Opportunity NYC
Opportunity NYC was an experimental Conditional Cash Transfer program (CCT) by the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. Announced in April 2007, it was the first CCT program to be launched in the United States or any other developed nation. Its initial phases were funded by a number of private partners including The Rockefeller Foundation, Robin Hood Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Starr Foundation, AIG, and Mayor Bloomberg's own Bloomberg Family Foundation. The program is being evaluated by MDRC, a nonprofit research firm, using a random assignment research design. Opportunity NYC is administered by Seedco, a nonprofit community development organization. The program ended on August 31, 2010.
History of New York City (1978–present)
Homelessness became a serious problem during the 1980s, specifically in the last two of Edward Koch's three terms as mayor (1978–1990). The city outlawed discrimination against gay and lesbian people in such matters as employment and housing in 1986. In 1989, Koch was defeated by David Dinkins in the Democratic Party primary in his bid for a fourth term, and then Dinkins narrowly defeated Republican Rudolph Giuliani in the general election to become the city's first-ever black mayor. Crime began a 15-year decline in 1990 during Dinkins's administration, but a combination of continued racial strife (such as that in the Crown Heights Riot in 1991), and an extremely weak economy (in January 1993 the city's unemployment rate reached 13.4 percent, the highest level of joblessness seen there since the Great Depression) caused Dinkins' popularity to seriously decline (including a threat by residents of Staten Island to secede from the city, where in a 1993 referendum, 65% voted to secede, but implementation was blocked in the State Assembly).