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By Root 1166 0

population figures do not include its extraordinary number of illegal aliens, variously estimated at from 500,000 to 1.5 million people. New York’s density is also unique. Tokyo, for instance, has more residents (11.7 million) but almost three times as much space—840 square miles—as New York. An average of 26,318 people are packed into each of New York’s 300 square miles—67,000 residents per square mile in Manhattan. The average density of the rest of New York State is only 217 people per square mile. According to Thomas Muller of the Urban Institute, the average density of older cities is half that of New York (11,660), and growing American cities average but 4,000 people per square mile. Great size brings special problems. Muller has estimated, for example, that larger cities spend about twice as much per citizen to provide the same services as smaller cities. “Any city that abandons more housing in two years than the entire housing stock of Des Moines is certainly not typical,” writes historian Richard Wade of New York.

Large, older cities share a common characteristic: they are losing population. Between 1970 and 1976, the nation’s population expanded by 5 percent—63 percent of this increase taking place in the Sunbelt states. In that same period, New York City’s population shrank by 442,000 and the Northern states by 2 million people. Central cities, according to George E. Peterson of the Urban Institute, were drained of an average of 345,000 people between 1960 and 1970; from 1960 to 1973, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Buffalo—to name a few—lost one-fifth their total populations, suffering a much steeper rate of decline than New York. The suburbanization of America continues, with older cities contributing their middle-income residents to newer city-suburbs like Houston or Greenwich.

Physically, the older cities share a common malady: their aging infrastructure is crumbling. Cursed with an abundance of pre-World War II construction and dwindling resources, New York is not the only city racing physical catastrophe. Boston’s leaking water pipes result in the loss of half its fresh water; the antiquated sewers of San Francisco vomit raw sewage into its bay and in 1977 resulted in eighty overflows; a young boy drowned when Philadelphia’s clogged storm sewers flooded. Unlike Dallas, aging metropolises don’t own computers that pinpoint potential breakdowns of their underground pipes, wires, water mains, tunnels. Like New York, they often paint, rather than repair, their rusting bridges. Surveying the capital facilities and reduced capital expenditures of older cities, a report from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress said neglect “appears to be the single greatest problem facing our nation’s cities.” Years of neglect spring from a common preoccupation with short-term needs. “Out of sight, out of mind,” moans Philadelphia’s Water Commissioner, Carmen Guarino.

The proportion of New York households living below the national poverty standard is less than the average for declining cities, as is New York’s percentage of black families. In 1974, New York ranked 6th in the percentage of welfare recipients (12.4 percent), behind Boston (16.9 percent), Baltimore (16.3 percent), Philadelphia (16.2 percent), St. Louis (15.8 percent) and Newark (14.4 percent). And New York is not alone in suffering high welfare fraud. A recent city survey concluded that in the first half of 1977 there were seven cities with greater ineligibility rates. Contrasted with New York’s 8.4 percent—which seems understated—were Boston (13 percent), Washington (12.1 percent), Chicago (12 percent), Akron, Ohio (11.5 percent), Baltimore (9.7 percent), Kansas City, Missouri (9.5 percent) and Memphis (9 percent). Still, New York was considerably above the proposed federal standard of 3 percent.

The problem of too many poor people ails most older cities, and some new ones. Their economies behave less as satellites, clinging to national growth patterns, than as whirling meteors lost in space. The number of poverty families declined by 2.3 percent in