Operation urban storm: a new generation of activists is fighting to bring back the cities

A NEW GENERATION OF ACTIVISTS IS FIGHTING TO BRING BACK THE CITIES.

The man makes it sound so simple. "My career goal has always been to manage a city of 100,000.... It was appealing in the sense that it has problems. It needed a professional at the helm.... It was tailor-made for my experiences."

Right. But why did Raymond Eugene "Gene" Shipman--a successful city manager whose track record includes top posts in cities from Chapel Hill, N.C., to Kansas City, Mo.--really come to Hartford, Conn., last September? Was he bored? Was he desperate for a job? Despite Hartford's glittering skyline and its reputation as "the insurance city," Hartford is a town whose three growth industries are, in the words of one community activist, crime, welfare and unemployment.

And those words, mind you, were spoken by someone who says he loves Hartford -- which makes him something of an anomaly. In a recent poll conducted by the Hartford Courant, nearly two-thirds of the city's residents called Hartford a "fair" or "poor" place to live, and almost a third of them couldn't come up with a single thing they liked about living there. More troubling, almost half the respondents said they thought life in Hartford would be the same -- if not worse -- in the year 2000.

They may be right. Hartford is the nation's fourth-poorest city of more than 100,000 people. But the naysayers haven't factored Gene Shipman into the equation. A smartly dressed, smooth-talking, apologetic smoker of 50, Shipman knows what he wants and has no qualms about going after it. His reason for making this risky career move is simple: Beyond Hartford's numerous

"challenges," Gene Shipman saw an opportunity to make a difference, a place to experiment. Hartford, the capital city of the nation's richest state, is representative of the scores of cities that have been bled dry and abandoned by suburbia and the federal government, an illustrative victim of the biggest collective write-off of the '80s. Here was a laboratory for untried strategies in urban renewal, the front in a new war on poverty, a place for Gene Shipman -- and others like him -- to take a stand.

NOT THE SAME OLD WAR

Many people associate the War on Poverty with liberal spending policies that do little to motivate individuals or cure entrenched dependency, and they usually point to the inner cities as evidence. In fact, a number of the Johnson administration's Great Society initiatives were successful in the 1960s, when the economy was strong and growing. Studies by Congress's General Accounting Office, congressional committees and private groups indicate that specific programs -- WIC, the nutrition program for pregnant women and young children; prenatal care; Head Start for poor preschoolers; childhood immunization; specialized education programs; job training; and Medicaid -- have been highly cost-effective.

While such programs may have eased the plight of the poor, the War on Poverty "vision" did nothing to address unemployment, underemployment and other basic economic realities that make and keep people poor, says University of Chicago sociologist and author William Julius Wilson. As industries, much of the middle class and many social institutions deserted the cities, poverty became concentrated there, making it more visible and seemingly intractable. The nation's changed and weakened economy, the devaluation of welfare benefits and the Reagan administration's regressive tax policies have sabotaged anti-poverty efforts, leaving the poor poorer and millions of others scrambling to stay above the poverty line.

In 1989 the nation's poverty rate of 12.8 percent, representing more than 31 million Americans, was higher than it was in 1970. Today one out of every five American children is poor; one out of every eight children suffers from hunger; and 40,000 U.S. children, or 9.1 of every 1,000 born, die each year before their first birthday -- a rate surpassed by only 19 countries in the world.

Virtually everyone agrees that throwing money at the problem isn't enough -- particularly when there's less money to throw around. Activists and policy experts are calling for new strategies, more comprehensive and confrontational than '60s-style solutions, that would reorder national priorities and redistribute dwindling resources. They say the antipoverty policies of the '90s must challenge America's increasing economic segregation, a separation of class and race so severe that it evokes comparisons with South African apartheid. If Americans want their cities and the people in them to survive, they can no longer stand by as middle- and upper-class taxpayers abandon the cities, taking the tax base with them, Shipman says. Regional governments, or some other means of spreading the wealth -- and the responsibility -- must become part of the debate over where to go from here.

