Fair Game

...Yet the charge of racism has for some time been used not as a light for our understanding, but as a punctuation to discussion It has proved handy as the ultimate defense against any criticism of a black person's ineptitude on the job, wrong-headedness in an argument, or general ill will It is a way of blacking out the opposition By writing off one's critics as racists, one may spare oneself the burden of considering whether the placement of three 24-story low-rent buildings in Forest Hills, where few buildings rise half so high, is altogether a good idea...

...In addition to being well able to speak for themselves, the residents of Forest Hills have managed to get liberal Democratic representatives and a benighted Conservative senator to intercede for them in Washington The municipality must speak for public conscience and for public policy But speak together the parties must Moralistic posturing and debates over who is more bigoted than whom avail nought but bitterness The immediate issues in Forest Hills, which is by no means of one mind in flat opposition to the project, have to do with numbers, with school facilities and transportation and police protection They are negotiable (As I write this, there are reports that the housing project may be scaled down somewhat??further evidence in a distracted city that where discussion falters, confrontation can pay off ). What makes the issues so damnably hard to deal with is the tendency of spokesmen for every side to zip from high pronouncements to base insults The climax of a TV debate between Golar and the head of the Forest Hills Residents Association came when the former accused the latter of advocating violence and the latter accused the former of having him served with a restraining order on the Sabbath All parties seem to be intent on breaking ground not for neighborliness, but for yet another failure in a field that can show lamentably few successes...

...There is still time, even as the buildings go up, to help the homeowners and apartment dwellers of Forest Hills distinguish the real changes that are likely to result in their area from the changes that fuel their nightmares, to modify the more troubling changes where possible, and to prepare people to deal with those that must come Unfortunately, the Lindsay administration sometimes seems determined to stamp out whatever sparks of kindly feeling exist between whites and blacks In the present circumstances...

...What community control would mean m general practice is that little low-cost housing would be built anywhere, outside of Indian reservations This rule would also cover hospitals and other institutions that everyone considers desirable but nobody wants next door Roads would be run only through other people's communities, where all airports and generating plants would be situated The 19th-century New England town hall still holds its charm, and we can all still get a kick out of the tales of the robust democrary practiced in frontier towns, but the idea that our century's cities can be operated in bits and pieces is an invitation to immediate chaos and eventual stagnation If the Forest Hills experience only puts the quietus on propaganda for community control, it will not have been a dead loss Break Ground/ Not Heads...

...The Mob Ascendant Just as advocates of the Forest Hills project tend to retreat behind avowals of principle and mutterings about racism, its opponents can take their stand on the high ground of community control Ah, community control What man are contained in this reduction of democratic ideals to mob pressures What man is so ignorant 01 crooked or crazy that he cannot become the voice of some angry segment of some bedeviled community, and hence deserving of our regard as well as our ear'' Since officials keep showing that they listen best to those who yell loudest, aspirants to community control have little incentive to exercise self-control...

...So one can accept the technique and still feel obliged to ask in every case whether it is being carried out in a socially beneficial way Does low-cost housing have to go up in Forest Hills, and in that particular section of Forest Hills9 Does it have to be three 24-story buildings, lather than five 40-story buildings or two 11-story buildings9 Perhaps Forest Hills will be able to absorb these thousands of newcomers without strain I daresay it will, certainly, we must all hope it will But there are risks here that ought not to be overlooked as one stands, with head uplifted, upon one's elevated principles...

...I do not pretend to have the answer to that question, but it ought to be open to discussion I don't doubt that the policy of putting low-cost housing outside of slum areas is well-intentioned, as is the policy of busing children to integrate the schools, and can be applied to worthy purpose in many places Which is to say, there remain some places where it cannot be so applied Such techniques, after all, are neither moral commandments nor laws of science They are efforts at meeting large social problems, and are useful to the extent that they do not make the problems worse or create new ones...

...City Hall has seemed less interested m tapping the good will in the community than in once again putting itself forward as the champion of the underdog at the expense of a relatively privileged group Simeon Golar cries out publicly that he is "pained by the shabby, destructive, yes, bigoted, leadership that would deny decent housing to the poor people of New York City " Well, I am pained by this official's effort to provoke passions rather than assuage them...

...Forest Hills, whatever one thinks of the place, is a fairly stable community m a city suffering from instability The needs or desires of white burghers must appear frivolous when set against the desperation of people trying to make some sort of a life out of the meager materials they have been allowed, trying to save their children from the pathologies of the slums Still, we know from unhappy experience what the flight of the middle class has meant to New York There will be little for the poor black family resett'ed m Queens to celebiate if middle-class white families are driven to Suffolk County...

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Heavy Winds in Forest Hills Readers of newspapers and watchers of television around New York do not need me to tell them that the Forest Hills section of Queens has lately been the scene of some unpleasantness over the breaking of ground for a low-rent housing project For the information of non-New Yorkers, the area's residents, mostly white, Jewish and middle-class, have been opposing plans to erect three 24-story buildings composing 840 apartments that will bring thousands of poor people into their midst A large proportion of the prospective tenantry will be elderly whites Some will be working-class families Some, mainly black, will be on welfare The Hills are alive with the sound of protest...

...So here is the situation Poor black families need clean homes and decent neighborhoods White middle-class families want to be able to walk their streets at night and send their children to school without anxiety As far as these needs and wants go, there is nothing shameful on either side Insofar as they conflict, they represent a common sort of political issue and are susceptible to the common forms of negotiation, compromise and guarantees The people of Forest Hills, after all, are accustomed to negotiating They are not prone to violence, they appreciate the virtues of talking their way out of conflict, and as ethnic neighborhoods go, they are probably better disposed than most toward black newcomers (Can these considerations have been lost on the planners who chose a Jewish section rather than, say, an Italian section of Queens for the project...

...Now, one way for an outside observer or a public official to deal with a controversy that pits the evident needs of poor blacks against the felt needs of comfortable whites is to mutter "Racism" and close the discussion And that is pretty much the way it has been treated by the chairman of the City's Housing Authority, one Simeon Golai I am well enough acquainted with Forest Hills to appreciate that its residents have their share of what, m the era before the escalation of the epithet, we used to call prejudice They have had little opportunity or desire to associate with colored folks, except in the course of business or housekeeping, and their notions of the Negro's ways do not bear transcribing here Granted...

...But the erstwhile apostles of community control??swinging politicians and engaged journalists??have never really cared much about the principle of the thing Or, rather, it was a highly selective principle, useful mainly for baiting the white Establishment No one ever really meant that communities should be put in the control of the antibusing housewives of Pontiac, Michigan, or the Ku Kluxers of Birmingham, Alabama, or the burghers of Queens Yet, in all fairness, are not these citizens entided to take to the streets with their fears, their rages, their greed7 Thus argued the residents of Lmdenwood, another white middle-class section of Queens, who succeeded, in the wake of the Forest Hills demonstrations, in getting the City's Board of Estimate to reject a planned low-income development for their area...