More Americans are poor than ever before, and the national poverty rate is at its highest level since 1994. Meanwhile, one in five New Yorkers lives in poverty. But poverty is absent from our civic discourse. Everyone is tired of talking about poverty, it seems, except poor people. Perhaps that’s because the rhetoric around the topic has rarely resembled reality. The latest issue of City Limits explores the lives of four low-income New Yorkers, including Tanya Fields.

It's Monday, Jan. 31, and as usual, Tanya Fields is having a hectic morning. The Bronx mother of four has already had to juggle her schedule after her babysitter called in sick, forcing her to be late for an important appointment in downtown Brooklyn. But on this occasion—unlike her daily work running a nonprofit star-tup or her prior years as an environmental advocate—there's no calling in sick or asking to reschedule: This appointment is for trying to keep her welfare benefits.

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City Limits Magazine


July-August 2011:
Remember Poverty? The Problem 1.5 Million New Yorkers Can't Afford to Forget

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Documentary


Census Tract 192

News Topics
The Economy
Justice
Health and Environment
Author
Neil deMause
Neil deMause
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Fields is a blur as she sweeps into the lobby waiting room at 14 Boerum Place, the glass-and-steel downtown Brooklyn building where low-income New Yorkers must come to apply for "fair hearings"—in which a judge can rule on challenges to decisions handed down by the Human Resources Administration, the giant city agency that oversees public benefits like welfare, food stamps and Medicaid. She passes through the metal detector that greets visitors at the door and rushes up to the window, where she talks calmly but animatedly with the worker on duty.

A minute later, shaking her head, she approaches the table of Project FAIR, the service staffed by Legal Aid lawyers that offers pro bono advice and referrals to fair-hearing applicants. Fields begins telling her story. The previous month, she explains, HRA cut o the welfare benefits and rent assistance she had been receiving since she stopped working full time two years ago during a difficult pregnancy. She'd filed for a fair hearing to object to the cutoff , and her hearing date was this morning. Unfortunately, by the time she'd arranged for a substitute for her sick sitter, she'd missed her hearing, and now just what is she supposed to do?

It's the kind of story that could be told by any number of the people who have packed the Boerum Place waiting room to bursting and now patiently wait for their numbers to be displayed on an overhead LED board. According to the most recent official figures, more than 130,000 fair-hearing requests are filed in New York City every year, almost double the total from five years earlier. Fields, though, is somewhat exceptional, and not just because of the thick red braids and ever present sunglasses that make her stand out in any crowd. She also has a tale to tell that involves both extraordinary personal turns of events and byzantine bureaucratic headaches—though at Boerum Place, the latter are pretty much par for the course.

From work to welfare

Eight years ago, as a 22-year-old first-time mom, Fields graduated from college with a political science degree and was working at her first job, as an administrative assistant at NorVergence, a company in New Jersey that sold discount Internet and phone service. She had just rented her first apartment. "I was so excited. I came in and paid three months' rent in advance," she recalls. "I was like, 'I'm not going to be a statistic. I'm never going to have to move home, and I'm never going to need to get on welfare. I'm going to take care of me and my child.' "