Carol Jenkins: Hello and thanks so much for joining the Invisible Americans podcast with Jeff Magic and Carol Jenkins. We address the travesty of child poverty here.

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Jeff Madrick: There are nearly 13 million children living in serious material deprivation in America and we don't see them. They are our invisible Americans and we plan to change that.

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Carol Jenkins: A couple of words about us. The podcast is based on Jeff's book, Invisible Americans, The Tragic Cost of Child Poverty. He's an economics writer, author of seven, and co-author of another four books on the American economy.

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Jeff Madrick: And Carol is an Emmy-winning journalist, activist, and author, most recently president of the ERA Coalition, working to amend the Constitution to include women.

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Carol Jenkins: and we are longtime colleagues and friends. In New York City, there are 420,000 children living below the poverty level. That according to the recent poverty tracker, indicating that a full quarter of people living in New York City are struggling to afford their shelter and their food. We talk with the people who put the tracker together, Chris Wimer, who directs the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work, and Chloe Sarnoff, Director of Policy Research at Robin Hood, the biggest nonprofit supporter of anti-poverty efforts in the city.

Afterwards, we'll talk with Christine Quinn of WIN, the largest provider of shelters in the city. Chris and Chloe, thanks so much for joining us today, and thanks for the hard work on the Poverty Tracker. We were all shocked beyond belief to know that the rate had gotten so high. If you could tell us a little bit about your reaction when you first saw the numbers, Chris, what did you think?

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Chris Wimer: Yeah, I mean, initially we were surprised, too, less that poverty rose, but more by sort of how much and that the level was one in four New Yorkers. living in poverty in the latest year of our data, which was from 2023. But when we started to look into it, you know, it sort of started to make sense. Essentially, we know that, you know, child poverty nationally had fallen to a historic low in 2021. And we also saw New York City poverty fall in 2021 as a result of all that sort of historic income support in response to the pandemic. And, you know, by 2022, a lot of that had expired By 2023, it really fully expired. With the removal of that aid, poverty was bound to rise again, especially child poverty. And that's what we saw. 

So in 2022, we sort of thought we were seeing maybe like a return to that sort of pre-pandemic normal, but that really accelerated in 2023. And it turns out that that's because of rising inflation, especially the sort of runaway costs of basic needs. So inflation, as everyone knows, has been rising overall. over this period, but the inflation on the real core basics like food and housing took off even faster than that. 

You know, that's exactly the things that are represented in a poverty line or in a poverty threshold, right? You know, the poverty threshold is measuring how many people have enough income to afford those basic needs. So, when the prices of those basic needs are really accelerating and skyrocketing, that shows up in the poverty line. That's the main reason that we saw poverty rise in 2023 to the extent that we did.

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Carol Jenkins: And for us to know that 420,000 children are counted in that 2 million that you estimate are in this, not being able to afford their basic needs. Chloe, if you could talk with us, I was a little pleasantly surprised to know that as you do the poverty tracker, you're actually checking in with people several times a year. How exactly does that work?

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Chloe Sarnoff: I think from Robin Hood's perspective, what we wanted to do was ensure we were capturing the nuances of economic instability. You know, oftentimes the poverty rate is thought of as just a moment in time, a snapshot. But we know from, you know, our decades of grant making and of supporting organizations that serve low-income New Yorkers, that families are experiencing changing hardships. You know, they're moving in and out of poverty over time. Maybe one year, you know, they're able to put away some savings, but the next year an unexpected expense could hit, or they could have their hours cut at their job. 

And so, we knew, you know, just anecdotally for years that this was not a static issue, that this was really dynamic, and families were experiencing And so, when we launched our partnership with Columbia University more than a decade ago, that's really what we were aiming to design, was a study and a tool that would allow us to move along with families as they were experiencing opportunities and setbacks. Our great research partners at Columbia are interviewing the same families multiple times throughout the year. So, over multiple years, you know, refreshing those samples as folks move out of New York or, you know, normal attrition happens, but that really allows us to understand not just what's happening to a family in a given year, but over a five-year period. And what we see is really alarming in that many families that manage to escape poverty one year fall into poverty the next.

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Carol Jenkins: And, Chris, I guess it's one of the markers is if you have $400 for an emergency, you know, that sort of is an essential thing, and so many families do not have it.

