A group called the End Apartment Warehousing Coalition, comprising 22 tenant organizations, supports legislation that would impose a fee on any landlord whose unit is vacant for more than three months. 

Tenant advocates assert that such an approach will help end homelessness. 

In reality, that would be an unprecedented form of regulatory overreach: forcing business owners to operate at a loss.

To understand why, turn to New York’s Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which tightened the screws on owners of the nearly 1 million rent-regulated apartments in dramatically new ways.

Most important, for the first time, it limited rent increases that could be justified by “major capital improvements” to units to just $15,000 over a 15-year period.

That means that no matter how much owners must spend to repair heating systems, roofs and windows, they’ll be limited in how much they’ll be permitted to raise the rent.

For tenant activists, this was a way to close a regulatory “loophole” that allowed buildings to raise rent. 

But there’s a direct link between the cap on capital improvement reimbursements and the so-called “warehoused” apartments.

If it costs more to maintain a unit — and keep it in compliance with housing codes — than rental income justifies, it only makes sense to padlock it.

In other words, an anti-warehousing law would force owners to lose money every month — or rent a substandard unit at the risk of being in violation of housing laws. 

It makes sense, and saves dollars, to keep the unit vacant.

Other proposed laws are as bad or worse. 

The End Warehousing Coalition, for instance, is pushing for a bill proposed by Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer to require inspections, and presumably repairs, for vacant apartments — on the grounds that they may harbor rats or pose a fire hazard for neighbors.

That approach leads to the worst of both worlds: forced spending on repairs and no rental income at all (at least until the fixed-up units can be rented). 

Losses would pile up — and, plausibly, spark the kind of abandonment the city saw in the 1970s.

Should supermarkets to be required maintain stores if they run in the red? Drug stores? Banks?

It’s a small step from being required to operate at a loss to a municipal takeover — and taxpayer subsidy. 

That’s called public housing — and the kind we have now operates at a $34 million annual budget deficit and faces an estimated $80 billion in deferred-maintenance bills.

The city’s already taking a small step along this road, offering grants to building owners to make repairs for which they can no longer raise the rent.

These are costs the private market can cover if it’s allowed to operate; instead, city taxpayers will have to pay.

Meanwhile, the 2019 law is hurting rent-stabilized apartments beyond the “warehousing” of some.

The most recent Census Bureau Housing and Vacancy Survey of city apartments found 33% of rent-regulated units have rodents, compared to just 18% of market-rate units, and three times as many have mold. 

Twice as many have toilet and elevator breakdowns.

The math here is simple: When you can’t raise the rent if your costs go up, you’re forced to do what it takes to keep costs down.

The post Want To End Apartment Warehousing? Ease Up On Rent-Control Laws appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Submit questions to Hannah.Mayhew@aei.org or on Twitter with #Poverty@AEI.

If you are unable to attend, we welcome you to watch the event live on this page. After the event concludes, a full video will be posted within 24 hours.

The post Measuring Poverty: The New Census Estimates and the Future of Poverty Measurement appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The following are key takeaways from DOL’s nine-page report:

1. PUA had a staggering 35.9 percent improper payment rate.

PUA’s nearly 36 percent improper payment rate includes 17.0 percent of PUA payments known to be overpaid, along with 17.4 percent that “could not be determined as valid” including because “proper documentation was not collected or retained to back up the payments.” Almost two years after PUA ended, it is deeply troubling that “there is insufficient evidence” to “determine the validity” of over one in six PUA payments.

2. The report provides only improper payment rates, and no new data on the massive number of individuals affected and taxpayer dollars lost.

Key details about PUA are still unknown, and the report is notably silent on the number of individuals associated with improper payments. But we know PUA peaked at an apparent 15.2 million recipients in August 2020. (The number of recipients is “apparent” because many claims were fraudulent, among other reasons.) With that caveat, DOL’s reported 35.9 percent improper payment rate suggests 5.4 million individuals were paid improperly then—or more than the combined populations of Chicago and Houston. That includes nearly 2.6 million who received overpayments and another 2.6 million whose eligibility cannot be confirmed. Many were victims of identity theft, with criminals using their credentials to fraudulently obtain benefits. Even these massive figures are only partial, since they reflect improper payments at one point in time, and not throughout the program’s operation.

The report also fails to spell out the value of the resulting improper payments. DOL separately reports that PUA has paid $133.7 billion in benefits. The combined 34 percent of PUA directed to overpayments or payments lacking documentation indicates some $46 billion in improper payments due to those causes. However, that would significantly understate total losses for taxpayers due to PUA misspending, since PUA recipients also received federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (PUC) supplements. PUC added $600 (and later $300) per week to PUA checks, suggesting that total PUA-related misspending—that is, including PUC supplements—is likely far above that $46 billion estimate.

3. The high improper payment rates likely understate misspending in the program’s critical early months.

As the report notes, PUA claims—and likely improper payments—fell sharply after December 2020 reforms required identity and employment verification. Therefore, it is likely that, during the program’s critical early months of operation, PUA improper payment rates were higher than the 35.9 percent average the report finds across the entire program, which operated until September 2021. That is consistent with a September 2022 report from the DOL Inspector General, which found a combined 42 percent improper payment rate for PUA and PUC during those programs’ first six months of operation in four states.

4. DOL tries to deflect blame for PUA misspending on “the previous administration.”

The report notes that “during the previous administration, state UI systems were overwhelmed by record numbers of claims amidst an unprecedented increase in unemployment triggered by the public health crisis.” The report also refers several times to PUA misspending “in 2020” or during “the first nine months” of the program—similarly suggesting the Trump administration was to blame. While most PUA spending and improper payments indeed occurred in 2020, the report notably fails to identify the actors most responsible for the program’s serious flaws—Democrats in Congress who created it.

In mid-March 2020, senior Senate Democrats including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the “Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Act,” which proposed creating the PUA program. That legislation was included almost verbatim in the CARES Act enacted a few weeks later. Schumer hailed what he termed the new “UI on steroids,” including the PUA program he rightly said he “conceived.” Key program flaws, such as allowing claimants to self-certify their eligibility and not requiring identity and work verification, were recognized almost immediately. Senior Republicans proposed needed reforms in July 2020, yet Congress failed to act until December 2020.

As its release deep in Congress’ August recess suggests, this report indicates significant defensiveness over the extraordinary failings of the PUA program. That shouldn’t surprise, given the program’s central—and still only partially understood—role in the greatest theft of tax dollars in American history.

The post Labor Department Report Finds Pandemic Unemployment Program Had a Staggering 36 Percent Improper Payment Rate appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

This may be an individual act of generosity but it suggests a plan much better than a tent city on Randalls Island playing fields or the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center parking lot. Better, too, than the just-announced state plan to devote $25 million to pay the rent on individual homes for asylum-seekers. The city’s 335 public housing projects have room, the Housing Authority desperately needs revenue for an $80 billion repair and renovation backlog, and poor tenants who sublet bedrooms could use the money to pay the rent, the collection of which has been lagging since the pandemic.

NYCHA has plenty of room — on empty land it already owns. As a result of its so-called “towers in the park” architecture, the Authority owns no less than 2,400 acres of open green space. Originally conceived as “campuses” of green, too many of these areas have become desolate and dangerous. As one architectural assessment has found: “NYCHA is an urban landbank . . .yet 88% of open space sits behind fences and is inaccessible for resident use. Forty percent of the city’s playgrounds are housed on NYCHA campuses but go mostly untouched because of damage incurred by unintended adult use.”

These are potential sites for modestly-sized tent cities which could have the collateral benefit of injecting lively activity into the projects. What’s more, the city could pay the financially-struggling Housing Authority for the use of the land — rather than paying the Roosevelt Hotel $365 a night for rooms or churches $65 a night for floor space.

But as the example of Camille Napoleon suggests, individual public housing tenants may be willing to take in migrants into NYCHA apartments. Hers may be simply be an admirable charitable act, to be sure. But the city, inspired by her example, might pay NYCHA tenants with empty bedrooms to take in migrants. According to HUD data, 32% of New York public housing tenants are “overhoused.” That’s the technical term for tenants with empty bedrooms and translates into around 16,000 units with unused

Nor is NYCHA New York’s only public housing with room. HUD reports that statewide — including Yonkers, Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo — 29% of public housing tenants are overhoused. That means that 53,000 public housing apartments have empty bedrooms.

No tenant should be forced, of course, to take in a stranger. But many would likely be willing to rent out rooms at $65 a night or more. Average income per person in NYCHA is just $10,000. Taking in lodgers is a time-honored way for low-income households to increase their income. What’s more, the migrants could help NYCHA tenants, many of whom are elderly, with household chores or grocery-shopping; many NYCHA projects are distant from supermarkets.

It would also help them simply pay their rent — which has become a big problem for NYCHA. As the Citizens Budget Commission has told the City Council, “NYCHA’s rent collection rate, which was as high as 95% as 2016, declined from 88% in February 2020 to 70% by January 2022. As a result of the falling collection rate, NYCHA’s rental income was 12%, or $119 million, below expectations in 2021.” Greater rent collection would help offset the $276 million in yearly operating subsidy the city pays NYCHA — whose operating costs per unit far exceed its income. (Of course, NYCHA should also be trying much harder to lower its costs, inflated by union-dictated contracts.)

This is a chance to solve two crises at once. Instead of paying hotels and churches to let migrants sleep there, the city should pay NYCHA or its tenants. In that way, it would effectively be paying itself. There’s no doubt the Housing Authority needs the money.

Willing public housing residents would have to be granted legal permission to do what a great many already do non-legally: sublet rooms. Asylum-seekers get access to expedited work permits, as the mayor is helpfully suggesting. Wilfred Moreno, staying in Camille Napoleon’s apartment, says he wants to work as a truck driver or mechanic.

The migrant crisis demands imaginative solutions. So, too, does the public housing crisis. Let’s address both at the same time.

The post Solve Two Crises at Once: Put Migrants in NYCHA appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The story is about a pregnant woman, Gia, whose two children are in the foster care system. It begins once her kids, who look to be around 6 or 7 years old, have already been in state custody for several months. She is trying to “work her case plan” in order to be reunified with them. 

We follow Gia as she tries to hold her life together. She is working at a photography studio in a mall, trying to pay her own bills as well as the child support she needs to pay the state while her kids are in foster care. Her cellphone is always about to die. Her car is on its last legs. She is trying to prepare for the new baby, buying a crib and some clothes, but she needs to get an advance from her boss. She has to submit to regular drug tests and attend classes on parenting and group therapy sessions where everyone talks about the trauma they’ve experienced that brought them there. She is only allowed one hour a week of supervised visitation with her children. 

What we never find out, though, is what brought Gia to this point. The drug tests suggest that she had a drug problem. She mentions that if the authorities ever found out what her sister did for a living she wouldn’t ever get her kids back. We don’t know anything about the father of her children or the father of her baby. This man — or these men — never make an appearance in the movie. 

