The Hobbs Ciena construction site on E. 102nd and 2nd Avenue in Spanish Harlem is the first affordable housing project in the country funded by the stimulus. The project created more than 100 union and non-union jobs. Related story.

It is $787 billion nationwide. More than $7 billion dollars to New York City. Twenty-eight federal agencies. Dozens of spending categories. Over 70,000 organizations and projects. And an optimistic effort at transparency.

That’s how President Obama’s stimulus program, also known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was designed to boost the national and local economy. State by state, city by city, program by program.

But with so much money passing through so many hands, it’s still tough for Americans to be sure where the money is going, and whether it is doing what it’s supposed to do.

A close examination of a handful of local programs in the five boroughs reveals that stimulus money has had a limited effect on the nation’s largest and richest city.

While it has clearly been a lifeboat for individual workers, programs and businesses, the scale and pace of spending have so far failed to create a rising tide of jobs. New York City’s unemployment rate has hovered around 10 percent for months, up from 8.5 percent when the stimulus plan passed almost 15 months ago. That trend may be changing, and so too might the ultimate measure of the stimulus. But right now, it’s hard to say it’s worked.

“It’s great that the stock market has bounced back,” Obama said in a May 13 visit to Buffalo. “But if you’re still looking for a job, it’s still a recession. If you can’t pay your bills or your mortgage, it’s still a recession. No matter what the economists say, it’s not a real recovery until people can feel it in their own lives.”

* * * * *

As Americans rang in the New Year on Jan. 1, 2009, the economic future looked grim. The nation was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month; the housing market was in free-fall. Wall Street, the beating heart of the New York City economy, was in crisis: The financial securities giant Lehman Brothers collapsed in September; there was talk of nationalizing the largest banks; Bernie Madoff was exposed in December in a massive financial scandal that rocked the country.

Two-time SYEP participants Carissa Ho, 19, (left), and Dan Tran, 17, (right) are reapplying to the summer jobs program at the Chinese-American Planning Council. Related story.

The recession was already 14 months old.

Congress passed the new president’s stimulus plan on Feb. 13, 2009. The idea was to heal the ailing economy by pumping in public money that would encourage private investment, hiring and consumer spending.

Lawmakers split largely along party lines. Conservatives opposed it as a government boondoggle. Liberals questioned whether it would do enough to help America’s suffering middle class.

The Act includes $499 billion in spending – that is, federal grants, loans and contracts – and $288 billion in tax cuts and benefits for families and businesses.

Congress divided the money up among 28 federal agencies, from agriculture to veterans’ affairs, which started distributing the money to states, educational institutions, non-profits and private companies. The state money filters down to local governments and agencies, which then identify projects, request bids and choose whether or not to accept them. In the meantime companies and non-profits go after the money from the other end, submitting bids, winning money and doling it out to subcontractors.

When it’s all over, sometime around the end of 2012, New York State will receive close to $30 billion in stimulus funds. New York City will receive between $7 billion and $9 billion of that, depending on who you ask.

An art installation in a Chashama location on Lexington Avenue. There is no open entrance to this exhibit but it is visible from the street. Related story.

The funds are being used to improve city infrastructure and energy efficiency, create jobs and improve schools, support health-care and social programs, among other categories. The city’s largest stimulus grant, $175 million, goes to improving the St. George Staten Island Ferry Terminal (see picture above).

In New York City, where has fallen slightly in the last three months — hitting 9.8 percent in April — the job market is expected to establish steady growth sometime in the second half of 2010, according to Mayor Bloomberg’s most recent analysis, issued May 6. But that will still leave the city with 169,000 fewer jobs in 2013 than it had when the recession started, the city said.

When it’s all over, sometime around the end of 2012, New York State will receive close to $30 billion in stimulus funds. New York City will receive between $7 billion and $9 billion of that, depending on who you ask.

Stimulus recipients are required to report every three months how the money was spent and the number of jobs created. New York City reported spending $2.2 billion through the end of March, which helped create 21,787 jobs. True enough, some of that money was spent on things like tax breaks and unemployment benefits. Still, that’s more than $100,000 per job.

