The Streets Were Paved with Gold (25 page)

Stating the problem is not the same as stating the solution. The era of massive 15-point programs, of neat panaceas, of soaring optimism, seems to have ended. Like many, I have learned there is
a difference between what
should
and what
can be
done, between what’s
needed
and what’s
possible.
“If the President called me in tomorrow and asked what the solution is for the nation’s aging cities,” Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Donna Shalala told me in late 1977, “I wouldn’t know. Nor does anyone else.”

As a Presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter seemed to be struggling to redefine liberalism, to approach problems with a fresh sense of humility; to marry a desire to right wrongs with a sense of fiscal responsibility. He took care, in a May 25, 1976, letter to Mayor Beame promising the federal assumption of local welfare costs, to strike the promise of a “prompt” takeover from a draft and substitute the phrase “as soon as possible.” Mindful that promises cost money, he toned down a staff-drafted speech on national health insurance, as well as language committing his Presidency to a sweeping Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill. He seemed to understand that declaring health care or a job a right was different from telling people how to pay for that right, or how to set up a system to deliver that right. Many ADA liberals took this as a clue that Carter was not one of them. As a reporter covering Carter, I took it as a clue that he had a realistic sense of limits, an engineer’s concern with how things worked, not just how they sounded. The first nineteen months of his Presidency suggest that I may have been wrong. Carter may not have known what he was doing, may just have been struggling not to offend moderate and conservative voters.

In the campaign, Carter’s letters to Mayor Beame promised: “As soon as possible the federal assumption of the local government’s share” of welfare would be picked up. Pressed to explain, Carter told me (and a roomful of reporters), “The local government should pay no part of the costs … and over a period of time the federal government should pay an increasing proportion of the cost, which would mean the state would pay a lesser amount of the cost.” Almost exactly one year later, Presidential press secretary Jody Powell declared that Jimmy Carter never promised a federal assumption of local welfare costs and instead had said the state should assume these costs. At about the same time, the President promised his long-delayed welfare reform proposals would entail “no additional cost above and beyond what we presently spend on welfare.…” That August, after a torrent of criticism from the Urban League’s Vernon Jordan and others reminding him of his
campaign pledges, he suddenly added $6.2 billion to his welfare reform proposal. By 1978, that sum had mysteriously ballooned to over $20 billion more, though it was hardly a Presidential priority.

In the campaign, Carter blasted President Ford: “Our country has no urban policy or defined goals,” he said, “and so we have floundered from one ineffectual and uncoordinated program to another.” Yet, fifteen months into his Presidency, Carter was floundering and had yet to announce his own urban policy.

None of this should suggest there are simple answers. According to Moynihan, if President Carter’s welfare reform bill had been passed, it would, for example, relieve New York City of just $60 million of the $560 million it expended on welfare in fiscal 1978. Even the federal government’s assumption of costs would be no panacea. City taxpayers are also federal taxpayers. And even if the Congress agreed to a national welfare standard, it would never be set as high as New York’s current standard. New York would then have two alternatives:
cut
welfare payments or
continue
to spend many millions to subsidize welfare.

An even greater danger is ignorance—both national and local. Committed to showing he cared, Carter decided to visit another planet in October 1977. The President had been severely criticized for neglecting urban areas, so he stepped aboard his
Air Force One
capsule and was deposited in Manhattan. From there, he journeyed north to the South Bronx.

Nothing had prepared the man from Plains for what he would encounter. Stretching before his eyes were more than 3,000 vacant lots, 43,000 newly abandoned apartments, a welfare caseload bearing one of three residents. The average inhabitant, he learned, earned $2,340—60 percent less than the average in his nation.

Stunned, and ever mindful of the cameras, Carter decided to deposit his flag on this strange land, vowing a special program to “salvage” the South Bronx and “turn it around.” The President got what he wanted—a headline. The natives got what they wanted—his purse. The mad scramble was on. The President, who didn’t know what he was doing, had company.

