Are There Solutions? Corruption, Cynicism, and Reform Proposals:
Falcón, Angelo & Feldman, Dan & Glazer, Nathan & Jeffries, John & McCarthy, Daniel & Messinger, Ruth & Stern, Sol & Tobis, David & Wycliff, Don & Rosenberg, Jan & Siegel, Fred
Last March Dissent organized, under the leadership of editor Fred Siegel, a round-table discussion on the problems of New York, with emphasis on the possibilities of solutions. We print below a...
...It took us forever to get some of them open from 3 to 6 P.M...
...Sol Stern: Well, build low-income housing and raise the welfare grants for housing, that's two areas...
...I don't understand it, frankly...
...Well, that's a very hard thing to get around in building a coalition that argues that government should do more...
...One policy is to say: "We'll be more honest," or "We'll listen to people more" —a change in personnel...
...but there is a general consensus that this won't be cheap...
...We print below a transcript, sharply reduced for reasons of space...
...And you don't need to undo rent control to adopt successful innovation from other cities...
...I think liberalism has been transformed in another way...
...The Puerto Ricans, in 1980, according to the City Planning Commissioner, were 60 percent of all Hispanics...
...For several years we were under a tight monitoring system and things were touch-and-go...
...The question is not what people thought about Claire or her challenger...
...Let's say that you talk about decriminalizing all drugs, and you get the predictable opposition from the right...
...But we live in a city that has between sixty and one hundred thousand vacant cityowned apartments...
...And I don't think that is widely enough known—I think, in terms of building enough political will to go forward, that's essential...
...next year—that's right now—will be extremely tight...
...I think it's more complex...
...When there aren't enough beds because agencies have not provided the beds for kids in foster care, the city gets the blame for that...
...that the better agencies have not taken black and Hispanic kids...
...How do you do it without more money, and won't you have to do it that way, in view of the general suspicion of government...
...or it is an incumbentprotection society...
...What institution has more notorious a culture of incapacity than the Defense Department...
...Angelo Falcon represents one such effort...
...Doing more means spending more money...
...They're still pretending that it's tighter than last year, but I think that's just to save face...
...Many of those reformers achieved power...
...So one problem is defining an alternative to a period of fiscally responsible government that hasn't particularly reduced taxes, [but] has been friendly to business and development so that many companies are still willing to shoulder the enormous burdens of doing business in New York...
...Break it up and create four or five alternative schools...
...So for four years we ran a surplus of $400 or 500 million each year and rolled it over...
...The various challenges from the Brooklyn blacks are another...
...It is simply a question of inertia that we don't have more than thirteen alternative high schools in this city...
...There are proposals circulating about ways to randomly redistribute children in high schools in the city...
...The school started out four years ago with nine hundred kids in the entering class, and there are now sixty in the senior class...
...That's something for which people would want to see money allocated...
...Ruth Messinger: We roll it over every year...
...Under Wagner some Puerto Ricans were brought in, then under Lindsay...
...Ruth Messinger, New York City Council member...
...There are so many irrational pieces in the system...
...And whether that's churches or business interests or whatever, I think we have a failure of leadership, a great deal of complacency, and a real unwillingness to change...
...Nathan Glazer: The capital gains tax on real estate...
...Whatever the reason, and you can argue about the reasons, one doesn't need a better case to say, "Shut it down...
...It's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, but this has fed the tendency of the City Council over the last fifteen years to acquiesce to a strong mayor...
...You put more people on, you fill more potholes, you place those foster kids more rapidly...
...It can't be simply because of television...
...Now virtually the entire Bronx organization is in jail or about to go to jail and there is still little in the way of insurgency...
...the degree to which the dominant majority black and Latin segments of this population have been disenfranchised...
...Dan McCarthy: Yes, it works...
...Sol Stern: I agree with Ruth that there are a lot of very easy things to do that we are not doing...
...Participants were: Angelo Falcon, Institute for Puerto Rican Policy...