Click on the links below to see how some of that money was spent.

The Long and Winding Road of the Stimulus
Where are your stimulus dollars going? Follow along as we trace the path of the stimulus dollar from your government to your pocket in this interactive slideshow. Producers: Jordan Shakeshaft and Eugenia Miranda.

A stimulus loan helped Spokes & Strings, a bike shop in Williamsburg, keep its employees hired and buy new frames. Related story.

Microloans Work One Job At A Time
Will Wood was in a bind. Business was off at his Brooklyn bicycle shop, Spokes & Strings, and his line of credit dried up. His loan application landed on the desk of a Brooklyn-based nonprofit specializing in microloans. Find out what happened next. By Lisa Riordan Seville, Danny Gold and Andrea Swalec.

Art in Unlikely Spaces
While arts are often the first thing to lose funding, advocates say they have an immediate impact on recovery. Chashama, a non-profit that turns vacant storefronts into galleries and performance spaces, is one of more than 120 city arts groups that received stimulus grants. By Liza Eckert and Vishal Persaud.

Job Crisis For Teens
The federal government has poured tens of millions of stimulus dollars into summer jobs for teens in New York City. But stimulus funds are running out for thousands of teens this summer as the program progresses into its second year. Read about the crisis. By Jordan Shakeshaft and Michael Cohen. By Jordan Shakeshaft and Michael Cohen.

Poor People Left Out Again
The stimulus program may have saved the U.S. economy from slipping from a recession into a depression, but minorities still have a harder time pulling themselves up. Who’s getting jobs in some of the city’s neediest neighborhoods? Advocates struggle to find out. By Eugenia Miranda and Spencer Freeman.

Follow along as we trace the path of the stimulus dollar from your government to your pocket. Producers: Jordan Shakeshaft and Eugenia Miranda, New York City News Service.

Simon Philipose, 23, enters applications for the SYEP program at the Chinese-American Planning Council in Lower Manhattan. (Photo credit: Jordan Shakeshaft)

After a full day of classes, 15-year-old Justice Coleman inhaled a cream cheese bagel with his friends from Port Richmond High School as they cracked jokes, ate snacks and gulped Snapples in front of a deli next to the Staten Island school.

Coleman prepared for September by applying for a job at the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), the city’s main summer jobs program for teens. But with just five weeks left in the school year, he still hasn’t heard back.

“I want a job for next year,” he said early this month. “So I can buy clothes and school supplies.”

The federal government has poured tens of millions of stimulus dollars into summer jobs for teens in New York City. But still, Coleman and tens of thousands of other city kids may spend their summers much like their after-school unwinding – hanging around the local deli.

Their plight underscores one of the biggest problems with stimulus funding as the program progresses into its second year. Stimulus funds are already running out for teens this summer – and the recession isn’t.

“We basically plowed most of the stimulus money into the program last year,” said Ryan Dodge, a spokesman for the Department of Youth and Community Development, the city agency in charge of SYEP. “We hope to get more federal help.”

The SYEP got $36 million in stimulus funds for teen jobs last year but has just $8 million left. The publicly funded program, which selects applicants 14 to 24 years of age by a random lottery, can employ 24,000 young people this summer — less than half the 52,000 who got jobs last year.

About a mile from Port Richmond, 15-year-old Parris Spann and his mother Vergie walked into the office of Staten Island’s SYEP provider, United Activities Unlimited, and rolled the dice for a summer job through an online application. The job means as much to his mother as it does to him.

“Most of all I want him to learn to be independent, manage his own money, and do something positive in the work field,” said Ms. Spann. “I hope he’ll be able to give me a little break, and take some of the slack off me.”

But Brian Licata, director of United Activities Unlimited, told them the chances were slim.

“It’s disheartening,” said Licata. “We get so many kids that come in, and not only do they want the job, they need the job.”

The blame lays at the feet of state and local government. Faced with a $9.2 billion deficit, Gov. Paterson plans to cut all funding for summer youth jobs when his budget is passed. Last year, DYCD received $19.5 million from the state for SYEP.

Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget, released in May, provides $10 million for the program, almost $4 million less than the city provided last year. He had planned to cut even more, but put it back in at the last minute.

In Manhattan, directors at the Chinese-American Planning Council are encouraged by the additional funds, but anticipate major downsizing to their program this summer. The organization, based on the Lower East Side, placed 800 young people in jobs across Flushing, Lower Manhattan and Sunset Park last year, but anticipates having just 160 spots this year, said director Peter Chang.

“It’s hard-hitting because a lot of young people do not get the experience of earning money, which is different from volunteering and interning,” Chang said. “The most valuable thing about the SYEP program is the experience.”

Tiffany Li, a junior at LaGuardia High School, is counting on finding work through the SYEP program to start saving up for her school’s senior trip to Italy next year. Li, 17, was selected the past two summers, but knows that with fewer available spots this year, the odds are against her.

“I hate asking my parents for money. They have worked so hard for me,” said Li, an aspiring psychologist. “I want to make my own money and be independent. It’s all up to me to do that.”

Another two-time SYEP participant, Dan Tran, 17, admits that while he still hasn’t mastered the art of saving money, the program has helped him build a resume he can be proud of. As a summer docent at the Museum of American Finance last year, the high school senior was eventually responsible for leading tours around the museum.

“That was the first professional job I had,” Tran said. “I had real responsibilities, and it helped me discover what I wanted to be when I grow up – something business related for sure.”

Tran hopes the SYEP program will place him at the CPC offices this summer, where he can learn how the not-for-profit sector operates. But the cuts to the SYEP may affect non-profit operations as well.

The Children’s Arts and Science Workshops in the Bronx is a youth center that places teens in jobs at non-profits around the city. Program coordinator Sigry Vidal said the downsizing of the SYEP program will hurt her clients as well.

“Many of our work sites may not receive the participants they requested to help run their programs,” Vidal said.

Rosa Pascual, of the Isabella Geriatric Center, a nearby senior center, said the agency got 120 teens through the SYEP program last year. This summer, she’s expecting teen employment cuts significant enough to strain the facility’s services.

“We will need to reduce the program offerings we can offer in the summer,” Pascual said. “We will also need to curtail staff vacation schedules because we will not have the help needed to permit many staff members to take off at the same time.”

Back on Staten Island, most of the kids in front of the deli with Coleman are also entering the SYEP lottery — further competition for a job. But he said he has a back-up plan.

“I’ll probably just cut grass for the summer,” he said. “Doing yard work for other people.”

By Liza Eckert and Vishal Persaud, New York City News Service

Meditation rarely happens in an open storefront at noon in midtown Manhattan. But on a recent Monday, curious passersby stopped short at the sight of two men who sat cross-legged, staring straight ahead, on a sidewalk on West 44^th Street. Inside, four more people meditated in tranquil serenity behind the plate-glass window during the lunchtime rush.

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

The Interdependence Project, an educational non-profit dedicated to Buddhist teachings, was hosting a performance-art installation – thanks, at least in part, to the economic stimulus.

Members of the Interdependence Project meditate outside Chashama’s West 44th Street location. Chashama provides space for performances as well as artists. (Photo: Vishal Persaud)

The group gained access to the space through Chashama, an organization that received $50,000 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which has allowed them to continue placing galleries in vacant stores all over the city.

“It’s an economic stimulus because it keeps the artists in New York and it also helps businesses,” said Anita Durst, founder and artistic director of Chashama. “When you bring artists to those spaces, they’re using the coffee shops, they’re using the delis, they’re using the hardware stores and they’re creating an activity that is healthy for the community.”

Chashama, which has been working with landlords and building owners to fill vacant storefronts with colorful art and performances for 15 years, used the stimulus money to hire to new employees to expand the number of spaces they manage.

Chashama’s ability to take on these spaces and make them available indirectly benefits groups like the Interdependence Project. Without access to these spaces, the project would have to find other venues to host their installations.