It is not the War on Poverty but "society [that] has failed," says Hyman Bookbinder, who was executive officer of President Johnson's Task Force on Poverty. "It tired of the war too soon, gave it inadequate resources and did not open up new fronts as required." Testifying before the House Committee on Government Operations last March, Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger called on the government to launch "Operation Urban Storm." "Now that the liberation of Kuwait has been accomplished," she said, "the federal government [should] immediately undertake the liberation of the millions of Americans in our cities [who are] trapped by the tyranny of poverty, illiteracy, hunger, unemployment, crime and hopelessness."

DIVIDING LINES

Stowe Village, a public housing project at the north end of Hartford, is a four-block hellhole of rundown three- and four-story brick apartment buildings, concrete, graffiti and yellow grass. The project is home to some 600 families, about 4,000 people altogether. Only one out of three men has a job. One hears stories of successful anti-drug and self-help programs, but the scene on the streets is one of dispirited people killing time -- and each other.

"We have our own Soweto," says Shipman, comparing Stowe Village to the infamous South African township. "We look at black townships in South Africa and become outraged, but you need go no farther than 20 blocks from [downtown Hartford] to see the same kind of living conditions. It is a place where, if you're not careful, it's tantamount to throwing away a human life."

The life of a 15-year-old girl was wasted on a Stowe Village street corner one day in April. The girl, a pregnant mother of a 2-year-old, was shot and killed by gang members while on her way to buy a soft drink.

A short drive but a world away from Stowe Village is Wethersfield, a Hartford suburb of 25,651 people, large Tudor homes and well-manicured lawns. American flgas fly from the porches on Garden Street; driveways are occupied by Volvos, Lincoln Continentals and Toyota pickups; residents bicycle or jog; and the streets are peaceful except for the occasional lawn mower or the sound of wind rustling through the leaves of stately maple trees. Drivers are cautioned to watch for children at play.

It's the same in Hartford's other suburbs: Newington, Rocky Hill, Windsor, Bloomfield and West Hartford. From these middle- and upper-class communities some 100,000 people commute each morning to their jobs in Hartford's insurance, finance and real estate companies. When they come home in the evening, they bring only their paychecks.

But for the 140,000 people who live within Hartford's 18 square miles, there is no escape from the sense that Hartford is both a reservoir and dumping ground for the region. Hartford has only one-fifth of the area's population, but it is home to 90 percent of the welfare recipients, two-thirds of the unemployed and 70 percent of the crime. It has the highest percentage of hungry children of any U.S. city surveyed in a recent study, and its infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the nation.

Hartford is a crowded, decaying city where property taxes are the main source of revenue but only half the property is taxable and three-fourths of city residents live in rental units. One out of four residents lives below the poverty line, and one out of five receives some sort of welfare. The city's unemployment is way above state and national rates. Some core businesses have moved their operations out of town or out of the country, and downtown landmarks have been razed to make room for new buildings that haven't come, leaving vacant lots and eyesores.

"Hartford is an island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of affluence," says the Rev. James Kidd, pastor of the city's Asylum Hill Congregational Church. The Hartford Courant recently completed a special series on the city's problems and concluded that of all "metropolitan cities explored as comparisons, none is so fragmented and stratified as Greater Hartford."

Yet Hartford's problems are not unique among Connecticut's cities. Located a few suburbs south of Hartford is New Haven, the nation's seventh-poorest city. In June the city of Bridgeport, located in the state's wealthiest county, became the nation's first major city to file for bankruptcy.

"Cities are in a death spiral," says Frank Shafroth, chief Washington lobbyist for the National League of Cities.

