The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [86]
In the campaign, Carter blasted President Ford: “Our country has no urban policy or defined goals,” he said, “and so we have floundered from one ineffectual and uncoordinated program to another.” Yet, fifteen months into his Presidency, Carter was floundering and had yet to announce his own urban policy.
None of this should suggest there are simple answers. According to Moynihan, if President Carter’s welfare reform bill had been passed, it would, for example, relieve New York City of just $60 million of the $560 million it expended on welfare in fiscal 1978. Even the federal government’s assumption of costs would be no panacea. City taxpayers are also federal taxpayers. And even if the Congress agreed to a national welfare standard, it would never be set as high as New York’s current standard. New York would then have two alternatives: cut welfare payments or continue to spend many millions to subsidize welfare.
An even greater danger is ignorance—both national and local. Committed to showing he cared, Carter decided to visit another planet in October 1977. The President had been severely criticized for neglecting urban areas, so he stepped aboard his Air Force One capsule and was deposited in Manhattan. From there, he journeyed north to the South Bronx.
Nothing had prepared the man from Plains for what he would encounter. Stretching before his eyes were more than 3,000 vacant lots, 43,000 newly abandoned apartments, a welfare caseload bearing one of three residents. The average inhabitant, he learned, earned $2,340—60 percent less than the average in his nation.
Stunned, and ever mindful of the cameras, Carter decided to deposit his flag on this strange land, vowing a special program to “salvage” the South Bronx and “turn it around.” The President got what he wanted—a headline. The natives got what they wanted—his purse. The mad scramble was on. The President, who didn’t know what he was doing, had company.
“Slum tourism” is how the Urban League’s Vernon Jordan dubbed the President’s trip. Why pick the vast South Bronx for a test program? “I think it’s partly because the President came here,” conceded the local federal coordinator, Alan Weiner. Why the South Bronx? “He came there,” admitted Mayor Koch’s original coordinator, Lloyd Kaplan. “Tolstoy’s War and Peace is about events and what flows from them. Jimmy Carter came to Charlotte Street. What else flows from that? That’s what I’m going to live out.”
The city lived it out by submitting, in December 1977, “A Plan for Revitalization” of the South Bronx. The price tag, considering the task, was modest: about $800 million. The “plan” called for economic development incentives, new housing and parks. A flurry of meetings followed. By April 1978, the city and federal government announced agreement on a joint seven-year plan to “save the South Bronx.” The city hoped that the total federal dollar commitment would reach $520 million and that this would trigger perhaps another $1 billion of public and private spending.
Do their schemes match their dreams? Will it work? The obstacles are forbidding. The South Bronx’s “Dresden-like quality is in no way typical of America’s urban problems,” Roger Wilkins of the Times has written. “To take the moonscape of the South Bronx as the metaphor for the nation’s urban needs is to inflate an already horrendous problem to a scale that would defy even the most ambitious political imaginations.” Carter’s entire national urban program, announced in late March 1978, totaled just $4 billion of new money. In the first year, the Carter plan called for the federal government to spend $55.6 million in the South Bronx. Yet one of Carter’s Washington urban strategists guesses, “To turn the South Bronx around would take maybe $10 billion.” The President is stalking a rhino with a pea shooter.
A good argument could be made that the President should be stalking smaller prey. “If I had to pick the area to put those resources in, it wouldn’t be the South Bronx,” said City Planning Commission Chairman Robert F. Wagner, Jr.