Van Bramer wants discount Metrocards for welfare recipients

From NY1:

A new bill would help some of the poorest New York City residents pay for their MetroCards.

Queens Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer introduced legislation on Tuesday that would require the city to provide half-priced MetroCards to welfare recipients who need to travel to work in order to receive their aid.

“It seems obvious to us that if the city requires folks who are on public assistance to work in order to receive public assistance, they should be able to get a discounted ride to get to work and be eligible for public assistance in the first place,” Van Bramer said.

Van Bramer said he was not sure how many residents would be eligible for the discount, though he said it was “an investment worth making.”

De Blasio enables never-ending welfare cycle

From City Journal:

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is proposing a full employment program for government-funded social-service workers. In the process, he will likely gut one of the most successful welfare-to-work initiatives in the country, and possibly return New York to its former status of America’s dependency capital, when one in seven New Yorkers were on the dole. The city’s gargantuan welfare agency, the Human Resources Administration, has just issued its “new vision for employment and education services.” Welfare users will no longer be expected to immediately look for and take a job in exchange for taxpayer support, an expectation that was the key breakthrough of welfare reform. Instead, welfare recipients will serve indefinitely as receptacles for an endless array of taxpayer-supported services.

Welfare applicants and recipients entering this complex new world of services will go through a three-tier assessment process. Those recipients deemed “fully employable” by HRA will get . . . not a job, but more services! They will be referred to off-site “contractor locations,” where the contractors will provide “in-depth assessments and direct clients to the proper set of services that are tailored to individualized strengths, interests, and needs.”

Does the “fully employable”welfare recipient now start looking for, or working in, a job? Not necessarily. According to HRA’s planners, “Individuals may then be referred to a combination of services,” which might include CareerBridge, a “new set of HRA contracted services for contextualized adult basic education, high school equivalency preparation, bridge training, English as a Second Language, and vocational training”; and CareerAdvance, “for clients who are job-ready, have high levels of skills/education, and/or others whose personal goals are immediate employment will be referred to CareerAdvance contractors to receive services.”

In a word, services.

Because what NYC needs is more people on welfare

From the NY Post:

Welfare is making a comeback under Mayor de Blasio, with 13,000 more New Yorkers on the dole by the end of his first year in office, according to a new report obtained by The Post.

Enrollment in the city’s cash ­assistance program swelled by 4 percent in 2014 to 352,596 — one of the biggest increases in more than a decade, the Manhattan Institute found.

The rise comes even as the city’s economy has prospered — some 90,000 jobs were added in 2014, according to the “Poverty and Progress in New York” report ­being released Tuesday.

“If government dependence on welfare is rising in a good economy, what’s going to happen in a bad economy?” wondered study author Stephen Eide, who said the trend was antithetical to data dating back to around 1960.

The surprising uptick, reformers say, is partly by design. De Blasio’s pick to head the $10 billion Human Resources Administration, Steven Banks, is a proponent of loosening welfare restrictions.

With Banks at the helm, the HRA launched a series of sweeping changes in its state-approved Biennial Employment Plan, including changing requirements for welfare recipients with kids younger than 4 years old. Recipients previously had to clock a 35-hour workweek to get their checks.

Welfare recipients can now substitute full-time education — ­including GED preparation — for their work requirement.

The de Blasio administration is also phasing out the Giuliani-era Work Experience Program, which gave welfare recipients jobs in city agencies, in favor of “additional job search, work study or internships for cash assistance clients with recent work histories or with advanced degrees,” the report notes.

Is this the way to reform workfare?

From the NY Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio is revamping the city’s welfare program, vowing to dismantle what was once the largest workfare program in the nation and to embrace new strategies for moving thousands of people off the welfare rolls and into jobs.

Workfare? Do you remember workfare? It is the program that ballooned during the administration of Rudolph W. Giuliani, with 36,224 people working in it or assigned to it by the year 2000.