SURRENDERED CITIES

The downward spiral began in earnest with Reagan-era cuts in federal aid to state and local governments. In 1981, 16 percent of New York City's revenues came from the federal government; today the federal share is only 9.6 percent. Philadelphia lost 83 percent of its housing aid and two-thirds of its job-training funds in the past decade. Hartford has suffered a 40 percent decline in Community Development Block Grants since 1977.

In a May 8 television address, New York City Mayor David Dinkins explained his city's fiscal crisis this way: "Our city, like every urban center, has been abandoned in the past decade by the federal government." For its part the Bush administration shows no intention of changing course -- and few in Congress are pressing the issue. "There's almost a conspiracy of silence between the Democrats and Republicans in Congress and between the White House and Congress not to talk about urban problems," says Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), whose district includes Bridgeport.

As cuts in federal and then state aid forced city governments to provide more services with fewer dollars, the spiral became a vicious cycle.

Faced with the inevitable dilemma of cutting services or raising taxes, many cities have had to do both, driving out industries, jobs and middle-class residents in the process. Philadelphia has lost some 200,000 private-sector jobs in the past 15 years, and Hartford has suffered a net loss of 40,000 residents since 1950 and more than 10,000 jobs in the current economic downturn.

With New York facing a budget deficit of $3.5 billion, Dinkins announced in May he would be forced to slash essential services by $1.5 billion unless the state government, which has a $6 billion budget gap of its own, came to the rescue. "Mayor Dinkins is in a no-win situation," says Shafroth of the National League of Cities. "If he cuts services, people will leave. If he raises taxes, people will leave. Both will cause people to leave the city -- the very people the city needs most."

This cycle has been repeated so often, and in so many American cities, that suburbanization has become "the dominant demographic trend in the nation," writes Thomas Byrne Edsall in 1986 to 1987 more than two million the May issue of the Atlantic. From Americans moved to the suburbs; between 1980 and 1990, 19 major cities lost population, all but seven of them in growing metropolitan regions.

Increased suburbanization is restoring the racial and economic segregation that the civil rights movement and Great Society programs sought to eliminate. It "is working to intensify the geographic separation of the races, particularly of whites from poor blacks," writes Edsall. It has also resulted in "a geographic separation of the haves and have-nots," observes Michael Wald, a professor at Stanford University Law School.

A study sponsored by the League of Cities documents the increasing disparity. In 1980 residents of the nation's 62 largest cities had per capita incomes averaging 89 percent of the incomes of people who lived in their surrounding suburbs. By 1987, the study shows, the figure had dropped to an average of 59 percent. Residents of Newark, N.J., the nation's poorest city, had incomes averaging only 32.1 percent of those of their suburban neighbors.

The study's author, Larry Lebedur, director of the Center for Urban Studies at Detroit's Wayne State University, predicts 1990 census figures will reveal yet another increase in urban-suburban income disparities.

A Bush administration plan could make matters worse. It would convert $15 billion in federal grants -- for housing, drug enforcement assistance, education, and social services -- into single block grants to states. The nation's mayors, horrified that the plan would allow state governments to spend the money as they see fit, fear that governors, faced with their states' fiscal crises, would leave mere crumbs for the cities.

Their fears are justified. The state-level conflict between urban and suburban interests has always existed, but it is even greater now that resources are scarce and suburban political clout is growing, says Alan Rosenthal, director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

"Everybody agrees that it's important to help the cities, but when push comes to shove [state legislators] are out for their districts and their constituents," Rosenthal says. "The view of some suburban legislators is that it doesn't do any good to dump money into the cities."

BATTLE PLAN

Hartford City Manager Gene Shipman has a plan to make city poverty a direct interest of suburbanites: He wants to move poor people right into their protected backyards. Residents of Wethersfield, make way for the people of Stowe Village.

Shipman is tired of what he calls "the doughnut syndrome," where cities are in the hole and suburbs get the dough.