...That would indicate something more then business as usual...
...Angelo Falcon: I think that's misleading...
...It just blows my mind to see how supine the black political constituency in this city is...
...One example is child welfare...
...In San Francisco you don't put up commercial space downtown without paying for day care...
...When government chooses to act in a wise way, when there is an organized constituency, it makes a tremendous difference...
...I recall a meeting with the mayor of Boston—I live in Cambridge—new immigrants coming in, Haitians, representatives of the community, and the mayor said, "What can we do for you...
...I'm asking out of ignorance...
...I think that the level of tolerance for certain problems in this society has risen to a point where you'll see people dying on the streets and not make a connection between that and social policy...
...Nathan Glazer: We have an interesting set of alternative explanations of what is going wrong here...
...But also I think you have to look seriously at money...
...And after we announced that that program was successful we then said we're not going to do any more, because the federal money has dried up...
...But in the present situation, with a 22-billion dollar budget and very large sums already devoted to welfare, education, and whatever, can you imagine anyone arguing that the time has come to start spending more...
...Those people want more spent to meet their needs, and the issue is how to organize them and make them into a constituency that could support the expenditures...
...And that's been a long-term process over the 1970s, in terms of people redefining those issues away, and a tremendous assault on liberalism while, for example, the Reagan people and the right have been able to lower the levels of tolerance in terms of defense spending...
...It is true that there are FALL • 1987 . 637 A DISSENT ROUND TABLE potholes to be filled, but we have an administration that finds it very comfortable to say, "The problem with providing services today is that there isn't any money...
...On the federal level, liberals looking to meet social needs have begun arguing for dedicated funding—for instance, taxing the Medicare benefits of well-to-do recipients in order to expand the benefits for those worst off...
...On the national scene, we're beginning to get a liberal/conservative consensus on welfare reform...
...Now that doesn't mean that they want to shell it out of their pockets...
...The confusion of our alternative policy is very much a confusion about what a locality can do in the absence of federal policy and in the context of New York State policy...
...I've had the opportunity over the last few years to see the planning and leadership of some of the major institutions in the city...
...One other point: I'm no longer as convinced as I once was that better political leadership will change this city...
...one is Carlyle's French Revolution, and the other is Sayre's Governing New York City...
...That's a tremendous constituency, their families and the schools they're in...
...In a city in which the median income of renters is about $12,000 a year, you have no alternative but to spend more unless you want to see the housing crisis literally destroy the social fabric of the city...
...Government spends $350 million a year for foster-care services...
...If so, where will it come from...
...I'm no longer as convinced, however, that dollars are the problem...
...So there is a consensus there on more money and what to use it for...
...The massive social harm that the criminality of drug abuse implies, you're not allowed to raise that, because you'd probably have more addicts if drugs were legal...
...In the Bronx, only eight years ago you had a reform borough president—Bobby Abrams...
...whatever has to be done you do more of, faster...
...That's all they want...
...We have to talk about whether or not there's a posture that produces better results...
...But I think there is a previous, related question: What policy or what policies are out there for the insurgents to offer...
...First of all, there are a lot of innovative ideas...
...Before you get to the level of my voting against rent control—I wouldn't just be defeated, I'd be hanged from the nearest lamp post—before you can get to that there are a million irrationalities blocking progress...
...Fred Siegel: Ruth, some examples...
...I think that we have to address more clearly the failure of our existing institutions to make better use of the resources they now have...
...How did this culture develop and how does it get changed...
...Why is it inconceivable that you could build a constituency for spending more money, given the alternatives, continuing with 40 percent of the kids• in poverty and an enormous homeless problem...
...In 1975 the city convinced people to make sacrifices so that the city could survive...
...So why wouldn't you want to do that tomorrow...
...I went to the city's Human Resources Administration and said, "Go to New York City's congressional delegation and tell them to change that...
...The city has chosen to discharge that responsibility through a contracting-out system that it defends by saying, "We are just not as good as the voluntary and religious agencies at being small, community-based, humane...
