Bloomberg to Use Own Funds in Plan to Aid Minority Youth

The program, the most ambitious policy push of Mr. Bloomberg’s third term, would overhaul how the government interacts with a population of about 315,000 New Yorkers who are disproportionately undereducated, incarcerated and unemployed.

To pay for the endeavor in a time of fiscal austerity, the city is relying on an unusual source: Mr. Bloomberg himself, who intends to use his personal fortune to cover about a quarter of the cost, city officials said. A $30 million contribution from Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation would be matched by that of a fellow billionaire, George Soros, a hedge fund manager, with the remainder being paid for by the city.

Starting this fall, the administration said it would place job-recruitment centers in public-housing complexes where many young black and Latino men live, retrain probation officers in an effort to reduce recidivism, establish new fatherhood classes and assess schools on the academic progress of male black and Latino students.

Mr. Bloomberg plans to announce the three-year program in a speech on Thursday morning in Manhattan, in which he will declare that “blacks and Latinos are not fully sharing in the promise of American freedom.”

Even as crime has fallen and graduation rates have risen in New York over the past decade, city officials said that black and Latino men, especially those between ages 16 and 24, remained in crisis by nearly every measure, including rates of arrest, school suspension and poverty.

Although the populations of young white, black and Latino men in New York are roughly the same size, 84 percent of those in the city’s detention facilities and nearly all of those admitted to children’s and family services facilities are black and Latino youth, according to data from the Bloomberg administration. “The magnitude of the disparities is stunning,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. “It’s tragic.”

Mr. Bloomberg has put the weight of city government behind large-scale social change before, with public-health campaigns against smoking, sugary beverages and fatty foods.

But now, he is confronting a problem whose intractability and deep-seated causes have bedeviled policy makers for decades. And by focusing so heavily on a subset of city residents, he risks angering those unlikely to be helped by the new resources.

“The success rate, in general, is not that promising,” said Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale, who has written extensively about urban issues.

The challenge, Professor Anderson said, will be persuading New York’s businesses to embrace these young men and offer them permanent employment after the city’s work is completed. “Companies have to be much more receptive to these young people and meet people like Bloomberg halfway,” he said.

The administration’s plan, developed after a year of study and debate, spans much of the city’s bureaucracy and multiple stages in the lives of the men it is trying to reach, beginning in middle school and ending with career counseling.

In interviews, aides to the mayor said the new measures emphasized the practical needs of the city’s most impoverished black and Latino men, many of whom are unable or unwilling to enroll in time-consuming education and training programs unless they are compensated, according to the officials.

So to promote remedial math and literacy classes in the morning, for example, the city would link them with paid internships in the afternoon. The internships would pay $7.25 an hour, but students would be paid only if they participated in the class.

“Working is a big motivator for these kids,” said Kristin Morse, the director of programs and evaluation at the city’s Center for Economic Opportunity.

For the first time, the Education Department would specifically tie the success of black and Latino boys — measured in part by test scores and graduation rates — to the grades the city gives schools each year. Those grades can determine whether a school remains open.

Much of the program is intended to prevent young men from entering or returning to the criminal justice system, which has long been a revolving door for many black and Latino youth.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 5, 2011

An article on Thursday about Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to help young black and Latino men misidentified, in some copies, the city department that would open five satellite probation offices in neighborhoods with the highest crime rates or in community organizations that offer services from which the young men might benefit. It is the Probation Department, not the Correction Department.

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City Room: Bloomberg Pledges Money and Land for Engineering School

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg raised his offer on Tuesday to universities interested in setting up a school of engineering and applied sciences in New York City: along with practically free use of a swath of land, the city will contribute as much as $100 million.

Mr. Bloomberg publicly presented an invitation to universities to bid on the chance to create a campus, either on one of three city-owned properties or elsewhere in the city. Issuing the request for proposals is the latest step officials have taken to try to make New York more competitive with Silicon Valley as a hub for technology-based businesses.

“During the 1980s and ’90s, Silicon Valley — not New York City — became the world’s capital of technology startups, and that is still true today,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a speech at a conference on the city’s future at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Midtown. “But if am right, and if we succeed in this mission, it won’t be true forever.”
City officials say the school could prompt as much as $6 billion in economic activity by creating 30,000 temporary and permanent jobs and, more important, by fostering innovations that could become big businesses. They argue that the city’s financial contribution, which would come from its capital budget over several years, would pay off in increased tax revenue and economic growth.

Mr. Bloomberg said he was encouraged by the “strong response” the city received to a call late last year for schools to express interest in the idea. The city received 18 submissions that involved 27 institutions from around the world — some teamed up to present ideas — and used those ideas to help focus the offer. Among the most enthusiastic bidders were Cornell and Stanford Universities.

In December, the first invitation identified four city-owned properties as potential sites for a new campus: the south end of Roosevelt Island in the East River, part of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, parts of Governors Island in the harbor and the Farm Colony on Staten Island. The Staten Island site has been dropped from consideration because it was not appealing enough to the first respondents, city officials said.

Cornell and Stanford each chose the Goldwater Hospital campus on Roosevelt Island as the place it would want to develop a campus. Stanford said it envisioned an investment of as much as $1 billion in a school that would have about 100 professors and 2,200 graduate students.

At the time, city officials had not indicated how much financial help they were willing to provide. But the mayor said Tuesday that the city would invest “up to $100 million in infrastructure upgrades” in the proposal that is selected.

But Seth W. Pinsky, the president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, said the less city money a bidder asked for, the better its chances of winning the competition would be.

Cornell has not yet said how much it thinks its proposal would cost, said David J. Skorton, the university’s president. But he said the school’s trustees were “just thrilled” at the prospect of setting up a “revolutionary campus” in the city, which has long been home to its medical school, Weill Cornell Medical College.

“This is going to be a complete campus, not an annex of Ithaca or a way station,” Dr. Skorton said.

Stanford’s president, John L. Hennessy, said that his university would submit a formal proposal. “A Stanford New York campus is a unique opportunity to launch another center of innovation on the East Coast,” Dr. Hennessy said in a statement. “New York will be a dynamic partner, drawing talented people from around the world.”

Some schools based in the city have complained that Mr. Bloomberg has overlooked them in his pursuit of a big-name school from elsewhere. But city officials say that any university with a highly rated school of engineering or applied sciences is welcome to bid, even those like New York University or Columbia University that have their main campuses in Manhattan.

“Universities from around the country, and some from around the world, have expressed interest in our offer,” Mr. Bloomberg said in his speech. “And that’s how it should be, because we are an international city — and a city that believes in free competition.”

The tight schedule for the project indicates that the mayor would like ground to be broken for the school before he leaves office. Bidders face a deadline of Oct. 28 to submit their proposals, and city officials hope to choose a winning bidder by the end of the year.

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