March 14, 1973
Page 7846
EPITAPH FOR A MODEL CITY
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, a very significant article appeared in the Outlook section of the Washington Post on March 4. The article, "Gary: Epitaph for a Model City," described in clear terms what has happened to the city "that was touted as an urban laboratory" 5 short years ago.
What has happened, the article states, is that, in blunt terms, "the whites are moving out of town," leaving behind a predominantly black city, deteriorating, crime laden, and without the tax base it needs to raise the revenue necessary to cope with its problems. The tragic path that Gary has followed can become the course of cities across this Nation if we fail quickly to find solutions to the problems that afflict our urban areas.
During the past weeks my Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations has held hearings on the impact of the President's new federalism and the 1974 budget on State and local governments. The distinguished mayor of Gary testified at those hearings. The focus of these hearings has been on the kind of commitment of Federal dollars the Federal Government must make to State and local governments for social programs and on finding an efficient system – categorical grants, special revenue sharing, bloc grants, and so forth – of delivering those funds to meet local needs. Those are important problems of intergovernmental relations. This article points out another critical, but often ignored problem that threatens to stand in the way of responsive government in nearly every city in the Nation.
That problem is the complex and often irrational structure of local and State government in America. The most efficient delivery system of Federal dollars cannot succeed if the very structure of State or local government prevents citizen participation in and examination of the governmental process. Particularly where jurisdictional boundaries and outmoded Government structures tend to divide the predominantly poor and black citizens who live in the cities from more affluent and white suburbanites, the cities must try to survive on shrinking, inadequate, and inequitable tax bases. These unrealistic jurisdictional boundaries frustrate citizen participation and obstruct the delivery of services within our federal system. While counties, cities, States, and regions battle for the Federal dollar, too few people ask which Government units are most responsive to their citizens – why governmental structures overlap and why boards and commissions which serve no significant function are allowed to exist.
Let us look at the governmental structure problem in Gary. The city shares its tax base with other townships in the county. The city and county both get shares of general revenue sharing. The county sheriff's department does not operate within the city, even though city taxpayers contribute to its support. The city depends on the property tax for most of its revenue, but property is assessed not by the city, but by an elected township official whose procedure is so secretive that hearings conducted last year by the Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee revealed that the mayor of this city of 175,000 people could not even get the information he needed to determine whether the city's largest property tax holder was fairly assessed. These various governmental structures competing for the same limited tax dollars and all performing separate and disjointed services are not the basis for responsive local government. Rather, they are bound to result in frustration and barriers that freeze citizens out of the processes of their local governments.
A basic challenge facing American democracy must be to structure Government to be responsive to the needs and wishes of the people. I feel that government at all levels is inadequately meeting that challenge. Particularly at the State and local levels – which the President describes as closest to the people – governmental structures are too often so archaic and complex that they frustrate responsive government. While we debate the merits of reforming the Federal Government and the federal system, we must not ignore the necessity of reforming State and local governments so they can best serve their citizens.
I ask unanimous consent that the text of the article, "Gary: Epitaph for a Model City," be included in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
GARY: EPITAPH FOR A MODEL CITY
(By Godfrey Hodgson and George Crile)
GARY, IND.– The blue and gold signs at the entrances to the city proclaim in bold lettering: "WELCOME TO GARY, CITY ON THE MOVE. Richard G. Hatcher, Mayor." But the slogan has now taken on an ironic significance. For the most noticeable movement, in a city that was touted as an "urban laboratory" for the nation when Mayor Hatcher took office only five years ago, is a sad one: The whites are moving out of town.
Whites now number less than a quarter of the city's population of around 175,000. In a last-ditch attempt to stanch this exodus, the Gary city council recently passed an ordinance outlawing the posting of "For Sale" signs. It took the local real estate men only a few days to rise to this new challenge. Up went new signs on houses for sale.
The exodus of the whites is only the symptom of a whole litany of woes that now beset the city of Gary, and with the best will in the world it is not easy to see where deliverance will come from.
There is the problem of crime, and rumors of crime, encouraging the white flight. A drug war broke out in Gary last fall. It is said to be a war over the hard drugs trade between rival black street gangs with names like the "Kangaroos" and "The Family." One explanation heard in Gary is that The Family has muscled in on a vacuum left by white criminals who also left town.