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Chris Wimer: Yeah, exactly. I mean, one of the core findings from the study over the years is that it's not just getting right over this poverty line, you know, not just getting $1 above this poverty line. You know, all your problems are magically solved. I mean, that's just common sense, too. We found, for example, that, you know, having a bit of a nest egg and some savings to weather that kind of a shock that Chloe described, has been a big important buffer for whether that type of unanticipated expense will send a family sliding into the experience of hardship or other types of economic distress. 

We also found that it's not just getting above the poverty line, but maybe getting around twice the poverty line where the risk. of falling back into poverty or falling into hardship really begins to decline. And so, you know, poverty is an important indicator, but it's not the only indicator. And that's a big contribution of the poverty tracker, I think, overall, is that we're trying to look comprehensively at people's well-being along multiple indicators. And as Chloe was talking about, follow people over time to see, you know, what are the important factors that predict people's ability to achieve that economic security for themselves and their families.

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Carol Jenkins: Well, Robin Hood has invested over $3 billion by now. I guess you started in 1988, and you have hundreds of grants that you're giving out and programs to try to stave off this poverty level. Talk to us a little bit about that, the ways that you are supporting so many organizations and people.

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Chloe Sarnoff: We have a wide range of portfolios that really are all designed to help meet the needs of New York City's lowest income families. So, everything from supporting child care access, ensuring that low income families have a place where their kids can safely learn and develop. So, many of our partners are in the child care space. To supporting K12 education, additional tutoring options for kids, many of the charter and other schools that provide such essential educational supports to kids. We also do everything to do with the whole household. We support a number of shelter providers in New York City. We also support families in their housing search to ensure that households that have vouchers are able to find and access stable housing. We support organizations that provide job training programs. 

We do a lot of work too with CUNY in ensuring that You know, our young people entering college are able to really thrive and persist through and graduate and find jobs that will put them on a path towards economic mobility. We support immigration, legal services and other legal services for households facing legal challenges. We support. food pantries all across the city. So, really, our goal is to kind of be everywhere that low-income New Yorkers are and supporting the really incredible human services nonprofits across the city that provide life-saving services for New Yorkers.

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Carol Jenkins: Well, it's incredible work. And I guess as a result of the tracker, you're saying that inflation is your big enemy at this point.

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Chloe Sarnoff: For families living in poverty, affording basic needs has always been a struggle. But I think one of the things that has really entered the narrative is this affordability challenge that isn't impacting just New Yorkers living in poverty, but low and moderate income New Yorkers as well who, to our earlier point, may not be in poverty this year, but may over time find themselves living below the poverty line as their wages really struggled to keep up with rising costs. And we know that housing is an enormous barrier. Accessing affordable, stable housing is an enormous barrier. Our research partners at Columbia through the Poverty Tracker find that, you know, we often think of rent burden, which is, are you spending more than 30% of your income on rent? 

And it's not just a binary. It's not that folks are spending 33% of their income on rent. Rent-burdened New Yorkers living in poverty are spending roughly 70% of their cash income on rent each month, according to the Poverty Tracker. That leaves almost no money left over for other basic needs, as food is getting more expensive, as child care is getting, you know, is incredibly expensive. Transportation, all these basic needs that folks really are just struggling to meet, really get compounded by our incredibly tight housing market.

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Carol Jenkins: I think you say in the poverty tracker that you need at least $50,000 of family, of how many does that include to actually make it in New York City?

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Chris Wimer: Yes. So, the poverty line that we use, it was around $47,000 in 2023, and it's going to be even higher in 2025 when we get that data in. That's higher than the national average. So, one of the advantages of the measure that we use is that it takes into account the high cost of living in New York City relative to other places, and that's especially the high cost of rent and housing in the city, but not just rent, of course. And the measure takes also a more comprehensive picture of people's resources, so it includes not just cash, but you know, the value of people are getting a housing subsidy or they're getting staff or, you know, school meals or things like that. So, it takes a more comprehensive picture. 

And so, the other thing that it points to is the need for policy to really step up and help make a dent in this crisis and help people with this affordability crisis in the city. So, we found, for example, in this year's report that, you know, policies were lifting, you know, half a million New Yorkers out of poverty, which is great, but there's, you know, a lot more that could be done. In portions of the report, we also discussed, you know, some of the action at the state level in New York State, where the state's making recommendations for a set of policies that can really make a big difference in the child poverty rate, both in the city and then across the state.

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Carol Jenkins: Governor Hochul seems to be supporting much of that. And one of them, if you could talk about the child tax, the Empire State child tax rate.