Shipman's job is to run the city government day to day, but he prefers to take a longer view. Nine months into the job, he has come up with the following plan to reverse the city's long decline:

* Require the suburbs to join a regional government that would involve the joint provision of some services and a transfer of resources from suburban coffers to the city of Hartford.

* Tear down three public housing projects and relocate the 1,000 families who live there to the suburbs.

* Levy a 1 percent "earnings" tax on suburban residents who work in Hartford, which he believes would raise $50 million for the city and make possible a 25 percent cut in property taxes.

* Lay off some city employees to bring a bloated bureaucracy under control.

* "Privatize" the direct delivery of services to the poor, reducing city outlays and increasing efficiency.

* Redirect the city's resources away from social services and toward "core municipal functions": economic development and the provision of street maintenance, water and sewer services, police and fire protection and the like.

* Emphasize programs that move poor people into jobs and self-sufficiency.

Shipman radiates an air of efficient authority and maintains a good sense of humor. He's even made bets with a city department head over the outcome of certain battles; so far Shipman has two bottles of fine wine to show for his optimism and skill. But he's had a harder time winning support for his larger -- some say radical -- vision.

Wethersfield residents, for example, want nothing to do with it. "The people of Wethersfield believe that when they moved here they left the problems of the city behind," says Wethersfield Mayor Betty Rosania. "They have paid their dues. They feel the problems of the city are the problems of the city."

Shipman's budget cuts have also run into opposition; in April some 500 city residents packed a public hearing to demand increased funding for city schools, day care and elderly services. The new budget slashes city funding for the city-owned shelter for homeless men by 57 percent and transfers management of the shelter to a private organization. The budget also eliminates eight positions from the city's seven day-care centers, whose low rates enable poor parents to work, and sanctions a gradual shift to home-based and other private day-care providers.

State government officials were not pleased when Shipman and other city officials sued the state in March, charging that state-run rental assistance programs compound "the racial and economic isolation of Hartford's population." These programs amount to a "system of state-created racial and economic segregation" and make the city a dumping ground for the poor, the suit charges.

Some 5,000 poor people live in Hartford with the aid of such rental subsidy programs. The lawsuit asks the court to either bar the state from locating more subsidized housing in Hartford or order it to establish a regional plan for affordable housing. "It's time for the West Hartfords, the Simsburys, the Avons to do their parts," says Deputy Mayor I. Charles Mathews.

Meanwhile the victims of Shipman's budget cuts stalk the halls of the municipal building; the city manager can't leave his office for lunch without being pestered by a city radiologist who's been laid off. But Shipman takes a sanguine view -- "I think I'm a breath of fresh air" -- and urges his critics to see what he calls "a holistic approach" to the city's problems.

Shipman says that once he stops Hartford's decay, he'll move on to his second goal: keeping the middle class in the city. He would use both a carrot and a stick. The carrot: federal and state investment in urban schools, infrastructure and industry, which would provide opportunities for poor people to work themselves into the middle class. The stick: Penalize those who leave with commuter taxes. "You need to pay a premium for the luxury of living in suburbia if that's what you choose to do," he says.

Finally, Shipman would also relocate some housing and services for the poor to the suburbs. "If you de-concentrate the urban poor so that what people are running from -- growing minority populations -- is spread out, that would be a disincentive to escape," he says. Moving poor people into the suburbs would free them from "inhuman conditions" in the city and expose them to a different, motivating lifestyle, he says.

AGAINST ALL ODDS

It's increasingly clear that Hartford and other troubled cities cannot go it alone; they need support at the regional, state and federal levels. But most suburban communities have proved unwilling to enter into regional governments voluntarily, and when redistricting based on the 1990 census is completed cities will have even less power in state legislatures, says the Eagleton Institute's Rosenthal.

Connecticut state Rep. Juan Figueroa (D-Hartford) is trying to force the issue. Last winter he introduced legislation designed to put added responsibility for housing the poor on the state's more affluent communities; it would have denied some state funding to towns that failed to follow through. But all that survived the suburban-dominated legislature was a watered-down requirement that municipalities "encourage" the building of housing to meet regional needs.

