The Abandoned Cities

...The old cities were losing their historic role of providing unskilled, manufacturing jobs to new immigrants...

...The Abandoned by JAMES B. STEELE The warnings have come for years...

...Boston dispenses aid to one in five of its citizens...

...Indeed, many experts sift- ing through the rubble of the slums conclude that the poor are worse off today than they were ten years ago...

...Even more significantly, abandonment reflects the fact that the nation has yet to mount a real attack on poverty and that all the social programs of the 1960s failed to help millions of poor Americans...

...His mother enrolled him in the job camp outside the city for his own safety...

...Conservative estimates put the num- ber of abandoned units in New York at more than 100,000...

...If we assumed it would happen tomor- row, we might not be far off the mark —arid more important, this might in- spire the country to act constructively to save the cities...

...Equally important, such support could provide funds for rehabilitation or repair...

...they already pay a higher percentage of their income for housing than the affluent...

...It cited a special 1965 census in Cleveland which showed that real income has declined in those areas previously known as the hard-core ghetto...

...gang violence has taken more than 100 lives in the last three years...

...After surveying seven cities in a na- tional study of abandonment, the Na- tional Urban League and the Wash- ington-based Center for Community Change came to the grim conclusion that "the central cities of the nation's metropolitan areas are as a whole at some stage of the abandonment process...

...While minority groups, overall, may have improved their living standards in recent years, many of those left behind in the North Philadelphias of this country—Daniel Patrick Moynihan notwithstanding—clearly appear to be worse off than a few years ago...

...An abandoned house becomes a haven for drug addicts, gangs, and crime—an unmistakable symbol of a neighborhood on the way down...

...It is the telltale and ominous sign of trouble festering at the heart of American soci- ety—of inequality and poverty and racism that have left millions of sub- merged Americans without hope for the smallest share in this country's affluence...

...Now a different kind of abandonment is sweeping through cen- tral cities, infecting good, relatively sound housing as well as bad...

...Displaced by the mech- anization of agriculture in the South, many blacks hoped to find work and a new life in the North—the same dream that had motivated millions of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants...

...A few such families move into other slum dwellings almost as deteriorated as the ones they left...

...Some city officials are convinced that the large-scale disorders of the 1960s will not recur...

...Few sights raise more doubts about the ultimate survival of urban civiliza- tion than the haunting, desolate, boarded-up, or burned out dwellings of East New York, Cleveland's Hough, or the North Philadelphia ghetto...

...Cities are hopelessly outflanked by the abandonment process...

...In Philadelphia, largely a city of single family row houses, about 25,000 units stand va- cant...

...Nor can the poor pay more...

...And no mechanism exists at the Federal level to help transfer housing into the hands of potential owner occupants or community groups...

...Not many years ago, North Phil- adelphia, now the home of 300,000 of the city's 700,000 blacks and Phil- adelphia's worst ghetto, was a quiet, pleasant section of the "City of Broth- erly Love...

...Those jobs were being transferred to new plants in the suburbs or were disappearing altogether...

...But all the conditions that sparked the riots are still there, and in many cases have grown worse...

...By block bust-, ing, many realtors transformed whole sections of central cities into absentee- owned, landlord-ruled compounds in which home ownership—long recog- nized as a stabilizing and positive force •—was a rarity...

...Philadelphia prides itself in having the most ambi- tious program in the nation for reha- bilitating abandoned houses...

...Those costs have soared in recent years without an off- setting increase in rents...

...For every unit vacant in the slums today, there are three or four or more units that may be only days, weeks, or months away from the same fate...

...In the last four years the city has restored 6,100 units to the market...

...National attention has recently be- gun to focus on the problem...

...Although part of the reason is slipshod administration of the city's urban renewal program, a key factor is the apparent loss of faith in some neighborhoods disclosed by lending institutions...

...The advanced stage of abandonment lends credence to the cries of commu- nity leaders that the quality of old housing is getting far worse...

...Considering the fact that almost no families want to live in public housing if they have any other choice, that is a clear indica- tion of the extent of the housing short- age...

