A study that focused on welfare recipients in New York City's Inwood and Washington Heights neighborhoods indicates that an extremely high percentage of families who reported problems as a result of the welfare-reform efforts launched by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had their benefits wrongly reduced or eliminated, the New York Times reports.

The number of welfare recipients in the city has been cut in half since 1995, although critics say the new study shows most of this reduction was achieved by simply throwing people off the rolls, the newspaper reports.

The study -- which lasted seven months and included 35 social service organizations in northern Manhattan -- found that of the 174 families reporting problems, 93 percent were wrongly denied benefits. What's more, the corrections often took 70 days to fix. The legal limit is 90 days.

The United Way-financed study also found that those families who were wrongly denied benefits needed a significant amount of advocate help to have their benefits restored. Such efforts drain the resources of these community groups and can take away from other programs.

These issues -- and other questions such as how many former recipients now have livable-wage jobs -- have led groups including the Washington Heights/Inwood Neighborhood Advisory Council to call for changes to the original welfare reforms.

Julie Levine, executive director of the nonprofit Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, told the newspaper the study was not originally designed to find fault with the city's welfare efforts.

It was intended to quantify the various needs of Upper Manhattan social services, ranging from child care to health care, but the sheer number of complaints forced study organizers to review this topic in greater depth.

Free registration may be required to view this story:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/
regional/062700ny-welfare.html