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Chris Wimer: Yeah, that's one of the main proposals that's come out of Governor Hochul's budget this year, and it's an expansion to the Empire State Credit, which is a state version of the Federal Job Tax Credit that's existed for quite a while in New York. There are sort of two features of the proposed reform that are, I think, really important, especially if that reform is made permanent and adopted. One is that it increases the value of the credit, right? So the maximum credit right now is just $330. That would increase to $500 for older kids and then $1,000 for the youngest kids, kids aged zero to three. And then just as important, it includes the lowest income kids in eligibility for that credit. 

So, right now, you really have to have a pretty substantial amount of earnings to even get that $330. This fully includes those kids who are left out or left behind by that credit structure. So, those families with low and no earnings would be able to get that full credit. And those two things in combination can make a real impact in child poverty. And so it's a great 1st step. I think there's a lot more that could be done and built off from that 1st step. And there, you know, there's some other interesting things in the budget as well. This idea of baby payments to people who are pregnant with. 

With a child, and, you know, a potential, like, a birth grant after that. It's limited. It would only be for folks on public assistance at first. So there's definitely ways that that could be scaled and made more impactful if it goes into law. But yeah, these are great first steps and hopefully are a foundation for doing even more to combat the problem.

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Carol Jenkins: Chloe, I see that Robin Hood is in support of the new housing proposals. If you could tell us a little bit about that. It seems it's over a decade, but it seems like a substantial number of new housing that would be available.

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Chloe Sarnoff: Yeah, I think you're talking about the city of yes for housing opportunity, which recently passed housing and making. Housing more affordable in New York City is 1 of our core policy priorities and there's sort of different you have to do different things at the same time. You know, there's no 1 size fits all approach. So we need to make it a lot easier to build affordable housing in New York City, which is some of what city of yes for housing does. And we also need to be increasing supports for our low-income tenants. 

And so, one of our core priorities on the tenant support side is to create the Housing Access Voucher Program, which would be a statewide program modeled a lot like Section 8, where low-income households pay 30 percent of their income towards rent, and the rest is covered by the government subsidy. And importantly, this voucher would be available to New Yorkers who are experiencing homelessness, but also those who are at risk of homelessness. New York City has a really robust housing voucher program for folks that are exiting shelter called CityFHEPS, which is housing right now about 50,000 households, which is a huge and incredibly important program. 

But we have very limited resources in New York City to help folks Prevent homelessness so to stabilize folks when they're experiencing housing instability, but before they enter shelter, and so the housing access voucher program, or would create that mechanism. And really importantly, it would be the only voucher really available outside of New York City to help households experiencing homelessness or at risk of it. That's a core priority for Robinhood. It is very similar to one of the recommendations that the Governor's Child Poverty Reduction Advisory Council put forward, though the proposal by that roundtable is a much bigger version, which would come with significant costs. 

And so, we really think that the Housing Access Voucher Program, which is a smaller program, is a really feasible, reasonable, and important place to start. And so that's really what we're pushing for this year, but it was not included in the governor's budget. And so we'll be looking towards next week to see the legislature include that recommendation and then really trying to ensure that that makes it into the final budget this year.

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Carol Jenkins: Chris, as we record this, we are getting a word that in certain proposals from federal government and Congress, there are cuts to Medicaid, to SNAP, to Social Security, that all of this may be on the table. What happens to our people, our children, and those facing poverty here?

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Chris Wimer: Unfortunately, entirely predictable results happen when that happens. So, the two main programs that I'm most worried about right now are Medicaid and the SNAP program at the federal level, you know, in the recent House budget resolution. there were very nonspecific but very large targets put on those programs, which helped millions of people across the country. SNAP is one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in the country. I mean, it's designed to support nutrition assistance, right? And the ability to purchase food, but it makes a huge dent in poverty, especially child poverty. And especially in the wake of, you know, changes to the safety net in the 1990s, staff has kind of become one of the last sort of pillars of support for low-income families and low-income families with children. 

So, anything that takes, you know, money out of that program, makes it more difficult to access, you know, cuts people off, restricts eligibility, all those things are going to just directly harm families. And potentially increase hunger and food insecurity as well, not just poverty. And Medicaid as well, that's a program that people count on for health insurance. It's less easy to measure in a traditional poverty measure than SNAP is, but there are folks who have quantified that and quantified the impact and shown that Medicaid reduces poverty a lot when properly measured. you know, losing access to health care, losing access to food assistance. Those are two of the basics that we've already shown and talked about how they've become more out of reach and more expensive for folks. So, unfortunately, this is just potentially kind of very harmful for families both in New York and across the country.