Whatever the reason, the war's casualties to date total more than 20 people; one of the victims was gunned down right in front of a police station.
In January, moreover, snipers from a public housing project cross the street killed a black student outside Roosevelt High School, which used to be the best school for middle-class blacks in the city. Sirens now wail through Gary every night at 10, announcing the recently introduced curfew, a desperate measure enacted to cope with crisis conditions.
And there are the downtown business and building problems. A 12-story Holiday Inn, across from City Hall, was the first major commercial building constructed downtown in a decade. It was expected to lead to the revitalization of the downtown commercial district. Instead, after only a year of operation, the management has sealed off the top half-dozen floors for want of customers.
Down the street, the imposing Hotel Gary, once the lunchtime haunt of U.S. Steel executives, is boarded up. The city's auditorium, one out of three department stores and countless smaller businesses present the same sightless face to the street.
Gary's two intersecting main drags are called Broadway and Fifth Avenue, suggesting the happy boosterism in which the city was born only 67 years ago. But today they look as if a Panzer division had fought its way along them, somewhat carelessly. Some of the empty sites are the result not of commercial decay but of urban renewal projects. But with HUD funds from Washington being held up by the Nixon administration, and naught for Gary's comfort in the new budget, it will be years before even those gaping holes are filled.
And there is the unemployment problem. U.S. Steel built the town in the first place. (Local legend has it that Judge Elbert Gary was attracted by the topography of the site where the great Gary mill still stands because "three men could hold it against a mob with machine guns.") At its peak, the mill employed 32,000 workers – a far higher proportion of the total work force than in most towns because of the shortage of secondary industry.
But last year the mill laid off close to half of its work force. The unemployment rate for Gary as a whole went up to 40 per cent. Most of the steelworkers are back at work now, but U.S. Steel has been investing in automation. It must, given Japanese competition so sharp that you can sell Indiana scrap, ship it to Japan, melt it back into raw steel, and still undercut Gary-made steel in the Midwest. Right now the mill employs about 24,000. Thousands of steelworkers have lost their jobs, and thousands more must expect to lose theirs to machines over the next few years.
And there is the education crisis. Gary's schools – nationally known for their experimental curriculum in the days when Prof. Paul Samuelson, for example, was growing up in them – now face catastrophe. According to Gordon McAndrew, an innovative school superintendent attracted to Gary from North Carolina a few years ago precisely because of the opportunities for change he sensed here, the schools are now on the point of running out of funds. They could not now meet another increase in teacher's salaries. Rather than face a strike, McAndrew says, he would be inclined to close the schools down to dramatize the issue, in the hope that the state would bail Gary out. As it is, 10 per cent of Gary's teachers have quit in the last three years.
It's all a vicious cycle. Crime fears chase out whites. Businesses follow them to the suburbs. Confidence and the tax base erode a bit further. More crime is bred. More flee. More tax money goes. And Gary becomes that much more dependent on federal help – at a time when federal aid is about to be brutally cut back.
Bill Staehle, director of Gary's Model Cities program, says wistfully: "If we still had a Democratic administration in Washington Gary really would have been the urban laboratory everyone said it was. The sky would have been the limit." It sounds like an epitaph for a Model City.
Gary may not be the most alluring city in the United States. Pollution often hangs over the city like a miasma, and political corruption has often been almost as noxious and pervasive. But Gary's future has not always seemed so dark. The early days of the Hatcher administration were a time of vaulting optimism, a strange time when the city's very problems were viewed as assets rather than liabilities.
President Johnson had vowed to eradicate poverty, and he decreed that neglected cities such as Gary must join his Great Society. Even after the Vietnam war escalated and the war on poverty became a holding action, the Great Society programs had to be tested somewhere. Gary, with its intriguing multiple ailments, was seen by the urban physicians in Washington as a microcosm of all American cities and chosen as the urban laboratory.
For nearly three years after Hatcher took office as (by a few hours) the first black mayor of a major city, a stream of federal officials, consultants, urbanologists and journalists, flowed through Gary. Studies were generated, projects proposed, programs funded, and concerned reports published in the national media. One city hall official remembers that abundant era with a gleam in her eye: "Whatever program we thought up, they sent us the money for it; and if we couldn't think up a program, why they sent us the money anyway." By 1972 the federal infusion had totaled $150 million, or nearly $1,000 for every man, woman and child in the city.
