Prometheus 6

Bloomberg Details City’s Antipoverty Experiment
By DIANE CARDWELL

Seeking new solutions to New York’s vexingly high poverty rates, the city is moving ahead with a bold antipoverty experiment that will pay poor families up to $5,000 a year to meet targets like exemplary school attendance, going for medical checkups or holding down a full-time job, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said today.

Under the program, which is based on a similar effort in Mexico but is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, families would receive payments every two months for meeting any of 20 or so criteria per individual. The payments would range from perhaps $25 for an elementary school student’s attendance to $300 for greatly improved performance on a standardized test, officials said.

Conceived as an experiment, the program, first announced last fall and set to begin in September, is to serve 2,500 randomly selected families whose progress will be tracked against another 2,500 randomly selected families who will not receive the assistance.

The city has already raised $42 million of the $50 million needed to cover the costs from private sources, including Mr. Bloomberg. If the experiment is successful, officials plan to make it a government-financed program.

Likening the payments, called conditional cash transfers, to tax incentives that steer people of greater means toward property ownership, Mr. Bloomberg said he hoped the payments would set people on a road out of poverty permanently.