. “Given what we know about the growth of low-wage jobs and the shrinking of the middle class, it will be, in fact, impossible to bring more people into the middle class unless we improve the labor market as well.”

A similar concern seems to have emerged with Mexico’s program, known as Oportunidades, which is now 10 years old, has a budget of more than $3 billion a year and covers nearly one-fourth of all Mexicans.

Intended to replace the food subsidies that had dominated much of Mexico’s antipoverty efforts, the program offers cash stipends to families to keep their children in school and take them for regular checkups. Parents must also attend regular talks on issues including health, nutrition and family planning.

Outside evaluations have found that the program has been successful in raising school attendance and nutrition levels and that the percentage of Mexicans living in extreme poverty has fallen.

Still, there are questions about how much more effective the program can be in lifting large numbers of people permanently out of poverty, in part because jobs are lacking.

In January, Santiago Levy, one of the program’s creators and a former undersecretary of finance in Mexico, said at the Brookings Institution in Washington that even if the program were 100 percent effective, it alone could not solve the problem.

“Now’s he’s out with a high school degree, a healthy man: Is he going to get a job or migrate to the U.S.?” he said.

But others see cause for optimism in the results of Mexico’s program and similar ones in other Latin American countries. In Nicaragua, for example, primary school enrollment rates grew to 90 percent from 68 percent; in Colombia, secondary school enrollment in urban areas rose to 78 percent from 64 percent, said Laura Rawlings, a World Bank specialist who has studied the programs, which she said are active or being created in nearly 20 countries.

The idea to try the program in New York has its roots in the broad attack on poverty that Mr. Bloomberg has made a high-profile cause for his second term. Roughly one in five New Yorkers lives in poverty, according to the Community Service Society of New York.

In keeping with the administration’s emphasis on outcomes, city officials say they will closely monitor the test group’s progress against that of the control group with the help of M.D.R.C., a nonprofit policy research organization involved in the program’s design.

All 5,000 families will be asked to agree to participate in the program before knowing which group they are in, said Gordon Berlin, the president of M.D.R.C., and those not receiving benefits will be paid a nominal fee to submit to monitoring and surveys, he said.

Officials expect that some of the control families will inevitably drop out, but Mr. Berlin said that in conducting similar experiments in the past, he had found that most were willing to participate even without the benefits because they were informed that it would help guide a government policy decision in which they had a stake.

The families receiving the benefits will be given a list of goals they are expected to meet, as well as the values assigned to them. They will also get a “passport” for documenting the completion of tasks that are not automatically reported elsewhere, said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor overseeing the effort.

The city is working with state and federal officials, Ms. Gibbs said, to make sure that families do not lose other benefits because of the grants.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/nyregion/30poverty.html?ref=nyregion)

[Cleveland Brown]

And where does personal responsibility come in (and the funding for this program 30 years down the line)? :koko:

[suga]

Bring on the priveleged whining:frog:

[volguus zildrohar]

So basically New York is introducing merit-based welfare? I suppose it's a step in the right direction if we look at it that way.

The desire to succeed should be ones impetus and the attaining of ones goals is the reward. That's what I was taught. While I commend the spirit of the program it doesn't seem far removed from turning in your book report early to get a homework pass. It's like Pavlov's experiment and sets a dangerous precedent, I think. The key is connecting folks to the people and the programs that they need so they can help themselves. The money being funneled into this can be funneled into already existing social services that are dying on the vine and would be quite capable of helping people do the right things the right way if the resources were allotted to them.

If all it takes is money to get people to do right explain the concept of the corporation to me.

[mikeelm]

How Stupid!

I can understand in some ways helping people less fortunate who are trying or can't find good jobs but there are also many people who create their situations by dropping out, getting into drugs and whatever.

Let them find their own way and isn't their places like the Salvation Army that can help these people and not have the city to do it?

[zilfondel]

NYC = Sweden?

Wow, talk about social engineering. If the libertarians ever... wait a minute, we don't give a fuck about the libertarians!

Goooo social democracy! Woohoo!

===================================

It's also clear that the above posters didn't read the article:

all of the money funding this project was donated from private sources.
It has been tested in 20 different countries, which have shown marked improvements in things like school enrollment.

Education = empowerment = opportunity for better jobs and a better life.

But then apparently you guys want poor people to fuck up their lives, eh?

[LMich]

If one has even a basic concept of the human condition, they would know that we do not live in a utopia, a utopia where everyone makes the right decisions every time they are confronted with a choice to make.

