Critics of HRA see the roll-slashing mentality as the main problem, and they want to get advocates in the room to help change what they see as an insidious culture. “Since welfare reform, the city’s goal has been to divert as many people away from public assistance as possible,” said Bich Ha Pham, Director of Policy, Advocacy and Research at the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies. “From the moment someone walks in the door to when they’re referred to a jobs program, the system is set up to get them out.”
Lawrence Mead, who played a key role in designing New York City’s reformed welfare system in the 1990s, believes advocates have a limited view of the circumstances. “[T]he very reason for the Job Centers,” he wrote in an e-mail, “was to be sure that people needing income took jobs where possible rather than immediately looking to welfare. For this reason, ‘public benefits’ had to become less immediately available than they had been before. The whole point of welfare reform was to end entitlement and condition aid on a serious effort to work. Clearly, the advocates do not yet accept this.”
This philosophical difference has engendered a high level of distrust all around. For Gotbaum, this distrust came to a head while her office was compiling the survey. “HRA had such a freak-out every time I was going to a Jobs Center. You’d think I was a terrorist or something,” Gotbaum said. She noted that Commissioner Doar requested advance notice whenever she visited a center, a request with which she did not comply. “‘Every time I do, you send some staffer to watch over me,’” she recalls telling the commissioner.
Looking back on her experience applying for food stamps, Veda Myers is certain that an advocate in the room would have helped. “The more you know, the less they can screw you around,” she said. “I mean, why do they put so much money to prevent against fraud? People aren’t trying to fraud the system just so they can get $100 of groceries.”