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Carol Jenkins: And Chloe Robin hoods response to all of that.

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Chloe Sarnoff: Most of our work is really focused on New York City and state. So a lot of that is figuring out who are the partners working to ensure that New Yorkers stay enrolled in benefits that they understand these rule changes. So, continuing to support many of our benefits access partners. And then really continuing to advocate for New York State stepping in and ensuring that New Yorkers don't fall deeper into poverty and hardship as a result of actions at the federal level.

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Carol Jenkins: And, Chris, are you optimistic?

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Chris Wimer: Oh, boy, it depends on the day, to be honest, if I'm optimistic or not. I mean, at the federal level, I'm not very optimistic at the moment. There are such tight margins in the house that I think if people are able to see the harm that those changes could cause in their districts, I'd hope. I would hope that some sensible legislation would come around, but I am hopeful and more optimistic at the state level. Like we talked about, you know, the actions that Governor Hochul is proposing, we'll see what the legislature proposes, but we said next week can make a difference in the face of some of these threats to resources that families are facing. But yeah, it does seem to change every day.

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Carol Jenkins: Well, I want to thank both of you for the very hard work that you are doing and for the poverty tracker so that we can actually tell where we stand. When you put it in numbers, like 2 million people, 420,000 children, it makes it so much clearer of what we're up against, you know, in this city. Incredible. Thank you both so much. 

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Chloe Sarnoff: Thank you for having us. 

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Chris Wimer: Thank you. 

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Carol Jenkins: Understanding the key part that housing plays in the financial stress of families in New York City, we talk with Christine Quinn, who is President and CEO of WIN, formerly Women in Need. It's the largest provider of shelters, social services, and supportive housing for families in the city. Thanks so much for being with us today and thanks for the tremendous amount of work that you're doing housing the unsheltered in this city. I hadn't realized that your organization may be the biggest in the country in terms of supplying homes.

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Christine Quinn: Yeah, we are the largest provider of shelter and permanent supportive housing to homeless families with children. We house about 12 or 13% of all of the homeless families with children in the system in New York. And what most folks don't realize is that 68%, close to 70% of the people in shelter today, tonight, are families with children. We all believe the majority of the homeless are single, mentally ill men. Not that there isn't that population and not that it doesn't need more help, but that's actually not the majority of who is homeless. If you think about it, the face of homelessness in New York City is really a five-year-old child with a working mother.

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Carol Jenkins: Right, five-year-old child with a working mother. Now, you provide both temporary emergency housing and then you have some longer-term facilities as well, which I supported housing, which I think lasted. So talk to us first about temporary. You know, I often go to the website that will tell you exactly how many children are in the shelter system. and it could be upwards of $40,000 any given night in New York City. So, talk to us about how you help them in urgency of their need.

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Christine Quinn: Yeah. A study recently by a very good group, Advocates for Children, found that one out of eight public school children in New York City was homeless. So, the number is staggering. We have, across the five boroughs, 16 temporary housing facilities, shelters more commonly referred to. And in those shelters, we fulfill, as do other non-profits, a legal requirement of the city. In the late 80s, early 90s, there was a court decree, a court case, that said the homeless have to be housed. So, the city contracts that responsibility out. That gets us kind of the bottom level of what we do. The money, you know, to pay for the content bill and basically a case manager. And we do case manage, we get benefits turned on, et cetera. 

We at WINS think what we do in sum total needs to be defined by the needs of the clients. So we raise private money. What we implement is what we call the Way to Win, which is a holistic wraparound service model based on a trauma-informed care intervention. So it includes a camp for children all summer, but also any school break, weekday, whatever. child care on site, an income building program, which is our job training, job placement program, tutoring, homework, health, recreation, MSWs or LCSWs intervene on a higher level, if you will. So that, we believe that all of that is what's necessary to make sure that people get out of shelter. And our average length of stay is 11 months. 

But more importantly actually than getting out of shelter is not returning. And when we do a look back with the support of the Robin Hood Foundation, we look back a year after we moved you out of shelter. 96% of our clients are still living independently. When we do a two-year look back most recently, 93% of our clients were still living independently, hadn't returned to shelter. 