“Slum tourism” is how the Urban League’s Vernon Jordan dubbed the President’s trip.
Why pick the vast South Bronx for a test program?
“I think it’s partly because the President came here,” conceded the local federal coordinator, Alan Weiner.
Why the South Bronx?
“He came there,” admitted Mayor Koch’s original coordinator, Lloyd Kaplan. “Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
is about events
and what flows from them. Jimmy Carter came to Charlotte Street. What else flows from that? That’s what I’m going to live out.”

The city lived it out by submitting, in December 1977, “A Plan for Revitalization” of the South Bronx. The price tag, considering the task, was modest: about $800 million. The “plan” called for economic development incentives, new housing and parks. A flurry of meetings followed. By April 1978, the city and federal government announced agreement on a joint seven-year plan to “save the South Bronx.” The city hoped that the total federal dollar commitment would reach $520 million and that this would trigger perhaps another $1 billion of public and private spending.

Do their schemes match their dreams? Will it work? The obstacles are forbidding. The South Bronx’s “Dresden-like quality is in no way typical of America’s urban problems,” Roger Wilkins of the
Times
has written. “To take the moonscape of the South Bronx as the metaphor for the nation’s urban needs is to inflate an already horrendous problem to a scale that would defy even the most ambitious political imaginations.” Carter’s entire national urban program, announced in late March 1978, totaled just $4 billion of new money. In the first year, the Carter plan called for the federal government to spend $55.6 million in the South Bronx. Yet one of Carter’s Washington urban strategists guesses, “To turn the South Bronx around would take maybe $10 billion.” The President is stalking a rhino with a pea shooter.

A good argument could be made that the President should be stalking smaller prey. “If I had to pick the area to put those resources in, it wouldn’t be the South Bronx,” said City Planning Commission Chairman Robert F. Wagner, Jr. “It might be a Bushwick or a South Jamaica”—smaller, more viable neighborhoods where limited resources and concentrated effort might make a real difference. If Carter wanted an urban test case to prove government could work, why pick the worst possible case? Why risk granting ammunition to those who say government can’t work?

Carter’s impulsiveness was again matched by the city’s. As has been proven time and again, city officials will do anything for a federal buck, even if they believe it makes no sense. Take, for instance, the proposed $1.1 billion Westway project, which would replace the dilapidated West Side Highway along Manhattan’s waterfront with a modern highway and park land. In his campaign for mayor, Koch called the scheme “a disaster” and vowed, “It will never be built.” Yet, six months after he was inaugurated, Koch
failed to alter Governor Carey’s support for the project and agreed to support the “disaster” rather than risk losing federal dollars. His Parks Commissioner, Gordon Davis, supported a $750,000 federal grant to build a new park and ball field in Brooklyn’s Canarsie section—until the local planning board said it didn’t need a new park and ball field. What they really needed, they said, was $250,000 to maintain the two parks and ball fields they already had. Commissioner Davis tried vainly to convince them they were “sacrificing” a federal gift. But the local board knew a “disaster” when they saw one coming.

Which, I fear, cannot be said for the city’s South Bronx plan. Privately, many city officials think the plan will fail.

“Why did you have to tell a reporter you wouldn’t have picked the South Bronx for a federal experiment?” Deputy Mayor Basil Patterson is said to have scolded Planning Chairman Wagner at a Koch cabinet meeting.

“Do you disagree?” Wagner asked. “No,” said Patterson. “But did you have to say it?”

Parts of the city’s plan “are a joke,” groused a city official. “What good does it do to build a beautiful new park when you need a machine gun to walk through it?” says Denis Alee, then the First Deputy Administrator of the Economic Development Agency. He was referring to the deeper economic and social problems of places like the South Bronx which are blithely ignored by new parks or buildings. A danger in rebuilding the South Bronx is that the same underclass will burn it down again.

We can’t deal with this problem until we talk about it. One of the few local politicians who does talk is Herman Badillo, born in Puerto Rico and once a representative of the South Bronx in the Congress. Today, Badillo is a deputy mayor of New York, and one of his responsibilities is coordinating the South Bronx plan. He speaks of youth gang members and the hard-core unemployed “who have no superego,” no sense of right or wrong. New business tax incentives, new housing, new parks—as called for in the federal/city South Bronx plan—don’t address this problem. Nor, necessarily, do conventional counseling techniques, more schools, more hope, more concern. It’s a tough problem they don’t have in Plains, Georgia, and we fear talking about in New York.

