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The nation's largest city faces a special handicap in coping with black problems: perched on the brink of bankruptcy for five years, it has had little choice but to curtail services that had once made life more bearable for blacks trapped in some of the bleakest ghettos in the U.S. Blacks occupy 41.2% of the substandard housing in the city and account for about 36% of the 867,173 New Yorkers on welfare. The basic monthly allowance ($476 for a family of four) has not gone up since 1974, but food costs have risen 42.5%, utilities 82%, transportation 50%. Says Arthur Barnes, head of the New York Urban Coalition: "What do these people eat, I wonder. I think a lot of them can't even afford dog food."
The city's public school system, with an enrollment that is 68% black and Hispanic, has cut back its already overworked teaching staffs and eliminated much needed guidance counselors and after-hours tutors—the kind of specialists who gave many black students added incentive to stay in school. Roughly 10% of the city's 1 million public school students are regarded as hard-core habitual truants. On any given day, as many high school students may be roaming the streets as are in class.
The unemployment rate for young blacks is estimated to be as high as 60% and likely to grow as the recession hits small businesses, which form the backbone of the city's economy. Roaming the streets, older youths fall easily into the only readily available "jobs": peddling drugs, pimping, prostitution, mugging, selling stolen goods, running numbers. Once in decline, heroin use is on the rise again.
Although blacks are underrepresented in New York's government (only five blacks on the 43-member city council), black voices do get a hearing in the city, a fact that has helped to ease some ugly situations. Still, there is a growing political apathy among New York's blacks—a feeling that nothing much changes in the ghettos no matter who runs the city government. Warns James Dumpson, a sociologist and assistant director of a private foundation working with the city's black neighborhoods: "When it's perceived that politics isn't serving the needs of the people, people tend to get disillusioned, cynical and despairing."
CHICAGO: POLITICAL CLOUT
A black former newspaper publisher in a gray pinstripe suit drove through the neighborhood on Chicago's far South Side, which he will soon represent in Congress. Gus Savage, 54, who defied the city's once invincible Democratic political machine to win a primary fight and thus ensure his election in November, symbolizes black progress in Chicago. So does his neighborhood. Ten years ago it was 60% white; now it is 85% black. Some of its tree-lined streets run past houses selling for $125,000 or more. Most of the residents have completed at least 13 years of schooling. Boasts Savage: "That's higher than for whites in this city."