And I think two of the most critical reasons for that are our income building program, that we work hard to get anybody who's work able into a job that is a living wage and can pay the rent. Two, the trauma-informed approach helps people use that little less than a year to work through the trauma of eviction, of homelessness, of sexual violence, of domestic violence, of substance abuse, whatever they have experienced. So I'm not saying in a month it's like perfect, but I mean, in a year it's like perfect, but it puts them in a better footing to move forward.

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Carol Jenkins: And is that a psychological, emotional help offered to the kids as well? Because a lot of the conversations we're having, you know, the kids are turning up in school. They're scared. They're scared they won't know where their family is when they go home at 3 o'clock or whenever that is. Talk to us about the kids and what you're seeing emotionally happening to them.

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Christine Quinn: Any child who is in a household that has something traumatic, homelessness, or a sick parent, a divorce, whatever it is, you see the same thing. They think it's their fault. And more often than not, they assume the role of an advocate. the kind of leader of the family. And they believe that if they work really hard and they're really good, everything will get better. And that's not the case. And that becoming an adult too early can have long-term negative effects. We know through studies that one of the ways to combat that is through play and recreation. 

And that's one of the reasons why it makes me so angry that when we build or rehabilitate a building to be a shelter, the city doesn't pay for us to put in a playground. We have to raise private money for that. But we know play makes a huge difference. We also know that art makes a huge difference. In our LCSW's Licensed Certified Social Workers Master's of Social Work program, we have social workers dedicated to just work with the children. 

And that is because it's a bit of a different model, right? You're not going to sit down and go back and forth and talk therapy, but when we have, say, a yoga class for the children, the social worker is going to participate in that class and he or she is gonna notice who doesn't sit on the mat, who sits in the corner, who's overly boisterous, whatever the indicators are, and then follow up appropriately with that family. We also recently, through the generosity and hard work of a woman on our junior board of directors, are getting lending libraries in all of our shelters. 

We have libraries, but now we have ones where the children or mom or dad can take the book with them up into the unit that they are living in. And we really think that makes a difference. We are also celebrating community because these children get bullied at school. make no bones about it, the other kids know who's homeless and who isn't. That's why every year we do a backpack drive, so kids have new backpacks, new supplies. That's why we, when people say, do you take used clothes? I say no, because we have to give everyone the new items or they will stand out. But we also try to make sure the kids know they're not alone and they're in a community of other children who are experiencing what they are experiencing. And that makes a big difference in their sense of overly uniqueness. We want every child to feel unique, but not so unique that it's okay to be bold.

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Carol Jenkins: I'm delighted to hear all of this. One of the things that we've found with every survivor of child poverty that we've dealt with written books and have made it, you know, out somehow, they always remember their mother in a government office trying to get out the paperwork. What kind of paperwork? And we are fans of virtually no paperwork.

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Christine Quinn: It takes a lot of paperwork to be homeless. I don't think I could get homeless benefits. I don't have my paperwork in that level of order. You have to have, when you go to the intake center, and Carol, when you go to the intake center as a homeless family, there's only one in the city in the Bronx. So everybody's got to schlep to the Bronx. Two, you have to be able to attest to two years of your recent finances, et cetera. There is legislation in the city council that would make it one year, but I accept that the city is going to require some paperwork. And then you go to this intake office and you meet with someone. 

Now, you're a sensible person. You're going to assume they're meeting with a social worker of sorts or a social worker in training. They're meeting with someone whose job title is fraud investigator. That sets the tone. That sets the tone. They're gonna say, where have you slept the past three months? Oh, you lived with your aunt and uncle? Don't they love you? Let's call them and see if they'll take you back. When Scott Schroeder was patrolling, he did a study and found that on average, homeless families go through intake four times. because they know they don't have anywhere else to go, they don't have anywhere else to go.

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Carol Jenkins: All right, so all of these adults walking around who made it out are still traumatized by it. I love your term being trauma-informed.

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Christine Quinn: And trauma-informed, you know, we have a 24-hour security team at all our shelters, and 80% of our moms are domestic violence survivors, so that security is very important, because if you don't feel safe, you can't heal. But we do our trauma-informed training for security guards, for maintenance workers, so they can understand that everyone they're interacting with has been through something. And that something that would not be a trigger to them could be a trigger to the client that they are interacting with. And that assumption and making people realize no blaming, no shaming, nothing is anyone's fault who is with us, makes a big change. We recently, in our permanent housing, had a young man who disrupted the lobby area. He was breaking things. 