We should also know that, sometimes, people make bad decisions knowing they are making a bad decision, and many times they are making a decision that's nothing more than a decision of chance; a crap shoot, if you will. Often (read: most) times, these bad decisions have vast negative effects on the children they raise, instantly handicapping another generation. This is just reality, a reality that can not be effectively addressed with the all-too-common "F%ck 'em" ideology too many of us have used for decades now in this nation.

I see a program like this helping address a very significant part of the reality of the human condition. I think the minute we learned how to form a society (i.e. finding the worth/value of every human being), that social darwanism was something we had to let go of. Lesser animals leave their sick, old, and other disenfranchized groups to live and die alone.

If we believe in the concept of 'society', believing in the worth and value of every one of our members, regardless of the level of worth/value, and believe that everyone has a true 'right to life'. And, furthermore, we believe that investing in individual, and thus ultimately investing in society on the front end is ultimately cheaper than investing in the individual, and thus the society on the back end (i.e. prison cost, increased health-care costs, etc.), than we shouldn't have any problem with programs like this one.

It's just my personal belief, but I believe that we're, ultimately, much better off in investing on the front end in programs like this one, than having to invest later in prisons, homeless shelters, and the like. And the "F%ck 'em" mentality to society ultimately leads straight to the loss of the subsequent generation to the cycle of chronic poverty.

That's really probably too much ideology on social democracy, but I just think that if paying a family to make the right decisions increases the chances that a child in that family will be able to break the cycle of chronic poverty, that we'd benefit from trying it out.

Paying someone for good behavior may sounds ridiculous and non-sensical, initially, to some. But, I'd much rather try that out to see if it works, than having to absolutely guaruntee to you that you'll meet these Children of Poverty down the road in one fashion or another, either as a violent criminal that ends up victimizing your or someone you know because they haven't been caught yet, a prison number that you have to pay for with your tax dollars, or an ill patient draining our healthcare system.

One thing is for sure, what we've been doing for the last half century or so hasn't worked, and I feel comfortable arguing that it's not because we've been too socially concious and inclined. Even if you don't buy fully into the idea of a social democracy, maybe you can grudingly view something like this as the lesser or two evils.

[Cleveland Brown]

NYC = Sweden?

Wow, talk about social engineering. If the libertarians ever... wait a minute, we don't give a fuck about the libertarians!

Goooo social democracy! Woohoo!

===================================

It's also clear that the above posters didn't read the article:

all of the money funding this project was donated from private sources.
It has been tested in 20 different countries, which have shown marked improvements in things like school enrollment.

Education = empowerment = opportunity for better jobs and a better life.

But then apparently you guys want poor people to fuck up their lives, eh?

Reading comprehension?

The city has already raised $42 million of the $50 million needed to cover the initial program’s cost from private sources, including Mr. Bloomberg. If it proves successful, the mayor said, the city will attempt to create a permanent program financed by the government.


BTW, no one said "fuck the poor". There is a difference between helping people in a bad situation and "rewarding" them for what should be normal parenting skills.

[Cleveland Brown]

If one has even a basic concept of the human condition, they would know that we do not live in a utopia, a utopia where everyone makes the right decisions every time they are confronted with a choice to make.

We should also know that, sometimes, people make bad decisions knowing they are making a bad decision, and many times they are making a decision that's nothing more than a decision of chance; a crap shoot, if you will. Often (read: most) times, these bad decisions have vast negative effects on the children they raise, instantly handicapping another generation. This is just reality, a reality that can not be effectively addressed with the all-too-common "F%ck 'em" ideology too many of us have used for decades now in this nation.

I see a program like this helping address a very significant part of the reality of the human condition. I think the minute we learned how to form a society (i.e. finding the worth/value of every human being), that social darwanism was something we had to let go of. Lesser animals leave their sick, old, and other disenfranchized groups to live and die alone.

If we believe in the concept of 'society', believing in the worth and value of every one of our members, regardless of the level of worth/value, and believe that everyone has a true 'right to life'. And, furthermore, we believe that investing in individual, and thus ultimately investing in society on the front end is ultimately cheaper than investing in the individual, and thus the society on the back end (i.e. prison cost, increased health-care costs, etc.), than we shouldn't have any problem with programs like this one.

It's just my personal belief, but I believe that we're, ultimately, much better off in investing on the front end in programs like this one, than having to invest later in prisons, homeless shelters, and the like. And the "F%ck 'em" mentality to society ultimately leads straight to the loss of the subsequent generation to the cycle of chronic poverty.

That's really probably too much ideology on social democracy, but I just think that if paying a family to make the right decisions increases the chances that a child in that family will be able to break the cycle of chronic poverty, that we'd benefit from trying it out.

