The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [11]
Since World War II, New York, like many older cities, has been transformed. Almost 2 million middle-income residents have moved out, and almost 2 million mostly poor residents have moved in. The city’s tax base has shrunk as its need for services has expanded. In 1960, 78 percent of the city was white; by 1975, 62 percent. And these figures do not include illegal aliens, variously estimated from 500,000 to 1.5 million people. Noting that 60 percent of the city’s population under fourteen is black or Hispanic, Bernard Gifford of the Russell Sage Foundation wrote, “It seems likely that the 1980 census will reveal a non-white majority in New York City.”
There would be little concern if the melting pot were melting. It is not. Once, New York served as an incubator, nursing the poor and hoisting them into the middle class. But that was when New York was growing, when there were jobs. By the early 1970’s, almost 30 percent of the city’s population was receiving some form of public assistance. Between 1970 and 1974, former Mayor Abe Beame reported, the income of New York City blacks declined by 3.7 percent.
Like many nations in Europe, New York has developed a permanent underclass, a group of people not easily reachable even if there were adequate jobs and counseling and broad social services. It is, said Senator Ted Kennedy in 1978, “the great unmentioned problem of America today.” Michael Harrington wrote eloquently of this new group in his 1962 book, The Other America: “If a group has internal vitality, a will—if it has aspiration—it may live in dilapidated housing, it may eat an inadequate diet, and it may suffer poverty, but it is not impoverished. So it was in those ethnic slums of the immigrants that played such a dramatic role in the unfolding of the American dream. The people found themselves in slums, but they were not slum dwellers.”
Thirty percent of all New York births in 1976, according to a research study by Nicholas Kisburg of Teamsters Joint Council 16, were illegitimate. That same year, according to the City Health Department, more than 50 percent of all black and 45 percent of all Hispanic births were illegitimate, and in some neighborhoods the figure was higher. In the last ten years, the number of false-alarm fires has zoomed from 37,414 to 249,041. We have a growing number of people, says Deputy Mayor Herman Badillo, “who have no superego, no sense of right or wrong.” That is the affliction of seventeen-year-old Francisco Mendez, a Bronx teenager accused of twenty-five counts of murder for setting fire to a Bronx social club, killing twenty-five and injuring twenty-four. When the foreman of the jury announced the verdict in State Supreme Court on February 10, 1978, Mendez smiled, turned to face the spectators, and shrugged.
Confirming the 1968 warning of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, New York continued to move toward two separate societies—one black, one white. It was not just the rich or some Catholics who sent their kids to private schools. By 1977, only 29 percent of the city’s white population attended public schools, and three-quarters went to schools that were at least 50 percent white. According to a Board of Education brief, “The rapidly changing demographics of the city have virtually eradicated the chances for meaningful integration in the Bronx, Manhattan and even Brooklyn.” By 1987, says Dr. Richard Vigilante, Director of the Board’s Office of Educational Statistics, the white enrollment in all five boroughs will be 14 percent.
There was considerable controversy in 1976 when Housing Administrator Roger Starr proposed a city policy of “planned shrinkage”—reducing services to blighted neighborhoods and encouraging a smaller city population. Instead, New York continues to follow a policy of non-planned shrinkage. Between 1970 and 1975, the city’s population shrank by 491,000—one of every 16 residents left. What troubles people like Sam Ehrenhalt, Deputy Regional Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is that those who left were mostly middle-income taxpayers,