These are not new ideas. Price’s remedies have been an article of faith among well-intentioned liberals since the publication of William Julius Wilson’s “The Truly Disadvantaged.” Oversimplified – a temptation Price resisted – the argument becomes: if only black children had better schools and “role models,” and if only there were “good” jobs to replace the manufacturing work lost, blighted urban neighborhoods would bloom anew. Unfortunately, reality suggests otherwise.
There is, for example, the Fort Greene neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., which seems – at first glance – the very sort of place Hugh Price longs for. Fort Greene is booming, sort of. Over the past four years, more than 16,000 jobs arrived in the neighborhood with Metrotech, a $1.25 billion office complex (a classic “enterprise zone,” subsidized by generous tax breaks); there is a busy retail district, with lots of entry-level jobs. There is also a solid, stable – and active – black middle class. None of which seems to have had any impact on the local underclass, especially those living in public-housing projects. Fort Greene has New York’s highest infant-mortality rate (more than twice the national average) and a glut of the usual cataclysmic social indicators – AIDS cases, welfare dependency, crime and, of course, out-of-wedlock births to teenagers. The contrasts are striking, and disheartening. “You can stand in the middle of Flatbush Avenue and see a tale of two cities,” says Eric Blackwell, publisher of the Fort Greene News. “On the one side, the glittering towers of Metrotech. Across the street, the projects, drug dens and numbers holes.”
In the projects, the arrival of Metrotech was about as popular (and noteworthy) as the longtime presence of the black middle class: “There’s a lot of resentment,” says Blackwell. “We got thrown a long, slow curve with Metrotech. Maybe 40 people got hired from the neighborhood.” As for the black middle class: “They have their own [public] schools, their own churches. They’re like foreigners.”
Blackwell exaggerates . . . but only a little. Much of the construction work at Metrotech went to locals, but most of the permanent jobs were filled by employees the companies brought with them. Even if they hadn’t been – even if Metrotech offered old-fashioned manufacturing rather than Wall Street back-office work – it’s not likely that many new hires would have come from the Fort Greene projects. “The people there are so isolated from the world of work, they don’t know how to go about finding jobs,” says Jan Rosenberg, a Long Island University sociologist. “Proximity doesn’t count for much in hiring.”
Indeed, Rosenberg and Philip Kasinitz (of Williams College) studied a nearby Brooklyn neighborhood – Red Hook – which still has plenty of manufacturing jobs, and found that hiring preference is referential, as opposed to residential (or racial, for that matter): it’s done by word of mouth. Friends of employees get first crack. Residents of the local projects are assumed unreliable. If you don’t know anyone who works, you’re not likely to find work.
The problem in the Fort Greene projects isn’t the absence of jobs. It’s the culture of poverty. It’s the pattern of dependent, irresponsible, antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of the welfare system, and the legacy of white racism, and the general, societal obsession with sex, materialism and violence and – yes – the departure of manufacturing jobs as well. It is complex and virulent; it has proved intractable. Rosenberg and Kasinitz believe government can fund programs that create the networks (and teach poor people the work habits) they’ll need to plug into the world of work – and that may help some. The companies that have moved into Metrotech are offering scholarships and internships, getting involved in the local schools. Hugh Price wants to mobilize the middle class, provide after-school “mentors.” All this may help. But mentors are not parents, and the absence of responsible parents, especially fathers, is the phenomenon at the heart of underclass poverty. “I recently went to a focus group for children in the Fort Greene projects,” Rosenberg says. “Nine of the 12 didn’t live with either parent.”
Hugh Price has made a start. His message overwhelms the despicable blather that has passed for leadership in the recent past. It doesn’t reinforce hopelessness by suggesting that white racism is insurmountable – that no progress has, or can be, made. But it doesn’t quite face the problem squarely, either: this isn’t a poverty that will be cured merely by jobs or with surrogates. The children of the cities need parents.
