http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/opinion/22herbert.html?th&emc=th
American Cities and the Great Divide By BOB HERBERT Published: May 22, 2007 A public high school teacher in Brooklyn told me recently about a student who didn't believe that a restaurant tab for four people could come to more than $500. The student shook his head, as if resisting the very idea. He just couldn't fathom it. "How much can you eat?" the student asked. When I asked a teacher in a second school to mention the same issue, one of the responses was, "Is this a true story?" A lot of New Yorkers are doing awfully well. There are 8 million residents of New York City, and roughly 700,000 are worth a million dollars or more. The average price of a Manhattan apartment is $1.3 million. The annual earnings of the average hedge fund manager is $363 million. The estimated worth of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, ranges from $5.5 billion to upwards of $20 billion. You want a gilded age? This is it. The elite of the Roaring Twenties would be stunned by the wealth of the current era. Now the flip side, which is the side those public school students are on. One of the city's five counties, the Bronx, is the poorest urban county in the nation. The number of families in the city's homeless shelters is the highest it has been in a quarter of a century. Twenty-five percent of all families with children in New York City - that's 1.5 million New Yorkers - are trying to make it on incomes that are below the poverty threshold established by the federal government. The streets that are paved with gold for some are covered with ash for many others. There are few better illustrations of the increasingly disturbing divide between rich and poor than New York City. "I get to walk in both worlds," said Larry Mandell, the president of the United Way of New York City. "In a given day I might be in a soup kitchen and also in the halls of Fortune 500 companies dealing with the senior executives. I've become acutely aware that the lives of those who are well off are not touched at all by contact with the poor. It's not that people don't care or don't want to help. It's that they have very little awareness of poverty." I'd always thought of the United Way as a charitable outfit. But Mr. Mandell has committed his organization to the important task of raising the awareness of Americans and their political leaders to the pressing needs of America's cities, and especially the long-neglected, poverty-stricken neighborhoods of the inner cities. It's a measure of how low the bar has been set for success in America's cities that New York is thought to be doing well, even though 185,000 of its children ages 5 or younger are poor, and 18,000 are consigned to homeless shelters each night. More than a million New Yorkers get food stamps, and another 700,000 are eligible but not receiving them. That's a long, long way from a $500 restaurant tab. Only 50 percent of the city's high school students graduate in four years. And if you talk to the kids in the poorer neighborhoods, they will tell you that they don't feel safe. They are worried about violence and gang activity, which in their view is getting worse, not better. This is what's going on in the nation's most successful big city. Mr. Mandell is upset that urban issues, which in so many cases are related to poverty, have played such a minuscule role in the presidential campaign so far. "People need to become more aware of the issue of poverty," he said. "It's discouraging, frankly, to have it barely mentioned at all in the debates. "It's true that John Edwards is the one candidate who seems concerned about it, but to actually have the issue come up just briefly in the debates, and not at all in the Republican debate - well, my view is that we have to change that." The United Way of New York has issued a white paper on "America's Urban Agenda" that says, "The greatest single challenge most American cities face lies in the increasing divide between the haves and have-nots." There was a time, some decades ago, when urban issues and poverty were important components of presidential campaigns. Now the poor are kept out of sight, which makes it easier to leave them farther and farther behind. We've apparently reached a point in our politics when they aren't even worth mentioning. === >From Ed: In the Op-Ed below, Mann and Criollo predict the poison-pill strategy which Mayor Villaraigosa pefectly proposes in today's LA Times. Don't fail to read both. -Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Labor/Community Strategy Center "MTA's Road to Ruination" -- Mann and Criollo LA Times Op-Ed Also: A List of How You Can Help! The Los Angeles Times opinion article, below, was written by Eric Mann and Manuel Criollo of the Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union and describes the huge bus fare hikes Los Angeles MTA is threatening and how this fits into a long history of MTA's policies of transit racism. If you are outraged at the injustice of MTA's proposed fare hikes, we need your participation in the following ways: 1) Attend the Thursday, May 24th at 9 AM at the MTA Headquarters (Vignes and Cesar Chavez) 2) Contact the MTA Board member that you know or in whose district you live to urge them to reject MTA's fare increase 3) Donate much needed funds to the Stop MTA's Racist Fare Increase Campaign call us at 213.387.2800 4) Contact us with ideas on how to move the votes of L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Councilperson Bernard Parks, Supervisors Zev Yaroslavasky, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Gloria Molina and other MTA Board