CRISIS IN NEW YORK

By Andrew Stein

Harlem, New York. The landlord has still not mended the window a year after it fell out. The stove is kept on all day to provide heat for the house.

Imagine the Mayor of New York calling an urgent news conference to announce that the crisis of the city's poor children had reached such pro­portions that he was mobilizing the city's talents for a massive rescue effort not unlike the one that saved us from bankruptcy 10 years ago. I believe some such drastic action is warranted, even essential, because our city is threatened by the spread­ing blight of a poverty even crueler in some ways than that of the Great Depression half a century ago. Almost 40 percent of our children — 700,000 boys and girls — now live in families with incomes below the poverty line. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has estimated that half of the babies born in the city in 1980 can be expected to be on our welfare rolls before they reach the age of 18.

Social critics, including Mr. Moynihan, have been telling a tale of two cities to describe the kind of community New York has become: while the city enjoys prosperity, the "new" poverty goes unchecked. The richest Congressional district in the nation shares a boundary with one of the poorest. And it was precisely during the last two banner years of economic growth and enhanced city budgets that the child poverty rate accelerated dramatically.

Today's children of poverty are suffering in ways that would have dumbfounded those who knew the Great Depression: an estimated

92 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

4. continued

3,000 babies born addicted to drugs every year, 10,000 children living in shelters and hotels for the homeless, 12,000 children who were abused or neglected so severely last year that they had to be removed from their homes and placed in foster care.

All too many poor children in New York are denied dignity even in death, according to a recent report by the Coalition for the Homeless. The report revealed that almost half of the infants under the age of 1 who died in the city between 1981 and 1984 were buried in potter's field in unmarked graves that their families thus could not visit.

All this poses a practical as well as a moral issue for the city, for the way we deal with the problem will deter­mine the quality of life for all of us in the future. There is no question that the problem is enormously difficult, but it is not yet hopeless. Many sen­sible steps can be taken to attack the situation, including the appointment of one person — a "czar" if you will — to oversee all agencies that serve children, efforts to engage the private sector, revamping of the workloads of caseworkers and the increasing involvement of the school system. There are others as well....

To understand what is happening

in the city we must return to poverty and its related disorders — family disintegration and teenage preg­nancy. The likelihood of a child's growing up poor is four times as great if he is born into a household headed by a woman rather than a traditional two-parent home. And it is even more likely if the mother is a teenager.

New York City has been massively afflicted by this "feminization of poverty." Though the city's popu­lation declined 11 percent between 1970 and 1980, the number of people living in female-headed families rose by almost 30 percent. The city's wel­fare rolls now consist mainly of minority-group women and children. Demographic projections suggest that this most vulnerable group will continue to grow as a percentage of the population at least through the next decade.

The most potentially destructive of these trends is the epidemic of teenage pregnancy. Although the total number of teen pregnancies in the city has decreased in the last decade (as a result of a decline in the teenage population) pregnancies among 15- to 19-year-old females went up from 12.3 percent to 13.1 percent between 1975 and 1984. The

city's Adolescent Pregnancy Inter-agency Council has projected that if the present rates remain constant, 1 out of 4 girls 14 years old today will be pregnant at least once before her 18th birthday; 1 out of 8 will have had at least 1 abortion before reach­ing 18; and nearly 1 out of 11 will be a mother before she is 18.

... What we are experiencing throughout the country, but most particularly in major urban areas such as New York, is the result of an unprecedented reversal of fortunes among our age groups. Historically, poverty had always struck hardest at the elderly, because they were most likely to be infirm, without work or without income. That held true until the mid-1970s. Then a disproportion­ate number of children began to be poor, a phenomenon exclusive to the United States among the industrial­ized nations....

Alone, the city can't eliminate poverty among children; it can't put back together families that fall apart, or are never formed, because of that poverty. But if we move the problems of poor children to the top of our agenda, we can find the means to intervene and save many from utterly shattered lives. In saving them, we would be saving ourselves.

Great Depression: See page 73.

Moynihan, Patrick: born 1927, U.S. senator.

Congressional District: a district within a state electing one member to the national House of Representatives.

potter's field: a place for the burial of poor and unknown persons, cf. Matthew 27:7.

THE URBANIZATION OF AMERICA 93

A NEW CITY

S

till synonymous in many minds with steel, Pittsburgh is not waiting for the resur­rection of Smokestack America. The metropolis of blast furnaces and belch­ing smokestacks is dead. In its place has risen a new city, smaller (estimated population: 410,000, down from 677,000 m 1950), cleaner, more modern in its architecture and confident m its future — m effect a prototype of the postmdustrial metropolis. The transition from a manufacturing to a service economy began way back during World War II, when 100 prominent citizens joined to spearhead an office building boom in the 1950s and 1960s that transformed the city's downtown — near the spot where the Allegheny and Monon-gahela rivers meet to form the Ohio - into what they named the Golden Triangle. That renaissance gave rise five years ago to a second one. While the steel industry was losing a great deal of money, seven major buildings went up downtown, including a $35-million convention center and noted architect Philip Johnson's spectacular headquarters for PPG Industries (formerly Pittsburgh Plate Glass). Universities and hospitals attracted companies in computer science, robotics and other advanced technologies. Since 1978 an estimated 15,000 high-tech and 30,000 service jobs have been created, more than making up for the decline in steel-workers from 79,000 in 1980 to 42,000 in 1983. Third only to New York and Chicago as a headquarters city for major companies, Pittsburgh is completing a new subway system and boasts a symphony that

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A city with a new image

plays to packed houses. Even the city's football
and baseball teams have the spirit: they have
won more championships in the last six years
than their counterparts in any other American
city. from Fortune Magazine

PART C Exercises

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