As The Cities Go, So Does The Nation
America is headed for a train wreck this fall, but it’s not the federal government that will be violently derailed - it’s the nation’s cities and the hopes of millions of city residents for a better life.
The cuts voted by Congress in the 1996 budget threaten to wreak havoc on our cities, especially on our most vulnerable urban neighborhoods.
It is hard for the press and the public to get a handle on the potential damage, because there is no single appropriations bill for cities. In separate actions on separate bills, the House and Senate are cutting federal funds for housing assistance, mass transit, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, education, job training, economic development, clean water and cleanup of contaminated, abandoned industrial sites and other environmental programs critical to urban revitalization.
Nowhere in this impersonal, balkanized process are the compounding and hurtful effects on communities and their residents ever registered.
Nationwide, congressional budget actions taken thus far would deny housing assistance to 50,000 low-income families and 100,000 homeless people next year.
They would eliminate job training for 590,000 adults. They would cut compensatory math and reading instruction for 170,000 urban school children. They would drop 48,000 children from Head Start and abolish summer jobs for more than 500,000 young people.
The Republican congressional leadership - which wants to cut taxes $245 billion for wealthy Americans - would also raise taxes on 14.4 million low-income workers.
None of these piecemeal cuts is specifically targeted at cities, but taken together, they hit our cities hardest. They hit poor people and low-income working families who live in our cities’ most troubled neighborhoods over, and over, and over again.
Imagine what it will be like to be a low-income working parent hit again and again by these cuts. Your preschooler is told there is no room for him in Head Start; your second-grader who is having trouble reading is consigned to an over-crowded public school classroom where she falls further behind; your teenage son can’t find a job during summer vacation and hangs out with a street gang; your hopes of getting off the waiting list for housing assistance are dashed. You have less money for rent, food and clothing because Congress raised your taxes.
Programs to fight drugs and violence in schools and public housing would be gutted or wiped out.
Current discussions in Congress about cutting spending and balancing the budget completely ignore the devastating impact.
Ignored are the layoffs that will occur in city hospitals when Medicare and Medicaid are cut. Ignored are the retail businesses that will fail and the jobs that will be lost in low-income communities when Food Stamps and AFDC benefits are reduced and rent in HUD-assisted housing is raised, and community residents’ purchasing power plummets.
Ultimately, our nation’s economy will suffer from these decisions, because metropolitan economies are America’s primary generators of jobs and wealth. However, their efficiency as economic engines is impaired by growing disparities between cities and suburbs; the suburbanization of jobs and the middle class has left many urban centers socially and economically isolated.
The growing concentration of poverty in urban neighborhoods and older suburbs has compounded problems of poor education, discrimination, joblessness, teen pregnancy, drug abuse and crime, perpetuating a vicious cycle of poverty, inequality, violence and despair.
The consequences of urban isolation and distress are felt far beyond the inner city, undermining the economic competitiveness of our metropolitan areas, deepening divisions within our society, eroding the bonds of trust and common purpose that are the basis of our civic culture.
America’s cities and suburbs will rise or fall together. The question facing the nation today is simple: Will we go up or down?
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