...Nathan Glazer, Professor of Education and Sociology, Harvard University...
...They don't argue with the state for alternative funding or cut some of our extraordinarily generous subsidies to real estate developers in order to use that money more equitably...
...I understand the argument that you need more money...
...Fred Siegel: The ice of the Reagan Age is cracking...
...Maybe its the Wicks Law, maybe its a failure of leadership, maybe there's a kind of culture of total incapacity where no one expects to be able to do anything and therefore they can't and have to be hit over the head by politicians...
...Sol Stern: But how would you explain the fact that, after the scandal in Queens, with the county leader and borough president known to be a crook, the machine these crooks represented had virtually no opposition at the next election...
...It's a question of changing the dominant message...
...So it's not just the question of political participation...
...It hasn't fully melted, but even before the Iragua affair there was a sense that the Republican agenda had run out of steam...
...The Democrats today aren't really a coherent party...
...And the Hispanic political constituency as well...
...David Tobis: Right, but the power does not rest with government...
...The economic policy for New York City is basically that the state gives the city money, and the city says, "Thank you very much, leave it by the door...
...Koch still has a reform air—he's not perceived as a machine guy...
...This is an administration, or the last two administrations, that has never done anything right in the military field, until they took on Grenada...
...So why don't they do it...
...One way for liberals to indicate that linkage will not just be business as usual, would be to tie an excess-profits tax on Manhattan development to a reorganization of the rent control system...
...But you also get the opposition from the left, that more people will probably become addicts...
...Jan Rosenberg, Department of Sociology, Long Island University...
...space is not really a problem...
...Get out of our way...
...the structure of government, both formal and 628 • DISSENT A DISSENT ROUND TABLE informal, has built up in ways that protect incumbency and frustrate insurgency...
...Obviously you want at the same time to make sure government will function better, and I believe, by the way, that it will if it becomes a priority...
...Couldn't something similar be done with subsidized housing, so that the wealthy who enjoy those benefits are taxed to aid the victims of the housing crisis...
...and Don Wycliff, New York Times Editorial Board...
...Forty percent of the children in the city are now living below the FALL • 1987 633 A DISSENT ROUND TABLE L. to r., Dan McCarthy, David Tobis poverty level...
...Ruth Messinger: But Angelo, I think there are people at a lot of different income levels in different communities in the city who know that the services they're getting for their tax dollar have gone down...
...I want to link two things said by Dan Feldman and Angelo Falcon: when you (Dan) said people don't trust government, I assume you meant middle-class people don't trust government...
...David Tobis: Let's get back to the issue that Dan Feldman raised about the cynicism towards government—"Government can't do anything...
...Ruth Messinger: I think that what John is saying is critical...
...So I don't know if you even need to ask enormous political courage of New York's representatives...
...John Jeffries: At the very least, it should be more costly for people who benefit from the current context to operate the way they're operating...
...You have to figure out ways to spend more money on low-income housing or the welfare housing grant...
...In the City Council there are very few insurgents...
...And it puzzles me, too, that people aren't more organized around what I see as some of the threats to education...
...I'm the author of the 10 percent Capital Gains Tax that will generate a half billion dollars for New York State this year...
...We're going to have to spend a lot of money for day care and some social services...
...The Wilder lawsuit has argued that the control of placement has rested with the agencies, and that they have discriminated on racial grounds...
...There is also the large black immigration from the Caribbean, the huge Asian immigration—let me tell you something interesting, they don't want government to do anything for them, they want government to stay out of their way...
...I now believe the numbers will be exactly the same as before, and you have to believe that it's deliberate policy...
...I've been to some of them...
...The round table was held at the Cooper Union and we wish to thank its vice president, Alan Green, for providing the meeting room...
...Dan McCarthy: The question of where the money is is a good one, but I have become increasingly skeptical as to whether dollars and budgets are the crucial issues in New York...
...But we each represent 210,000 people...