The program mostly dropped out of the headlines after Mr. Giuliani, a Republican, left office, but his work-first ethos still prevails: In April, 9,194 welfare recipients participated in or were assigned to workfare, and thousands more were required to engage in job-search programs that de Blasio administration officials have described as largely unsuccessful.

Now, Mr. de Blasio says, it is time for change.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, plans to prioritize education and training for able-bodied welfare recipients instead of automatically assigning them to workfare positions — cleaning parks and subway platforms and performing clerical duties — that have been described as dead ends by advocates for impoverished families.

Over the next two years, city officials say, those workfare jobs will vanish completely and be replaced by transitional employment programs, internships and community service positions in growing sectors of the economy to ensure that more welfare recipients find paying jobs.

Research shows that programs heavily focused on education and training have been less successful than others at moving welfare recipients into the workplace. And somewhere out there, Mr. Giuliani must be wagging his finger, warning of the dangers ahead.

Tweeding simply explained!

"These are the people who make sure we get nothing but then turn around and have us to vote for them again."

deBlasio ends immigration sponsorship requirement

From the Daily News:

In a reversal of his predecessor’s policy, Mayor de Blasio has quietly stopped requiring immigrants’ sponsors to repay the city if the people they helped go on welfare.

De Blasio is also refunding close to $1 million to 250 New Yorkers who were compelled to cough up money under the policy, according to budget documents released last week.

Most of the refunds are going to sponsors who are relatives of the immigrants they sponsored, officials said.

The payback policy stems from a 1997 federal law, which requires sponsors of immigrants to sign a contract saying they are financially responsible if the people they sponsored accept some public benefits.

The feds didn’t enforce the law, and no city adopted the policy until New York took it up in 2012 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The city gave low-income sponsors, victims of domestic abuse, asylum seekers and refugees a pass, along with recipients of food stamps and Medicaid.

Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Lilliam Barrios-Paoli said the de Blasio administration ended the paybacks in February because it was “wrong.”

“These people are our neighbors. They pay taxes. And they deserve better,” said Barrios-Paoli.

The rest of us pay taxes, too, and we deserve better than to have freeloaders brought here to mooch off us. When my immigrant ancestors came here, they also were required to have sponsors that would be financially responsible for them if they couldn't work so they would not become burdens of the state. Why did that change?

No more welfare for booze, sex and gambling

From the Daily News:

Welfare checks could no longer go for beer, booze and babes under a bill that passed the New York state Senate on Tuesday.

The bill would bar welfare cash withdrawals at liquor stores and strip clubs, and would penalize recipients caught blowing support checks on sin and vice with the loss of benefits for a month or more.

The feds have ordered states to crack down on welfare waste, fraud and abuse by February or lose 5% of their federal public assistance funding.

Ban on using benefits for bad things

From the NY Post:

Legislation is being introduced in the state Senate that would bar welfare recipients from using their public-assistance money to buy booze or cigarettes or spend money on lottery tickets or in casinos, The Post has learned.

The proposed law also would impose a ban on welfare spending on adult-oriented entertainment, such as strip clubs.

“Public assistance is designed to help needy families provide for their children until they can transition back to the workforce and become self-sufficient,” said state Sen. Thomas Libous (R-Binghamton), the deputy majority leader and bill sponsor.

“This common-sense legislation would protect hardworking taxpayers from abuse while ensuring that individuals receiving welfare benefits continue to get the temporary assistance they need and deserve,” he said.

Recipients who violate the ban would lose benefits for one month for a first-time offense and three months for a second. A third strike would permanently boot the offender from the program.

Welfare recipients receive both food stamps and cash assistance for other needs — to help defray the cost of housing, utility expenses and clothing — under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program.

A family of four could receive a maximum $668 in monthly food-stamp benefits plus $433 in cash- assistance benefits.

People who qualify for welfare receive an “electronic benefit transfer” debit card to access their cash assistance.

