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By Root 1189 0

the U.S. between 1970 and 1974. In that same period, the number of poor residents swelled by 8 percent in New York and by more elsewhere. The disparity between relatively rich and poor cities is spreading. George Sternlieb, director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University and one of America’s foremost urbanologists, estimates that while the median income of New York City tenants was 8 percent below the national average in 1965, by 1975 the gap had widened to 30 percent. And New York’s lagging income growth is unique. “The per capita income growth in the City,” Alan Campbell and Roy Bahl of Syracuse University wrote in 1976, “is a full 10 percent lower than that in the nation’s ten largest central cities. Using this disparity, the income potential of the City can be estimated—if per capita income in New York City had grown at the same rate as that in the ten largest cities over the 1969–73 period, it would have reached $6,254 by 1973, an amount in fact $404 higher than the actual 1973 level.”

New York’s declining public school enrollment is less unique. Between 1970 and 1975, its public school population slipped 3.8 percent—the smallest drop among the nation’s fifteen largest cities. St. Louis and San Francisco, for instance, lost about 22 percent of their enrollment; New Orleans, 14.3 percent; Philadelphia, 10.2 percent; Los Angeles, 6.2 percent. And the flight of white pupils from the public schools is not a New York phenomenon. A survey of twenty-nine cities by Diane Ravitch of Columbia Teachers College reveals that New York’s white school population decreased by 29.8 percent in eight years (1968–76). Twenty-four cities experienced sharper losses, including Atlanta (78.3 percent), Detroit (61.6 percent), San Francisco (61.5 percent), Chicago (40.4 percent). Even booming Houston lost 45.2 percent of its white school population. Though few of the twenty-nine cities had a majority non-white population, all but eight had a majority non-white school population. New York no longer calls them “Public Primary Schools for Colored Children” as they did in the 1840’s, but they might as well.

New York may rank first in the perception of crime, but not in the actual incidence of crime. In the first nine months of 1977, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report statistics, eleven other cities had higher crime rates. Three growing cities—Phoenix, Denver and Dallas—were ranked 1, 2 and 3. Boston, San Francisco and Detroit had more crime per capita than did New York. The city ranked 12th in murders, 18th in forcible rape, 3rd in assaults, 21st in larceny, 2nd in robbery, 12th in home burglary. The Police Department reports that in 1977, for the first time since 1973, the number of violent crimes in New York declined. Of course, none of this news is any consolation to, say, senior citizens, who, when they brave the outdoors, clutch their handbags as if they contained uranium. Or to those who recall that in 1830 there were no murders in New York, no cases of arson, one rape, thirty-eight burglaries and four manslaughters.

There is comfort—and discomfort—in the social characteristics of New York’s population. New York is not a bastard-child. It shares many of the same social problems—too many poor and too few middle-income people, spreading segregation, a worn-down infrastructure, eroding neighborhoods, slums, youth gangs, haunting fear of crime. But, one might ask, if New York is similar to other cities, why has no other major city confronted bankruptcy?

Economic Characteristics

The economic trauma of New York is on display elsewhere. The percentage of poor people is greater in the South than in the North. Even bustling Houston has a seventy-three-square-mile distress zone—half the size of Washington, D.C.—where one of four residents lives below the poverty line and one of ten lives at half the poverty level. According to David T. Stanley’s 1976 monograph Cities in Trouble, New York is one of twelve major cities with a declining or static tax base. In 1976, three cities had higher unemployment rates—Detroit