OT THE WAR BUSH AVOIDS -- More Excerpts from "Amazing Grace", Jonathan Kozol

[Context: Discussion of Conditions In South Bronx, Harlem]

On the day after Easter, another little boy who lives in Bernardo's
neighborhood is killed, this time by a fire that consumes his home.

Mrs. Washington connects the deaths of both these children with the
cutbacks in inspection services and other public services that have now
begun in earnest. But the cut backs she refers to are, in fact, not
really new. In one form or another, these reductions in the programs
that defend the life and health and safety of poor children have been
taking place for over 20 years in New York City.

In 1970, for example, 400 physicians tended to the health of children
in the city's public schools. By the spring of 1993, the number of
school physicians had been cut to only 23, most of them part-time.

Where once there had been 30 rat exterminators on the city's payroll,
says the Times, "now there are only ten," only two of them in all of
the South Bronx.

Housing inspectors, whose job it is to check on matters such as broken
elevator doors or five-foot piles of garbage, have also been cut back
repeatedly over these years-from 700 in the 1970s to 213 at the time
Bernardo died.

Now, in early 1994, the city announces plans to cut their ranks again,
this time in a way particularly likely to be felt in places like Mott
Haven.

Up to now, building inspectors, fearful of going into certain buildings
all alone, have been able to request permission to go out in teams of
two in the South Bronx.

Henceforth, according to the city, "solo code enforcement inspectors"
will go into areas previously served by teams of two, and in "daylight
.. . . only", allowing taxpayers "a reduction of 20 inspectors."

What's going to happen, says an official of the inspectors' union, is
that inspectors, who have the right to refuse to enter a building where
their lives may be endangered, will simply write, "No access to
building" on inspection sheets, which means that hundreds of broken
elevators, trash heaps in which rats may thrive, and serious fire
hazards like illegally barred windows or illegally obstructed doors
will be added to those other hazards that already have gone undetected.


"It means more kids are goin' to die," says Mrs. Washington. "I just
wish that when the papers talk about these 'cuts,' they'd put some
pictures in of all the children who got burned in fires or got killed
in accidents, show some pictures of the hallways in these buildings, so
that folks would understand what it's about."

"You don't think that they already know?"

"They know and they don't know," she replies. "What can I say?"

As with many fatal accidents and fires in Mott Haven, it is impossible
to know for sure if better inspection and enforcement would have saved
Bernardo's life or that of the boy incinerated in the fire; and city
officials are at times reluctant to release such information even when
it is available.

But, as Mrs. Washington observes, if the function of inspectors is to
save lives by detecting dangers, then cutting their numbers by two
thirds seems to assure that you've increased those dangers several
fold. "If that's not so, then why have any inspectors?" she quite
reasonably asks. "Why not just fire them all?

"Drug dealers aren't the only people killing children," she remarks,
the sort of statement one hears often in the South Bronx and which
sometimes causes great offense among the affluent because it speaks so
clearly of incendiary feelings of which most of us would just as soon
not hear. But it may be important that we hear these words because they
make it absolutely clear that what some financiers and politicians see
as nothing more than fiscal prudence, other people see as social
homicide; and every time another bit of mercy is subtracted from the
public treasury, feelings of this nature are compounded.

The mayor [Rudolph Giuliani, 9/11 "Hero"] insists that "all the people
of the city" will be shouldering the human costs of his decisions; but
this is obviously not so. The costs of cuts in sanitation, for example,
are incurred and felt almost immediately in the South Bronx.

Their consequences are significantly diluted in those neighborhoods
where sanitation, like so many other basic services, is being purchased
more and more through private means by local business and homeowners'
groups, which have been granted semi-governmental taxing powers to
raise money locally and spend it locally, another stage in the
secession of the fortunate from common areas of shared democracy.

In midtown neighborhoods, privately purchased sanitation services have
made "a stunning difference," says the president of the Times Square
Improvement District, one of several dozen of such districts.

[These districts] have also hired private guards in order to discourage
beggars and drive out the homeless, sometimes gently, sometimes
forcibly, and have also paid for better lighting, additional street
signs, even cleaner trash cans.

"When districts feel clean, they feel orderly.... When they feel
orderly, they feel safer," the head of the Times Square district notes.

Calling this development an example of "reinvented government," an
assistant to the mayor tells a reporter that "his goal is to see
Manhattan . . . blanketed with such improvement districts"-"at least
south of 96th Street," which is the point at which the Harlem ghetto
starts on the East Side.

Mrs. Washington asks me, as she will do many times this spring, why
there is so much pressure to cut taxes. I repeat to her the arguments
I hear downtown: Taxes are already viewed as very high in New York
City. If they are reduced somewhat, it is believed that this may spur
investment, which might generate some jobs. If taxes, on the other
hand, were to increase, it is feared that wealthy people may abandon
New York City.

"But," she says, "it seems, in a way, like they've abandoned it
already. Their kids don't go to the same schools our children go to.
They don't use the subways much. They have their private cars and
limousines. Most of them don't use the hospitals we use.

"Now, if they have their own street cleaning and their own police, it
isn't like they're really living in New York. How much more could they
abandon it than they have done already?"

I have had talks like this with friends in the financial world and with
some journalists, but never before with someone who is truly poor. I
carry the argument along, as I have often heard it stated. "The fear
is that they could abandon it completely and go somewhere else that
might have lower taxes."

"Where would they go?" she asks.

"I don't know. Connecticut? New Jersey?"

She sweeps away the argument impatiently. "All this is a game the
politicians play. People in New Jersey and Connecticut could say the
same until they cut us down to nothing. If you want to solve the
problem, raise the taxes everywhere in the United States. Then the
millionaires won't have no place to hide."

"That's a good idea," I say, "but I don't think it's going to happen."

I tell her of the comment of a lawyer in New York, who told me that a
further flight of business from the city is quite probable if taxes
aren't reduced. "They're being killed by personal income taxes," he had
said, in speaking of some of his business colleagues.

"There's killing and there's killing," Mrs. Washington replies when I
repeat this to her. "I don't think the '! you talked to knows what
'killing' means."

"Do you want me to say that?"

"Write it down."

The year before I had this talk with Mrs. Washington, a Wall Street
money manager who had been extremely lucky, or had made some very
shrewd decisions, had had earnings of more than $1 billion, which was
just about five times the total income of the 18,000 households of Mott
Haven.

An extra 20 percent tax on his earnings, if redistributed in the South
Bronx, would have lifted 48,000 human beings-every child and every
parent in every family of Mott Haven-out of poverty, with enough left
over, I imagine, to buy many safe new elevator doors and hire several
good physicians for the public schools that serve the neighborhood.

Dozens of other investors in New York, ac cording to financial
publications, were making annual earnings of between $10 million and
$400 million during 1992 and 1993.

When the newspapers speak of New York City's lack of money, clearly,
they are referring not to private wealth but to the public treasury.
Still, the statements Mrs. Washing ton has made stick in my mind.

Ever since that time, when I have seen news stories about "fiscal
shortages" in New York City, I have read those words with complicated
feelings.