...it'll serve as a base for next year...
...So I'm one of the last of the big spenders in New York City...
...But let's get back to the issue of money Nat Glazer has raised...
...Religious agencies run the majority of the system...
...That tax works...
...Ruth Messinger: Well, you mentioned linkage, and I think that's a good example because it is a policy that in New York City . is now (a) more rhetoric than reality...
...New York had two-party competition through the 1920s...
...Whenever I hear there's a failure of leadership I get a little worried because it's so indefinite...
...Fred Siegel: Is more money required...
...What about] the Wollman Rink...
...Insurgents are disarmed at the beginning...
...The mayor advertises the surplus every year in July as if it were the greatest thing that had happened to the city...
...I agree with what both Dan and Don said: you have to be clear about what you would do—and make it sound sufficiently compelling that people will pay for it, and you have to let people know that the burden of paying for it is not going to fall on exactly the same people who paid it before...
...Now we're in a situation where if you tell a kid to work in McDonald's for $5.00 an hour, he's going to say "Forget it, I'm going to sell drugs for $1,000 a week...
...Then that frightens the business classes, or leads to near bankruptcy, and there is a period of "fiscal responsibility...
...Beset by an accumulation of social problems, the Reagan administration and conservatism generally have been floundering ever since their 1984 triumph...
...But the control of what happens to those kids in foster care does not rest, and has never ultimately rested, with the city...
...Board of Education President Bobby Wagner has said alternative schools don't cost any more...
...There are so many things that we won't challenge, and it's partly, as far as I'm concerned, partly attributable to the Rawisian nonsense which has stifled FALL • 1987 • 631 A DISSENT ROUND TABLE L. to r., Fred Siegel, John Jeffries...
...this was followed by an era in which Republican fusion tickets—Republicans allied with labor or liberals, as with LaGuardia and Lindsay— supplied the opposition...
...In 1976 and 1977 the city said that a variety of strategies to fix up some of those apartments would never work...
...So I think that's clouded the issues...
...The danger is that if liberals fail to deliver the goods or to take advantage of this opportunity, the cynicism that follows will be even deeper than the cynicism we've just been through...
...A prima facie case that this is a school for failure...
...Dan Feldman: Look, there are many other irrationalities...
...Sol Stern, special assistant to the City Council President...
...These revelations create additional cynicism, which translates into frustration and apathy...
...While that's often said, I don't believe it's completely understood...
...You have a president who built a constituency for spending a lot more money on an issue he was able to define as key to the national interest...
...Sol Stern's question is the key one: Why aren't those parents screaming like crazy...
...As FALL • 1987 • 629 A DISSENT ROUND TABLE L. to r., Sol Stern, Nathan Glazer, Angelo FalcOn soon as anyone says that, I think he's almost out of the political game...
...They've been able to say, "Look, this is a matter of life and death, we've got to spend more money on arms because we have no choice...
...As a result, children received inadequate care...
...Then the city tried using federal money, announced that they were extraordinarily successful, that to and behold low-income communities could manage their own housing, do some sweat equity, use government money, run their own buildings...
...Where is the screaming and hollering from the minority community that's victimized by an institution like Thomas Jefferson, saying: "Anything is better than this...
...The city runs a very small piece of foster care—about 5 percent of the system—those beds were established in the late 1940s and mid-1960s, to take the kids that voluntary agencies refused to take...
...One on the culture of incompetence or incapacity...
...And all they said was, "We can fix up the houses, we can handle it, don't do it...
...I don't think that this city is lacking insurgent groups trying to build coalitions...
...David Tobis: That was the point I wanted to make: We have to spend more, because if we don't we're only going to be dealing on the margins of the problems...
...Which would be reasonable if it happened once...
...But when you get down to connecting with constituencies at the street level, it's a very different process...
...and there is a track record...
...You also have to be careful in terms of who are playing the broker roles, in terms of social classes, and how they're projecting a community that's very 638 • DISSENT A DISSENT ROUND TABLE disorganized and newly settled...
