My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3 #40, April 6, 1998

GHETTO BLASTER

As I suggested last week, many Americans who have done reasonably well in life tend to give themselves the credit for this, and correspondingly tend to blame people mired in the poverty and crime of the inner cities for their own misery. So their solution to the problems of urban America is to file for divorce, refuse to pay alimony, and demand the sluts get a job.

This is the essence of the new welfare reform legislation. Two years and out, get a job, you're on your own. You say there are no jobs? You say there is no money for child care? Too bad. The welfare bill assumes it was the individuals who failed, that they simply preferred laziness, theft, or the dole, to honest work.

But in our inner cities, the community has failed. When people fled to the suburbs, they took with them the tax base, the jobs, and worst of all, the critical mass of people with middle class values that community depends on. They started a downward spiral: fewer people paying taxes means the people left pay higher taxes, but still not enough for basic services; less tax money means lower quality of public safety, health, transportation, and education; less safety means businesses lose customers and credit, and eventually move out or go broke; fewer businesses means fewer jobs; fewer jobs means more crime and more people on welfare; more people on welfare puts further strain on public services, and on it goes.

All the institutional supports for success start to unravel. Families, schools, police protection, the business community, basic health services, financial services, even churches--all have been weakened and even destroyed in our cities, which is especially hard on the working poor abandoned there. They have middle class values and aspirations, but no hope for their future in the city--they can only dream that someday they too can escape to the suburbs.

Welfare itself has contributed to that institutional failure by assuming that all residents of the inner city are dysfunctional. What it has not done well is offer reinforcement to existing strengths within the inner city neighborhoods. It seems to me that instead of abandoning the cities--which means abandoning over a hundred years worth of investment in museums and libraries and orchestras and parks and universities--we should use our welfare dollars to rebuild a solid, working, middle class community in the cities.

My vision of how the inner city could be rebuilt works like this:

1. In addition to the money allotted for family support, a major investment would be made up front in supplies for the rebuilding of the physical infrastructure of the neighborhoods, parks, schools, and libraries. In periodic community meetings, residents could decide how they wanted to distribute this pool of capital, but to begin with, large centrally located buildings would be renovated to become community centers, with central kitchens, day care centers, meeting rooms, clinics, gyms, and study areas filled with books, desks and computers. A community credit union would offer checking accounts and credit at reasonable rates.
2. In the two years they are eligible for benefits, everybody except the handicapped or drug-impaired would earn their welfare money by serving the community. Those who are demonstrably good at parenting would preside at daycare centers, freeing other parents for other kinds of work or schooling. Those who are good at cooking would cook at those daycare centers and prepare meals on wheels for the disabled or sick. Men would re-paint, re-roof, re-plaster the deteriorating buildings they live in; other men would escort children to school to protect them and send the message that going to school is a manly concern. Mothers and fathers would walk the school hallways to maintain order, and they would help clean and repair the school buildings. They would help teachers, by working with children in small groups, making sure they do not fall behind, and would work with children after school, coaching them in sports, reading to them, talking with them. They would monitor parks and playgrounds so that children could play in safety.
3. All adults would be expected to teach their skills to younger workers and to students, who would be doing community service as part of the curriculum.
4. Normal city services would become more neighborhood-based. Doctors and nurses from public hospitals would visit neighborhood clinics, city colleges would offer courses in the community centers, and police kiosks in each neighborhood would provde swift response to crime. Bookmobiles from the public libraries could provide books and story hours for the children. City and federal contracts in these neighborhoods would be awarded only to vendors who agreed to take on young people from those neighborhoods as apprentices and teach them the skills of their trades.
5. Residents with a managerial bent would help organize the community, assigning jobs and making sure they get done. If they then wanted to use this experience to start businesses, they would get credit from community banks, with the understanding that they would hire and train workers from the neighborhood.
6. Men of the community would work with young troublemakers, teaching them skills and demonstrating better ways of becoming men. Predators and drugdealers would have the choice of moving elsewhere, being jailed, or becoming part of the program.
7. Drug addicts would be treated in the community centers, where other members of the community would be trained to help them.
8. Students with a flair for words would be trained to produce newspapers, radio programs, web sites, to inform the community about its successes. Periodically there would be celebrations to honor students who got good grades, apprentices who graduated from their programs, people who made the community a better place to live. The community would create for its children the awareness that success, learning, and hard work are expected of them.
9. All able-bodied residents of the community would be at work or school every day, in jobs whose effects on the community are visible. Children, teenagers and adults would all have a chance to see that their contributions are important. And when they have used up their two years of welfare, they would have marketable job skills and references from people who have watched them work.

My theory is that if we invest our welfare money this way, we will end up with a community that polices itself, educates its children well, and works hard, a community that can invest in new businesses, new homes, and new ideas, a community that demands and rewards good behavior.

This is not entirely my crackpot idealism speaking--there are plenty of examples of urban slums that have been turned into successful communities with the help of community reinvestment programs and community policing. If we used our welfare money to create an environment that encourages work and achievement we would succeed with at least some of the people. And if we succeed, these former welfare recipients will pay taxes, start businesses, buy homes, and lure business back to the city. Their tax money will rebuild the libraries and schools and hospitals and parks. Our cities will become again places that nourish the spirit, places where poets and artists and teachers and students long to go.

If it sounds farfetched, remember the Harlem Renaissance. Remember the vitality of the teeming lower east side of New York in the '20's and '30's, the arts and ideas and talent that flowered from those overcrowded immigrant tenements. They didn't just enrich the neighborhood. They enriched America.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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