“This is a mindful and creative way for us to engage the public,” said Josh Adler, arts coordinator for The Interdependence Project. “So this is not only performance, it’s not only a chance for people to meditate, but when we work with Chashama and go to a different space, it also gives us a way to engage our civic society.”

An art installation in a Chashama location on Lexington Avenue. There is no open entrance to this exhibit but it is visible from the street. (Photo: Liza Eckert)

Although a large portion of the $787 billion stimulus funds are targeted at “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects, the plan funneled $50 million to the arts. Advocates say the arts money can have a more immediate impact.

Urban infrastructure projects can take months or years to plan, which delays the creation of many jobs, but artists begin to hire and spend as soon as they receive grant or loan money, said Victoria Hutter, spokeswoman for the National Endowment for the Arts, which is distributing the stimulus money to arts programs across the nation.

“Artists and art administrators are workers just like anybody else,” she said.

The NEA grants are generally $25,000 or $50,000 per award. Durst said she eliminated two positions early in the recession – one in 2008 and another in early 2009. She was able to replace them after receiving the grant in 2009 and hired new employees in June and September.

“We actually found employees who were more qualified and better at the job,” she said. “We’re now able to do more things we couldn’t do before.”

Chashama is just one of 1,300 arts organizations in New York City that generate $3.1 billion in revenue annually. It’s a small part of the city’s $544 billion economy – but an important one.

It’s hard to put a dollar sign on the value of the arts industry because it has a different kind of value to the city, said Steven Dubin, professor of arts administration at the Columbia University Teachers College.

Artwork hangs inside Chashama’s West 44th Street location in early May. When the Interdependence Project performed a few weeks later, the interior of the space had been changed. (Photo: Liza Eckert)

“The impact is intangible,” he said.

New York received more NEA recovery money than any other state, with 139 grants totaling $6 million. Of that, 123 grants, worth more than $5 million, are going to organizations in New York City like Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

And some say that’s still not enough. NEA president Rocco Landesman, a former Broadway theater producer, along with actors Jeff Daniels and Kyle MacLachlan, addressed Congress in April to ask for more funding.

The money effected institutions both large and small in areas like dance, theater, and visual arts. But the money can affect more than just the artists.

Chashama is filling five more empty buildings in neighborhoods across the city, including two in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, two in Jamaica, Queens and one in Manhattan. Durst said these temporary galleries liven up a neighborhood and bring in artists who wouldn’t otherwise be there. And the two new jobs are in no way frivolous for the employees.

“If I had not received the position, I’d still be interning somewhere else – unpaid,” said Devin Mathis, who was hired as a programming assistant because of the stimulus grant. A grad student at the Pratt Institute, she said she likes being able to take what she learns at school and almost immediately apply it at her job.

A sunbather sits near an art piece in Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens. The park, which hosts a rotating display of artwork, received $50,000 from the recovery act. (Photo: Liza Eckert)

One drawback of the NEA recovery money is that it is a one-time grant. Groups can use the money to get out of a financial slump, but come next year, they’ll be on their own. Hutter said they can apply for other NEA grants down the road.

“It’s up to them to figure out what they need going forward,” she said.

This situation – receiving a grant and having to find more money elsewhere in the future – is par for the course for anyone who works in the arts, said Dubin. Artistic organizations often hobble from one funding source to another, and they are generally first to get cut, he said.

“Insecurity is the basic way arts and art organizations operate,” he said.

Randall Filer, a labor economics professor at Hunter College, said the stimulus funds are an important stopgap, filling some of the void in donations left by the recession.

“They reduced the downsizing in support for arts, but that’s all they did,” said Filer. “So they enabled more previous programs to be preserved, but they didn’t create any new incentives.”

Durst said Chashama is looking toward the future by talking to potential donors and looking for grants to make sure the people that have been hired can keep their jobs.

“It’s been a worry of mine,” Durst said. “But I think we’re going to be able to replace it.”

Will Wood was in a bind.

