The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [15]
What explains the decline in city unemployment despite the loss in 1977 of 41,000 jobs? A smaller population might be one answer, but Bienstock says the population had stabilized. The answer, laments a Bureau official, is that “people are dropping out of the labor force, becoming so discouraged that they give up looking.” Or perhaps many subsist more profitably on the streets. We often ignore this because we cannot quantify it and because it is so painful. Unemployment is actually higher than our already bleak statistics suggest.
By early 1978, the Bureau was reporting the good news that city jobs had grown by 16,500 from February 1977 to February 1978. But even this hopeful sign was potentially misleading. Such an increase reflected an expanding national economy, growing at a rate of 4 percent, and obscured the depressing news that New York’s job growth of one-half of 1 percent lagged behind that of every major city in America. Deputy Bureau Chief Sam Ehrenhalt told me in April 1978 that he expected the city to lose another 250,000 jobs over the next five years. “The bleeding has stopped—for the moment,” he said.
That New Yorkers should become dispirited in such circumstances is inevitable, since imperceptibly the outrageous has become normal. Potholes and dirty streets are normal. Poor people are normal. Fear of crime is normal. Corrupt building inspectors, doctors and nursing home operators stealing from Medicaid, city workers not working, pushers and pimps roaming streets as freely as hot dog vendors—all are normal in New York City.
Terrified teachers are normal. While visiting Harren High School one day, I stopped to wait for the elevator on the fourth floor. Classes were in session, and the corridor was empty except for a pretty, middle-aged woman who was also waiting for the elevator. She was a teacher.
“Excuse me,” she inquired softly. “Are you going to the first floor?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t like to walk down the staircase alone,” she explained, smiling. “Would you mind escorting me?”
Her nonchalant tone bespoke neither fear nor shame. When I went to high school, we feared bumping into teachers in the stairwells. Today, teachers fear bumping into their dangerous students. To a visitor, that change is a surprise; what’s shocking is the teacher’s air of resignation. She had come to assume that danger was part of her job.
People may accept danger, but they don’t enjoy it. An August 1977 New York Times–CBS survey of city residents revealed that two-thirds rated the city a fair or poor place to live. One month earlier, a similar nationwide poll found that only 6 percent of Americans thought New York City a good or excellent place to live. The attitude becomes a statistic when people pick up and move. “We know the image of New York that many people have is exaggerated,” Robert F. Flood, Vice President for Corporate Services of Union Carbide, said just weeks before that giant decided to depart. “We have many employees who live safe and happy lives here. But it is an image we have to contend with. And it isn’t just crime and high living costs. It’s the city’s changing ethnic mix, which makes some people uncomfortable, and the graffiti on the subways, the dirt on the streets and a lot of other things.” The company’s surveys found that “a substantial majority” of executives and managers, down to those earning $15,000 a year, wanted Union Carbide to move.
It is difficult—no, dangerous—to ignore the economic and social contagion that has swept New York City. The contagion observes few borders. Between 1970 and 1975, New York State lost 2.5 percent of all its nonagricultural jobs. In that same period, the nation’s nonagricultural employment leaped 7.4 percent. The state’s economic stagnation, a 1977 report by Syracuse University economist Roy Bahl disclosed, meant the loss of $6 billion in potential tax revenues since 1973.
The contagion afflicts most of the Northeast. Since 1934, there has been a massive geographic redistribution