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NEWSLETTER
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Poverty in America
Michael Seltzer spoke recently with David R. Jones, president of Community Service Society of New York, about poverty in America and what “the growing ranks of low-income New Yorkers can do to escape their predicament”. The background to their discussion was reports noting that the number of Americans living in poverty has reached an historic high of 46.2 million, and that the number of neighborhoods in which at least 40 per cent of the population lives in “extreme poverty” soared by a third between 2000 and 2009. This increase, according to a Brookings Institution report, has wiped out all the economic gains of the 1990s.
What follows are excerpts of Jones’s remarks from their talk. The full transcript of the conversation is available on the web site of PhilanTopic, a blog of opinion and commentary from Philanthropy News Digest. Seltzer is a regular contributor to the site.
“Those statistics are terrifying on a number of levels,” Jones said. “The poverty level is the same in Manhattan as in rural Mississippi….A family of three can buy a lot more goods and services in Mississippi on $17,500 a year than can a family living in Manhattan….”
His organization, he said, was created more than a century and a half ago because its founders “perceived poverty in urban areas as a potential danger to civic order…. in a multi-ethnic city like New York, keeping the civic fabric in good repair is vital. For those reasons and others, we have always taken a three-pronged approach to our work: research, service and public relations….Our intent is to shape public policies and encourage affordable interventions that promote better lives for all New Yorkers….
“For many people, making the transition into the world of work is neither simple nor easy….They need help in securing an actual job that pays a living wage. Once they are working, they typically require additional support such as day care and benefits like paid sick leave. And as they establish themselves in the workplace, they need opportunities to climb a career ladder within a trade. We also believe that low-wage workers need the collective bargaining power of a union to ensure that they receive adequate health care, access to reliable credit and other benefits that the rest of us take for granted….
“Each year, after having failed them in elementary and junior high school, we fail to graduate hundreds of thousands of young people from high school….In New York City alone, over eight hundred thousand working-age adults lack a high school diploma. That’s why we are now focusing on helping young people secure their GED….
“In New York, and across the country, we are falling way behind in terms of our economic competitiveness. We are at risk of turning into a second-rate power within a generation. It is a huge cost to our economy when we fail to provide a top-notch education to all Americans. That’s the case that advocates for the poor across the country should be making to their elected officials.”
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