Published 19:14, July the 12th, 2009
For needy, city offers red tape
When Judith Rubinstein was named NY1’s “New Yorker of the Week” recently, she was immediately deluged with 70 phone messages. They weren’t congratulations — that’s what Facebook is for — but rather viewers calling for the help that her organization Connecting To Advantages provides in accessing public benefits, from tax rebates to food stamps.
The callers ran the gamut, from seniors needing help with utilities to laid-off middle-class workers with mortgages and no way to pay them. “And a 19-year-old with a baby,” Rubinstein recalls, “who said, ‘I went to the food stamp office, and they said they couldn’t help me until I was 22, but I was sure they were wrong.’ And in fact, they were wrong.”
Notwithstanding the glass-half-full economic stories we keep getting deluged with — my favorite are the ones that tout falling rates of new jobless claims as good news, though a more accurate headline might be “America Running Out of People to Fire” — this city is still growing increasingly crowded with people who don’t have money to pay for housing, food, child care and health costs all at the same time. And when they seek help, the nouveau poor are finding out what the never-rich already knew: Getting government aid can be as much work as a full-time job.
Try it yourself. Call 311 about food stamps, and you’ll soon find yourself lost in the thicket of the city Human Resource Administration’s automated info line. Or you could try the city’s much-hyped ACCESS NYC Web site — when I dutifully input all my family data, it spit back a list of programs it “cannot make a determination” whether I’m eligible for. Clicking on “apply online for programs” helpfully results in an error message.
Instead, we’re left with Rubinstein and her band of unpaid volunteers, who have to beg their way into soup kitchens and unemployment offices. Meanwhile, a Ready Access to Assistance bill to allow info tables at all city offices has been stalled for three years because the mayor is opposed. He should reconsider — the city’s in no position to turn down free help in clearing red tape.