...The Urban League's study of seven cities reported that the "impetus to withdraw residential investment cap- ital from black or potentially black areas within central cities has created a situation in which the viability of the cities as a whole must be ques- tioned...

...The way was cleared for the collapse of the private market...

...Senate committee, for the first time, set aside a full day for testimony on abandonment during hearings last summer on the 1970 Housing Act...

...Census Bureau this year disclosed that the number of black families headed by women rose sharply in the 1960s—a clear indication to many authorities that deepening poverty is causing social and family conditions to deteriorate even further in America's ghettos...

...In varying degrees, abandon- ment is touching most older, large cities in the East and Middle West...

...but also an area in which individual and family in- comes are declining while indices of so- cial pathology are rising...

...Welfare rolls in New York now top the million mark...

...One of the mysteries to many housing officials is where displaced families are going...

...Louis, and Cleve- land all report a problem of similar scope...

...So what was once a slumlord's bounty is now a bitter harvest, and many property owners are getting out of the inner city as fast as possible...

...But today, the turn- about has caught cities unprepared and ill-equipped...

...There are no easy answers...

...Government support in these areas could promote home ownership by owner-occupants or community groups, thus saving the dwelling before abandonment...

...Nowhere is abandonment more in- tense and daily life more agonizing than in the heart of the slums, in what the Urban League and Center for Community Change described as the "crisis ghetto...

...Handsome brick row- houses stood along narrow, tree-lined streets...

...In the final analysis, however, abandonment must be viewed as more than a housing crisis, even though that fact alone is causing deep concern...

...But this figure has not kept pace with the speed of aban- donment...

...One pos- sibility for easing abandonment sug- gested by experts calls for massive gov- ernmental intervention in the central city home mortgage and home loan improvement market...

...He is biding his time until he leaves for the country and a job training camp...

...In Philadelphia, the welfare rolls recently passed the 300,000 figure, one out of every seven of the city's population...

...Street cars crisscrossed at inter- sections and transported passengers to all parts of the city...

...A leading student of aban- donment, Rutgers University professor George Sternlieb, calls the private withdrawal in part a "crisis of confi- dence in the future of the city...

...City housing officials in Philadel- phia readily admit that the size of the waiting list might double or triple if better public housing were available...

...She is making sure that the Oxford street gang members are not hanging out in front...

...Louis...

...Most new work in the city was in service industries, largely for white collar and clerical employes, and it was concentrated downtown in sleek office towers...

...Since no other landlord is likely to want to invest in slum areas today, the only alternative for those owners who foresee economic suicide ahead is to board up their property and walk away...

...he suggests that she move...

...The last few times she called to complain about the house, she could not even get through to the owner...

...Now comes the visible, disquieting sign that many of the nation's great cities—the ones that figured so much in the "urban crisis" rhetoric of the 1960s—are indeed dying...

...But some find their only alternative is to enter public housing, often an ugly apartment in a high rise brick or concrete canyon that has be- come synonymous with crime...

...Physical abandonment is only the last step in a long process...

...The report gave much of the credit for this positive force in Detroit and At- lanta to the fact that "mortgage lend- ing institutions have refused to panic and social and criminal problems are less overwhelming...

...As George Sternlieb of Rutgers put it: "The proc- ess of physical abandonment is pre- ceded by psychological and fiscal abandonment...

...In the past, abandonment has served as a kind of natural process in cities, removing the oldest, most dilapidated houses from the market...

...Generally, the answer lies deep in the nation's post World War II experi- ence, in the familiar legacy wrought by the influx of poor blacks into cen- tral cities and the national movement to the suburbs at the cities' expense...

...But the new immigrants—as Amer- ica came to recognize painfully in the 1960s—found a changed central city, one that could no longer provide a job and a future for a man trying to claw his way out of poverty...

...What that means, in human terms, is that poor inner city minorities for the most part are living in absolute squalor, in old, dilapidated housing built for a generation of immi- grants seventy-five or 100 years ago...

...The systematic de- cline in private ownership has left a vacuum no bankrupt city can fill...

...Today, whole blocks are vacant, and glass and rub- ble line the streets...