Unfortunately, Badillo’s concern does not seem to loom large in the South Bronx plan he shaped. Badillo prefers talking, quite impressively, about the consequences of continuing to neglect places
like the South Bronx. “Planned shrinkage,” or “encouraging abandonment,” as he also calls it, “is a good theory for making New York a poor city. If we don’t build in places like the Bronx, the poor will move to middle-class areas and the middle class will leave. Soon there will be nothing but the South Bronx.… Parts of New York still look like they’ve been in a war. They represent indifference. We can’t allow them to stand.” The South Bronx is not a total wasteland. There are 750,000 real people living there, hundreds of community organizations—dedicated citizens struggling to salvage their neighborhood and lives.

But saying
why
something must be done is not the same as saying
how
it will be done. Sadly, resources are limited. There is no way to achieve a balanced federal budget and eradicate the spreading blight of the South Bronx. Spending money for urban ills—like spending money for defense—does not guarantee success. Ten years ago, the Mott Haven Development Fund Project was formed to rehabilitate twenty decayed buildings on East 139th and 140th streets in the South Bronx. The federal government guaranteed $4 million of bank loans, community-based organizations pitched in. Five- and six-story brick buildings rose from ashes, creating two gleaming new blocks. Today, six years after the rehabilitation was completed, half the twenty buildings are totally abandoned and the rest are slipping fast. The Mott Haven Development Fund Project was not the answer, as earlier high-rise public housing or the Cross Bronx Expressway which tore up neighborhoods was not the answer. Sometimes we just don’t have answers. Or, as the city’s original South Bronx plan admits, “We cannot say with any confidence that practical solutions exist.”

In the early seventies, it was thought that the new Yankee Stadium would transform the surrounding Bronx neighborhood. It hasn’t—though it cost four times the original projections. The New Orleans Superdome cost nine times what it was supposed to, and in 1977 lost $13 million. In 1975, Renzo Zingone, a Milanese builder, was to lead a flock of Italian manufacturers to construct a vast industrial park in the South Bronx. It was, then city EDA Administrator Alfred Eisenpreis announced at the time, “a vote of confidence in New York.” Mr. Zingone has not been heard from since.

There is reason to worry that the South Bronx plan will become another false promise. A gap exists between the almost infinitely difficult task and the finite resources Carter will make available; between abstract plans and real people and problems. Beyond this
is the inevitable clash between the
desirable
and
do-able
—the same clash witnessed throughout the city’s last twenty or so years. Wishing to do good for people, New York often tried to do too much. Enthusiasm, or desperation, overcame our sense of limits. We forgot there were limits to what a city could spend, tax or borrow. Just as the city, and Jimmy Carter, may be ignoring a sense of limits in the South Bronx—trying to do too much with too little on the wrong battlefield.

New York’s demands for massive national assistance may also be ignoring federal budget and political limits. Washington should further tilt toward its declining cities. It should target jobs, low-interest loans, incentives for business expansion, relief for high welfare and energy costs; further help stretch the city’s enormous debt to permit the easing of choking debt service payments; offer incentives to state and local governments to improve their productivity. New York, like other older cities, is afflicted with too many poor people and too few resources. Alone, sometimes all New York can do is imitate, in Brian Berry’s words, “the man with the garbage can following the elephant into the ring, just cleaning up the awful mess that’s there.”

But after saying this, honesty compels recognition that most federal aid programs already tilt toward New York. President Carter’s proposed urban policy would tilt even more toward older cities. Yet his proposed tilt aroused potent political opposition. The Sunbelt is angry, as are the suburbs. Everyone wants a piece of the action, and everyone doesn’t have the same generosity of spirit exhibited by liberal New Yorkers in the thirties. In addition, the President is committed to balancing the federal budget and has already announced his intention to reduce the percentage of the GNP spent by the federal government. Many in Congress and the nation already blame government spending and the huge federal deficit for raging inflation. As of June 1978, twenty-three state legislatures—two-thirds the required number—had approved an amendment to the Constitution banning federal deficits.