Paying someone for good behavior may sounds ridiculous and non-sensical, initially, to some. But, I'd much rather try that out to see if it works, than having to absolutely guaruntee to you that you'll meet these Children of Poverty down the road in one fashion or another, either as a violent criminal that ends up victimizing your or someone you know because they haven't been caught yet, a prison number that you have to pay for with your tax dollars, or an ill patient draining our healthcare system.

One thing is for sure, what we've been doing for the last half century or so hasn't worked, and I feel comfortable arguing that it's not because we've been too socially concious and inclined. Even if you don't buy fully into the idea of a social democracy, maybe you can grudingly view something like this as the lesser or two evils.

You're right, we don't live in a Utopia, but that doesn't mean it's possible to correct every handicap. Indeed, many of you points echo those of Johnson's Great Society ideal, yet we know that ended in absolute failure. Indeed, the Great Society programs almost directly correlate to the degradation of the black family in America, because rational people decided to maximize their government subsidies than investing in their family/community. Before you retort that we should have invested more, if we did it would strangle our economy. Even communist/stalinist systems were unable to rid social ills, even with their massive distributive programs. Hell, some of those nations are plagued with rampant family problems, depite decades of indoctrination and programs.

But what about the Scandinavian nations? I really don't know, since those nations really seem to be an aberration in terms of the high success of their social programs. Indeed one could tick off a list of failed supposedly "successful" social programs in many western nations. Indeed, nations with some of the most generous maternity programs have some of the lowest birthrates, nations including the US that implemented housing programs to reduce social stratification have increased it with their urban/suburban subsidized ghettos.

I'm not against helping the poor, just pointing out that sometimes the ideal (helping the poor) indeed a very honourable goal can't be acheived by the "means" of government social engineering (wide-scale, long-lasting welfare programs). Ultimately they instead of uplifting the human spirit these programs modify social norms, thus creating an permanent underclass that feels that they MUST rely on those programs.

[arbeiter]

Well, when "normal" parenting skills are increasingly rare and harder to maintain, I say we should do what we can to incent it, especially among social groups where it's the hardest to provide stability for children. This is a fresh approach and I'm 100% in support.

[LMich]

I'm not against helping the poor, just pointing out that sometimes the ideal (helping the poor) indeed a very honourable goal can't be acheived by the "means" of government social engineering (wide-scale, long-lasting welfare programs). Ultimately they instead of uplifting the human spirit these programs modify social norms, thus creating an permanent underclass that feels that they MUST rely on those programs.

But, unlike traditional social welfare this is a privately funded program. Also, unlike traditional welfare, this program's requirements seem significantly more stringent. Most importantly, though, is that unlike traditional welfare, this seems to be aimed at increasing the chances of children of welfare parents to break the cycle, which is probably the most impressive thing about this. It's much easier to get people while they are young. This program is also for the poorest of the poor, those making 130 percent or less of the federal poverty level.

This plan seems more than worthwhile, to me, and I don't see any possible negative consequences that could outweigh the many possible and positive benefits of such a plan.

[tackledspoon]

I'm all for programs like these. Like LMICH said, it's much better to invest in these things at the front end, rather than neglect the poor and end up paying for it in the end with state-sponsored rehabilitation programs and prisions. Unlike traditional American Welfare programs, this one encourages advancement.
I like the idea of incentives, though education is not the great equalizer that we hold it to be in this country and the true benefit of this plan is its social democratic nature. Education can definitely help to decrease inequality, but not nearly so much as most Americans are led to believe. A huge portion of the economic inequality in this country is due to luck, which cannot be equalized. Correcting for the after effects of luck through progressive taxation programs will lessen the earnings gap far more than equal opportunity programs ever could, especially considering the qualitative differences between schools in affluent and poor neighborhoods.

[Xing]

You can only expect a psychologically aware, and sociologically intelligent city, like NYC, to come up with a plan like this.

[passdoubt]

Unusual idea... sounds a bit paternalist, but I think I like it. I'll be interested to see how it pans out.

[Jularc]

In Mexican Town, Maybe a Way to Reduce Poverty in New York


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/04/25/nyregion/25poverty-600.jpg
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg visited Toluca, Mexico, Tuesday.


By RAY RIVERA
April 25, 2007

MEXICO CITY, For a few days every other month, the narrow sidewalks of Tepoztlán, a scenic mountain town south of here, fill with hundreds of women from surrounding villages, many tugging along children by the hand or carrying infants slung at their waists in rebozos.