...They grow, they fes- ter, they leap across a street through a backyard to the block on the other side," is how Edward J. Logue, pres- ident of New York state's Urban De- velopment Corporation, describes the way abandoned housing spreads...

...Persistent unemployment, a lack of public transportation to get to new suburban blue collar jobs, and rising crime rates exist today...

...Before she goes to the corner store, Shirley Spencer pulls back a rotting curtain from the window of the front door and checks the abandoned house across the street...

...The process has speeded up so dramatically, a recent national report warned, that it threatens to create "ghost towns" of central cities...

...The continuing flight of whites from most central cities to the suburbs is opening up some additional housing for minority families...

...The sight of a vacant house or apartment building in older sections of large cities is not new...

...Her fear was real...

...The problem dates back to the late 1940s when millions of poor black rural Americans began pouring into central cities, taking up residence in old homes and neighborhoods that had housed generations of immigrants be- fore them...

...Chicago, St...

...Part of the rise in the rolls may re- flect a new attitude toward welfare— that it is a right, not a privilege...

...Three months ago, the gang, one of perhaps 100 in the city's ghetto areas, began to harass Clarence, a thin, bespectacled, ascetic-looking youth, for reasons he does not under- stand...

...As in most cities, the public housing waiting list in Philadelphia has mush- roomed—from 6,500 applicants four years ago to 13,000 today...

...Landlords are abandoning old hous- ing because it no longer produces the rent to cover maintenance, mortgage payments, and taxes...

...The notion of landlords fleeing the central city would once have been a cause for rejoicing in many a poor neighborhood...

...For months her landlord has refused to make repairs to bursting pipes and crumbling walls...

...Part reflects rising unemployment general- ly...

...The last few years have seen many cities breathing easier as "long hot summers" passed without outbreaks...

...Significantly, the Urban League study found that in cities such as At- lanta and Detroit—both with substan- tial home ownership and economic class integration in the central core— the abandonment problem was far less severe than in cities such as St...

...If they are, she waits until they leave...

...Partly as an outgrowth of that meet- ing, Congress authorized a paltry $20 million in grants to cities where the abandonment problem was acute...

...In effect, the building is abandoned...

...JAMES B. STEELE is the urban affairs writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer...

...As poverty and social problems mul- tiplied in the core of the city, financial institutions became more unwilling to approve mortgages for buying or re- pairing homes there...

...A U.S...

...On the second floor of Shirley's building, sixteen-year-old Clarence Williams watches out the window, too...

...Once that happened, the typ- ical neighborhood began to slide down- hill...

...But statistics coming out of the U.S...

...To these organizations, the term means "a slum in which not only are the residents all poor and members of a minority group and the housing deteriorated...

...What is causing this abandonment...

...In Philadelphia, where abandon- ment became a political issue in the city's May primary in which the na- tion's "number one tough cop," Frank L. Rizzo, won the Democratic nom- ination for mayor, abandoned housing is spreading into once stable, white working class areas...

...There is little point in conjecturing just when disorder might break out...

...Mayor Kevin White of Boston looked despairingly at the abandoned remains of the Brownsville section of Brooklyn on a recent bus tour with big city mayors and remarked sadly that the area "may be the first tangible sign of the collapse of our civilization...

...Poverty actually is increasing in the crisis ghettos," the Urban League study claimed...

...Shirley Spencer, a tall, twenty-one- year-old black woman with two small children, lives in a dingy four-room apartment in North Philadelphia, in a neighborhood pockmarked by aban- donment...

...She does not want to be pulled into the house the way a friend of hers was recently...

...And the program does not even attempt to deal with the question of how to stop abandonment by land- lords...

...First, a few owners began to pull out, leaving boarded-up houses behind...

...Once begun, the process begins to take on a life of its own, spreading far beyond the worst slums to other neighborhoods...

...All the while these changes eroded the economic base of old central cities, realty interests were playing a brutal and ruthless game in white working class neighborhoods by capitalizing on fears of racial change...

...Thousands of housing units are be- ing abandoned by landlords in cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadel- phia...

...Abandonment is removing thou- sands of housing units from the low income market during one of the na- tion's most acute housing shortages...