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| I couldn't agree more
by maybaby66 at 4/2/2008 11:13:14 AM
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
New York and Region
World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science: CONNECTICUT OPINION; WEALTH OF A CITY SHOULD BE MEASURED IN PEOPLE.
LEAD: THE announcement four years ago that New Haven ranked among the nation's 10 poorest cities sent officals there scurrying for explanations and solutions. Millions had been invested to fight poverty in this, the model for the Great Society. The Mayor quickly formed a Poverty Commission.
THE announcement four years ago that New Haven ranked among the nation's 10 poorest cities sent officals there scurrying for explanations and solutions. Millions had been invested to fight poverty in this, the model for the Great Society. The Mayor quickly formed a Poverty Commission.
Like other Eastern cities, the commissioners concluded, New Haven's poverty reflected a loss of manufacturing jobs combined with a population of ''unskilled'' and minority residents. And the high-school dropout rate among black and Hispanic youth suggested a bleak future. The solution was economic development.
A bilion dollars has been invested in city since the Poverty Commission formed. Last year alone, the city had the 13th highest number of building permits in the nation. Still, argue the Mayor's critics, there are as many poor today as before the investment boom.
I want to challenge two claims made by most participants in the poverty debate, that our cities are ''impoverished'' and that ''economic development'' is the answer.
The outstanding question in the New Haven is why the number of poor increased despite massive public investment and an unique array of neighborhood services. The answer is deceptively simple. Poor families settle here precisely because it is a good place for them to live.
In what other Connecticut city can you find neighborhood day care, a mall in which you can safely hang out, reasonable bus service, neighborhood health clinics, integrated schools, high-quality rentals, regular free concerts and art exhibits and neighborhood parks of playgrounds? New Haven also has a flourishing underground economy. Earning money ''off the books'' is a matter of survival for the poor. Our city attracts poor people, and we should keep it that way.
Wouldn't ''real jobs'' help? Maybe some. But the fact is that the majority of poor people cannot work full time. They are elderly, disabled, single heads of houeholds or minors, struggling to maintain a decent quality of life on fixed incomes. Rapid economic development, even yuppie style, means high rents and few services. When a library closes, rents skyrocket or the landlord refuses to accept children, when the police fail to arrest batterers or drug pushers, the poor suffer more than when a factory leaves.
What about education? Manufacturers are leaving because they ''lack confidence'' in our schools, says the Poverty Commission. Surely if we go back to basics, tighten discipline and give our youths ''real skills,'' dropouts will fall, particularly among black and Hispanic youths, and manufacturers will return.
For more than a century, New Haven has discouraged large manufacturers while it flourished as a service center in education, communications, research and health. Its community life, meanwhile, has been based on a notion of shared responsibility for those who were left out in the growth process, a notion that has to be periodically impresed on Yale and A. T. & T. In addition, even youngsters who drop out of school are well aware that they already possess skills far in excess of the jobs they can expect to enter in services or manufacturing. Youngsters who whiz through video games are no happier working at McDonald's than their older brothers or sisters are working the letter-sorter machines at the post office. Suburban dropouts get better jobs than black graduates from New Haven. But the problem is racism, not confidence.
And the real ''dropouts'' are the middle-class parents who have given up on public schools. The splendid level of disorderly creativity at the city's magnet schools are a magnificent reply to those who claim integration can't work or that poor youngsters lack motivation. The challenge is to engage the dreams of all the city's children rather than to encourage a few while we snuff out the imagination of the rest with rote learning and discipline.
New Haven ''poverty'' reflects another fact. The city attracts a higher percentage of female-headed households, primarly white, than other cities. Women are the backbone of the service economy though even those employed full time are often poor. The key issues are decent low-cost housing; day care, music lessons and athletic leagues for children; protection from violence; inexpensive food; useable public transportation; support for the informal economy; arts and culture, and the maintenance of streets and parks. These services require respect for people, not high capital expenditures.
Poverty in New Haven is not primarily a problem of race, jobs or education. For most New Haven poor, the problem is to maintain a decent life without wage work. Subsidies for the way the poor live could certainly help, rent control and day care, for instance. But what really needs revitalizing is respect for what makes living in a city worth the effort - the openness to strangers, the sense of excitement about racial and life-style differences and the celebration of the young, the elderly and the women who tough it out in the harshest of circumstances. It is when a city loses these things, not when it has people with low incomes, that it becomes ''improverished.''
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