At one point, the then-city controller, a former gym teacher named Jesse Bell, was reduced to telling a group of evaluators from the Office of Economic Opportunity: "Don't send us any more money until you send us someone who knows about the programs."
The federal blitz was matched by a shower of concern from the big foundations. The Ford Foundation, the National Urban Coalition and others sent their men to town. Then they provided funding to hire three "super-executives" to oversee three key areas: municipal finance, public safety, and housing and community development. (The super-police chief, known in Gary as "Safety" Johnson, was a colorful New York cop who packed a pistol most of the time. He is back in New York now, where he earned national acclaim recently by rescuing the hostages from a Black Muslim gang in a Brooklyn sporting goods store.)
The public interest law firms weighed in, too, offering to bring suit against U.S. Steel for polluting the air. In the general spirit of goodwill, U.S. Steel itself put up the dough for one of the "super-executives."
The key broker for this flood of social investment in Gary was Jim Gibson, from the Potomac Institute in Washington. One of the tacticians of the civil rights movement in its Southern phase – he grew up around the corner from the Martin Luther Kings in Atlanta – Gibson went to Gary to look around soon after Hatcher was elected and stayed for six months. He became a kind of deputy mayor, and it was he who thought up, and sold, the idea of treating Gary as an urban laboratory for the nation. With Gibson back in Washington, Gary had a hot-line to the foundations and the federal government.
For a while people were going around saying Gary was lucky to be in such bad shape; it would get so much help that it would be a model of what could be done to regenerate cities. And for a while it looked as if the experiment might just work.
The level of administrative competence was nothing to boast of, but things did happen, and without the traditional payoffs and graft. A good deal of excellent low-income housing was built; 4,800 new units in five years. Education and health programs were started. Thousands of "hard core unemployables" were given job training, many of them by U.S. Steel. (Many of those who went on to work at the steel Mill lost their jobs in the shake-out of 1971.) The open, burning city dump was safely filled in, and the sewage system began to be cleaned up. In the context of Gary's experience of city government, the reforms were dramatic.
But they were almost all targeted to benefit the Hatcher administration's black constituency. The city's new minority, the white steelworkers, was largely left out. One all-white suburb, Glen Park, tried to disannex itself from the city. The Great Society might be a new day for the city's blacks, but for the white workers, struggling along just above the poverty line, it was something else.
By the beginning of the 1970s, all over industrial America, there was a growing awareness that 25 years of high wages had not brought on the earthly paradise for the white working class. As the economy staggered under the impact of inflation, and unemployment rose, the politicians and the media became aware of a new, bitter mood of discontent and dubbed it the blue-collar blues.
The white people who had moved out of Gary and other areas in the white hinterland of the Calumet region of northwestern Indiana were no exception. But at least they had institutions to look to, institutions that had helped them in the battles of the past.
There was the national Democratic Party, for one. None of the candidates for the presidential nomination in 1972, surely, could afford to ignore the plight of what had been the traditional core of the party's electoral support.
There was labor. Even if the big battalions of the AFL-CIO were not likely to be activated quickly, a militant tradition survived elsewhere: in pockets of insurgency inside conservative-led unions and in organizations like the late Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago.
There were the churches. In the Roman Catholic Church, particularly, there was a general awareness that a majority of the white working class in the troubled cities – Irish, Italian, Polish, Croatian or Mexican by descent – were Catholics.
There were other potential sources of help, too: the foundations, the media, the new consumer movement symbolized by Ralph Nader, and a host of liberal organizations, all anxious to justify their existence by addressing themselves to the newly perceived problems of the white working class. That, in the phrase of that year, was where it was at.
Every one of these principalities and powers was represented in force in the George Rogers Clark high school in Hammond, Ind., across the line from Gary, on Dec. 5, 1970, for the official founding session of the Calumet Community Congress. The great majority of the 1,500 people who crammed into the school's gymnasium that Saturday afternoon, of course, were local people.
They represented an impressive cross-section of the life of industrial northwest Indiana.
When the CCC elected its first 20 officers, they included two union officials, two welfare workers, two truck drivers, two housewives, two students, two clergymen, a city employee, a roofer and a steelworker. The 143 groups represented included Protestant churches and Catholic sodalities, union locals and ethnic clubs, students and teachers, peace groups and anti-pollution people, as well as such purely local interest organizations as block committees and a group from a trailer park. There was a group called START and a group called STOP.