Like many of the stories told in the media today, the reader hears the story from the mother’s point of view, but the agency (for privacy reasons) is not allowed to respond. And the children are never interviewed either. 

What is the effect of skipping over the story of how these kids came to be removed from their mother’s care? It is that our sympathies come to lie entirely with Gia.

With one exception — when she does use drugs while pregnant — the viewers could easily assume that this state action was a big mistake, another example of child protective services needlessly intervening in the lives of poor people. Indeed, Gia’s friend tells her that her whole life “they have tried to take our culture. They try to take our homes. Try to take our freedom. And you know they’ll try to take our babies, too.”

This narrative plays out throughout the film, which ends with a social worker trying to persuade Gia to give her baby up for adoption voluntarily before the baby is taken into foster care. It is the narrative that is popular today in academia and journalism and politics.

But it is a lot easier to buy into this narrative if you have no idea what preceded the children being removed from Gia’s care.

That is not to say there are no mistakes or that every child in foster care cannot be at home with his or her parents. But the events of this story, and many others, are told selectively.

In the movie, one young man talks about how he was taken into foster care as a boy and explains that he doesn’t blame his mother for what happened. This is hardly an uncommon reaction among former foster youth. Many of them truly believe that their parents could have cared for them. And they were desperate to return home to their families. But we also know that children are not simply taken from their parents because of poverty. The idea that neglect is just another word for poverty is belied by the research.

A recent study of almost 300 case files in California, for instance, found that “nearly all investigations of physical neglect (99%) included concerns related to substance use, domestic violence, mental illness, co-reported abuse or an additional neglect allegation (i.e., abandonment).” Neglect is responsible for many more child maltreatment fatalities than abuse.

“Earth Mama,” which premiered at Sundance, has gotten rave reviews from critics, including at The New York Times, which notes, “By focusing instead on Gia’s existential reality — her habits, the pleasure she gets from her job, the awkwardness of her gait — Leaf humanizes her. It’s very moving, and adamantly political.” The political viewpoint is one which is shared by many, and it is easy to support because we will never know the full story.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Deseret News contributor and the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives,” among other books.

The post What ‘Earth Mama’ Doesn’t Tell Us About Foster Care appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

On Monday, US Attorney Damien Williams warned that he may shut down the city’s “safe injection sites,” where illegal hard drugs are used under medical supervision. 

That same day, a state Supreme Court judge halted the issuance of new pot dispensary licenses, after finding that giving first preference to ex-drug dealers violated state law aimed at helping veterans.

It’s the perfect time for a different approach: drug-use prevention.

And New York already has a model it can follow: Its successful tobacco-control efforts. 

Like pot, tobacco is legal but unhealthy.

But, in contrast to the cannabis rollout, which the state has hoped would lead to a sales-tax windfall, Albany does not urge New Yorkers to take up smoking to feed the state budget through the cigarette excise tax, scheduled to go up to $5.35 per pack Sept. 1.

Instead, the Department of Health’s Tobacco Control Program, funded by the court-ordered national tobacco settlement, lists clearly its highest priority: “Prevent initiation of tobacco and e-cigarette use by youth and young adults.”

It does this via paid media campaigns strategically placed on television, social media, radio, billboards and in print throughout the state.

There are heart-wrenching TV spots featuring dying smokers gasping for breath, urging those watching never to start.

They’re not only emotional; they’re effective, per a 2017 study published in the journal Public Health Management Practices, which found sustained media campaigns can contribute to lowering long-run smoking rates by up to 14%.

In sharp contrast, neither the Office of Cannabis Control Board nor its sister agency, the Office of Addiction Services and Support, which focuses on the hard-drug epidemic, show any serious interest in preventing drug use.

Those who doubt even pot’s potential harm should consult the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which describes five major categories of potential ill effects from marijuana use, including social anxiety, depression, suicide and schizophrenia.

This is no small matter in light of the latest Gallup survey finding 17% of Americans regularly smoke pot.

Yet the state OCM chooses not to draw attention to health matters; instead, on its website it guides users to where they can find legal dispensaries.

Its discussion of health effects, when you can locate it, is limited to “marijuana use disorder” — which cautions against smoking too much. 

There’s no discussion at all that cannabis is a potentially dangerous drug or that one might be better off avoiding it altogether.

There’s far more focus on the potential “social equity” of granting dispensary licensees to former illegal drug dealers — the priority just halted by the courts.

The Office of Addiction Services is similarly pursuing an acceptance, not prevention, approach to the deadly epidemic of hard-drug (fentanyl) use and overdose, which took the lives of more than 3,000 New Yorkers last year.

But the OAS takes the view that the wave of drug use can only be managed, not reversed.

Its website emphasizes “free harm reduction supplies” — nalaxone (to reverse overdose effects) and “test strips” to help users ensure their streets drugs are not impure or too strong.

This is the philosophy of the East Harlem and Washington Heights safe injection sites — opposed by law-abiding neighbors — that the US attorney may close.

Indeed, “harm reduction” is Priority No. 1 for programs funded by a $2.6 billion windfall from the national “opioid settlement.”

And the state wants to spend $27.7 million of a future settlement on methadone-type treatment for addicts and ensuring access to “harm reduction” sites, where addicts can shoot up under nurse supervision — but just $6.3 million on prevention, mainly counseling programs.

What’s missing here is any concerted, mass-media high-profile drug-use-prevention campaign akin to the effort of the Tobacco Control Program.

Even those prevention programs the OAS supports are worrisome; its education and community programs aim to “delay the initiation of substance use” and “prevent escalation of substance misuse.” 

Don’t start too young and shoot up carefully, in other words.

New York is home to the world’s most creative ad industry.

The efforts to combat terrorism spawned the smart, and useful, “if you see something, say something” slogan. 

The industry should be called upon to develop an effective message to deter drug use, not just to manage its effects or cheerlead legal availability.

Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign may have been simplistic — but it had the virtue of being right.

The post Why Does NY Campaign to Stop Smoking but Not Illicit Drug Use? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Research from our AEI colleagues Kevin Corinth and Bruce Meyer found that removing the credit’s phase in permanently could have caused up to 1.5 million workers to leave the workforce. Despite the likely employment reductions, some policymakers have lamented the end of the pandemic-era CTC, arguing that the current CTC unfairly withholds the full amount from the poorest Americans. They also suggest that concerns over negative employment effects are misplaced because the overwhelming majority of CTC recipients already work. At a recent Senate Finance Committee Hearing (at which one of us testified), a proponent of the CTC Sen. Michael Bennet cited statistics claiming that nearly 80 percent of those affected by the expiration of the expanded CTC were already working. He went on to claim that many of the parents no longer receiving the full benefit “work two and three jobs in many cases.”

After crunching the numbers ourselves, we found these claims to be misleading. Firstly, there are large employment differences between those who are ineligible for the full CTC because they do not have enough income tax liability (typically households with income below $30,000-35,000) and those who receive the full credit because they do. Figure 1 shows the employment rates of potentially-eligible parents whose income is below the full CTC income threshold for their household size and tax filing status.

Nearly all parents with household income high enough to give them the full CTC were employed (red bars), while just over half of those ineligible for the full CTC worked (blue bars). The red bars are below 100 percent because it includes all adults whose household incomes are above the income threshold – including non-working spouses. Additionally, some full-CTC recipients may not be currently working, but worked in the past, resulting in high enough income to qualify for the full CTC.

More importantly, however, parents with incomes below the full CTC income threshold had much lower employment levels. Although over half worked, there remained a nearly 30 percentage-point employment gap between parents whose incomes were high enough for the full CTC and those with incomes too low to receive the full amount, suggesting an opportunity to increase employment rates.

Parents in households with incomes below the full-CTC threshold were also much less likely to work full-time (Figure 2). For example, less than 40 percent of head of household tax filers with income below the full CTC threshold had a full-time worker in the household, compared to over 80 percent of households with enough income to receive the full credit. This suggests that increasing work hours also offers an opportunity for families to receive the full CTC.  

We also checked the claim that many parents ineligible for the full CTC worked multiple jobs. As shown in Figure 3, parents working multiple jobs is extremely rare no matter the family income, but especially uncommon among families with income below the full-CTC income threshold. The belief that many families work two or three jobs but still do not have enough income to qualify for the full CTC is not supported by the data.

Rather than the current CTC denying the full amount to working families unfairly, our analysis suggests that many families below the full-CTC income threshold could work more. This raises questions about the work disincentives at play in other safety net programs. Many low-income families receive other government benefits, such as SNAP and housing assistance, which counteract the work incentives of the CTC. The question remains how much the employment disincentives of these other safety net programs discourage families from working more and therefore receiving the full CTC.  

Contrary to Sen. Bennet’s claim that “no matter how hard [these low-income families] work, they cannot lift their children out of poverty,” these data show that there is opportunity for families who do not receive the full CTC to work more and experience the full benefit.

The post The CTC Work Incentive Works appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Make no mistake: This was not a protest on the part of teenagers drawn to 14th Street by Kai Cenat, an online “influencer” with millions of followers, including thousands eager for free PlayStations he used to lure them to demonstrate his importance.

(He faces incitement to riot charges.)

But as dozens in the crowd were being arrested for vandalism, they realized they had a useful line of defense: invoking the movement predicated on police mistreatment of minority youth.

The NYPD was not intimidated into turning a blind eye toward the destruction of food carts and cars — not this time around.

But the chant pulled up the curtain on what has long been the dirty secret of mass protests, from the Watts riots to the rampages accompanying the “protests” of the police homicides of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

There’s always been a significant part of the crowd that is, in Harvard social scientist Edward Banfield’s legendary phrase, “rioting for fun and profit.”

Banfield, in his landmark 1970 book “The Unheavenly City,” usefully delineated mass actions.

“Demonstrations” linked clearly to a cause are not riots — and Banfield defended them.

So, too, did he exhibit sympathy for the “outburst of righteous indignation” a specific incident sparked by concern about its “wrongfulness going unpunished.”

The George Floyd-linked actions were stirred by such concerns, at least at first.

But Banfield also had a distinct diagnosis of events such as those in Union Square and a similar unruly pop-up last week in downtown Chicago: rampages. “Young men are naturally restless, in search of excitement, thrills, ‘action,’” he wrote.

The young male “wants dramatic reassurance that he ‘can make things happen’ and breaking the law is one of the few actions that immediately and demonstrably makes things happen.”

Rioting “is a way of making them happen on a wholesale scale.”

The link, then, between Union Square vandalism and gang membership and violence is clear.

Such rampages, observed Banfield, “occur today not only in the slums but elsewhere” — and need not have any link to race or racial justice.

Miami authorities who must gird each year for drunken spring-break revelers’ violence can vouch for Banfield’s analysis.

When police seek to arrest those “committing acts of vandalism and harassing the police and an officer has to arrest a drunk disturbing the peace, the youngster will often set upon the policemen and a major riot looms before reinforcements can be called.”

