Food Stamp Sign-Ups Low in N.Y.

Former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) was fond of describing food stamps as a strand in the web of welfare dependency. And the number of New Yorkers receiving food stamps fell by 700,000 during the former mayor's tenure, the sharpest drop in city history.

But federal judges and U.S. Department of Agriculture investigators found that Giuliani-era caseworkers routinely and illegally denied food stamps to tens of thousands of poor people.

Giuliani's critique still echoes in national conservative circles. Analyst Jeffrey M. Jones wrote in the most recent issue of the Hoover Institution's in-house magazine that food stamps contribute to overeating, and he argued for "retaining a stigma [about food stamps] historically associated with welfare."

"When Rudy was mayor . . . the ultimate goal was to get people off of any welfare benefit," said Patricia M. Smith, a deputy commissioner at the city's Human Resources Administration. "Mayor Bloomberg has gone out of his way to say that food stamps are not welfare."

In fact, Bloomberg, who was endorsed by Giuliani, has been cautious about reversing his predecessor's policies. His administration has declined to seek a state waiver that would allow jobless single adults to receive food stamps for more than three months in any three-year period.

And New York state, with support from Bloomberg, is one of just four states in the nation that fingerprints food stamp applicants.

"Rudy chose to apply his policies of intimidation to food stamps," said Harvey Robins, a former top welfare official under former mayor Edward I. Koch (D). "If Bloomberg is truly serious about hunger, he should stop fingerprinting and see what happens."

To talk with working-poor New Yorkers in food pantries is to hear of people snared in a bureaucratic maze of waiting lines, lost applications and improper denials. (New York still has one of the highest rates of mistaken denial of food stamp claims in the nation.)

Julia Guillen cleans out airplanes at La Guardia Airport. She earns $7 an hour and lives with two sons and an 8-year-old grandson. In October 2004, she applied for food stamps.

She missed an appointment, and a caseworker closed her case. Then she could not find a bank statement. Then they wanted paperwork proof of child support. (Guillen moved twice in the year she applied for stamps, sometimes sleeping on her mother's floor -- 42 percent of food stamp recipients spend more than half their income on rent.)

On and on it went. Today she receives food stamps, but she is feeling none too secure about it. "It seemed like they made everything impossible."

Advocates agree with city officials that a public benefit cannot be given away willy-nilly. But they add that a city such as New York, with its social democratic traditions, should not make it so arduous for the poor to find food.

"We are hurting the very people who are choosing work as their lifestyle," said Robins, the former welfare official. "New York created the social safety net, and we should be leading the way in re-stitching it."