These local people could feel that they were not alone. Gary had become a focus of national concern. Sen. Kennedy and Sen. Muskie both sent telegrams of support. The first chairman was George Patterson, who symbolized labor's traditions of militancy: He had been a picket-line captain at the Memorial Day massacre during the steel strike of 1937. The Congress heard a message from Ralph Nader, read by Nader man John Esposito. It was a blistering indictment of U.S. Steel.
Monsignor Geno Baroni of the U.S. Catholic Conference's task force on urban problems was there, smoking small cigars, and trailing behind him with the smoke clouds of reporters from the big Eastern media. He took care that they should all grasp his dream of building the white, ethnic working class into a new, radical force in national politics. And, sure enough, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The New York Times all pegged to the founding of the CCC long stories about what Newsweek called "a rising cry: ethnic power."
Some of the money came from local churches. But the American Jewish Committee came through with a grant, and so did the National Urban Coalition. Just as the federal government and the foundations had seized on Gary in 1967 to show what they could do for black people, so, three years later, the national liberal institutions were rallying round to show what they could do for the white working class with the Gary oven as their laboratory.
A lot of people's work had gone into setting up the CCC. But above all it was born of the interaction of four remarkable men: Saul Alinsky, Jim Wright, Staughton Lynd, and Bishop Andrew Grutka of the Catholic diocese of Gary.
They could hardly have had more diverse origins. Alinsky, who died last year, was the most famous community organizer in the country, an intellectual radical from Chicago, toughened in the labor wars, pragmatic, effective, a veteran.
Jim Wright is a young steelworker, as tall and powerful as a pro football linebacker, whose father came up from Mexico to work in the Inland Steel mill in East Chicago after World War I..
Bishop Grutka is as impressive a man physically as Wright, with a large, sculpted head and a mane of white hair. He comes of Croatian immigrant stock, and was a friend of Alinsky's since the 1930s. But he is no radical churchman. His concern is pastoral, and he turned to drastic measures because he was desperately worried about what was happening to his flock.
Lynd is a historian, son of Robert and Helen Lynd, who wrote the sociology of "Middletown," and a former professor at Yale. He is a Quaker who played a leading role in the civil rights movement and the national peace movement.
After the Hatcher election, in 1968, Jim Wright had become increasingly frustrated by the indifference of his Inland Steel local to national issues, and especially to the Vietnam war and Chicanos. He met Staughton Lynd at a labor history forum at the community college in East Chicago. Lynd had become interested in the possibility of building a mass working-class movement.
At about the same time Alinsky had been contacted by two Protestant ministers who were appalled by the rapid racial polarization that was developing after the Hatcher victory. They wanted to persuade their (suburban) white working-class church members to become more conscious of their responsibility for the inner city. Alinsky in turn contacted his old friend Bishop Grutka, and the bishop, together with some Protestant churches, put up the money for Wright and two others to be trained in community organizing at the Alinsky school in Chicago.
Early in 1970 the organizing began. Wright, Lynd and several other organizers applied the Alinsky method. They began by contacting as many local groups as they could find: almost any groups, provided they had local concerns.
In August, the Lake County Democratic machine discovered that Lynd, who was involved in the organizing, had been to Hanoi. The county chairman, John Krupa, promptly denounced the CCC as "a power grab ... motivated by the godless, atheistic forces of Communism."
In the short run, these attacks were a godsend. "When Krupa attacked us," Staughton Lynd remembers, "we were sitting around saying, 'How can we get some attention?' Never in the world would we have been able to get 1,000 people at that convention without Krupa." Bishop Grutka agrees.
In the long run, though, Krupa's attack may have been shrewd. "We just rolled brother Krupa out the window," says Lynd. Then, smiling wryly, he adds, "and it turned out we also rolled Staughton Lynd out the window." Several of the Protestant groups, nervous at the idea of being associated with radicals, withdrew their support. Wright fired Lynd. It was the first blow to the CCC, and it came right after the triumphant convention.
The row over Staughton Lynd was not the only shadow over the founding of CCC. Less than half a dozen of those 1,500 faces at the CCC convention were black.