Currently, recipients can use the card to buy cigarettes and booze or spend an afternoon at the racetrack or strip club.

The Libous measure would specifically bar recipients from using their EBT cards to make withdrawals from ATMs in liquor stores, betting parlors and sex clubs.

MTA to employ welfare recipients

From the Daily News:

Up to 1,000 welfare recipients will scrub subway stations for their benefits under a cost-cutting measure in the MTA’s 2012 budget, approved Monday by the agency’s Finance Committee.

The welfare workers are the equivalent of 225 full-time cleaners on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority payroll.

The Work Experience Program helped hundreds of participants obtain full-time union jobs cleaning the subway before it was canceled in 2008. It’s being revived as the MTA struggles to close budget gaps year after year in the recession.

The new fiscal plan, however, did not restore last year’s service cuts.

Some states wise up

From the NY Times:

The most widespread hurdle has been the demand for photo identification at the polls, a departure from the longstanding practice of using voters’ signatures or household identification like a utility bill. Seven states this year have passed laws requiring strict photo ID to vote, and similar measures were introduced in 27 other states. More than 21 million citizens — 11 percent of the population — do not have government ID cards. Many of them are poor, or elderly, or black and Hispanic and could have a hard time navigating the bureaucracy to get a card.

The poor would have benefit cards that contain their photos. I don't understand the assertion that the others would "have a hard time navigating the bureaucracy to get a card." Standing on line at the DMV is not that difficult. A pain in the ass, yes, but not difficult. Plus you need to have ID to do so many other things these days, like enter courthouses or board planes, that I find it hard to believe that there are 21 million citizens walking around out there without photo ID. Are these 21 million citizens actually adults registered to vote?

From the NY Times:

As more Americans turn to government programs for refuge from a merciless economy, a growing number are encountering a new price of admission to the social safety net: a urine sample.

Policy makers in three dozen states this year proposed drug testing for people receiving benefits like welfare, unemployment assistance, job training, food stamps and public housing. Such laws, which proponents say ensure that tax dollars are not being misused and critics say reinforce stereotypes about the poor, have passed in states including Arizona, Indiana and Missouri.

In Florida, people receiving cash assistance through welfare have had to pay for their own drug tests since July, and enrollment has shrunk to its lowest levels since the start of the recession.

How do we get this in New York? Oh wait, Cuomo is governor. Never mind.

Telling it like it is

From "Penner's Pen" at the Queens Courier:

Some so-called developers continue to act like pigs, by feasting on taxpayer dollars. The Borough of Queens and New York City prospered for centuries prior to the creation of various city and state development corporations over the past decades. In too many cases, projects have been heavily subsidized by taxpayers, commonly known as corporate welfare. Between direct government funding, low interest loans and long term tax exemptions -- the bill to taxpayers may be greater than the benefits. Also there is a relationship between Pay for Play campaign contributions from developers to elected officials looking for favorable legislation, permits and subsidies.

Don't forget the conflict of interest for senior staff from city or state regulatory and permitting agencies. Too many leave at the end of any Mayoral or Governor's administration to become employees or consultants to the same developers they previously oversaw. Former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff went to work on some of the very same projects he previously represented at City Hall. Too many mega developers try to purchase the support of local community groups by making so-called voluntary donations. They also make promises for capital improvements, which after the major project is completed don't always appear.

If projects like Willets Point are so worthwhile, why can't major developers use their own funds. Can't they obtain loans from banks, like medium and small businesses, rather than pick the pockets of taxpayers to pay a significant portion of the bill? Can our water, sewage, power and transportation infrastructures handle the additional stress on the environment from such projects?

Existing small business people at Willets Point created their companies, over time by their own hard work and sweat with no assistance from government. During that same time period, they created several hundred jobs. Both the owners and employees are our neighbors. They pay taxes like the rest of us. The only difference is that for decades they have been denied basic essential municipal services that we take for granted.