New York is fortunate the NYPD interrupted just that scenario by making a Level 4 call for 1,000 police to swarm Union Square. But we’ve seen it go the other way too many times.

These rampages can also blur into a “foray for pillage,” Banfield wrote.

“Here the motive is theft, and here also boys and young adults of the lower class are the principal offenders. Stealing is ordinarily most conveniently done in private, of course, but when disasters — fires, floods, power failures — interrupt law enforcement it may be done as well or better in public.”

That’s exactly what happened as the 2020 George Floyd protests spun out of control — and some 450 New York businesses were damaged or destroyed.

In Floyd’s home city, Minneapolis, minority business owners, many law-abiding immigrants, lost all they’d worked for in a flash (mob).

We have a serious problem distinguishing between riots and legitimate protest — as made clear when Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson last week objected to Michigan Avenue rampagers being characterized as a “mob” — which is what it was.

(By the way, what do all those kids do when they’re not on their phones waiting to join the next flash mob?)

Too often, legitimate protests provide pretext and cover for riots aimed at fun or profit.

That’s exactly why those stragglers around Union Square fell back on the Black Lives Matter chant — to excuse their behavior. But the effort was late and transparent.

During the George Floyd protests, however, it worked — to the point that the NYPD, in trying to curtail violence and property damage those marches enabled and devolved into, became the legal villain.

The city settled a lawsuit, paying $13 million to those whose rights the NYPD allegedly violated — as if it could be clear in the moment who was protester and who the rioter.

We are far too quick to ascribe a political motive to indefensible riots.

Let’s be clear: A very thin line separates Kai Cenat from Al Sharpton. The influence of both has been evident on New York’s streets.

The post Union Square Melee Proves Riots Have Little to Do with Real Political Grievances appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

But if change is truly going to come to public media (the preferred term), it will require a far less ham-handed approach than that of the House. The Trump administration tried to end CPB funding — and the system, still citing Big Bird (which has flown to HBO Max), rallied bipartisan support. Conservatives are not wrong to seek to correct the left-leaning and geographic biases of what purports to be a national system but disproportionately draws audiences in politically blue enclaves. The Pew Research Foundation reports that no less than 87% of the NPR audience identifies as Democratic or leaning-Democratic. But changing the content bias in a system with national reach and public funding will require revisiting — and rewriting — its original authorizing legislation, essentially unchanged since its original passage in 1967. If public media supporters were open-minded, they’d welcome such change.

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, there were still just three television networks in the United States — no Netflix, no Amazon Prime, no Apple TV. That was before streaming, podcasts, even Fox or HBO. Government, per the law, was needed to ensure “creative risk” would be taken in what was viewed as the vast wasteland of television and radio. It is understatement, indeed, to say that the need for such a provision has been overtaken by events. Public broadcasting today clings to its funding on the basis of such rationales as providing for civil defense warnings, along with that of ensuring, as per the law, over-the-air broadcasting access in an era of broadband. Yet it has developed a strong interest group network that blocks defunding. The House vote was nothing but symbolic. Those put off by the system must dig deeper.

As I’ve written in an  American Enterprise Institute paper, the single most important change would be that of letting the 1,500 public radio and TV stations keep funds the law now requires them to send to NPR or PBS — and instead, retain it for themselves, for such purposes as news coverage of their own communities. NPR boasts that it receives little direct federal funding — but the law requires local stations to devote 23% of their own federal funding “solely to be used for acquiring or producing programming that is to be distributed nationally and is designed to serve the needs of a national audience.” NPR’s federal funding is indirect, but it’s guaranteed.

Letting local stations retain their funds would allow them to gather  local news — and to cover the sorts of stories that NPR might overlook in favor of those also found on the front page of major newspapers such as the New York Times. Story selection — a disproportionate focus on progressive causes de jour — is the core reason why NPR alienates conservatives: police shootings rather than minority crime victims, or gender affirmation rather than the decline in marriage. Both have their place — but good journalism would not be either/or. It should find out what’s going on across the country and let listeners know, rather than reinforcing their interests and biases. NPR does carry locally-based stories but they are largely local angles on national stories: for example, how a heat wave reflects global warming, how any issue relates to race and gender.

To allow different types of stories to bubble up from regional stations, they should be made available without cost to NPR’s national news desks — and All Things Considered and Morning Edition should be free of charge to local stations, if they choose to run them. High levels of station financial dues should be dropped. Local journalism is endangered and a robust, truly local public radio system could help — especially because the stations themselves are endangered by the fact that listeners can now access national programming through their smartphones. Local license-holders will have to produce original content or have no reason to exist. They face a market test: To survive, they must raise funds from their communities to augment those from Washington. That contrasts with the CPB-funded PBS NewsHour — too often a dishwater-dull series of talking heads whose aged audience is probably less than a million. 

Successful public radio stations around the country — in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Portland — have discovered that news and public affairs draw local support. But, according to Pew Research, the trend toward local journalism is downward. Per Pew: “Program and production expenses for the 129 news-oriented local public radio licensees was $480.2 million in 2021, compared with $539.4 million in 2020. … [A] decrease in these kinds of expenditures indicates that the stations are directing fewer dollars toward the creation of news content.” 

I know I’m proposing a policy bank-shot here. The hope is that local journalism will stay away from knee-jerk progressivism and, in turn, improve public radio news. But even just holding hearings on bringing the Public Broadcasting Act up-to-date would be useful. The law requires 70% of federal funds to go to television — while NPR, an afterthought in 1967, has proven to draw large audiences. Public media’s advocates, not just its opponents, should be open to change.  The fact that a “national” system has no major studios below the Mason-Dixon line should be an embarrassment. The fact that it has become a partisan lighting rod does not reflect a failure of conservatives to appreciate its virtues, but a failure of the system to serve a broad cross-section of America.

The post The Right Way to Fix Public Broadcasting appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

But his targeting of private buildings owners with $10,000 a month fines for scaffolding that stays up for more than 90 days without building repairs proceeding also suggests selective prosecution. 

That’s because no private building owner has more sidewalk sheds than the city’s Housing Authority.

“Almost every development has them,” observes Danny Barber, the head of NYCHA’s Council of Presidents, whose members represent tenants from each borough. “Some more than others. We all complain about it.” 

For his part, Barber, a near life-long resident of the Andrew Jackson Houses in the Bronx, dates the scaffolding there to at least September of 2013.

“It’s a degrading thing to live with,” he says.

The extent of the NYCHA scaffolding is impressive; their snaking length is measured in miles not feet, their time standing in years, not months.

NYCHA, reported here for the first time, has 137,022 linear feet of sidewalk sheds — 26 miles — installed in 114 of its developments.

That’s 6% of the 2 million linear feet of all sheds citywide.

NYCHA estimates that sheds have been up for up to 8 years — although residents like Danny Barber report much longer duration. 

In its most recent (2023) “physical needs assessment”, the Authority estimates that its buildings need no less than $3.2 billion in “façade repairs” in order to comply with Local Law 11. 

That’s the law that calls for façade inspections to be made at least every five years and repairs to be made to unsafe buildings over six stories high — at the risk of fines and imprisonment. 

Keep in mind that NYCHA properties are not midtown commercial buildings. 

They are residential apartment complexes whose entrance ways are blocked by the scaffolding, where, as Barber puts it, “the lighting is not the best.”

Erected to protect residents from falling debris when building inspections identify the need for repairs to brick facades, for instance, they remain up indefinitely when repairs do not occur — no unusual occurrence for a public housing system with an estimated $80 billion renovation backlog.

They are worse than unsightly. 

Their dark spaces shield criminal activity and block the scrutiny of the security cameras NYCHA has installed at great expense.

As the NYPD’s former Chief of Department Carlos Gomez put it during his tenure as department’s Chief of Housing, they are threat to the “physical security” of public housing tenants, a “refuge for criminal activity” and “places to store contraband.” 

They contribute, in other words, to the disproportionate violent crime that occurs in and around the projects by providing safe spaces for criminal, not law-abiding residents. 

It’s not as if this is a new problem.

In September of 2014, then Mayor Bill de Blasio, in a news conference with Al Sharpton at the Lincoln Houses in East Harlem (one of seven dilapidated projects named for US Presidents), pledged with no small fanfare that taking down the miles of sheds there was the first step toward removing “all of the sheds from past projects” over the course of the next year.  

“They’re a part of the landscape and a really bad part of the landscape,” he said, “and they’re being removed.”. He called doing so “an order from the top”.

Given that history, It’s  easy to understand why public housing  tenants are cynical about political promises. 

So don’t expect the Department of Buildings, now targeting commercial property owners, to start levying those $10,000 fines on NYCHA, as well-deserved as they might be.

They’d only make matters worse by cutting into the Authority’s budget.

Yes, Catch-22 is what one finds when the city is both inspector and owner of buildings. 

NYCHA today makes no pretense that it can rapidly remove all its scaffolding;  it reports that it’s seeking $323 million in state funding for façade repairs which — if obtained — would allow it to remove some 39,515 linear week of sheds, a bit more than a quarter of the total — IF the funds come through and IF NYCHA can spend them effectively. It would be at least a decent down payment.

To make all this even worse, the NYCHA sheds are not only ugly and dangerous — they continue to be necessary.

At the Jackson Houses alone, in the past three months, bricks from building facades have fallen, sparking those below only because of striking the ugly green boxes.

In May, bricks fell from the 15^th floor of the building at 3505 Park Avenue, a building NYCHA inspectors had designated as unsafe eight years earlier, in 2016.

Try getting away with that if you own a private apartment or office building. 

 “I’ve had mixed feelings about the sheds after that,” says Danny Barber. NYCHA itself concedes the point. Says interim CEO Lisa Bova-Hyatt: “The safety of our residents is our top priority”, as she put it at the Adams’ event announcing the new “get sheds down” initiative.

In other words, the NYCHA scaffolding problem is just another symptom of the vast maintenance and repair problems the Authority has not found a way to address — other than blaming “federal disinvestment,” as Bova-Hyatt says. 

But money alone cannot address the dysfunction that has led the Authority to fall under the scrutiny of a federal monitor. NYCHA and City Hall emphasize the potential of the new PACT (Permanent Affordability Commitment Together) program, which enables private investment in public housing renovation — but it’s been slow to get started and contains any number of poison pills such as costly union labor requirements and resident approval and employment.

The Adams administration does suggest a good interim ameliorative: See-through netting to replace scaffolding, an approach it says applies to NYCHA as well as commercial buildings.

Let’s see whether it will be any more effective than its predecessors in implementing such promises, when it comes to public housing.

It effectively concedes that any progress will be slow, by noting that NYCHA will also consider “more aesthetically pleasing” versions of the sheds.

In the meantime, the Adams administration should be mindful of the old adage about those in glass houses and stones — or, in this case, falling bricks.