The unequal distribution of state and local tax burdens compounds the problems of cities and their residents. A recent study by Citizens for Tax Justice found that, on average, middle-class families pay one-third more of their income in state and local taxes than do families in the top 20 percent income bracket.

Connecticut residents are not taxed on their incomes, but they pay the highest sales tax in the country. Partly as a result of this regressive system, Connecticut's tax burden on the poor is the country's fifth-highest, according to the study. The poorest 20 percent of state residents pay 16.5 percent of their earnings in state and local taxes, while the middle 20 percent pay 9 percent of their incomes and the top 1 percent pay 5.5 percent.

To address those disparities and narrow Connecticut's projected $902 million deficit for this fiscal year, first-term Gov. Lowell Weicker, a former Republican U.S. senator who ran for governor as an independent, proposed the adoption of a state income tax. Weicker's plan is not progressive -- it would tax all residents at the same rate -- but the idea of any income tax at all is anathema to the many wealthy suburbanites who work in New York but live relatively tax-free in Connecticut. In a flurry of political maneuvering, state legislators promised to kill the plan. At press time the debate was unresolved.

Federal tax policies and funding priorities exacerbate urban-suburban and rich-poor gaps, says Frank Shafroth of the League of Cities. "There are enormous federal subsidies for the people who need them least, the people who are leaving cities," he says, "and there is less and less assistance to those who are left behind."

Given these political realities, troubled cities should consider other alternatives, says Wayne State's Lebedur. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area, for example, formed a metropolitan council in 1967 that redirects some funds from communities with growing tax bases to those with weak tax bases. The merger of Nashville's city and county governments has succeeded in keeping businesses in the area and property taxes down, and Denver and its suburbs have attracted more businesses to the region since they formed a regional marketing alliance.

Such arrangements could prove helpful, but cities ultimately need more money from Uncle Sam, Shafroth says. Yet if the National League of Cities were to go to Congress right now with a proposal for renewed revenue sharing, "they would shoot us down in a minute," he says. So the league is spending a year "laying the groundwork, trying to present good information" that will convince Congress that cities deserve federal help. "We're trying not to have anyone think we're up there holding out a tin cup," he says. Asked which members of Congress are "good" on the issue of aid to cities, Shafroth says simply, "There is nobody."

FRONT-LINE VICTORIES

With the prospects for outside help so dim, local officials, community organizers and antipoverty groups are doing what they can to rescue cities and their residents from the slide into greater decay. While Hartford's problems are pervasive, the city also has its success stories. Some of the most effective organizations are using a combination of public and private funds to help poor people break the cycle of dependency and become self-sufficient. To cite a few:

Jobs. America Works of Connecticut has adopted an "all-win" strategy to get poor women off welfare, says chief officer Lee Bowes. The women win because the program teaches them job skills, shows them how to get along in the workplace, finds them jobs, pays them to intern for two to three months, and then provides them with the support they need to make it as regular employees -- whether it's helping them get to work on time or making sure their kids are picked up from school.

"The main difference in our program is that we get jobs for people," says Bowes. "There is so much focus on job training as a solution for the problems of the poor, but a lot of our people have been through two, three, four different training programs. They don't give you real work experience and access to employers," she says. "We do."

Private employers and the state government also win. The state pays America Works $4,000 -- about one-third the annual cost of keeping a family of three on welfare -- for each welfare recipient placed in a job. The state also continues to provide day care and medical benefits to the working woman for a year after she gets off the welfare rolls. Companies that hire America Works clients get a federal tax benefit of up to $4,500 if the employee stays on the job for more than a year -- and 75 percent do.

Since 1985 America Works has placed some 1,000 former welfare recipients in jobs, Bowes says. "We could handle more people," she adds, but potential clients have become harder to reach since the state welfare department, citing computer problems, stopped providing lists of names and addresses.