...But in the weaker case, an alternative policy would be one in which those people who bear the brunt of sacrifices, both cyclical and structural, bear them less frequently...
...Daniel McCarthy, Municipal Research Institute...
...If we don't spend the money, what is the scenario...
...This is a city with the highest city and state income taxes in the country, with the most elaborate, costly social services...
...Sol Stern: I'll make a couple of points...
...There are so many plain old sane things to do before you get to that point...
...Dan Feldman: One answer is that the public cynicism about the efficacy of government is so great that if you tell them, "Give us more money and we'll be able to do this," they'll say, "Baloney, you won't...
...So you're not going to get much of a response because the feeling is: "That money is going to be used by those other guys up there, like they've done in the past, and that's it...
...Dan Feldman a lot of debate: You can only make changes that benefit the most disadvantaged...
...With all this reporting on the dropout rate, 632 • DISSENT A DISSENT ROUND TABLE L. to r., Angelo Falcón, Ruth Messinger, Jan Rosenberg, Don Wycliff there was a piece in the Times about Thomas Jefferson High School...
...Dan Wycliff: But I don't elect the archbishop, I elect the mayor...
...If tomorrow the city was hit with a tidal wave or an earthquake that produced the level of homelessness and dislocation we now have, emergency powers would be invoked to override the ordinary clash of political interests and to ration essential supplies...
...and I still haven't heard what we're going to do...
...But most people don't do that...
...and (b) based on a totally different set of notions of exchange — "We'll give you this if you do that" —than exists in other places...
...Whatever you might think of the new Queens Borough President Claire Schulman, she was literally picked by the same party leaders who had so loyally supported Manes...
...You can't solve the problems of poverty in the city without spending more money...
...Now this is going to link up directly with the question of what do people expect government to do, how do they trust government...
...John Jeffries: I just want to pick up on two things with respect to alternatives...
...And they won't accept the answer that "Yeah, but if we had prohibition we'd have fewer alcoholics, and you know what harm that does to society...
...Angelo then said that lowincome people don't trust government either...
...The city can say: "Gosh, it's not our fault...
...These people are making things happen in some of the city's neighborhoods, maybe about the only interesting things happening...
...On the one hand, people say there is a homeless crisis...
...If there's going to be ferment, I think it's going to come from outsiders, from new immigrants, whether from other parts of this country or other parts of the world...
...Then all of a sudden that gets transformed with Koch in a way where the substance of reform isn't there but the form is there...
...What's striking in 1987 is that, despite the scandals and the very real failures of the Koch administration, there is no alternative yet on the horizon...
...But it's our tax money, and we're contributing it—under forced conditions— to pay for services, and they're building up a surplus...
...It's crazy...
...And when they're asked to amplify on that, they cite programs the federal government has cut...
...I don't think it's fair to say that the desire to challenge doesn't exist...
...I know linkage has belatedly begun here in New York...
...It takes one third more to build anything, taxes are extravagant—it's really a credit to New York that anyone still wants to build or invest here...
...Yet nowhere in the political culture of New York is there a willingness to override 630 • DISSENT A DISSENT ROUND TABLE L. to r., Dan Feldman, Dan McCarthy ordinary interests no matter how severe the social emergency...
...Formally New York resembles a oneparty state...
...the question is where money moved very fast...
...Don Wycliff: I have to confess I get very worried immediately, not when somebody says spend more, but when somebody talks about how to organize the poor and make them into a constituency...
...The formal structure is clear, and is now a matter at least under some debate...
...Yet they were able to swing a population around to the notion, "Let's flush more money down the drain...
...I will send you to the Upper West Side of Manhattan Dominican community and you'll get a very different reaction in terms of what government is about...
...And you create something in its place that we have evidence has worked...
...Fred Siegel: Ruth, when you say there's a hidden surplus, does that come from the Financial Control Board...
...by now they are probably down to 50 percent of Hispanics...