They come in by bus or foot and gather in the cool shadows of the municipal auditorium, where government workers sit at tables on the stage, ready to hand out cash.

The women are participants in an antipoverty program that is a model for one that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg plans to start in New York City. The mayor traveled to Mexico on Tuesday, joining City Hall officials who arrived two days earlier for a fact-finding trip.

On Monday in Tepoztlán (pronounced teh-pos-LAHN), they watched as about 800 women waited for three hours or more in the auditorium to go up to get their money. If the women and their children have kept all their medical appointments, and if their children have stayed in school, the money is theirs to use as they wish. The awards range from 360 to 3,710 pesos (about $36 to $370), enough to buy food or shoes or other necessities. The size of the award depends on how many children they have and what level of school the children are in.

The program is 10 years old, has a budget of more than $3 billion a year and covers almost a quarter of all Mexicans.

It may seem strange that one of the world’s financial capitals should look to a small mountain town for answers to its own urban ills. But since this program got its start in rural Mexico in 1997, it has been heralded by the World Bank and others as a powerful model for fighting chronic poverty.

Outside evaluations have found that the program, called Oportunidades, has been successful in raising school attendance and nutrition levels. The percentage of Mexicans living in extreme poverty has fallen by 17 percentage points since 1996, when it reached 37 percent.

Those results have spurred some 30 countries to adopt some version of the program.

Before Mr. Bloomberg’s arrival here, his deputy mayor for human services, Linda I. Gibbs, and her staff interviewed local doctors, school officials and scholars who have studied the program since its inception.

But will something that works for the impoverished of Mexico help the poor of New York?

“Clearly the economies of the Mexico and the U.S. and New York City are very different,” Ms. Gibbs said as she toured the village’s medical clinic, where many Oportunidades recipients go for their regular checkups and medical care.

“But what the poor have in common is that they are really struggling to make ends meet, that every day every decision is, ‘Do I do this thing or do I do that thing?’ It’s not a matter of can I go to work and get health care; it’s often a matter of trading it off.”

The program pays cash stipends mostly to mothers — about 97 percent of recipients are women — on the assumption that they will be more likely to spend the money on their children. To qualify, people must be in extreme poverty, roughly defined by officials here as living on less than the equivalent of $2 a day.

The payments are tied to changes in behavior intended to lift families out of poverty. So the program requires families to keep their children in school and take them for regular checkups. Parents must also attend talks on health, nutrition and family planning.

In addition, pregnant women, infants and breast-feeding mothers receive an iron-fortified supplement to ward off malnutrition.

They also receive small grants to offset the cost of school uniforms and supplies, but many of the women in Tepoztlán said the school grants are not enough to cover the extra costs.

And there are hardships in staying qualified. Getting time off work to get medical checkups can be difficult. And making the trek every two months to receive their cash typically consumes the whole day. Many of the women, when they can find jobs, work as cleaning women or in the cornfields with their husbands.

Luisa Rosa, a participant who is a 35-year-old mother of four, also volunteers to help organize others in the program in her village, Huachinantitla, about a 20-minute walk from Tepoztlán, to ensure they keep up with the requirements.

“The truth is, it is difficult,” Ms. Rosa said. “Because sometimes they don’t get permission to get off work, so they don’t go for their medical appointments.”

Some in her village have received notices that they are no longer eligible, she says, but that has been rare.

One woman, Sylvia Hernández-Zavaleta, 47, said the program saved her life. Four years ago, doctors discovered she had pancreatic cancer during one of her required visits to the medical clinic, making early intervention possible.

“And while I was hospitalized,” she added, “I did not have any other income but money from Oportunidades.”

And as for the time-consuming gatherings, academics have also found value in that. In addition to chatting and gossiping, the women also encourage one another.

“They become social gatherings and help shift norms,” said J. Lawrence Aber, a professor of applied psychology and public policy at New York University, who was part of the mayor’s poverty commission that pushed for New York to adopt the program. “It’s a form of social capital.”

Still, there are questions about how much more effective the program can be in lifting large numbers of people permanently out of poverty. The quality of the services they get — particularly education — is poor.

“While they’re spending a lot more time in schools, the impact on learning is mixed,” said Susan W. Parker, an economist in Mexico City, who has studied the program since its inception under the name Progresa.

And then there is the question of whether they can find a decent job locally, or whether they will feel forced to migrate to the United States.

That issue bothers the program’s principal architect, Santiago Levy, a former undersecretary of finance. At an interview at his home in Mexico City, he said, “Progresa is a program to improve human capital; it is not a jobs-creation program.”

