In his twenty-five years working for New York state's social service agencies, Arthur Schiff frequently came in contact with low-income people and newly arrived immigrants. "I saw a lot of waiting rooms and a lot of poor people waiting in them," Schiff recalls. What no government agency was giving them, Schiff decided, was an information network to help them survive in a highly sophisticated society. So, in early 1992, using $ 50,000 of his savings, Schiff launched City Family, the country's first magazine to target an audience others shunned.

Simultaneously published in Spanish as La Familia de la Ciudad, the glossy, full-color, digest-size quarterly has a print run of 100,000 copies (half English and half Spanish) and is distributed free in New York City in cooperation with the local Health & Hospitals Corporation, immigrant agencies, adult literacy centers, social service programs, and major voluntary hospitals.

Schiff took for his model the Seven Sisters magazines (Family Circle, Redbook, McCall's, et al) because, he explains, "they provide practical information that their readers need to solve their problems in the shortest amount of time."

City Family gives its readers up-to-date information on family matters, as well as on food, health, fashion, and furnishings -- written at a fourth grade reading level. There are columns on infant care and legal and personal advice and lots of phone numbers for social service agencies. A story in an early issue explains with pictures and diagrams how to increase storage space in a public housing kitchen. In another, a lawyer gives advice on what to do if a landlord won't repair a bad leak in the bathroom.

When Schiff began shopping his idea around, all of the major magazine publishers, including The Hearst Corporation and The New York Times Company, turned him down. "They told me the ad pages for their magazines were way down because of the recession, so they couldn't take a chance and back a magazine that had a readership they weren't familiar or comfortable with," Schiff says.

Finally, two foundations -- the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York Charitable Trust -- came through with grants. The fifty-two-year-old publisher, who once headed New York's food stamp program, began publishing his magazine out of his house. He works with a staff of seven, five of whom are volunteers.

Because the magazine is free, its survival depends on advertising. Schiff is convinced that low-income people are a more attractive market than advertisers realize. "Surveys show that the money low-income people spend on consumer goods far outstrips their income," he explains. "So obviously they are making and spending money that are not reporting." He hopes to attract advertising from local social service agencies, retail stores, professionals -- for example, doctors and lawyers who provide services to low-income people -- and big brand-name companies that sell consumer goods.

Advertisers for the first two issues included Colgate, Con Edison, and New York Telephone. Schiff plans to double his quarterly's print run for the June issue, to go to ten issues next year -- and then go national.

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