The post 26 Miles of Scaffolding Blights NYC’s Public Housing, Some Up for 10 Years appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

WFI is now at the stage of producing papers and events on how best to reform and enhance the nation’s workforce development programs. The latest of these papers is from two senior workforce researchers, Kenneth Troske of the University of Kentucky and Peter Mueser of the University of Missouri. Their WFI paper examines the performance of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), the law that funds and governs federal workforce development programs. The authors find that some WIOA programs, like job counseling, can and do benefit participants and the economy, while others have modest returns due to decades of declining investment, growing administrative burdens, and lack of integration across programs.

Mueser and Troske show how inflation-adjusted WIOA funding has dropped 90% from its 1970s peak. Reductions in real funding levels, however, have accompanied by growing program complexity and higher administrative burdens. This leads to a perverse situation in which low funding helps undermine effectiveness while administrative costs consume a larger portion of the program spending creating a downward spiral declining resources and underperformance. This is all happening while the technology-driven need for retraining and reemployment services continues to rise, squeezing nation’s job training and employment support system at both ends.

So, how do we fix this? Troske and Mueser provide a range of potential fixes that would help address deficiencies and inefficiencies in the WIOA system that policymakers in Congress and the Biden Administration should study closely. Their recommendations include:

• Reducing preliminary eligibility paperwork at local workforce development boards to fast-track onboarding
• Expanding the authority of workforce development boards to require co-location of programs like TANF and vocational rehabilitation with American Job Centers and to share administrative costs to promote efficiency and easy of participant use
• Changing divisions between adult and dislocated workers to reflect more accurately the divide between those merely looking to upskill for new employment and those looking for more intensive services, including housing, support for criminal justice-involved workers, and less educated and lower skilled workers.

In my response to Troske and Mueser, I argue these and other changes they recommend while important and necessary, are unlikely to provide the depth of innovation the broader WIOA job and career training system require to make significant performance improvements. In parallel to their reforms, I recommend that governors seek broad flexibility under Section 1115 of the Social Security Act to restructure their workforce systems to make them more responsive to the needs and priorities of the states while reducing the administrative burdens that are consuming WIOA from the inside.

This recommendation would build on the experience of the State of Utah over the past 30 years in utilizing Section 1115 waiver authority to integrate and streamline workforce and human and social services. I argue states should be able to submit reorganization plans (as Utah did) for federal approval along with strategies for evaluating the success of their efforts and, in return, waive out of many of the regulatory and administrative constraints that contribute to rising administrative costs and reduced performance. The U.S. Department of Labor would also coordinate training and technical assistance to bring the best of our knowledge and practice to bear on the challenges participating states are seeking to address. States that that demonstrate success under waivers would be eligible to receive additional federal resources to expand and accelerate progress. Congress could use these successful strategies to help inform additional rounds of WIOA reform that would help raise national program performance.

Implementing smart reforms frees local leaders and frontline workers to exercise creativity on par with the private economy, removing the “results-funding” catch-22 that plagues workforce programs. Updating workforce policies for the 21st century will help bolster American human capital and economic competitiveness while expanding opportunity for workers. With vision and commitment, a more agile, entrepreneurial, and successful workforce system can help unlock the full talents of our people.

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The destruction of Greenwood, unfortunately, was not an unusual fate for historic black communities in the U.S. While the Greenwood massacre stands out for the horrific means and scale of its destruction, dozens of similar communities were demolished, legally, by local governments through use of a federal urban-renewal “slum-clearance” program. These actions, no less than the events of the Greenwood riot, robbed black Americans of wealth, businesses, and civil society institutions. These lost neighborhoods—the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Mill Creek Valley in St. Louis, Kenyon-Barr in Cincinnati, Black Bottom in Detroit, Bronzeville in Chicago, West Ninth Street in Little Rock, 18th and Vine in Kansas City, the Fillmore District in San Francisco—hummed and thrived until planners decided that they were slums that had to be altered, cleared entirely or in part, or replaced (most often) with public housing projects or highways.

These federal urban-renewal funds—authorized by the federal Housing Act of 1949—were used on a truly massive scale. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that “approved projects had cleared (or intended to clear) over 400,000 housing units, forcing the relocation of over 300,000 families, just over half of whom were nonwhite” (emphasis added). “The proposed clearance areas included nearly 57,000 total acres (90 square miles), of which about 35 percent was proposed for residential redevelopment, 27 percent for streets and public rights-of-way, 15 percent for industrial use, 13 percent for commercial use, and 11 percent for public or ‘semi-public’ use.”

Progressives such as Eleanor Roosevelt, an early champion of public housing, believed that, by constructing blacks-only public housing such as the Brewster Homes in Detroit, whose ceremonial opening she attended, they were doing blacks a favor by including them in these programs. Many then viewed public housing as desirable quarters. As Edward Banfield and Martin Meyerson wrote in their landmark book about Chicago public housing, Politics, Planning and the Public Interest, “The leaders of the race relations organizations wanted Negroes to have their fair share of public housing.”

But as the nature of slum clearance became clear, black thought leaders came to oppose such projects. A notable example was the clearance of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, which would, ironically, gain fame in absentia as the setting for playwright August Wilson’s greatest plays, such as Fences and Jitney and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. (Wilson’s home is preserved today, but the neighborhood is gone). As Brian Robick wrote in his Carnegie-Mellon dissertation, “Initially, the prospect of improvement won the approval of some of the neighborhood’s elites, but these projects, all intended for a primarily white audience that lived beyond the borders of the Hill, coupled with an inadequate relocation effort, quickly ignited grassroots resistance. Neighborhood activists objected to renewal plans and to official definitions of Hill District blight, which implicated not only buildings but also the African American population that lived, worked, and shopped in them, as factors contributing to urban decline” (emphasis added). In other words, the Hill was “blighted” because it was black.

Paul Jones, a columnist for the city’s black newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier, got to the heart of the matter in a way that could be applied to slum clearance generally: “What about the churches, schools, business neighborhood associations, civic groups? All these are part of the whole problem of uprooting the lives of many people, whose patterns of living have been labeled, ‘not desirable, not acceptable, not endurable.’” Without doubt, the Hill was rich in these uncounted ways, boasting a radio station, a newspaper, and an array of jazz clubs, including the legendary Crawford Grill, and a stadium for the Negro League’s Pittsburgh Crawfords. (Crawford was a smaller neighborhood within the Hill.)

 In Cincinnati, planners set their sights on the Kenyon-Barr community. A 2017 photo essay in Cincinnati Magazine, in an issue entitled “Lost City,” would describe the demolished “slum” this way:

Since the 1920s, the West End—and Kenyon-Barr in particular—had been the heart of the Black community in Cincinnati. What remains of Kenyon-Barr today is 2,700 photographs in the Cincinnati Museum Center’s archives, a survey conducted prior to demolition. . . . The photos are, wittingly or not, heartbreaking, even haunting: people and potted plants filling residential windows, corner markets busy with shoppers, billboards and businesses, rowhouses upon rowhouses—a vivid street life, frozen in time address by address. . . . They are imbued with an ominous sense of what’s to come: the willful, wholesale demolition of a 400-acre neighborhood. And not just the structures but the community—the social, political, and cultural network—that filled them.

Substituting for all of this were the Laurel Homes and Lincoln Court public housing projects.

In Detroit, the Brewster Homes, later the Brewster–Douglass Housing Projects, would be built to replace the neighborhoods of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. Detroit historian Jamon Jordan estimates that, combined, those neighborhoods had hosted 350 black-owned businesses, as well as mutual aid organizations—self-organized community institutions to provide aid or advocacy for those in need—including the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Aged Colored Ladies, the Booker T. Washington Business Association, and an active branch of the Urban League, dedicated to helping new Southern migrants adjust to city life. The Reverend C. L. Franklin preached—and his daughter Aretha sang—at the New Bethel Baptist Church before it was torn down. Owner-occupancy of small two- and three-family homes was common.

Public housing by its nature—government-owned and managed, allowing no private ownership but only rentals, and excluding retail and commercial businesses—cannot foster this sort of spontaneous community of dispersed ownership. Urban renewal took no consideration of these factors. It was taken for granted in federal housing legislation that “slums” were to be judged only by their apparent and superficial physical condition and not by what their residents were crafting through their own efforts.

It is a profound irony that, only a relatively short time after their construction, many public-housing projects would face the wrecking ball themselves. The notorious Pruitt-Igoe high-rises in St. Louis imploded just two decades after opening to architectural acclaim. One can hope that the mixed-income townhouses and such that replaced them will fare better. But that won’t compensate black Americans for the loss of institutions and wealth—destroyed, in this case, not by racists mobs but by ostensibly high-minded progressives.

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Given the slipperiness of the concept, it is reasonable to ask whether we can measure social capital. In ongoing research with Kevin Corinth, we are exploring the development of individual-level social capital measures. However, research characterizing and quantifying the social capital of places already exists and paints a consistent picture: Social capital appears stronger (more valuable) in some places in America than others.

First, consider the Social Capital Index developed by the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the US Congress within Vice Chairman Mike Lee’s office. Figure 1 displays the state-level social capital values by decile. States shaded red and orange have the lowest levels of social capital, whereas states shaded green and blue have the highest levels of social capital.

Source: Social Capital Project, “The Geography of Social Capital,” Joint Economic Committee, April 2018, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/socialcapitalproject.

Generally speaking, the southeastern and southwestern United States have the lowest levels of social capital, whereas a continguous group of states from the Upper Midwest and Mountain West and another constituting northern New England have the highest levels. The index is comprised of seven subindexes. Importantly, states that thrive in any specific subdomain of associational life—including family unity, family interaction, community health, philanthropic health, institutional health, collective efficacy, and social support—tend to thrive in all subdomains.

Each of the five states in the lowest decile of social capital—Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, and Arizona—consistently rank below the median on each subindex,[iii] suggesting that each subindex captures related features of social capital. Similarly, the six states in the highest decile of social capital—Utah, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado—tend to rank above the median across subindexes.[iv] Of the 21 cross-state correlations among the seven subindexes, all but one are positive.

The JEC researchers also created a county-level Social Capital Index, based on four subindexes. Figure 2 displays the index values for each county, broken down by decile.

Source: Social Capital Project, “The Geography of Social Capital,” Joint Economic Committee, April 2018, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/socialcapitalproject.

Unsurprisingly, states that are lowest in social capital—including much of the Southeast and Southwest—are also home to the counties with the lowest levels of social capital. Only 14 percent of all the counties in the five states lowest in social capital (185 counties for which we have data) escape the bottom three deciles at the county level.[v] Although there are some high-social-capital counties in relatively low-social-capital states (such as in Georgia and Alabama), almost all the counties in the Southeast and Southwest rank among the lowest in social capital.

Most counties in high-social-capital states also tend to be at the top of the county rankings. In the top-decile states, only 16 percent of the counties fall outside the top three deciles at the county level. There are, of course, outliers in every region. But both the state and county Social Capital Index show that some regions in the United States are characterized by thriving communities and strong social ties, while others suffer from broken families and social detachment.