Intervention. While America Works tries to place poor women in jobs, the 1,400 members of Asylum Hill Congregational Church -- some 80 percent of them suburbanites, and almost all of them white -- are working to break the poverty cycle at an earlier stage. Three years ago the church raised $400,000 to guarantee college educations for a middle-school class of 79 kids. About 100 church members and three staff members work with the children in the "Dreamer Project," says pastor James Kidd.

Church members also run Saturday-morning and weekday tutoring programs for kids, and they pay the salary of a community social worker at the nearby middle school. Church members have begun a new project to sponsor families in homeless shelters, providing financial assistance, helping them "work the system" and eventually helping them find housing in the suburbs. "It's a way of rescuing families," Kidd says.

The church also helps run a soup kitchen, offers courses on urban problems, supports housing-renovation projects, and even ran a full-page newspaper ad that declared, "We Love Hartford" and encouraged others to become involved in efforts to help the city.

"It's a justice issue," Kidd says of his church's activism. "The key thing is personal involvement and support. People feel trapped; they don't have hope. They need to be given opportunities and resources." Church and other community-based programs can be more effective than government efforts to help the poor because "people [in privately run programs] care about the neighborhood and about the kids," he says. "The city doesn't.

Kidd decries the disparity between Hartford and its suburbs, pinning much of the blame on the state legislature. Acknowledging that "the last thing the suburbs want is to be part of the city," he encourages his parishioners to lobby their state representatives for extra money for the cities. "I tell them to talk to their neighbors about it. It's in their interest in the long run."

Change. For the Rev. Mark Welch, director of the Christian Activities Council's Metropolitan Training Institute, "boosterism" and efforts to "serve the poor with programs" are important but ultimately insufficient responses to "the moral imperative of the '90s." "We believe in justice before charity," he says. "Just tinkering with the system won't do it; we need systematic and structural change."

Welch emphasizes the importance of community activism in the style of the late Saul Alinsky: helping poor people figure out what they need most from the system and organizing them to fight for it. The Asylum Hill Organizing Project, Project Mash and other community groups mobilize low-income residents to work for tenants' rights, better schools and increased neighborhood safety. They also promote housing rehabilitation and job training and placement.

Community investment is also key, Welch says. The Christian Activities Council (CAC), a mission of the United Churches of Christ, sponsors a minority-owned and -operated corporation that manages some 180 apartments in the city for low-income people. In cooperation with the Hartford Housing Authority, CAC secured a state grant of $870,000 in May to move 10 low- to middle-income families from public housing projects in Hartford to their own condominiums in West Hartford. CAC will help the families with down payments and low-interest loans, while requiring them to put some "sweat equity" into their new homes.

Vision. One key to solving the city's problems is making people believe that it's possible, activists say. With a $25,000 seed grant from the private Knox Foundation, organizers are forming a task force of 45 community leaders -- from business, government, community, education, labor, religious and other groups -- to implement a new "vision process" for Hartford.

"There is a mood of pessimism and hopelessness in this town, and it's important to attack that," says Knox Foundation President Ivan Backer. "This community is so fractured that it has been unable to make decisions that stick.... We thought we needed to start by just getting everybody to sit down around one table."

After holding community-wide meetings and forming work groups open to all, the task force will produce an action plan for the city that all segments of the community can support and city officials can implement, Backer says. More than a dozen studies and plans have been conducted since 1980; they produced hundreds of recommendations but little has been done. Backer hopes community involvement will make the process different.

CHILDREN FIRST

Because poverty is having an increasing impact on the nation's children, advocates for the poor are finding allies in unexpected places. Suburbanites, business executives, pro-family groups and crime fighters are beginning to acknowledge the long-term impacts of neglecting the nation's children. In March the CEOs of AT&T, BellSouth, Prudential, Honeywell and Skychefs appeared before the House Budget Committee to call for a doubling of funding for the WIC program. The executives warned that as many as 40 percent of the nation's children are headed for educational failure unless more is done to meet their health, social and developmental needs before they reach school age.