...The poverty rate for the elderly has been cut in half over the last twenty years because of government action: the establishment in the U.S...
...By informal I mean both the role that money plays in politics— which is almost unbelievable—and the impact of the waves of corruption and its exposure...
...On the surface he doesn't look like one of the machine, he doesn't look like a Meade Esposito...
...Ruth Messinger: Well maybe it can't be simply because of those things, but I think that those are things that have changed extraordinarily in the last two decades...
...Institutions don't change unless there are major forces at work, and I think those forces are now coming to a head in New York and will shape the future, namely demographic forces...
...That leaves aside the question of spending more money...
...Ruth Messinger: I think it's too facile to say the challengers aren't there...
...But New York has day-care slots available for only 18 percent of the eligible children...
...In my judgment the questions are of critical mass: how do groups find out what they have in common, how do you build coalitions with sufficient numbers and sufficient conviction that can make a challenge...
...Why spend $30,000 in rent for a welfare hotel, when you could use that money to build something...
...On the one hand we say the city is changing, but it's not changing to constituencies that want more government...
...We've got in this city a set of protection societies for sources of income that we are choosing not to tap...
...Jan Rosenberg: Education is one of the issues that raise this question of critical mass in just the ways we've been talking about...
...New immigrants are transforming the city, ninety thousand a year settling in New York...
...The voluntary agencies did not want to take the worst and most difficult cases...
...It is frustrated to some extent by the diffusion of accountability created by the current structure and power of the Board of Estimate...
...Change will come about through better civic leadership, media leadership, and journalism...
...Don Wycliff: It strikes me that to talk about conservatism and liberalism in New York City is almost meaningless because so many normally liberal elements are invested in the status quo...
...of Medicare and Social Security...
...We have nine hundred schools open seven hours a day five days a week forty weeks a year...
...The Wilder lawsuit will give the city greater control...
...Now why would city government be against fixing up city housing if there's federal money for it...
...I've always believed that people in government are happy to spend money...
...I think you're asking a good question, and I can't answer it: Why is there a commitment to an additional one-half billion dollars' worth of surplus when there are services that are desperately starving...
...But in fact the party is little more than a collection of cliques, each with its own pipeline to the treasury...
...Eventually, how many kids can go to Stuyvesant High School...
...But it always requires something else, and it's the something else that seems to have disintegrated...
...The mayor says, "See, we haven't wasted it, we were just being cautious...
...Ruth Messinger: I don't think it's true that in order to put through an innovative idea you have to agree to change some existing policy...
...today, as the joke goes, the two-party system is Democrats versus prosecutors...
...The housing situation, rent control, the way the school system operates—everybody has an investment in major governmental institutions remaining the way they are...
...And we have to talk more about the extent to which local governments, in the absence of state and federal aid, interest or intervention, can solve these problems...
...Over the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the foster-care system moved from white to black...
...Money was also important ten, fifteen years ago...
...Don Wycliff: Wait a second, you have to explain that...
...The introduction of 636 • DISSENT A DISSENT ROUND TABLE Newsday in this city has done more to open up policy issues than any other single event...
...That's always available to reformers, and in New York, with its history of machine abuses, that's been an almost sufficient agenda...
...And then we started ending each year with a surplus...
...You can take money that's currently allocated to subsidize the real estate interests and the banks and the stock markets in the city—Ruth Messinger has done a wonderful study documenting hundreds of millions of dollars that could be gotten from subsidies now provided for people that don't need the subsidies...
...We took in more than we thought, and we spent a little less than projected, but it's okay...
...Let me give you an example...
...Because they were able to convince people that it's a priority...
...There is this reservoir of funds we ought to have the right to touch, not overspend, not spend down to the last penny, but touch...
...It's not going to filter down to us...
...They are, but this is a very difficult city in which to organize...
...Ruth Messinger: County leader politics...
...These schools provide models of success that Ruth was talking about...
...It would be extraordinarily expensive for this city to undertake any expansion of the housing program...
