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By Root 1121 0

taxes, high energy and living costs, high crime, reduced services—would suddenly disappear. Though Candidate Koch suggested he would reduce “excessive” city taxes, Mayor Koch’s four-year recovery plan called for no such reduction. And, as noted earlier, the tax bite was steeper in 1978 than in 1975. By 1978, the most dangerous people in New York were the same as they were in 1975 and before: those who acted as if they believed the horse thief. Or as Margaret Mead, thinking in a world context, once said, “If we build … thinking in too rosy terms, people will become apathetic and not do the things that need to be done. We have to realize that everything we say about the future will influence the future.”

It is hard to be sanguine about the city’s future when we recall that there were, in the spring of 1978, 25,000 abandoned buildings or lots, each no longer paying property taxes. Another 27,300 buildings, according to Koch’s Community Development Budget, would be abandoned by landlords—caught between inflation and impoverished tenants on the one hand and rent control on the other—by June 1979. A total of 71,000 occupied dwelling units would fall into the city’s hands by then—four times the number in January 1978—Koch ominously reported later in the year. Thus the City of New York will, conservatively, become the landlord for approximately 500,000 people—a population larger than that of all but twenty-four American cities. Besides not paying taxes, these properties will require City Hall to provide fuel and maintenance. And, as experience dictates, the city will fail to collect rents from many tenants who live in these buildings. Worse: “My biggest worry is, what happens on the first cold day of winter?” says Housing Commissioner Nat Leventhal. Will the city be able to turn on the heat? That this cancer was allowed to fester and multiply can be traced, in part, to the Beame administration, which treated abandoned buildings as it treated budget gaps. They didn’t exist. Instead of gearing up to cope with and try to manage these properties, Beame and Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti ignored a confidential April 1977 report from their own Office of Management and Budget. In fact, someone ordered most copies destroyed. It was an election year and abandoned buildings were bad news. Perhaps they would go away.

Another problem that won’t go away is the underclass, which few public officials dare talk about. One of the few progressives who has is Senator Edward Kennedy. This problem, he told Detroit’s 23rd annual NAACP dinner in May 1978, is “the great unmentioned problem of America today—the growth, rapid and insidious, of a group in our midst, perhaps more dangerous, more bereft of hope, more difficult to confront, than any for which our history has prepared us. It is a group that threatens to become what America has never known—a permanent underclass in our society.… They are the other side, the untold side, of our statistics of self-congratulatory progress.” Kennedy produced data revealing that more than 50 percent of all New York blacks were born to mothers without husbands (vs. 20 percent in 1956); among Hispanics, almost 50 percent of all children were born out of wedlock (vs. 11 percent in 1956). “But the life of welfare,” Kennedy continued, “is not the life of independence and freedom. When Martin Luther King spoke of his achievement, and yours, and we thrilled to his words, he did not say ‘Comfort at last’ or ‘Welfare at last.’ He said, ‘Free at last.’ … There is ample evidence that the welfare system itself, in combination with other factors, has helped to produce the very disease we now must seek to cure.”

It would be a tough cure to bring off even if we were willing to talk about it. Though New York has reduced welfare rolls and fraud, the number of people on welfare remains staggering. Almost one of every seven city residents—930,000—was on welfare in 1978. Another 500,000 to 1.5 million illegal aliens, many of them desperately poor, were, in effect, declared non-persons—not counted, not taxed, ignored. There are too few