While such efforts are critical, a new war on poverty must also contend with federal tax policies, wage stagnation and structural changes in the economy that have seriously wounded the middle class. Given the 8 percent decline in inflation-adjusted, average family income since 1973 and the widest gap between rich and poor Americans in 40 years, policy analysts are calling on the government to go beyond its traditional emphasis on antipoverty programs, to devise policies that help families and children stay out of poverty.

Right now, however, more people are moving into poverty than escaping from it. Between recession and the restrictions on unemployment benefits imposed by the Reagan administration, many formerly working, middle-class families have joined the ranks of the poor in the past year. Between February and March the number of families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), or "welfare," increased by 68,000 -- the 20th consecutive monthly increase and the largest single monthly increase since 1975, according to Rick Ferreira, policy associate at the American Public Welfare Association.

That increased the total number of AFDC recipients to an all-time high of 4.4 million families, or 12.6 million people, two-thirds of them children. Yet welfare is hardly a ticket out of poverty; the purchasing power of welfare benefits has decreased by 42 percent since 1970, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Monthly welfare payments currently average $135.36 per individual and $390.86 per family, Ferreira says.

Taken together, the declining effectiveness of government income programs, increased unemployment and lower earnings are responsible for two-thirds of the dramatic increase in child poverty, according to the Children's Defense Fund. About one-fourth of the increase is due to the greater proportion of children living in single-parent families, the report says.

Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, has called for nearly $6 billion in new federal spending on children, much of it to expand current immunization, daycare and Head Start programs. The much-acclaimed Head Start preschool program, for example, served only 27 percent of those eligible last year, Edelman says. Antipoverty efforts should also include a combination of community-based social services and a national "economic policy to enhance employment opportunities and raise incomes," says Lisbeth Schorr, author of Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage.

One-stop assistance centers are being launched in several school districts across the country. They include social workers, day-care centers, health care clinics, job training and counseling. In Maryland, parents can go to Family Support Centers for assistance in child-rearing, health and nutrition counseling, education and job training.

On the economic policy level, the Children's Defense Fund, the Progressive Policy Institute and others have called for an increase in the personal income-tax exemption for low- and middle-income families with children; further expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit to decrease the penalties and increase incentives for poor people to work; an increase in the minimum wage; passage of some version of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which was vetoed by President Bush last year; more money to alleviate hunger and homelessness; and the reform of divorce laws to protect children and ensure the payment of child support.

"To be born in a ghetto is to be consigned a fate no American should have to suffer," writes Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America. The comprehensive antipoverty programs Lemann proposes would cost from $10 billion to $25 billion a year -- "at the high end about one-thirtieth of the federal budget," he estimates. The programs would be "relatively expensive per participant, and their payoff is not immediate or tangible," he concedes, "but in the long run they save the government money that would have gone to welfare and incarceration."

ATTITUDE PROBLEM

Perhaps the greatest enemy in a new war to save American cities is the attitude espoused by many Wethersfield residents: "The problems of the city are the problems of the city. We've paid our dues." The consequences are evident: geographic, economic and political "secession of the successful" from the less fortunate of society, increasing inequality, pervasive poverty and deepening despair.

Robert Reich, political economist at Harvard University and author of The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism, warns that the gap between rich and poor communities is "widening into a chasm." This trend toward greater economic segregation "raises fundamental questions about the future of American society," he says. "The stark political challenge in the decades ahead will be to reaffirm that, even though America is no longer a separate and distinct economy, it is still a society whose members have abiding obligations to one another."

Gene Shipman couldn't agree more. "We have a moral imperative to act," he says. "We can't afford to throw away our cities or the people in them."

COPYRIGHT 1991 Common Cause Magazine
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group