Real business people who believe in capitalism build companies on their own. How sad that some don't want to do it the old fashion way by sweat and hard work. They continue to look for shortcuts in the form of huge subsidies at taxpayers expense, including favorable tax code changes, long term low or no interest loans, physical infrastructure improvements such as roads, sewers and street lighting, along with eminent domain favors from elected officials.

With a looming multibillion dollar municipal budget shortfall and $60 billion dollar long term debt, there are surely other priorities that City Hall could spend hard earned tax dollars on than the so-called Willets Point development project.

Bloomberg after welfare recipient's Lotto winnings

From Eyewitness News:

There is an update on a story Eyewitness News brought you more than a year ago about a former welfare recipient who won the lottery, only to have half his winnings taken away by the state.

Not only did he recently gain a major court victory in his battle to get back his prize money, his case could result in millions of dollars being returned to others.

Last time we heard from Walter Carver, he was taking on Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city's team of attorneys.

He is suing the city for taking half of his $10,000 in lottery winnings to reimburse the state for money he received years ago while on welfare. Under New York law, the state is entitled to half the winnings of any welfare recipient. That, plus taxes left Carver with a little more than $1,000 the day he went to claim his prize.

Carver says the state and city have no right to his lottery winnings, since during the three years he was on welfare, he worked 36 hours a week for his checks, washing floors on the Staten Island ferries. He sued, arguing that taking his winnings is a a violation of the Fair Labor act.

The U.S. District court ruled he had no case and moved to dismiss it. That's when the former sergeant in the Vietnam war and his attorney fired back by filing an appeal.

A few weeks ago, Carver and his attorney found out they won the appeal. The U.S. Circuit Court ruled that the lower court's dismissal was in error.

Eyewitness News has learned that since 2002, the state has intercepted $33 million in lottery winnings from welfare recipients, many of them having worked for their checks just like Carver. It is for them, he says, that he continues his David and Goliath battle against the city and state.

It apparently CAN be done!

From City Journal:

...if you think that America no longer encourages long-term dependency or underclass poverty, you haven’t been paying attention to public housing. Like cash welfare before the reform, public housing is dominated by extremely poor single-parent families (53 percent of public-housing households nationwide earn less than $10,000 a year, and only 13 percent have two adult residents). Like welfare, public housing offers recipients a disincentive to marry: because rents are fixed at 30 percent of household income, there’s good reason not to put a second wage earner on the lease. And like welfare, public-housing projects—and the closely related voucher programs run by housing authorities—impose neither a work requirement nor a time limit on recipients. So not only do 2.2 million people live in public-housing units in America; they spend an average of more than eight years in them. And dwarfing their ranks are the 5 million living in private, voucher-paid housing, where the average length of residency is six years.

In short, American housing policy encourages the formation of households in which low-income single women raise children—exactly the sort of homes where kids’ prospects are bleakest. Crime rates, moreover, are consistently high in and around public housing, and voucher units have been widely implicated in the spread of social problems to formerly safe areas. The problem is financial, as well: housing vouchers alone, which didn’t even exist until 1974, now cost taxpayers $18 billion, more than the $16.9 billion that we spend on welfare. And it’s a policy that disproportionately affects the African-American poor. Nearly 45 percent of public-housing tenants are black, as are 42 percent of voucher recipients.

All this makes what Renee Glover is doing in Atlanta so important. Since 1994, Glover, a child of Jim Crow–era Jacksonville, Florida, has led the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA)—the nation’s fifth-largest public-housing system, with 50,000 tenants and voucher recipients, 99 percent of them, like her, African-American. She has drawn national recognition for the fact that during her tenure, Atlanta became the first city in the United States to tear down virtually all its projects. But Glover’s plan is far more ambitious than demolition: she has set out to transform the dysfunctional behavior that condemns people to languish for years in public housing. Her approach is the most dramatic change in any city’s public-housing system since Franklin Roosevelt created the program in 1937.