Reassuringly, the social capital patterns produced by the JEC measures recur in other state- and county-level social capital indicators. In his foundational book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam created a state measure based on 14 indicators. He took the indicators from data spanning 20 years, stretching from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. (The JEC measures were from data collected between 2010 and 2016.) The correlation between Putnam’s index and the JEC index is 0.81. Comparing Figure 3 (displaying Putnam’s measure) to Figure 1, it is clear that the two different measures rank the states similarly.

Source: Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), http://bowlingalone.com/?page_id=7.

The JEC county-level measures are similarly strongly correlated with other carefully constructed county-level measures. In two recent papers, Opportunity Insights measured three aspects of social capital. The indicator that it focused most on—economic connectedness, or the extent to which people with lower socioeconomic status have high-economic-status Facebook friends—is strongly correlated with the JEC measure across counties. (The correlation is 0.75.) Comparing Figure 4 (showing the Opportunity Insights economic connectedness measure) and Figure 2 makes clear the similar patterns the two measures produce.

Source: Raj Chetty et al., “Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility,” Nature 608, no. 7921 (2022): 108–21, https://socialcapital.org.

Data from a variety of sources that are collected in different decades, measuring different aspects of social capital, and combined in different ways tend to identify the same places that have borne the brunt of deteriorating associational life and the same places that appear to be thriving. This concurrence means that researchers can meaningfully characterize the social capital levels of different parts of the country and attempt to discern the causes of geographic variation in social capital and the consequences. Future research in this series will aim to understand what makes the state of social connections so vibrant in some places and what can be done to strengthen social capital in struggling areas.

[i] Tristan Claridge, “Current Definitions of Social Capital: Academic Definitions in 2019,” Institute for Social Capital, January 15, 2020, https://www.socialcapitalresearch.com/current-definitions-of-social-capital.

[ii] Scott Winship, “Social Capital: What Is It?,” Social Breakdown, April 28, 2023, https://www.aei.org/articles/social-capital-what-is-it.

[iii] The only exceptions are Nevada, which ranks 16th in philanthropic health, and New Mexico, which ranks 23rd in community health.

[iv] The only exceptions are Utah, which ranks 30th in institutional health, and Vermont, which ranks 40th in philanthropic health.

[v] Authors’ calculations using Joint Economic Committee Social Capital Project data.

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But the mayor’s just-announced 60-day limit for single adults in the city’s shelter system raises the obvious question: Where should they go next? 

There’s a short answer the city’s legion of case workers should provide: cities where housing vacancies are high and the unemployment rate is low.

If the Big Apple needs to copy Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and provide the bus ticket, we’d be doing all involved—cities and migrants—a favor.

It’s no secret New York faces a perennial housing vacancy shortage—mainly because of our own ill-considered policies (see stabilization, rent).

But that’s not true in, for instance, Albany, where, per the Census Bureau, 9.5% of rental units are vacant.

That’s low compared with metro Baltimore (12.5%), Birmingham (11.9%), Little Rock (11.2%) and metro Charleston (15.3%).

What’s more, all these cities have unemployment rates of 3.5% or less; Little Rock’s is just 2.3%.

High housing-vacancy rates should and do mean low rent costs.

In Albany, according to Apartments.com postings, one can find a three-bedroom apartment for $1,100, in Birmingham for $923 and in Detroit for $918.

All are a far cry from the $3,500 being asked for just a studio in Manhattan.

Gotham’s combination of sanctuary-city and right-to-shelter laws have made it a powerful magnet for migrants.

But cities such as Detroit—where an incredible one of every five homes stands vacant—are in desperate need of newcomers, to repair and revive the city.

Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg had it right in 2011 when he said immigration is “the only solution for these big, hollowed-out cities where industry has left and is never going to come back unless you get some people to move there.”

Bloomberg went so far as to suggest a federalist approach to immigration policy—let cities in need of labor set their own rules.

That likely wouldn’t pass constitutional muster, but some changes in the status of the migrants crowding the fabled Roosevelt Hotel and outer-borough motels would have to be worked out. 

No city would benefit from their arrival if they’re not permitted to work—on the books, contributing to Social Security and other struggling programs.

This need not mean granting amnesty for their illegal border-crossing, nor a glide path to citizenship.

Historically, agriculture depended on short-term “bracero” workers, many of whom would return to their countries of origin once the fruit was picked.

The same approach may not work with migrants in big cities—but work visas and “guest worker” status are better than crowding New York’s shelter system.

We don’t need the elusive comprehensive immigration reform to take such a step in the face of a crisis that demands action.

The potential for migrants to be welcomed and contribute even to unlikely locales has, ironically, been well-demonstrated by what as branded a stunt by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: flying border-crossers to tony Martha’s Vineyard.

Although many sent to the island moved on, some decided to stay; The New York Times reports a Venezuelan family found jobs in landscaping, painting and roofing and now rent their own home, four in a two-bedroom house, with bicycles as transportation.

Sharing bedrooms is a time-honored way for immigrants to make ends meet—and an obvious approach to housing affordability.

The advent of e-bikes makes more-distant jobs accessible.

What’s more, some of the Martha’s Vineyard migrants found homes elsewhere in other Massachusetts cities such as Lowell and Brockton, which have struggled since losing key industries.

Others headed to Provincetown, the tourist mecca where job openings for restaurant workers and retail employees are advertised right now.

It’s no secret Help Wanted signs are out all over America—nor that in the long run the nation needs more workers to support our entitlement programs for retired boomers.

The chaos on the southern border is no way to approach such problems—but nor can we act as if those crowding New York are going to self-deport.

We can make short-term accommodation while, one hopes, we take long-term steps to secure the border and give priority to those crossing legally.

It’s to his credit that Mayor Eric Adams has realized sheltering migrants without time limit is not an economically sustainable policy for a city facing a budget cliff.

But the time limit should be seen not as a sanction but as a key to opportunity—just somewhere else.

The post Adams’ Smart Migrant Move Could Help the City’s Overburdened Shelters—and Migrants Themselves appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The following highlights what GAO found:

1. The pandemic saw a large increase in government benefits fraud, and fraud is likely to be an ongoing challenge in future emergencies.

The COVID-19 pandemic saw an increase in the frequency and volume of identity-related fraud, particularly in the areas of unemployment insurance and assistance to small businesses, as well as sophisticated fraud schemes. These developments will likely continue to challenge future federal emergency assistance efforts. [Page 1]

2. Federal agencies reported over $500 billion in estimated improper payments during fiscal years 2021 and 2022, which omits some of the peak months of pandemic spending.

Federal agencies reported about $281 billion in estimated improper payments for fiscal year 2021 . . . — and about $247 billion for fiscal year 2022. [Page 3]

3. Most government programs at risk reported improper payment rates of 10 percent or more.

For fiscal year 2021, agencies reported estimated improper payment rates of 10 percent or greater for 26 risk-susceptible programs and activities, which accounted for about 87 percent of the government-wide total of reported estimated improper payments. For fiscal year 2022, agencies reported estimated improper payment rates of 10 percent or greater for 17 risk-susceptible programs and activities . . . [Page 29]

4. As with other recent official estimates, those improper payment figures are conservative estimates.

We have found that the federal government is unable to determine the full extent to which improper payments occur . . . [Page 4]

5. The legislative response to the pandemic bears some blame for rising fraud.

Legislation to address emergencies can also introduce new risks. For example, a state auditor noted that when CARES Act legislation expanded unemployment insurance payments to independent contractors, staff did not have the means to conduct traditional employment verification for them. Some independent contractors who realized the state had no way to verify their unemployment may have been able to fraudulently claim they were unemployed, contributing to improper payments. [Page 16]

6. Self-certification of eligibility is especially problematic.

We and others have repeatedly found that self-certification can increase the risk of fraud, which may ultimately reduce the total amount of funds available to eligible individuals and businesses. [Page 16]

7. Programs must do a better job using available government data to ensure benefits are protected.

Agencies should proactively identify data they may need to verify applicant identity and eligibility and resolve any barriers to accessing data before an emergency occurs, including entering into data-sharing agreements. . . . For example, agencies can enter into Computer Matching Agreements, which permit federal agencies to conduct data matches with one another to establish or verify personal information. [Page 12]

8. Even verifying Social Security numbers proved a challenge during the pandemic, and the failure to do so resulted in billions of dollars in losses.

In January 2023, the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee identified $5.4 billion in potential identity fraud associated with 69,323 questionable and unverified Social Security numbers across disbursed COVID-19 EIDL and PPP loan program applications. The committee found that if SBA had been able to verify the accuracy of the Social Security numbers on borrower applications, it could have reduced the possibility of identity theft and ensured that benefits were paid only to eligible recipients. [Page 12]

9. Quickly paying benefits without verifying eligibility and then attempting to recover improper payments after the fact, often called the “pay and chase method,” is a recipe for disaster.  

States made advance payments to individuals followed by post payment verification audits, which increased opportunities for improper payments, including those resulting from fraudulent activity. . . . One state official noted that relaxing this unemployment verification control cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in improper payments. [Page 20]

10. Prepayment controls should be a priority and can help ensure benefits are paid both swiftly and accurately. 

Prepayment controls can help prevent improper payments by identifying potential fraud and control deficiencies early, and they generally offer the most cost-efficient use of resources. [Page 22]

Tools such as data matching can provide some assurance against improper payments, while potentially allowing for more timely payments. [Page 20]

In the end, GAO concluded that “applying lessons learned from past emergencies will help agencies build a foundation to quickly respond to and mitigate payment integrity risks in future emergencies.” That’s putting it mildly. The massive and still only partially understood scale of pandemic losses argues that taxpayer-funded programs must be better protected in the future, and that critical process should start now.

The post The Latest Extraordinary Findings on Pandemic Improper Payments appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

I want to make three key points in relation to the Child Tax Credit. First, Congress initially created
the Child Tax Credit as a tax credit for working families with children, complementing the Earned
Income Tax Credit or EITC, which is primarily a refundable tax credit for those who do not owe
federal income taxes. Second, over the years, Congress increased benefits to low-income families by
expanding the refundability of the CTC, meaning that it now substantially overlaps with the EITC.
Finally, any efforts to turn the CTC into a child allowance would move it away from the positive
design features that have made the EITC (and by extension the CTC) one of the most effective anti-poverty policies we have. Policymakers should consider the potential negative implications on
employment of changing the CTC, which would make long-term poverty reduction in the US more
challenging. This is especially true in light of the poorly targeted nature of proposals expanding the
CTC into a child allowance.

