Because spin, data manipulation and misleading statements seem so crucial to Mayor Bloomberg’s policies and practices, it’s as shocking as an ice cold shower when the NYC shifts to realistic data collection for policy planning. Evidence-based planning, absent elsewhere in Mr. Bloomberg’s universe (about which I will post shortly), is being introduced by NYC’s Center on Economic Opportunity. . It galls me to say it, but, Mayor Bloomberg and his Deputy Linda Gibbs deserve praise for this effort. Update: Late December New York Times report is here .

One of the flaws I (and many others) have pointed to in the work of the Mayor’s Commission on Economic Opportunity and its human services planning, in general, has been its reliance on a jury-rigged federal definition of poverty which utterly fails to face the economic reality of life in NYC. By limiting the focus of planning for lower income New Yorkers to an arbitrary measure (approx. $20,000/year for a family of four), NYC agencies have generated unrealistically low estimates of New Yorkers’ needs for benefit and program assistance. By this measure, there are about 1 million people in poverty in NYC. The actual number of people in need is much larger. For example, 1.3 million New Yorkers use food pantries and soup kitchens for emergency food, because they lack income enough to eat without that help. Many of those who cannot eat without help are not "poor."

The gold standard method of looking at need in NYC (and elsewhere for that matter) is to figure out what it costs to live and see how many people have enough income to manage. This approach, long advocated by the National Research Council of the National Science Foundations , has been used by the Women’s Center for Education and Career Advancement as a more realistic planning tool. Using it, it turns out that as many as half of New Yorkers have income too low for them to manage. The Women’s Center’s classic report from 2004, though long (111 pages) is worth reading. (pdf file is here ).

The NYC effort, lead by Mark Levitan poverty research director of the Center on Economic Opportunity (formerly of the Community Service Society) has been the subject of an excellent article in City Limits by Tram Whitehurst which you should read . Of course, gathering more realistic data and reporting is a good step. Until we know the dimensions of a problem, we cannot properly plan to respond to it. (Remember the story about the blind men and the elephant) While, federally funded poverty efforts will still be limited to the federal poverty guideline, local efforts may, in the future, be more realistically focused. Thanks are due to Mr. Levitan, Ms Gibbs and Mr. Bloomberg. See also Maureen Lane’s post at the DMI blog and this City Limits interview with Levitan

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