members. Please contact BRU lead organizer Manuel Criollo, Francisca Porchas or Damon Azali at 213.387.2800 Los Angeles Times Opinion MONDAY, May 7, 2007 MTA's Road to Ruination Huge fare increases and disproportionate rail subsidies are reminiscent of the MTA's mid-1990s racially discriminatory ways. By Eric Mann and Manuel Criollo ON THE MORNING of May 24, the Los Angeles MTA board will hold a public hearing to consider a series of draconian fare increases - raising the $3 daily pass to $5 and then $8, the $52 monthly pass to $75 and then $120 - rates put forth as a trial balloon by its employee, Chief Executive Roger Snoble. It's all a calculated ruse. The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority hopes that when, under massive pressure, it tries to make only unbearable increases rather than excruciating ones, a naive and servile public will thank the board for its mercy. In fact, any fare increases would be a disaster for Los Angeles, reducing transit ridership, increasing pollution and hurting the city's poorest residents. Bus riders, in particular, cannot afford a fare increase. The core of the MTA's 500,000 public transit riders are the black and Latino working class who use public transportation every day. The majority can hardly afford the current $3 daily pass ($90 a month) or the $52 monthly pass. Say the MTA tries to raise the monthly pass price $10. That would mean $50 a month for a family of five, $600 more a year, and an annual family transit bill of $3,720. We have been down this road before. In 1994, the MTA almost destroyed its bus system in order to subsidize contractor-friendly rail projects that were racially discriminatory. Light rail costs $150 million a mile and subways $280 million - and to pay for construction overruns and operations, the MTA raided the bus funds. At the same time, the MTA announced its plan to raise fares to $1.35 from $1.10 and eliminate monthly passes. The Labor/Community Strategy Center and the Bus Riders Union, represented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, rushed into federal court to charge that the MTA was violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids the government from allocating money in a racially discriminatory manner. The court issued a temporary restraining order and forced the MTA to re-institute the monthly pass. Among those who testified in support of the Bus Riders Union was Antonio Villaraigosa, then deputy to MTA board member Gloria Molina. Out of that litigation, the center and the Bus Riders Union signed a 10-year consent decree with the MTA, which agreed to dramatically improve the bus system. The consent decree secured a $42 monthly pass and an $11 weekly pass (though pass fares went up $10 at the start of 2004). The MTA replaced 2,000 dilapidated diesel buses with 2,500 natural gas buses and now boasts that it has "the largest clean-fuel bus fleet in the U.S." The not-so-secret story is that the MTA refused to buy those buses, appealed every court ruling and buckled only after the Supreme Court refused to hear its hollow appeals. The federal District Court reduced its oversight of the MTA in October, 2006 (which we are appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals), and only seven months later the MTA is regressing to its race- and class-biased policies - cutting bus service and threatening to raise fares. The MTA is back to creating a separate and unequal public transit system, giving massive subsidies to the significantly whiter rail ridership while complaining that it cannot afford what are truly tiny subsidies to bus riders, who are 60% female, 85% black, Latino or Asian and many of whom have family incomes under $15,000. Buses are the only viable alternative to cars for a county of 10 million people spread over 4,000 square miles. Just four miles of subway drilling cost $1.2 billion; for the same price the MTA could buy 2,600 clean-air buses and double the size of the existing fleet. By contrast, service cuts and fare increases will depress ridership, leading to more cars on the road and dramatically increased pollution. (In L.A. County, 70% of greenhouse gas emissions are from cars and trucks.) Any attempt to raise fares should require an environmental impact report. High-speed bus-only lanes - combined with prohibiting cars altogether in auto-free zones and during auto-free days - are the only ways to reverse the rise in respiratory illness and global warming. The MTA, claiming a $100-million operating deficit, wants us to believe that punishing its riders is its only choice. But it continues to subsidize rail projects at absurd levels. About $57 million is spent on operations for Metrolink - a subsidy of about $5 a rider - which serves the whitest, most affluent suburban transit users. For the Gold Line, weekday ridership is 19,000 at an operating subsidy for each passenger of almost $7. The three Wilshire/Whittier bus lines, the most heavily utilized and effective in the nation, carry 90,000 daily passengers at a subsidy of 79 cents each. The 13-member MTA board needs a two-thirds majority to raise fares, so five "no" votes would kill any fare hike. If Villaraigosa and his three appointees (Bernard Parks, Richard Katz and David Fleming) vote against it, then just one more "no" vote - maybe from Molina or one of the other county supervisors - would stop this attack on passengers and put the MTA's rail addiction back in permanent rehab. ERIC MANN is the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center. MANUEL CRIOLLO is the lead organizer of the Bus Riders Union. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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