Oportunidades will never cure poverty in Mexico without major reforms to the country’s labor market, Mr. Levy said. Still, he credits the program as one of two major reasons poverty has declined, the other being money sent home from Mexican workers in the north.

“When I first proposed this to the cabinet, I was murdered by some of the ministers,” he recalled. “The standard arguments were the husband’s going to beat the wife, take the money and go and drink, or they’re going to buy cigarettes, or people are going to be lazy.”

That has not happened, Mr. Levy said.

“The evidence shows that 99 percent of the time they buy shoes for the children, roof for the housing, food, or they save,” he said.

For it to work in New York, Mr. Levy says, the city will have to ensure that it can survive changes in political administrations, as it has in Mexico. Another important component of success for the Mexico program was to keep it free of the political opportunism and patronage that has plagued past antipoverty programs, which with a few exceptions they have largely done, he said.

Under the New York plan, which is still being developed, poor families would be paid up to $5,000 a year to meet goals like attending parent-teacher conferences, getting regular medical checkups and holding down a full-time job. Participants would get their money through automatic deposits, not by attending a large gathering.

A pilot program is scheduled to begin in September with 2,500 randomly selected families whose progress will be measured against 2,500 families who will not receive the benefits. The pilot program will be privately financed. The city has already raised $42 million of the $50 million needed to cover the initial costs. If it is successful, Mr. Bloomberg hopes that public money will eventually go into it.

But there is still a question of how a rural program will translate into an urban setting. Mexico began expanding the program into smaller cities only in 2001, and into larger metropolitan areas in 2004. Mexico City was one of the last areas in the country to get the program. In 2006, only about 18,300 residents there were receiving benefits, according to the program’s statistics.

The mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, has been a strong critic of the program, saying that it is too conservative and that at the pace with which it is expanding, it would take two generations to help his city’s worst off.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bloomberg and his staff viewed the program in the larger setting of Toluca, an industrial city of about 750,000 about 45 minutes west of Mexico City, where the women gather in a courtyard outside a bank for their money. Later, he met with President Felipe Calderón, though it is unclear if they discussed the program.

While Toluca is a big city, the mayor’s delegation did not view the program as it operates in a major metropolitan area like Mexico City, to the frustration of some in his delegation. Ms. Gibbs, the deputy mayor, said this was mainly because the programs are not as developed in the nation’s largest cities, and because of scheduling considerations.

Mexican officials say the dropout rate is higher in cities, and the program is more prone to fraud, because families can more easily hide income and household assets that determine whether they qualify for benefits, which could also be an issue in New York.

Mayor Bloomberg acknowledged that the program might not work in the five boroughs.

“But shame on us if we don’t have the courage to try things which, if it doesn’t work, you will describe as a failure and I would describe as something we should be proud of that we at least tried to help,” he said. “We should not walk away from any idea that can possibly help.”

Elisabeth Malkin contributed reporting.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/nyregion/25antipoverty.html?ref=nyregion)

[Nowhereman1280]

I think this is a great idea. If there is one thing I have learned in economics, its that people respond much better to positive motivations than negative consequences.

One of my favorite economics professors I've ever had always used to use this personal example: He lived next to a sorority on campus. They would always throw huge parties and make a ton of noise through the night. Since my professor doesn't think the way normal people due (because he is an economist) instead of going over and pounding on the door and threatening to call the cops on them, he went over with some of his neighbors and said "we'll pay you to keep the noise down." They know that by simply turning down the volume a little bit, they get a couple thousand dollars a year from the neighbors for their sorority.

Programs like this are exactly what will eventually break the cycle and eliminate poverty. The sooner poverty is reduced, the sooner we all get richer since more people in better jobs = better economy and more economic output. If everyone in the US got a college or technical school education, our economic output would grow by like 20 or 30%. That means there would be 20 or 30% more wealth. The reduction of poverty is good for everyone and programs that offer a real, instant, positive reward for working to break the cycle will really have an impact.

[chiphile]

Most comments to this thread, especially the first ones, epitomize why New York City will always be the greatest and will set the trends, while most of America continues to suck.

A little suburban boy from cleveland, if handed the same cards as these less fortunate people, wouldn't last a day on personal responsibility. Interesting how you never complain of the government subsidizing your suburbia, your better school system, and your white privilege. Everyone makes it, one way or another, because of social systems that support them. When a city tries to make a social system for the poor, it's called libertarian, perhaps even communist, funny. The whole point of these programs is to reward personal responsibility, in case you missed the entire damn article.

Continue on New York, do what you do best - being better than everyone.