The Center is proposing that city officials help ignite the entrepreneurial spirit latent in New York s neighborhoods. It s not charity it s common sense. Jason Turner, the new chief of the Human Resources Administration, and the Economic Development Corporation s Charles Millard don t do lunch. And social service bureaucrats charged with helping public assistance recipients get off welfare might as well be on a different planet from the economic development staff assigned to stoke the employment rate. The lack of cooperation is perplexing and illogical.
City government ought to tear down the firewall between welfare reform and economic development.
If both welfare reformers and economic developers keep their eyes on job creation, they will inevitably find new ways to work together. City government seems to have abandoned all hope of helping public assistance recipients find real jobs. The administration refuses to keep track of the 350,000 welfare recipients it has bounced into oblivion. But recent data from the state reveals that about 20 percent of workfare participants left the rolls because they had found work, and the Human Resources Administration itself estimated that only 4 percent of participants claim permanent employment as a result of the city s workfare program. For decades, the city s idea of economic development has been grounded in a strategy of charming multi-million dollar corporations to stay in Manhattan with offers of prodigious real estate subsidies and tax abatements.