THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 12, 1995 TAG: 9503100043
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
``I think the inner-city housing projects, which have become breeding grounds for drug dealing and violence, should be eliminated. Law-abiding residents of the projects are terrorized by outlaws who lure generation after generation of young men into lives of delinquency and crime. Public- and private-sector partnerships must find alternative ways to provide low-income housing so that these ghettos of crime can be abolished!''
Close to five years have passed since Peter G. Decker Jr., then chairman of the State Board of Corrections, included this paragraph in a comprehensive message to board members on the state of crime and punishment in Virginia.
Now, Norfolk is assembling a partnership - a task force on the future of public housing - that could be much like what Decker envisioned.
Granted, City Councilman Herbert M. Collins Sr., who with fellow Councilman Mason C. Andrews will co-chair the group, hasn't endorsed elimination of public housing. But neither has he ruled out some demolition.
And he has described those in public housing, as a group, as ``the most underemployed, the most undereducated, the most underchurched, . . . the most underdisciplined people in our society.''
Like Decker, Collins thinks these residents should be blended into the city's general population. ``It seems to me that there's too much warehousing. They need to be brought into the mainstream.''
The task-force findings can help the poor, uneducated and unskilled in ways that punitive, quick fixes popular in both Washington and Richmond cannot.
For too long politicians have tried to appease unhappy voters with instant cures for societal evils that have been decades in the making and whose alleviation requires a national response that goes to the roots.
The country is dealing here with a culture in which too many young people lack stable homes, reject school, fall short on qualifications essential in the 1990s - not to mention 21st century - workplace and, too often, turn to crime.
The Norfolk task force is a result partly of municipal concerns about conditions in three public-housing neighborhoods close to the proposed MacArthur Center, a $270 million downtown retail project that could offer these nearby residents jobs.
Whether within this limited frame or in a broader context, Collins, Andrews and the 37 other members face a daunting assignment. For real solutions demand steps that our impatient society has been slow to take.
But if the kind of action implied by Collins' comments does emerge, the economic, educational and crime-abating results will benefit more than the direct recipients. Society as a whole will be the winner. by CNB