Glover’s tool kit includes much more than demolition, construction, and the work requirement, as complex and unusual as they are. Her least-known but most ambitious effort is what she unabashedly calls “human transformation,” an effort to instill in the public-housing poor the habits needed to join the social and economic mainstream. Glover’s memory of her childhood in the segregated South inspires the program. “We had a very strong and very strongly knitted community,” she recalls. “There was never a day that passed that we didn’t hear that we were being prepared to be the next leaders of the country.”

To re-create that culture of ambition and discipline, the AHA has invested nearly $27 million in what amounts to intensive counseling for public-housing tenants. The counselors—twenty-first-century versions of the Victorian “friendly visitors” who sought to encourage independence among the poor—follow the relocated tenants to their new homes and check up on them there, verifying that they’re employed or in school. They try to teach them the things that most Americans learn from their families: how to get a job and then get a better one; why it’s important to meet your children’s teachers and go to PTA meetings; how to live frugally and save for the future. It’s a striking example of what political scientist Lawrence Mead calls “the new paternalism.”

Rangel charity in trouble

From the NY Post:

Alianza Dominicana, the troubled Washington Heights nonprofit with ties to Rep. Charles Rangel, got hit with a $192,000 invoice after a state audit turned up multiple instances of improper billing, The Post has learned.

The state Office of Children and Family Services audited the nonprofit in 2005, the year it received about $1.2 million in federal funds to run after-school and healthy-living programs for at-risk kids and families, state documents show.

Alianza Dominicana claimed partial salary reimbursements for about eight staffers who actually had multiple job responsibilities beyond the project that was funded by federal welfare dollars, the state found.

The state denied $111,350 in "personal service costs" and "fringe benefits" that Alianza had on its books.

The nonprofit also claimed to have spent nearly $3,000 to bring local kids to the movies, but when state investigators pressed for names of children in that program, there were none, state documents show.

In total, Alianza was ordered to repay the state $192,304 for improperly claimed welfare funds, according to the state. The organization is making regular payments, said a spokesperson for the Office of Children and Family Services.

Alianza's city funding -- $60 million in recent years -- was abruptly cut off this summer after the city Department of Investigation launched a probe.

Alianza Dominicana's executive director, Moises Perez, who did not return a call for comment Friday, has agreed to take an unpaid leave during the city's probe.

How many more cases like this are out there?

From WNYC:

As the city and state continue to negotiate, Luis Cruz will continue to check the mail each month in search of a receipt that says his rent has been paid. So far he’s good through February. But he says, “At any moment there could be a knock on the door and someone could say DHS is no longer paying your rent. Are you going to pay it yourself or leave.”

Cruz’s family would not be able to pay the rent on their own. The family came from Puerto Rico and went straight into a city shelter. The family says they originally came to New York in search of medical care. Cruz says doctors in Puerto Rico never controlled his wife's diabetes and now she is blind, suffers from arthritis, and depression and requires his 24 hour care.

He opens a refrigerator full of insulin. Cruz says his 8-year-old daughter is also mentally ill. The family survives off $1,300 a month in disability payments. Last year about 1,600 families with a disabled family member left the shelter system. Cruz says as for his family, they hope to never have to go back.

I suppose this piece was supposed to make me feel sorry for these folks. Nice try, but after I paid my tax bill this month, that ain't happening.

Why in the hell do we not have a residency requirement for these benefits? The world can darken our doorstep and beg for our money, and we New York State taxpayers, like the jackasses we are, pay for it. Our taxes go up year after year because our elected officials have never met a welfare case they don't fall in love with, no matter where they come from. All because of the tweeding.

Pass a law that you have to reside in NYC and state and pay taxes here for 5 years in order to get benefits from us. There's a residency requirement to get a freaking library card but none to live off taxpayer money. How backwards is that?