First, it is important to acknowledge the history of the Child Tax Credit. The CTC started in 1997 as
a modest $500 per child non-refundable tax credit for working families as a way to offset some of
their federal income and payroll tax liability. Over the years and through different Congressional
sessions and Presidential administrations, the CTC has expanded to the point that under current law
it is partially refundable, meaning that families without federal income tax liability can still receive
some of the credit as a transfer payment. Eligible families can receive a refundable credit of 15
percent of earnings above $2,500 per year, up to a maximum $1,500 per child in tax year 2022 (the
maximum refundable amount increases for inflation each year until it reaches $2,000). The 15
percent phase-in reflects the employee and employer share of payroll taxes. Families with significant
federal income tax liability receive $2,000 per child as a non-refundable credit on their federal
income taxes.

Read the full testimony here.

The post Testimony: The Child Tax Credit: 25 Years Later appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The CTC—the version that we have today—should be celebrated as a bipartisan achievement
because it serves the dual purposes of providing tax relief for families and encouraging work.
Since it was introduced in 1997, the CTC has become more generous and expanded to more
working families, including to those who do not earn enough to pay federal income tax. Research
shows that tax credits that incentivize work are successful not only in increasing employment but
also in improving the long run outcomes of children.

However, for six months during 2021, the CTC was replaced with something completely
different. Congress turned the CTC, provided to working families, into a child allowance
provided to all families regardless of their work effort. This reform cost an additional $100
billion annually, likely contributing to the high inflation we have experienced for the past two
years. If made permanent, it would lead an estimated 1.5 million parents to exit the workforce. It
would also put at risk the other benefits of tax credits that encourage work, including promoting
the long-term wellbeing of children.

Read the full testimony here.

The post Testimony: Correcting the Record on the Effects of Replacing the Child Tax Credit with a Child Allowance appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Dog bites are quite common, especially among children, but something strange happened during the pandemic. Shortly after many communities instituted COVID-19 lockdowns, attacks surged.[i] One children’s hospital in Colorado experienced a threefold increase in pediatric emergency department visits due to dog bites during the first few months of the pandemic.[ii]

Why Have Dog Bites Increased?

Pet ownership spiked during the pandemic as homebound Americans sought out alternative sources of companionship. The American Veterinary Medical Association found that the percentage of US households that own at least one dog jumped from 38 percent to 45 percent between 2016 and 2020.[iii] Young adults were especially likely to have adopted puppies. This created many new owners with limited social options for themselves and their pets.

In an interview with Forbes, dog trainer Courtney Briggs noted that the rise in dog ownership coincided with a decline in sociability for both people and their pets. “There are now more humans with more dogs than ever before, but with less training and socialization than in pre-Covid circumstances,” she explained. “So dogs, as well as humans, did not get the training they needed to avoid situations where bites could occur.”[iv] Closed parks and playgrounds meant Americans were spending less time in public and had less exposure to different types of people (such as kids) and the unique social situations that these interactions produce.

American Society Suffers from “Fearful Aggression”

Michelle Burch, who works for Safe Hounds Pet Insurance, says that dogs are adopting an aggressive posture—“fearful aggression”—as a form of preemptive protection.[v] Animals become aggressive because they feel threatened or insecure. And the lack of social experiences is making this behavior more common. When people and places are unfamiliar, it is more difficult for dogs, and people, to discern threats. The problem with maintaining an offensive mentality is that it results in an awful lot of tragic encounters.

Unfortunately, these defensive social postures are not limited to dogs. The social isolation brought about by the pandemic coincided with a wave of antisocial behavior, much of which was the result of a lack of social exposure and the pervasive feeling of anxiety and agitation in the early months of the pandemic.

Signs of Americans engaging in fearful aggression were everywhere during the pandemic.

When students returned to school in 2021, they witnessed a spate of fighting among students who had experienced months of social isolation during the pandemic. Denver public school officials reported a 21 percent increase in school fights across the district between the fall of 2019 and 2021.[vi] The Wall Street Journal reported that attacks against teachers have risen sharply since students returned to school.[vii]

Air travel also saw an increase in aggressive behavior. By the summer of 2020 when air travel resumed, attacks against flight attendants and other passengers skyrocketed. The Federal Aviation Administration recorded a nearly fivefold increase in investigations of in-flight disruptions from 2019 to 2021.[viii] Health care workers also reported an explosion of violent, aggressive, and degrading behavior.[ix] The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that registered nurses experienced a 33 percent increase in violent encounters with patients from 2019 to 2020.[x]

In an interview with the Atlantic, sociologist Robert Sampson said that ethical behavior is contingent on social connectedness: “When we become untethered, we tend to prioritize our own private interests over those of others or the public.”[xi] It’s hardly a novel concept. Émile Durkheim famously noted that our commitment to social norms was dependent on our connection to each other.[xii]

When the pandemic reduced social opportunities, it not only made us lonely; the experience led some people to more freely violate social norms. This increased feelings of unease and anxiety in public spaces.

Rebuilding Social Capital

The good news is that patterns of sociability appear to be returning. The number of Americans who report having not socialized at all in the past seven days dropped from 31 percent in late 2020 to only 19 percent by the spring of 2023.[xiii] We’re relearning how to be with and around each other. For Americans who adopted a dog during the pandemic, the news is also good. Research has found that dogs are great catalysts for social interaction.[xiv] The magnetic pull of a dog was found to be consistent regardless of how friendly (or apparently friendly) its owner was. If you are lonely and want more opportunities to forge social connections, walking around your neighborhood with a dog is a good way to do it.

Even after having a couple of negative experiences with dogs in the past, my kids still run up to dog walkers in our neighborhood to see if they can get a couple of pats. As a result, we talk to strangers or neighbors we otherwise would not have. The most important lesson here is repetition and practice. The more time we spend with each other in various places, the more familiar and comfortable we will be doing so. We expand our social repertoire. As with so many things, there is no replacement for simply being out there and doing it. If you want to pet someone’s dog, though, it’s a good idea to ask permission first.

(Full disclosure: I’m more of a cat person than a dog person. Despite recent experiences, I swear I hold no personal grudges. My kids, who are still asking for a dog of their own, don’t either.)

[i] Theodore E. Habarth-Morales et al., “Pandemic Puppies: Man’s Best Friend or Public Health Problem? A Multidatabase Study,” Journal of Surgical Research 276 (August 2022): 203–7, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002248042200110X.

[ii] Cinnamon A. Dixon and Rakesh D. Mistry, “Dog Bites in Children Surge During Coronavirus Disease-2019: A Case for Enhanced Prevention,” Journal of Pediatrics 225 (October 2020): 231–32, https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(20)30824-6/pdf.

[iii] Malinda Larkin, “Pet Population Still on the Rise, with Fewer Pets per Household,” American Veterinary Medical Association, November 17, 2021, https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2021-12-01/pet-population-still-rise-fewer-pets-household.

[iv] Leah Campbell, “Dog Bites Are on the Rise: What Parents Need to Know,” Forbes, May 24, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahcampbell/2021/05/24/dog-bites-are-on-the-rise-what-parents-need-to-know/?sh=595c3d343c56.

[v] Campbell, “Dog Bites Are on the Rise.”

[vi] Kalyn Belsha, “Stress and Short Tempers: Schools Struggle with Behavior as Students Return,” Chalkbeat, September 27, 2021, https://www.chalkbeat.org/2021/9/27/22691601/student-behavior-stress-trauma-return.

[vii] Scott Calvert, “‘There Were Fists Everywhere.’ Violence Against Teachers Is on the Rise.,” Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/violence-against-teachers-is-on-the-rise-97a74dcf.

[viii] Francesca Street, “Dread at 30,000 Feet: Inside the Increasingly Violent World of US Flight Attendants,” CNN, September 6, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/flight-attendants-unruly-passengers-covid/index.html.

[ix] Bram Sable-Smith and Andy Miller, “‘Are You Going to Keep Me Safe?’ Hospital Workers Sound Alarm on Rising Violence,” Kaiser Family Foundation, October 11, 2021, https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/are-you-going-to-keep-me-safe-hospital-workers-sound-alarm-on-rising-violence.

[x] US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Economics Daily: Nonfatal Injuries Resulting in Days Off Work Among Nurses Up 291 Percent in 2020,” May 6, 2022, https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/nonfatal-injuries-and-illnesses-resulting-in-days-off-work-among-nurses-up-291-percent-in-2020.htm. 

[xi] Olga Khazan, “Why People Are Acting So Weird,” Atlantic,March 30, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/03/antisocial-behavior-crime-violence-increase-pandemic/627076.

[xii] Khazan, “Why People Are Acting So Weird.”

[xiii] YouGov, “How Often Are Americans Socializing?,” June 21, 2023, https://today.yougov.com/topics/society/trackers/socializing-past-week.

[xiv] June McNicholas and Glyn M. Collis, “Dogs as Catalysts for Social Interactions: Robustness of the Effect,” British Psychological Society 91, no. 1 (February 2000): 61–70, https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1348/000712600161673.

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The regulation of landlord–tenant relations — like housing and building-code enforcement — has historically been a matter for localities, the units of government by far the closest to housing markets. Cities and towns have long had a variety of policies, ranging from the non-zoning of Houston to the price regulation of rents in New York City.

But of late, the Left has taken up the idea that an eviction crisis is at hand — and that extensions of tenants’ rights and, indeed, housing subsidies are the remedy. The truth is that evictions have not spiked. They have, to be sure, increased since the period of the federal ban. But even Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, whose founder, sociologist Matthew Desmond, has campaigned to limit the practice, paints a nuanced picture:

We recorded almost 66,000 eviction filings in January 2022, approximately 35.1% less than normal for a typical, pre-pandemic January. Over the next eight months, those numbers steadily increased, peaking at over 96,000 cases filed in August 2022 (8.2% less than historical average). Case volumes declined slightly in the last quarter of the year, but that follows a predictable seasonal pattern. The 85,593 cases filed in December were 1.6% less than historical average.

The truth is that, in competitive housing markets, owners are at pains to retain tenants rather than capriciously kick them out. A steady revenue stream is the most important part of rental-property ownership.

None of this deterred the Biden administration, this past January, from issuing “The White House Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights,” whose provisions are clearly based on the view that renters are at risk of being harmed by rapacious owners. It included such provisions as the need for “clear and fair leases,” eviction prevention, and the rights of tenants to organize. Indeed, the core idea here — that tenants need a “bill of rights” — reflects a worldview that, absent such a document, they will be at the mercy of greedy owners. The document, what’s more, takes no note of tenant responsibilities, such as paying the rent and maintaining the premises.

Notably, this blueprint was at pains to note that it does not “constitute US government policy.” The powers of Washington do not, apparently, extend to such matters.

Enter the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), established by Congress in 2008 as an independent agency under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act. FHFA oversees “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs) such as the secondary-mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Chartered during the New Deal to provide liquidity to the infant long-term U.S. mortgage market, “Fannie and Freddie” have, more recently, become vehicles for questionable progressive social ideas, most notably the “affordable-housing goals,” which prioritize credit for lower-income households over their ability to repay their loans. That policy helped contribute to the 2008 financial-crisis mortgage meltdown; indeed, it may well have been the key catalyst.