...Unfortunately in New York City that's a rather easy abstract question to deal with: for groups that don't benefit from existing circumstances, an alternative would be any situation that allows them to benefit more...
...John Jeffries, assistant professor, Columbia University School of Architecture and Planning...
...We need to look hard at what's worked, and try to understand that there's been a lot of money spent and some things have worked...
...But it's not that hard to do in this city...
...And last year when some of us began to get wise we were given a set of projections that said things were different: impact of federal tax reform, the increase in the cost of living, lack of elasticity in some of our sources of income...
...Dan Feldman, State Assembly member from Brooklyn...
...Politics has largely been reduced to small groups able to organize for their own interest, so that politics becomes an extension of business...
...You start moving senior citizens programs in there...
...get more people who are in fact entitled to a welfare grant, given their income status, and who are now excluded—get them into the welfare system...
...Underemployment, poverty, unemployment, etc., should be more evenly distributed across groups...
...Or if it won't cost that much, why wouldn't the city use money from other sources...
...That rhetoric, while it may have some basis in reality, also serves to diffuse accountability...
...So right there you're going to have trouble connecting on that issue with one large constituency in the city...
...He said we can't spend more...
...Don Wycliff: I agree, and I'm troubled because we've gotten to the point of "Can we do it without spending more money...
...I mean, a sixty-four-dollar screw...
...In the conservative eras of the 1920s and 1950s there were reform movements waiting to challenge the machines...
...Special Services for Children (SSC), the city agency that oversees the foster-care system run directly by private agencies, is repeatedly blamed, but is not provided with the resources to do its job, to monitor agencies adequately and to hold them accountable...
...Rebuilding our existing institutions is crucial to the future...
...So then I think you FALL • 1987 • 635 A DISSENT ROUND TABLE have a separate argument, which is, "Where is there money...
...There are thirteen alternative high schools in the city, serving only 2 percent of the city's high school students, and they work...
...Fred Siegel: What are the structures that frustrate coalitions...
...The real story of New York in the 1980s, I believe, is not the budget, it's not even corruption: it really is that this is the watershed period in the city's history when new people came to the fore and exercised their influence over the future direction of the city...
...The best example is housing...
...you make what we mean by community schools...
...There are things that the private sector does not do adequately, and then government takes the heat for it...
...While I have the floor I will say one more thing, because a few times people have raised the question of the ethnic and racial change that is occurring...
...I've been reading two books recently...
...We're coming toward the end of a period of fiscal responsibility...
...We don't trust you...
...Our policies lack equity...
...New York has not developed a housing policy that links development in Manhattan with the needs of the outer boroughs...
...There was a challenge to Claire Schulman...
...Running a surplus sounds like a good thing...
...The city was forced to create its own system...
...Nathan Glazer: The discussion is taking off on the problem of why there's no strong alternative where so many people are involved in corruption...
...q FALL • 1987 • 639...
...What will be their policy aside from "Get the rascals out," a good slogan but not a policy...
...If you're in government and you're battling with the guy you see the reality...
...In New York, Puerto Ricans used to be able to rely on the fact that, look, we may have a chance to get in some more positions because every once in a while these white guys start fighting...
...Angelo Falcon: But isn't that welfare reform movement being sold, whatever the substance of it, as more of a punitive thing: "We're going to put these people in line...
...Ruth Messinger: Yes, but in defense of what Don is asking you, it is the city's responsibility...
...What's mind-boggling to me is, where are all the parents in that district...
...There is no demand to demonstrate need before someone can move into a subsidized Mitchell-Lama building, or a child inherit a rent-controlled apartment...
...On the other hand, we continue to distribute housing as if there were no crisis...
...The city in particular, and reform more generally, doesn't have to be held up to ridicule because of a rent control system that provides subsidized rents for Faye Dunaway and Mia Farrow, good liberals though they may be...
...Ruth Messinger: That comes originally from Dan McCarthy, and from virtually anybody that's ever looked at the budget...