Additional question: Is the US destined to become a refugee camp?

Answer: We already are!

Full-throttle tweeding efforts underway

From City Journal:

Several dependency-promoting bills are gathering steam in Albany. In theory, current state law requires putatively homeless single mothers with an income to contribute a small portion of that income to the costs of their taxpayer-funded apartments. For instance, a single mother with two children and a monthly income of $1,000 could be asked to contribute around $160 a month for her private apartment. But when the city tried to enforce the contribution rule last spring, homeless advocates went ballistic, and the administration backed off. The city wants to start enforcing the rule again, but a bill sponsored by state senator Daniel Squadron of Brooklyn would forbid it.

The requirement is both fair—other low-income New Yorkers put far more of their income toward rent—and good policy. The absence of any rent requirement creates a powerful incentive to enter and stay in the system. It also undermines the reciprocity contract between taxpayers and welfare recipients that lies at the heart of welfare reform. The result: a nearly half-billion-dollar annual bill to house single mothers claiming homelessness.

Other pending legislation would forbid the city from medically evaluating a recipient’s claim that she was incapable of working; it would also allow enrollment in a four-year college to fulfill welfare’s work requirements. The first bill opens up a wide arena for fraud; the second ignores decades of pre- and post-welfare-reform experience showing that the best way for an unskilled worker to enter the workforce is actually to start working, rather than spend years in often fruitless “education and training” programs.

If the Albany dependency brigades weren’t dangerous enough, the Obama administration has been conducting its own campaign for expanded welfare eligibility—not surprisingly, perhaps, given that some of the nation’s most influential welfare advocates now occupy key positions in the federal bureaucracy.

This double-sided attack on New York’s welfare reform lacks all empirical basis. Since 1995, the city’s welfare rolls have dropped nearly 70 percent, from 1.1 million to 350,000. Rather than increasing, as opponents of welfare reform warned, the child poverty rate in New York City dropped 34 percent during the same period, compared with a 5 percent drop nationwide. In 2008, New York City had the lowest child poverty rate—26.5 percent—and the lowest total poverty rate—18.2 percent—of the country’s eight largest cities.

Work, even at minimum wage, remains the best route out of poverty. When tax credits and medical and housing benefits are included, an average single mother of two with an $8.25-an-hour job in New York City receives a $63,000 annual income. On welfare alone, that same mother would pull in $43,000 a year—a whopping amount for non-work, to be sure, but still less than work provides.

City turns blind eye to illegal conversions

From the NY Times:

For at least two years before a fire killed three men in an illegally divided house next door, Diane Ross and her family lived in an illegal apartment at 42-38 65th Street in Woodside, Queens.

Their life there — in a basement divided into one apartment and four single-room units, with six others upstairs, all crammed into a two-family house — seemed to them to be business as usual, and attracted no special notice. Neither the tenants nor their landlord, who said he charged $107 a month for each room, tried to hide it.

Con Edison workers entered the house in 2007 to make repairs. The city taxed the house as a three-family home, even though it was built for two. And the Ross family and their landlord say that city agencies visited their apartment and helped pay their rent for about two years — until Nov. 7, when the fatal blaze swept through the basement next door, killing the three men.

After that, building inspectors declared Ms. Ross’s apartment a hazard and ordered her out.

The Administration for Children’s Services and the Human Resources Administration, which provide rent assistance in various situations, said they could not reveal whether they had supported Ms. Ross’s family, citing confidentiality rules. They said that they checked documents and sometimes visited clients’ homes, but that they did not function as building inspectors.

But the story of 65th Street illustrates a problem often cited by housing advocates: Dangerous, illegal apartments often exist in plain sight, under the noses of overworked building inspectors whose job is to discover and fine violators, and of neighbors and workers who are not responsible for combating illegal apartments but may see or learn of unsafe situations.

Welfare seekers flock to NYC

From the NY Post:

Homeless and unemployed, Kenneth Wecker, 62, moved back from Florida to his native city to take advantage of New York's social services...