Now the GSEs are back for an encore. The FHFA has asked them to develop “tenant protection policies” in keeping with that “White House Bill of Rights.” Many of the questions that Fannie and Freddie staff raised during a comment period are nothing if not leading: Should tenants get adequate notice before an eviction action? Should Fannie and Freddie make sure housing codes are enforced? Is rent stabilization (price control) worth considering?

The context here is important. Fannie and Freddie hold extensive portfolios of multifamily apartment buildings. Fannie Mae alone purchased $69 billion in multifamily-building mortgages in both 2021 and 2022. So Fannie and Freddy have a clear financial interest in ensuring that owners are able to continue to make their mortgage payments for these buildings. That further suggests they actually have an interest in fair but swift eviction policies, since deadbeat tenants mean landlords who can’t pay their bills — as became a significant problem during the lengthy eviction ban in the Covid era.

What’s more, thoughtful social policy should reflect an understanding that the threat of eviction — rather than being the sword of Simon Legree, the cruel plantation owner in Uncle Tom’s Cabin — in fact protects other tenants. Those who behave badly — whether by being disruptive or engaging in criminal activity — threaten the quality of life of those who work hard and play by the rules. Indeed, that is made clear, ironically, by Mathew Desmond’s best-selling 2016 book Evicted, which sparked a wave of concern about tenant protection. Although Desmond ultimately proposes an entitlement to housing subsidies, his brilliantly drawn case studies of troubled tenants make clear why eviction is an important tool of social order — as evidenced by tenants who, for instance, are involved in the drug trade and cause a building fire.

When the GSEs buy mortgages to incorporate into bonds with the implicit backing of federal taxpayers, they should care above all that the revenue streams on which owners rely will be steady. That’s their role in financial markets. When they put their financial model at risk by seeking to incorporate nonfinancial goals, they remind taxpayers of the massive bailout that was required when Fannie Mae was forced into bankruptcy in 2008 and became the subject of the largest bailout of the financial crisis.

This is not a good scenario, and we should not take any steps, even small ones, to repeat it.

Editor’s note: This article has been corrected to reflect that FHFA is an independent agency established by Congress in 2008, and not a part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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New York City Housing Authority officials just revealed the $40 billion estimated in 2017 for the new roofs, pipes and boilers the aging projects need has ballooned to $78 billion.

Yet a state plan billed as a miracle funding cure has moved no faster than heat repairs in the winter—and may not even work at all.

It’s time for a much more radical rethinking of the system in which at least 330,000 New Yorkers live.

The essential problem, of course, is the age of the nation’s largest public-housing system and the fact maintenance has long been deferred.

The vision for the system at its 1930s opening was working-class housing, with rents supporting operations and maintenance.

But over time, those with options left for private housing, and the system became a de facto poorhouse, with rental income limited to 30% of low earnings.

It’s true that Washington didn’t step up to fill the gap—but that had never been the plan when “the projects” were built.

So it’s no surprise that roofs leak, water seeps into bathrooms, mold grows and plaster cracks.

In early June, chunks of the roof fell right off, onto the sidewalk sheds of the Jackson Houses in The Bronx, only erected because repairs are so slow.

Those and other horror stories prompted something called the Public Housing Preservation Trust, the legislation for which Gov. Kathy Hochul signed last June.

It’s been billed as the way private funds will be injected into the projects.

But not only has it gotten off to a very slow start—the first six members of a required board were only just appointed—there’s good reason to doubt that it will even work.

Crucially, the legislation includes what amount to a series of poison pills that risk deterring the private developers the system is counting on.

Developers will be able to rely on bond revenue backed by federal housing vouchers, which will pay most of NYCHA’s rents.

But progressive particulars will hamstring them: They must pay prevailing wage to union labor.

The board has to include a labor representative.

And developers will be brought in only to do the repairs—not to manage the buildings.

That job will, incredibly, still be left to unionized NYCHA employees, who have such a demonstrated record of failure that a court-ordered federal monitor must oversee the system. 

What’s more, this will only happen if residents vote to approve the approach for each building. 

That could stall the whole process: Tenants may well not want more of the same.

To date, no developer has been named under the terms of the legislation, though NYCHA expresses hope that may soon change.

The details of the Preservation Trust differ significantly from a better alternative known as the Rental Assistance Demonstration.

RAD projects allow developers to both get access to capital for repairs and also manage the buildings themselves—at a profit—once repairs are done, if they can keep order and prevent new decay.

(Notably, they have a limited ability to evict disruptive tenants.)

The process has already borne fruit at such sites as the Baychester Houses in The Bronx, which The New York Times hailed as the future of public housing.

Even this approach may not be enough to address $78 billion in repair needs, though.

That sobering figure suggests the city must face squarely the grim reality that it simply may not be possible to maintain such a large public-housing system—and that more imaginative approaches are needed.

Those could include selling high-value NYCHA real estate to private developers while helping tenants move.

It might mean shrinking the overall size of the system. 

It’s worth recalling that many of New York’s public-housing projects were built as part of a massive “slum clearance” program, overseen by—who else?—urban planner Robert Moses.

What do you think? Post a comment.

It put the wrecking ball to many neighborhoods whose condition was not nearly as bad as advertised.

But given the condition of NYCHA today, the time might be right for a new round of slum clearance—of the projects themselves.

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Thanks to a merit-based admissions policy, New York’s exam schools, such as Stuyvesant High School, have been a particular blessing for Asian students, many from low-income immigrant families, who make up 83 percent of the student body. By contrast, only seven of 762 students in this fall’s incoming class are black, down from 11 in 2022 and eight in 2021.

As the New York Times put it, “The annual numbers traditionally fan a debate over the admissions process at [the city’s eight selective high schools], to which acceptance is determined by a single entrance exam.” In other words, we can expect another push like the one former mayor Bill DeBlasio mounted to find less objective measures to correct the schools’ racial “under-representation.”

It is not wrong to be concerned about the underrepresentation of black and Hispanic students at schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. But those numbers reflect the public school system’s failures, not the failure of merit-based admissions policies.

That the admission test is not the problem is demonstrated by a different set of numbers: the percentages of black students at New York’s elite private high schools, such as Fieldston (10 percent), Horace Mann (5.2 percent), Riverdale Country Day (8.5 percent) and Collegiate (5.8 percent). These are not easy schools to get into, much less afford. Nevertheless, all have significantly higher percentages of black students than Stuyvesant.

True, these private schools may be relaxing some standards, as the Supreme Court found that Harvard was doing, but they generally require or strongly recommend that applicants take exams like the Secondary School Admission Test.

A more convincing explanation exists for why elite private schools admit more black students. It’s called Prep for Prep—a summer and after-school enrichment program that, since 1978, has focused specifically on helping promising New York City “students of color” qualify for admission to elite independent schools. Established in part with support from Columbia University, the program has produced extraordinary results. For the most recent academic year, 668 Prep for Prep students were enrolled at 150 top private schools, including Andover, Choate, Exeter, Horace Mann, Poly Prep, and Trinity—supported by $35 million in financial aid. Prep for Prep’s long-term results appear positive, too, with 85 percent of black students going on to graduate from college within six years. Asian students are also included in the program. One can make a good case that this is how a genuine version of affirmative action should work: providing remedial tutoring and financial aid to promising students to compensate for the shortcoming of New York City’s public school system.

If you need more convincing that the public education system is to blame for black and Hispanic underrepresentation at the city’s exam schools, consider: black and Hispanic enrollment at New York’s specialized high schools has dropped sharply since the 1970s, when it accounted for 14 percent of Stuyvesant enrollment. (Today, it’s 6.2 percent.) New York has plenty of qualified minority students; they’re just going to other schools. All of this undermines the case for relaxing testing standards or merit-based standards of any kind, whether in New York, Boston, San Francisco, or Buffalo—all cities where exam schools are under fire. The tests are not the problem; it’s the public schools themselves.

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However, a closer look at the data suggests these statistics are misleading. When understood properly, they support the importance of encouraging employment in SNAP.

The main problem with these claims is that they rely on household survey data collected by the Census Bureau, which, according to an expert review, “suffer[s] from an alarming and growing extent of survey error and few studies attempt to correct for this error.” Many recipients simply fail to report receiving government benefits when asked on surveys, with research suggesting that between 25–50 percent of SNAP recipients (depending on the survey) do not report participating, while some non-recipients report receiving it. This misreporting should give researchers caution when presenting the results of any analysis that relies on Census data alone. 

To make matters worse, researchers often misrepresent employment among SNAP households even when using Census data by including employment outside of the time the household receives SNAP. For example, the NBCNews claim likely reflects employment at any time in the past 12 months, not necessarily when the household was receiving SNAP. (Although even this is unclear because the authors did not respond to multiple requests for methodological clarification.) In fact, the way the Census Bureau survey asks the survey question, it is possible that the “working person” was not even present in the household when they received SNAP.

Collectively, these problems vastly overstate employment among households while they are receiving SNAP. Below, we show the number of workers per SNAP household according to three different data sources—SNAP quality control (QC) data, the Current Population Survey (Census), and the American Community Survey (Census). SNAP QC data contains a representative sample of real SNAP cases, and shows that less than one-third of SNAP households include a worker (Figure 1). According to Census data, between 55–60 percent of households receiving SNAP at any point in the year contained a working person at the time of the survey. When we expanded the definition of employment to working at any time in the past 12 months, the rate of households with a “working” person comes closer to 80 percent.   

Figure 1. Number of Workers (at the time of the survey) in SNAP Households According to Three Data Sources

Why do these differences matter? It should be unsurprising that many SNAP households contain adults with some work history. But the relevant information is whether household members work while they receive SNAP, and to what extent SNAP contributes to low employment. And given the particularly low work rates documented by SNAP caseworkers in the QC data, policymakers are rightfully concerned that so few are employed while receiving benefits, especially when the economy is strong and employers are struggling to find workers.

There is also an inconsistency in presenting these data to make a case against SNAP work requirements. As already noted, survey error is a problem. But beyond survey error, the use of a broad definition of employment to include work outside the time of SNAP receipt changes the analysis. This also raises the question for opponents of work requirements: If employment is common among SNAP households, why would households struggle to meet work requirements? Burdensome paperwork is the oft-cited culprit, but most working adults should be capable of reporting work hours to a government agency.  

Although low-income families face barriers to employment, including disability and caretaking, we recently found that even after accounting for these constraints, a large share of SNAP recipients were not working, not caretaking, and not disabled, raising questions about why employment was not more common.

Because employment is one of the most important ingredients for escaping poverty, policies should encourage work among those SNAP recipients who are able. Policymakers may have different approaches for accomplishing this goal, but we must first agree on the facts—especially when the livelihoods of American families are at stake.

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A new AEI report “Could News Bloom in News Deserts?”[ii] highlights reasons for both concern and optimism about the future of local journalism, which communities need in order to learn about the activities of local government, community organizations, and religious institutions—the sinews of social capital. Even basic coverage of high school sports, which may inspire celebration over the defeat of a traditional rival, builds the sort of fellow feeling that strengthens social capital.

