Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 13, 1994 TAG: 9408050011
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: ESSEX, MD. LENGTH: Medium
A crowd of about 80 men and women - with children and mortgages and blue-collar jobs - were being told that welfare families from the Baltimore projects soon might be moving to their neighborhoods.
Outside the auditorium, Jerry Hersl, a 38-year-old engineer, summarized the crowd's anger.
``People here moved from Baltimore city, and they worked for that move. Now somebody could move in down the street, not have a job, get a 100 percent rent subsidy, send their kids to the same school I'm sending my kids to. And that's not fair. ... For the federal government to come give a handout to someone and give them the same things that I've got,'' Hersl said, ``that's wrong.''
But that is precisely what Washington's new war on poverty promises to do.
After 30 years of largely futile federal efforts to improve the lives of the poor in urban slums, Henry Cisneros, the secretary of housing and urban development, has a different idea. He wants to help the poor improve their own lives by moving them out of the ghetto.
Urban ghettos concentrate poverty, joblessness, drugs and crime and isolate the poor from mainstream institutions and values, Cisneros argues. His theory - vividly supported by at least one successful experiment - is that the poor will thrive when transplanted to neighborhoods with good jobs and good schools, where work and achievement are expected.
But Cisneros is clearly playing with political dynamite.
``Are they gonna get jobs?'' shouted John Barr, 46, a burly, bearded union representative from Bethlehem Steel.
Hopefully they will, said Bob Gajdys, who heads the nonprofit assistance agency that will help run the Baltimore program. But there is no requirement.
A loud groan swelled. ``So what's the sense?'' a woman yelled.
``Are they gonna be asked to further their education?'' Barr asked. Yes, Gajdys said. ``Are they gonna be forced to?''
No, Gajdys said, his patience cracking. ``It's against the law to force anyone to do anything.''
``Well, you're forcing these people down our throats!'' someone yelled. The crowd burst into applause.
The focus of the crowd's ire is a key piece of Cisneros' grand experiment in desegregation. The federal program, called Moving to Opportunity, will help about 700 families in cities across the nation move from the most desperate enclaves of public housing to subsidized apartments in low-poverty neighborhoods.
Federal officials hope the experiment will reproduce the dramatic results of a highly acclaimed pilot program in Chicago, where the greater safety and opportunity of suburbs have helped nearly 3,000 poor families find jobs and send their kids to college far more often than the families they left behind.
Housing experts are generally enthusiastic about the plan. But there are concerns that the Chicago experience will not translate easily to Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Baltimore, the other cities selected for Moving to Opportunity.
In Chicago, a dedicated public-service agency not only provided the screening and intense counseling essential to the families' success, but also moved quietly, scattering families through the metro area with no warning or fanfare. Suburbanites did not have a chance to get angry.
That advantage clearly has been lost in Baltimore, where local politicians are bashing the program. At the Essex meeting last month, Rep. Helen Bentley, a Republican running for governor, sent an aide to assure constituents in the eastern suburbs that Bentley ``will never condone wholesale movement of low-income people ... by the government.''
Moving to Opportunity does not envision a mass exodus from the slums to the suburbs. Not yet, anyway. For now, the $5 million program will transplant about 140 families in each city and monitor them, along with two control groups, for 10 years.
One control group will stay in targeted public housing units where 40 percent or more of residents live in poverty. Another control group will move from those targeted units to private, subsidized apartments, but they will not get much guidance or counseling.
The experimental group will comprise volunteers from targeted public housing who agree to move to private housing in neighborhoods where the poverty rate is less than 10 percent. They will receive enormous levels of assistance to try to duplicate the dramatic success in Chicago.
by CNB