The former accountant was first told in 2007 that he was eligible for a taxpayer-funded monthly rent subsidy of $899 from the city through its Advantage New York program, started by the Department of Homeless Services. It's the most generous municipal rental-assistance program in the nation, DHS said.

He also collects $1,226 a month in federal Social Security disability payments and a small monthly allotment of food stamps that he says isn't enough to feed himself properly.

Wecker is part of a wave of benefit seekers who have arrived in the city since the Great Recession hit, social experts say. As middle-class residents flee because of high taxes, the poor and disabled look to New York to access some of the best taxpayer-funded social services in the nation.

The state and city have long been what some economists call a "welfare magnet." In particular, New York City offers better housing and Medicaid options than much of the rest of the country.

It's impossible to quantify how many city programs are accessed by out-of-staters like Wecker, because New York doesn't track that data. And of the dozens of programs offered in New York, none makes local residency a requirement for getting benefits.

But increases in applications for social services suggest a surge in welfare immigration. The Advantage NY program assisting Wecker, for instance, is providing city-funded leases to about 131 households a week -- a 79 percent increase over the previous year.

Demand for Food Stamps has soared by 30 percent in the city in the last two years -- up to 1.6 million. The federal government pays for 90 percent of those costs, but New Yorkers make up the difference.

That leaves the door open for people to come to the Big Apple -- where Medicaid qualifications are among the most liberal in the country, said Human Resources Administration Commissioner Robert Doar.

New York also provides dozens of housing programs, free heating subsidies and school meals for needy children, plus a program started in the 1980s to offer housing to HIV and AIDS sufferers.

"Many of these federal programs have a required state contribution to the state program -- so, yes, New York taxpayers are paying twice," said Rector.

You can also spend your entire career in another country and then come here to retire on the public dole. Don't worry, NYC taxpayers will take care of you until you croak!

More illegal apartments found near Woodside blaze site

From CBS 2:

As neighbors mourned the victims, at least some of whom were said to be members of the local Bangladeshi community, others in the diverse community complained that too many homes there have been illegally subdivided, causing dangerous conditions.

"Everybody changes from two-family to four, five, six families – it's not right," one neighbor said. "I pay my tax for two families – why should I pay the same as they pay?"

Just next door, inspectors found more illegal apartments, and another building was ordered shut, leaving several people homeless.

"I was told I had to vacate," one resident, Jeffrey, said.

He said he lived in a single-room occupancy in the basement for several years.

"I assumed everything was legitimate," Jeffrey said. "When I was on Welfare, inspectors came and inspected it. They were paying the rent."

Here's the address where the fire was. Note that there was a complaint in 2004 for illegal conversion of basement, but the DOB supposedly found nothing. The house next door has had illegal apartments since 1998 but no enforcement was done.

And Paterson wonders why he's unpopular...

From the NY Daily Balance:

The number of New Yorkers getting food stamps has hit a 15-year high, thanks to an aggressive effort by state and NYC officials to seek out new recipients by mining government databanks for anyone who might be eligible.

The number of food stanmp recipients jumped 25 percent just since last year, and more than 1.5 million New Yorkers are getting the benefit, the highest since then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani led a crackdown as part of welfare reform.

That was then. This is now.

Gov. Paterson and his Democrat allies in the Senate and Assembly have been systematically dismantling those reforms to encourage more New Yorkers to get on the dole.

They already wiped out an antifraud fingerprinting provision that heped trim welfare rolls to historic lows by purging double dippers.

As part of this year’s budget, they loosened the workfare requirements so full-time college students could collect a welfare check while attending classes.

This month, Paterson unilaterally decided to use $140 million in deferal stimulus money (that’s supposed to create jobs) to give generous back-to-school bonuses to welfare moms, with no accountability and without even telling them what the money was for.

It's called tweeding.