A stimulus loan helped Spokes & Strings, a bike shop in Williamsburg, buy its merchandise for spring. (Photo: Lisa Riordan Seville)

Business was off at his 11-year-old Brooklyn bicycle shop, Spokes & Strings. He didn’t need much money to keep it afloat, but his line of credit dried up, and he feared he might have to start laying off workers.

“I was fishing for anything I could get,” Wood said recently in his shop on Havemeyer Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, packed with bikes from floor to ceiling. “It was by far the worst sales slump we had ever seen.”

Then, late last year, his loan application landed on the desk of Nancy Carin at the Business Outreach Center (BOC) Capital Corporation, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit specializing in microloans – small loans to small businesses struggling in today’s tight credit market.

Carin was sitting on $600,000 in federal stimulus funds targeted for loan programs such as hers.

So as she scrutinized Wood’s balance sheet, pondering the cost of inner tubes and caliper brakes, she had an additional question to ask, a question that a lot of people might ask about the stimulus program these days:

Can an $8,000 loan to a bike-shop owner save the U.S. economy?

“Without the stimulus funding, we really couldn’t do the amount of work we’re doing right now,” Carin said. “We couldn’t make as many loans.”

BOC Capital Corp. is the microlending arm of the BOC Network, a group of nine business centers that offer training and financial services to low-income and minority communities across New York City.

Headquartered in a brown brick church on South Oxford Street in Fort Greene, BOC Capital Corp. has spent about $367,000 in stimulus funds so far – more than half of it in microloans to small businesses such as a restaurant and a fashion accessories designer. The money has created precisely 2.95 jobs and retained 45.66 others, according to progress reports submitted to the federal government.

But those numbers don’t tell the whole story about the impact of stimulus funds on jobs, Carin said.

“If you helped a client – for instance a restaurant client – get a new lease, did you help save that business?” Carin said she and her colleagues ask themselves. “They weren’t going to be able to survive if they didn’t stay in that space, but do you count saving all those jobs?”

The pressure to count jobs illustrates some of the difficulties of adapting the international microfinance model to the U.S. economy.

Video: Bike shop owner Will Wood talks about how his company benefited from stimulus funding.

Video: The stimulus money that loan cab driver Abdoulaye Mbaye received will let him expand his fleet.

Microlending, which grew popular in South Asia as a tool to build developing economies, is designed to work incrementally, loan by loan and job by job. But that pace may be at odds with the goal of the stimulus plan to swiftly lift the U.S. economy out of recession.

Microfinance can boost the economy but can take a long time to create jobs, said David Roodman, a research fellow for the Washington, D.C. based Center for Global Development, a think tank on global poverty.

“Most kinds of spending stimulate,” Roodman wrote in an e-mail message. “As for fast, not so much.” He said the biggest obstacles are creating the institutions that make the loans. “If you are building a program from scratch,” he said, “it can take years to build the program up to a meaningful scale.”

Critics say the time, effort and cost that go into giving a microloan in the U.S. make it a less effective model here than it is in developing countries.

The current microloan trend began with the Grameen Bank. Its founder, Mohammad Yunus, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for the banking system he created in Bangladesh to extend tiny amounts of credit – from $5 to $100 – for women to buy the sewing machines, cows or farming equipment they needed to start small businesses.

That system is based largely on trust – loans are given out to groups of people, and repayments are leveraged by group responsibility, or peer pressure. That’s not the way it works in Brooklyn.

“You got to go through a lot of scrutiny,” said Abdoulaye Mbaye, an immigrant from Mauritania who got $25,000 to expand his taxi fleet (see video). “You got to show your credentials, show your business plan and tell them how you’re able to pay the loan, how much you’re making in terms of revenue weekly or monthly.”

That scrutiny takes time and money. BOC Capital Corp. has sunk more than $150,000 in stimulus funds to hire another loan officer and implement a more automated system.

The high overhead costs typical of domestic microfinance organizations limit their growth potential, said Roodman, the microfinance expert.

“Microfinance has been a tough business to do well in the U.S. [Microfinance] can’t be a national model because of the subsidies needed to operate it,” Roodman said. “Americans are expensive, that’s what it comes down to.”

