DATE: Wednesday, August 27, 1997            TAG: 9708270004

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B13  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT

                                            LENGTH:   91 lines

PARTNERSHIP MORE GRASS-ROOTS EFFORTS WOULD BRIGHTEN HAMPTON ROADS CITIES

The Puritans of Massachusetts thought of America as a ``shining city on a hill,'' a blessed land inspiring yearning and hope in humankind. President Ronald Reagan embraced that vision, expressing it often in his speeches.

The image sticks. Not everyone who is not American aspires to become American. But millions do. The unabating floodtide of immigrants - legal and illegal - confirms the United States' powerful appeal to peoples everywhere.

But America's cities do not shine as they could. Long-established core cities generally contain miles of dismal residential and industrial areas. Despite decades of urban renewal and housing-code enforcement, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Newport News and Hampton suffer extensive rot.

The rise and fall of industries and economic ups and downs that destroy some businesses while thrusting up others leave their mark on the the cities, towns and countryside of America.

The Model T Ford doomed the horse-drawn carriage and the buggy whip, transformed the national landscape.

Mechanization of farming motivated the migration of millions of poor Southern blacks and whites to Northern cities starting in 1920s. The migrants got jobs in smokestack industries and construction projects. Many of the migrants' children did better than their parents, some in factories, others by going to college.

U.S. blue-collar jobs paying decent wages vanished wholesale in the sixties, seventies and eighties, with dismaying, often tragic, consequences for families, core cities and the social order. Crime and squalor spread. Automation, foreign competition and downsizing sped the decline of blue-collar jobs.

Many Americans didn't notice. Then legions of professionals, middle managers and other white-collar workers had their jobs swept away by the same forces that had struck blue-collar workers. Unemployment pain piled up in the suburbs. White-collar layoffs were front-page news.

But education and occupational and interpersonal skills are substantial assets. Most white-collar workers could exploit them in quest of a fresh start. Most blue-collar workers were less advantaged. But many of their children are finding new paths to prosperity.

Many white-collar workers found jobs equal or superior to the jobs they had before being axed. Some started businesses. Some suffered permanent income drop. But poverty had edged into the suburbs, some that had become cities.

What could be done about it? President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty - primarily in cities - was done in by Johnson's commitment of U.S. troops to intervention in Vietnam's civil war. Both wars were costly. Neither was won by Washington.

Dealing with poverty's ills fell to local and state governments and the private sector. Some state and local initiatives appear to achieve salutary results. Public and private community programs already in place have the potential for stimulating yet more grass-roots activity to brighten neighborhoods and their inhabitants' lives.

Citizens throughout Hampton Roads cooperate - through civic leagues and other associations - to banish crime and blight. In concert with municipal authorities, citizen groups are enhancing public safety, protecting and cleansing the environment and constructing and repairing housing.

Each spring in Hampton Roads, platoons of volunteers participate in Paint Your Heart Out. Started by Chesapeake Rotary Club, Paint Your Heart Out has spread across South Hampton Roads. Scores of houses inhabited by the needy elderly are repaired and perked up.

Habitat for Humanity chapters on both sides of Hampton Roads and on the Eastern Shore are building inexpensive, sturdy, energy-efficient dwellings for low-income families.

Working with neighborhood leagues, Norfolk conducts code-inspection sweeps to arrest and eradicate blight. Portsmouth and Virginia Beach likewise concentrate on combating - preferably preventing - blight.

Norfolk is bulldozing housing and commercial structures in East Ocean View to clear the land - much of it prime waterfront acreage - for upscale housing.

Portsmouth recently demolished a large number of rundown low-income apartments, most of them vacant, to prepare the site for better housing. The area had become an open-air illicit-drug market where murderous violence was common. Portsmouth residents and police are leaders in collaboration to curtail criminality. They hope to end the reputation of their city as the most dangerous in the region.

In every South Hampton Roads community, residents and business and political leaders are striving with measurable success to upgrade the safety and appearance of neighborhoods. But more always needs to be done. The region is rich in human resources - concern, talent, energy, experience. Is it unrealistic to suggest that proliferating partnerships between grass-roots groups and local governments bent on community betterment could work wonders, reclaiming blocks from decay, structure by structure, making more of each city's neighborhoods shine and thus boosting morale, hopes and pride and beating back the influences inimical to peace, harmony and tranquillity? I think not. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The

Virginian-Pilot.

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