Between 2004 and 2019 alone, the country lost 2,100 newspapers: a fourth of the total within 15 years.[iii] That decline was matched, or indeed worsened, by a hollowing out of the staffs at remaining news operations. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that employment in newspaper publishing declined from 455,000 employees in 1990 to just 137,220 in 2019—approximately a fourth of the 1990 level. According to a census conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the number of employed journalists declined from 55,700 in 1990 to 23,030 in 2019, a change of over half. The difference is even starker in terms of population: In 1990, there were 22 journalists per 100,000 people in the US, while in 2019, that figure dropped to just seven.[iv] Major newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have adapted and thrived, but local newspapers, some of which had operated for more than a century, have shut their newsrooms.

Long reliant on local advertising that has been scooped up by competing websites, local newspapers (for example, the Vindicator in Ohio and the Carter County Times in Kentucky) do much more than provide a venue for supermarket coupons. Historically, their bread and butter has been coverage of local government, providing accountability for public officials and the information citizens need to make democracy work. But they provide for social capital as well. Even such seemingly mundane matters as local events calendars, photos of 4-H fairs, and obituary notices reinforce the ties that bind communities together. If a school play happens without a review in the local newspaper, students have been, on some level, cheated of recognition—and adults are unaware of the need for volunteers.

The collapse of the advertising-based business model for local news makes its survival an open question. “Could News Bloom in News Deserts?,” however, provides some positive findings. As the report points out, although public attention has been focused on newspaper closings, data from the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism Local News Initiative show that since 2017, 112 local newspapers or online news sites have been established.[v] AEI distributed a nine-question survey to all of them. The 27 completed surveys provide reasons for both hope and concern.

On the positive side, a variety of business models have emerged. These include for-profit sites and papers such as the Appalachian News-Express, which relies on not only advertising but other revenue sources, including real estate rentals, and print operations that serve other local enterprises. Others, however—such as Cardinal News in southwest Virginia and the New Bedford Light in southeastern Massachusetts—use a nonprofit model that allows them to receive grants from local community foundations and major businesses. Still others have forged partnerships with college journalism programs to provide internship opportunities and local public radio stations, themselves in need of local reporting.

At the same time, many of the local news startups, such as the Asheville Advocate, rely on volunteer labor, which may not prove sustainable. Others, such as the Bowie Sun in Maryland, are one-person operations, raising the same concern.

The stakes are high for those who care both about the health of the American federalist system—reliant on an informed local citizenry—and those concerned about the social capital of local communities.

[i] Richard Alm and W. Michael Cox, “Creative Destruction,” EconLib, https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CreativeDestruction.html.

[ii] Howard Husock, “Could News Bloom in News Deserts?,” American Enterprise Institute, July 12, 2023, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/could-news-bloom-in-news-deserts.

[iii] Penelope Muse Abernathy, News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive? (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/news-deserts-and-ghost-newspapers-will-local-news-survive.

[iv] Steven Waldman, “The Journalist Population,” Report for America, June 28, 2021, https://www.reportforamerica.org/2021/06/28/the-journalist-population. Note that the reporter employment figure for 2019 is an extrapolation, as explained in the source.

[v] Husock, “Could News Bloom in News Deserts?”

The post Local News and Social Capital appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Because policy focuses unduly on economic outcomes and problems, we tend to view this trend through the prism of its impact on poverty and upward mobility. But even in economically secure families, the increase in family disruption has had untold emotional, psychological, and social consequences. 

If income or mental or physical health had fallen 40% over 60 years, it would be the central issue driving our policies and politics. For the same reason, the decline in married parenting should torment policymakers today. One way that policy can potentially reverse this trend is by addressing the ways that our safety net has weakened marital childbearing and childrearing. But we need ambitious proposals to tackle such an entrenched problem.

Reforming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) presents such an opportunity, and one that could also address issues of family affordability and work-family balance. To encourage marriage and marital childrearing and to provide working- and middle-class families with more options in combining work and parenting, EITC eligibility should be tied to individual earnings rather than the earnings of the tax unit. This change would not affect single beneficiaries, but it would markedly alter the benefits available to married couples.

Under current law, there are four benefit schedules for married couples, depending on whether they have no children, one, two, or three or more children. The income of the couple is compared against the appropriate benefit schedule, which first increases with income, then levels off, then declines for higher-income couples. The reform proposed here would let each spouse of a married couple use their own individual income to determine their own EITC benefit, using the existing benefit schedules for married couples. 

At the most basic level, this would allow any couple to marry who would do so but for the loss of EITC benefits. But not only would this marriage penalty be eliminated; there would also be a sizable marriage bonus. That should affect the behavior of a larger group of couples.

Consider an unmarried couple, in which one partner with two children makes $20,000 per year and the other (childless) partner makes $30,000 per year. Under current policy, while they remain unmarried, the parent gets a $6,604 EITC benefit, so their combined income is $56,604. If they get married, their EITC drops to $1,991 because the couple’s income is relatively high and the benefit phases out. They are worse off by $4,613. Under the reform proposed here, after marrying, the parent continues to receive an EITC of $6,604, but now the childless partner also gets a $6,203 benefit, based on their $30,000 earnings and the two children. That leaves the couple better off by $6,203—a net swing of $10,816. 

The marriage bonus would be even more powerful if both partners were previously getting an EITC. Consider unmarried partners, each with one child, making $20,000 and $30,000. Their combined EITCs, both based on the schedule for a single child, come to $6,637 (under current policy and the reform). Under current policy, if they marry, their EITC falls to $1,991. But under the reform, if they marry, they both get to move to the EITC schedule for two children. Their combined EITC nearly doubles to $12,807.

For families already headed by a married couple, the reformed EITC would, at a minimum, serve as an effective tax cut, increasing their ability to afford necessities, pay bills, or invest in their children. But it would help married couples in other ways as well.

For one, the proposed reform would help already-married parents to reduce their combined work if they wish to have one parent spend more time caring for the children. Consider a married couple with two children where, as above, one parent makes $20,000 and the other makes $30,000. Under the reformed EITC, if the first parent cut their work in half, so that their earnings dropped to $10,000, the couple would still receive a combined EITC of $10,213. So their combined income (with the credit) would be $50,213—not much less than the $51,991 they get under current policy working their existing hours. If the first parent was previously working 52 weeks for 40 hours a week at $10 an hour, they could drop down to 20 hours a week or 26 weeks of full-time work. Or they could take a more flexible job, such as in the gig economy, that works better with their parenting schedule.

Or perhaps the couple would like to have a third child. Under current policy, if both parents continued to work the same amount, their EITC amount would increase from $1,991 to $2,816 if they moved from the schedule for two children to the schedule for three or more children—an increase of just $825. Under the reform, the amount would rise from $12,807 to $14,458—by $1,651, or twice as much as today. And apart from the increased boost in moving from two kids to three, their EITC would be over five times as large as under current policy, which may be the more important consideration.

My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Bodi Yang, estimated the cost of this proposal at $395 billion over 10 years. (To avoid subsidizing upper-income families with one high-earning spouse and one who does a nominal amount of work, the new EITC would be restricted to people in tax units with under $100,000 in combined income.) That estimate assumes that no one changes their marital, fertility, or work decisions. 

Of course, the entire point of the proposal is to influence those decisions. To the extent that it is successful in doing so, the cost would rise. But that increase would reflect people taking advantage of the expanded opportunity to do the things the reform incentivizes. Higher outlays would come from more marriage, more marital fertility, and more spouses altering their working decisions to optimize under expanded choices. (Some would presumably move from one-worker to two-worker, while others would move from two to one.)

This proposal could go further in incentivizing marriage. It could, for instance, eliminate the EITC for single childless adults. Providing EITC benefits for single adults disincentivizes marriage because it reduces the return to getting or staying married. The number of single childless beneficiaries is relatively small, as are the benefits they receive. Research suggests that these benefits do not incentivize work very much for this subpopulation. This addition to the proposal would reduce the 10-year cost to $370 billion.

Alternatively, the EITC schedules for married parents could be reformed along the lines of my 2021 proposal. That reform envisioned giving all married couples a single schedule, regardless of how many children they have. The super-schedule would follow the current-policy schedule for a married couple with three or more children, even for parents who only have one or two children, up to the maximum EITC amount available under current policy ($7,430). This maximum amount would be available for couples with incomes nearly 50% higher than under current policy before phasing out for those with incomes above this threshold.

This version of the reform would have several effects. It would incentivize marriage, disincentivize childlessness, and incentivize marital childbearing. Most notably, the reform would incentivize people to have and raise their first child in marriage rather than as single parents, since the increase in the EITC over current policy would be largest for a family with one child. If these marriages are sticky, then subsequent births will also occur within marriage. By tying this super-schedule to individual earnings, which my 2021 proposal did not envision, the incentives would be even stronger. 

Imagine an unmarried couple expecting their first child and making $20,000 and $30,000. Under current policy, if they remain unmarried, their combined income will be higher than if they marry by the $3,995 EITC benefit the mother would receive. Under the reforms proposed here, including the super-schedule for married parents, both parents would receive a $7,430 EITC if they marry, for a combined $14,860, but the mother would still only get $3,995 if they do not, leaving them better off by $10,865 if they wed. Without the super-schedule, they both get a $3,995 EITC and are better off by only $3,995 versus not marrying. 

Adding the super-schedule to the proposal would increase the 10-year cost to $767 billion. Adding it and eliminating the single childless EITC would cost $741 billion.

An EITC with a marriage bonus would counter, at least partly, the loss of benefits a couple might see from marrying, such as from food stamps or housing subsidies. The marriage penalties in these programs are why reform must go further than simply removing the EITC marriage penalty; an EITC marriage bonus is necessary to counteract the more powerful marriage disincentives in cash and noncash benefit programs. The point is not to make the tax code pro-marriage but to make the combined effects of tax and transfer policy less anti-marriage. The proposal here is much more preferable to policies that directly attempt to reduce marriage penalties in safety net programs. Those policies—which phase-out benefits more slowly as income rises, allow couples to ignore spousal income in determining eligibility, or tie benefits to individual rather than family income—are expensive, increase dependency, and risk luring more people off of work. 

Reducing the number of children being raised without one of their biological parents should be at the top of the nation’s priorities, and it is time to throw everything at the problem. Reforming the EITC along the lines described here should be part of that effort. It would help already-married working- and middle-class families while leaving the safety net undiminished for single-parent families, even as it clearly rewards marriage.

Correction: This article has been updated. The original version used cost estimates that were understated. The tax model used data on tax unit earnings, splitting those earnings between spouses in a tax unit based on a simple rule. Using data that include the actual individual earnings of spouses, the tax model produced the significantly higher costs in the current version. The author thanks Max Ghenis, CEO of PolicyEngine, for discovering the error, and Angela Rachidi, of AEI, for expressing her skepticism of the original results.

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