Now, security knew that he was having trouble. They knew that his dad had recently gotten into a 12-step program and was six months sober, but it had been a tough go. They didn't have him arrested. They got dad, was taken care of. The vice president for supportive housing followed up the next day. The kid knew he had done wrong. So what could have been in some ways like the end of that child's life with a record was an experience where adults helped him. And dad's support group, we have a men's mentoring group, was there for him as well.

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Carol Jenkins: I want to talk more about your permanent housing, well, long-term housing, because you do eventually. Is it really like the average time, seven years?

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Christine Quinn: You can stay in shelter as long as you need. You can stay in supportive housing forever. But we see an inflection point at seven years where sometimes people say, you know what, I don't want any services. I'm good. You know, I don't, or, you know, I don't want you in my business anymore, whatever the level is, but you can stay there as long as you want. But at some point people feel like they just want something different. And that seems to be around seven years.

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Carol Jenkins: Do you have figures on after those seven years? Are they still… That's a little hard to trace.

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Christine Quinn: That would be good. The level of people getting kind of evicted or leaving and not… and going back to homelessness out of supportive housing is very low, very, very low. And we believe that about 30 to 40% of homeless families need supportive housing to thrive independently. And, you know, sometimes people will say, isn't that a lot, like to give housing and services? And I like to, you know, ask people when they say that, rarely, but sometimes, do you have a therapist? Do you have somebody, you know, who takes care of your children? Everybody needs a little help sometime. 

And these are just families who need a little help. I was up at a supportive housing we have in the Bronx and I was having a tenant meeting. And one of the women disclosed that she had been a corrections officer, but she had an injury and fell on hard times, et cetera. Then another woman said she had been a prisoner. and, you know, had gotten out in dinnertime. At the end of the meeting, I saw the two of them in the corner talking, and I checked in on them, and they were planning to meet the following week to go to a meeting at the Women's Prison Association to advocate for prisoners. And I thought, like, that's what community can do, is bring people together who you think would be on opposite sides, but are not, and actually are bonded by their similarities.

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Carol Jenkins: Well, Christine, such fabulous work. I want to ask you about the prospect of doing something about the cost of housing. You talk about people who were working or have jobs and still cannot afford housing in New York City in any way, shape, or form. What happens

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Christine Quinn: There's a couple of things there. One, right now, the city has a very good voucher program that'll pay 70% of your rent, you pay 30. For a long time, it wasn't working because the amount was $1,500 a month for a family of four. StreetEasy did a survey for us. There was no neighborhood in the city where that was the median area rent. At the end of the de Blasio administration, we got legislation passed that raised it to $2,500 and calibrates it up with inflation. Interestingly, the mayor has a pocket approval. De Blasio wouldn't sign it, but he didn't veto it. So it went into effect. So that was one thing that's really helped more clients get housing. We're seeing the usage of vouchers go up every year. 

So there is some capacity there, but we need more. Mayor Adams obviously is having some challenges, but I think it's. It's appropriate to congratulate him for the passage of the city of yes, zoning, which is going to allow some bigger buildings in this city and because of other legislation that the council passed, which requires. that 10% of all new housing be affordable to those exiting shelter, we're going to see some more affordable housing than we would have had those two things not happen. But we need to remain vigilant. When I started working around housing and homelessness in the late 80s, if I had said, this building has affordable housing, you would have assumed it was for people exiting shelter.

Now you say affordable housing, it could mean for middle class people because housing is so expensive and that's not wasteful, that's needed. So we need to remain vigilant on the City of Yes and on these other laws to make sure housing is being developed. At every affordable level, so no group is left out. Like, the 1st iteration of Mayor De Blasio's affordable housing plan had no units that were affordable to those exiting shelters. We need to make sure something like that doesn't happen again. When we are gonna, we don't endorse candidates for 501C3, but we are gonna prepare materials very soon for all of the folks running for mayor to make sure that they understand the issues that affect homeless families and to make sure that they are conversant.

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Carol Jenkins: Good luck in preparing that information. Thanks so much, Christine.

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Christine Quinn: All right, you take care, bye-bye.

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Carol Jenkins: Thanks so much for joining us on the Invisible Americans podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts, but we urge you to visit our website for transcripts, show notes, research, and additional information about our guests and their work. That's www.theinvisibleamericans.com. Please follow us on social media and our new YouTube channel, and our blog posts are up on Medium as well as our website. That's www.theinvisibleamericans.com. Jeff and I will see you the next time.

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