DATE: Wednesday, April 16, 1997             TAG: 9704160001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Glenn Allen Scott 

                                            LENGTH:   89 lines

LOW-PROFILE AGENCY QUIETLY LINKS INNER-CITY RESIDENTS AND JOBSHUNDREDS OF CIVIC-SPIRITED BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONAL PEOPLE, PUBLIC OFFICIALS AND INVESTORS HAVE JOINED TO MOBILIZE RESOURCES TO AIM RESIDENTS TOWARD PRODUCTIVE LIVES.

Federal Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo held a March press conference in Washington to spotlight investment and job-creation successes in Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Communities.

Unfortunately, good news from America's ravaged inner cities is often measured in modest increments and overshadowed by bad news, so few hearts are lifted.

But the Cuomo press conference won a banner headline in The Pilot. And taxpayers who read the story may have derived some satisfaction from Cuomo's praise for Norfolk. By the start of April, more than 700 inner-city residents had been prepared for jobs and 389 were employed.

These results were not achieved with a snap of the fingers. If providing jobs for inner-city dwellers were easy, the nation's oldest cities would not be as beset by socioeconomic ills as they are.

More than 50 corporations and hundreds of individuals from the private and public sectors are involved in the multipronged assault on joblessness in Norfolk's 14 targeted neighborhoods (population: 44,305, 17 percent of the city total). In these neighborhoods:

51 percent of the city's recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children live.

The income of 52 percent of residents is below the poverty line - per-capita income is $5,276.

34 percent of the working-age population is unemployed.

30 percent of families are headed by women.

55 percent of adults lack high-school diplomas.

These statistics depict a daunting challenge. But hundreds of civic-spirited business and professional people, public officials and investors have joined to mobilize many of these resources to aim Enterprise Community residents toward productive lives.

Norfolk, which received a $3 million grant (of which it has expended a third), was one of 13 cities participating in the federal 10-year program singled out by Cuomo.

Construction is creating jobs that many inner-city residents have eagerly filled. A grocery chain and airline-reservation service, both new to the area, are among the job creators, as are government, colleges and universities.

Coordinating the effort is Norfolk Works Inc., an independent not-for-profit agency chaired by Councilman Mason C. Andrews, who was mayor when the city sought the Enterprise Community designation.

Norfolk Works Inc., established two years ago, attributes its solid results to making education, training, job information, career-counseling and placement services available to applicants at neighborhood centers.

The exodus of African Americans from Southern farms and villages to cities during the first half of this century was one of the great internal migrations of history.

The migrants did not go the cities to get on welfare. They migrated in search of jobs that paid enough for families to live on. They migrated to start businesses. They were pursuing the American Dream of upward mobility.

African Americans who went North put behind them Jim Crow - racial segregation mandated by law - but not racism. Nonetheless, blacks who went to the cities obtained paying work, which meant a shot at bettering their lot.

But blue-collar jobs began to disappear 30 years ago, killed off at a faster and faster rate by advancing technology and the exporting of work to foreign places.

Steel mills shut down. Assembly plants closed. Whites and blacks suffered. Because blacks often had been the last hired, blacks tended to be the first to go.

The loss of jobs, as sociologist William Julius Wilson, a black conservative, points out in his recent book, When Work Disappears, had catastrophic consequences for blue-collar workers generally, for black blue-collar workers disproportionately, for cities, for race relations, for the nation.

President Johnson's War on Poverty in the 1960s was a broad-based counterattack aimed at reversing the rapid decay of inner-cities, North and South, where African Americans were clustered. That it largely failed is clear.

But it failed, in part, because nothing seemingly could entice investment and jobs back to central cities. The flight of capital and the affluent - including upwardly mobile, middle-class blacks - to suburbs accelerated. The tide was too strong.

That tide still runs. But a countertide also runs: Some capital is flowing back to cities. Norfolk's tax base is growing and the city is gaining jobs. Norfolk Works Inc. is busily doing what it can to connect the city's disadvantaged with the jobs they need. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The

Virginian-Pilot.

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