But microfinanciers and their supporters in the Obama administration view it as a long-term investment in helping people who need support the most.

The stimulus funds reached BOC Capital Corp. via the U.S. Treasury Department’s little-known Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, established in 1994 to provide financial services to those who have trouble getting loans from traditional banks.

To receive money, CDFIs must provide their clients with counseling to build their businesses. The CDFI received $98 million in stimulus money in July 2009. Within two months, it had dispersed the full amount to 69 microlenders and other financial institutions across the country. President Obama’s budget for 2011 proposes a 30 percent increase from last year, to $140 million. A treasury spokesman did not return calls for comment.

Richard Aguilar, better known as Rico, builds out a custom frame at Spokes & Strings. (Photo: Lisa Riordan Seville)

With its $600,000 recovery loan, BOC Capital Corp. pledged to increase the number and size of its loans by 15 percent; they can range from $1,000 to $50,000. They offer short-term loans, to help businesses fill orders, at 1 percent per month for three months, and larger loans that stretch over several years, with interest at around 10 percent.

The loans are not cheap, but they offer borrowers who often can’t get loans access to capital. In the credit crunch that followed the recent economic downturn, small businesses owners turned away by conventional banks came to BOC Capital Corp., Carin said.

Of the $367,000 the agency has spent through March, about $195,000 went to microloans and the rest toward improving the organization’s systems for tracking it.

Between January and March, the organization made just three loans, totaling $40,000. One loan went to Wood, the bike shop owner. Another went to a beauty parlor that had closed due to financial problems and was able to reopen and hire back staff thanks to the loan. Several more loans will be made in the next reporting period, Carin said. CDFI loans must be spent within three years, and Carin said she hopes to finish spending the money sooner than that – by the end of 2010.

“Our intention is that, because it’s stimulus funds and there’s such a need in the marketplace, that we’ll deploy it more quickly,” said Carin.

Regardless of the total number of jobs BOC Capital Corp.’s stimulus-funded microloans create, the program made a difference for borrowers like Wood. In addition to repairing bikes at Spokes & Strings, he builds them under the brand NYC Bikes. Though last year was the worst he had ever seen, things were looking up at the end of the 2009 year. He had a buyer who wanted 250 custom-made bikes. He had the supplies for next season sitting on a dock. But with credit at a stand-still, he didn’t have the money to build the bikes, or to get that order paid through.

With his $8,750 loan, he was able to deliver on the order and have merchandise for this spring. The short-term boost of cash helped save three jobs, let him hire another part-time bike mechanic and let him pay off the loan.

Wood said the loan helped position him for the business that has begun to trickle back in with the arrival of spring. He may even be able to create another job.

“If somebody I knew came back to me now,” said Wood, “I would hire them.”

The Hobbs Ciena construction site on E. 102nd and 2nd Avenue in Spanish Harlem is the first affordable housing project in the country funded by the stimulus. The project created over 100 union and non-union jobs.

Jonathan Sawyer eavesdropped on a cell phone conversation on a cross-town bus on 125^th Street about a month ago.

“Recession? What recession?” Sawyer heard a middle-aged black man say to the person on the other end. “We’ve always had next to nothing.”

For Sawyer, a volunteer at an East Harlem job-training center, the snippet of conversation crystallized what he has been thinking about many of the city’s neediest neighborhoods.

The federal government’s massive stimulus program may have saved the U.S. economy from slipping from a recession into a depression, but minorities still have a harder time pulling themselves up.

“They were talking about how for people of color in low-income communities, there is no recession because you’re used to not really having that much,” said Sawyer. “So it’s just people who are recently unemployed who think that there’s a recession.”

Sawyer, 24, volunteers for the Welfare & Workforce Development campaign at the East Harlem nonprofit Community Voices Heard, part of a statewide coalition of 15 organizations called the New York Stimulus Alliance dedicated to ensuring that stimulus funds reach the poorest minority neighborhoods.

While unemployment hovers at about 5 percent in wealthy neighborhoods like the Upper West and Upper East Sides, it’s three times that much in impoverished areas in Harlem, northern Manhattan, the South and Central Bronx, and Central Brooklyn. (See graphic.)