...The council has more than enough power in the City Charter to be a strong legislature...
...School buildings ought to be community resources, to have a range of programs...
...But I think that it's frustrated as well by the size of those districts and the extraordinary difficulty of building serious challenges and moving ideas...
...Now I don't think it's inconceivable in this city to get people convinced that it's a priority to spend more money on the underclass—when they decide that if we have a school system in which a third of the kids are on welfare, we can't use that school system, and therefore it's going to cost us seven or eight thousand dollars a year to send our kids to private schools...
...we pay these people a lot of money and they're supposed to provide the service...
...But as soon as somebody else starts trying io energize them, I get very worried and suspicious...
...So there are many examples like that, before we even get to the issue of money...
...Now there's a second thing we've heard, going against simplistic views that we simply need more money: that there is some kind of incapacity in government, that even when it has it, it can't do it...
...Very often when you talk about them people respond to you as if you were discussing something that couldn't exist within at least 5,000 miles of these shores, whereas they exist in other cities, where there are successful minority administrations, and administrations the same color and sex as ours, but where they're trying different things...
...Then, following Lindsay, you had Democrats fending off Democratic reformers...
...The person who is supposed to be closest to you is your City Council member...
...Why is it inconceivable to build a constituency to 634 • DISSENT A DISSENT ROUND TABLE spend more money on social issues if you put it in the right perspective...
...Every time there's talk about expanding a program, people in the Latino community say, "We're not going to get any of this stuff...
...The response that I got was, "You're not familiar with what you're talking about, so shut up and go away...
...Not that everyone is agreeing on this buzz-work about obligation, or that welfare mothers will either have to go to work, or report to work training, or go back to school...
...Well, it isn't extremely tight...
...Sol Stern: Or what are the consequences of not spending the money...
...In 1985 I noticed that you can't use federal money except for temporary housing for the homeless...
...In fact, with all the statistics it gathers, the city doesn't even know what the incomes are of its rent-controlled tenants...
...What are the consequences to the city of 40 percent of the children living in poverty, of a hundred thousand families doubled up in housing...
...That was a problem nationwide...
...That seems to me to undermine some of the strong programs that have been created, rather than creating more of the magnet programs that have in fact drawn students from a variety of neighborhoods and from some variety of backgrounds—though they've left large segments of the poor and underclass untouched...
...The feeling many people have is that reform opportunities come in cycles, and that we now face a period of opportunity for liberals...
...Isn't the government legally responsible for those children...
...Angelo Falcon: I've seen many discussions like this, where you can make a very rational case why you need to spend more money...
...The future of New York is black, Hispanic, and Asian...
...Nathan Glazer: What happens to this surplus...
...After all the scandals, Mayor Koch is still running at a 55 percent approval rating...
...David Tobis, Welfare Research Institute...
...Martin Shefter's book on the fiscal crisis argues that there are waves of reform, bringing government which responds to new people coming to the city by providing social services...
...In sum, what would the insurgents say, what would they do...
...We don't have to debate whether we can do something like decriminalizing drugs, which is certainly utopian whether it's right or wrong, or even having a fair rent allocation system or taking back some of the money from the rent control subsidy...
...Fred Siegel: I don't think John has answered Don Wycliff's point...
...Why...
...Fred Siegel: But Don, right now black levels of political participation in New York are higher than white levels of political participation...
...They are frustrated by the perceived difficulty of different groups agreeing on a sufficiently common agenda to do something together...
...It touches the lives of many segments of the population...
...bring the welfare grant somewhere a little closer to the level of poverty...
...I really go back to what John said, and a little bit of what Don said: the examples are out there...
...It can't be simply because of the power of incumbency or money...
...We are paying money for every large development and to protect a hidden surplus of about a half a billion dollars a year...
...That is, if we can find ways to have cyclical and structural change such that the burdens had a more random incidence, that would be an alternative situation...
...I'm talking about the white middle class, or the ethnic middle class...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