Alexis McCall lives on E. 106^th Street and hasn’t seen much change in the neighborhood, except that the cranes at luxury condominium construction sites have started moving again. As she stuffed envelopes for one of Community Voices Heard’s mailings, the 40-year-old volunteer rolled her eyes when asked if stimulus jobs were helping people in the neighborhood.

“It’s obvious; it’s going somewhere else,” she said. “I see friends, family looking for work. Folks are trying to make a living, and working at Burger King is not going to cut it unless you’re management.”

Ana Maria Archila, of the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road, which is also part of the alliance, said on of the biggest problem has been getting word out about the availability of stimulus jobs.

Government officials point to two Web sites, New York State Jobs Exchange and New York State Department of Labor, as one-stop shopping for stimulus jobs, Archila said on the ground level the word isn’t getting out.

“I’m sure the stimulus has created many, many new jobs,” she said, ticking off stimulus public works projects in the area. “(But) it has been hard for community members and for people interested to access information about where those jobs are created and how to access them,” said Archila.

In the absence of real jobs, the stimulus helps pay for job-training programs and food stamps and helps parents with back-to-school supplies.

Archila’s own organization, Make the Road, received funding for its English as a Second Language programs, and East Harlem’s STRIVE (see audio story in left column) received $500,000 to train workers for jobs in “green” construction.

“There has been investment in our communities, but the jobs that have been created through infrastructure have not reached our communities,” said Archila.

Rather than employing low-income residents who need work the most, stimulus funds have mainly given more work to people who already had jobs with contractors, according to Community Voices Heard.

“How these jobs are determined and how they go out is a mystery to me,” said Diane Blanford, a 54-year-old member.

Breaking into unions and getting the right training for jobs are major barriers for low-income people competing for access stimulus-funded jobs.

The New York City Housing Authority, for instance, was supposed to hire 30 percent of its staff from local residents when it received $423 million in stimulus funds for renovation and construction, creating 3,500 jobs.

Not all of the money has been spent yet — but so far, only 214 jobs have gone to residents of housing projects or local, low-income residents.

“If your development is not offering anything to get you ready for one of those jobs, when those jobs do come along and there’s work being done over there you won’t get the job,” said Blanford. A NYCHA spokesperson did not return calls for comment.

Last summer, the mayor and governor showed up in East Harlem to tout the groundbreaking of the first affordable housing site in the country funded by stimulus funds – a 259-unit project on East 102^nd Street that received $26 million in tax credits. More than 100 union and non-union workers have been pouring the foundation since August, but it’s not clear how many new jobs were created and how many locals are employed.

And even the existing jobs are troubled. Last fall, workers at the site complained that they were getting paid $32 an hour for work for which they were supposed to get $49 under the law. The complaints are reportedly being investigated by the state Labor Department of Labor and the city Department of Housing Development and Preservation. Officials declined to comment on the investigations.

James Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy institute, says low-income neighborhoods would benefit most from direct public employment and wage subsidies that compensate employers who provide training to low-income workers, according to recent City Council testimony. He did not return a call for comment.

Advocates say most of those types of jobs are reserved for people who have been on public assistance, according to Community Voices Heard.

Archila said it’s easy to find out which projects are getting funded through the Web site recovery.gov and New York City’s stimulus tracker, but harder to find out who is getting the jobs. When advocates met with the state’s stimulus czar, Timothy Gilchrist, in December, Gilchrist and officials from state agencies said it was difficult for them too.

Gilchrist spokesman Ryan White said that because employers are reporting to different agencies that have doled out money through a variety of programs, the flow of information is disparate and de-centralized.

Most of the money has already been spent, and officials are now mainly keeping tabs on projects to see if the funds are being spent according to regulations.

“I really don’t want to minimize the fact that there has been real investment in communities across the state,” said Archila. “But there has been, perhaps, not enough information and not enough communication about how the stimulus is reaching families.”

(Infographic by Spencer Freeman)