The whole idea behind organizing in the Gary area – Alinsky's idea, but also the ministers' and Bishop Grutka's – had been to build two parallel organizations, one black, one white, which would march together to fight the good fight. When Wright went off to the Alinsky school, a black trainee, Obadiah Simms, went too.
Simms, one of the original Freedom Riders and a former pro-football player, was supposed to build his black organization simultaneously with Wright's. But as things turned out – partly because the row over Lynd made it necessary to advance the timetable for CCC – Simms didn't get his outfit, called the Federation of Community Organizations (FOCO), going for another six months. And when he did, the founding congress was a fiasco.
Simms had hired the cavernous Gary armory, which was a mistake. Only about 100 people turned up, and they looked lost in the sea of chairs. The sound system didn't work. But what was worse was that the Hatcher administration had stacked the meeting with its own people, many of them people they had put into federal manpower jobs. In private, Hatcher administration officials make no bones about the fact that they were not about to have anyone else organizing the black in Gary. "Who needed confrontation in the year of the Mayor?" one of them said with a laugh.
Simms' meeting ended up electing as president a man who wasn't even there, a crippled black from East Chicago whom nobody knew. For all practical purposes, FOCO collapsed on take-off.
Even before the FOCO fiasco, the hopes of organizing in Gary had taken a body blow when Jim Wright left, in February 1971, to work for Father Baroni in Washington. He has now moved on again to Baltimore where, he hopes, "the handles are there for doing something with young workers." While Saul Alinsky kept on at organizing in the Back of the Yards section of Chicago for 30 years, Wright, the CCC's strongest leader, departed only three months after the CCC was founded.
At the end of 1971, there was a bitterly disputed election for the CCC presidency. George Sullivan, who had helped organize a breakaway union of steel-haulers to the militant, and indeed paramilitary, displeasure of the Teamsters, won the election. Jim Wright's Alinsky-trained successor refused to accept Sullivan, and CCC split into two. Today, both halves have collapsed.
Today, less than 30 months after the high hopes and media publicity on the founding of CCC, the effort to organize the white working class in northwest Indiana is dead.
"What's been happening?" we asked the Gary planning director, Chuck Allen, a black architect who was trained professionally as a city planner. He answered laconically: "They're leaving."
"Can you stop them?"
"No. We don't control the economics of this city."
The economics of city government in Gary are simpler than in most places. The city depends for its revenue on its share of a property tax. Other public jurisdictions – the school district, for example, Calumet Township, Lake County – also get their shares. And valuation is assessed not by the city, but by an elected county official, according to formulas determined by state law. The power to tax, therefore, does not lie with the city.
Roughly 46 per cent of the property tax paid in Gary is paid by U.S. Steel. Spokesmen for the corporation point out that its tax burden increased 61 per cent from 1966 to 1971, and that, moreover, at a time of economic difficulty for the steel industry.
The corporation's critics and city officials, on the other hand, are more impressed by the fact that although U.S. Steel invested more than $1 billion in Gary during the 1960s alone, its total, multi- billion investment there was only valued for taxation in 1971 at $519 million, and, by state law, the tax assessment was based on only one-third of that, or $173 million.
Half of Gary's tax base, in other words, is assessed at a mere fraction of its replacement-cost value. The other half is steadily being eroded by white flight and the consequent decay of the city's commercial center.
That is why Gary so desperately needs outside help, on a scale which can only come in practice from the federal government. According to Jim Holland, Mayor Hatcher's administrative assistant, the fiscal 1972 budget passed by the city council came to $24.4 million. In the same year the city received $25.5 million in federal funds.
It is – as both Holland and Hatcher point out – too early to calculate precisely how much Gary would get under the new Nixon dispensation, by which categorical federal programs are to be replaced by special revenue sharing and general revenue sharing. But Holland did some disturbing figuring on the basis of what he knows to date. "We can estimate $3.5 million to $4 million in special revenue sharing. If they don't include Model Cities" – that is, if Model Cities continues to give Gary a separate $2.7 million annual grant – "that would bring our receipts up to near $7 million. But the rumor is that Model Cities will be included. Then from general revenue sharing we can expect $3.1 million."
That comes to a high of around $10 million and a low of $6.6 million, in place of $25.5 million.
"It would really be a kick in the teeth if it happened suddenly," Holland says. He acknowledges that the cities have been promised "hold harmless" clauses in the federal legislation that would protect money already committed, but he asks, "What exactly is a commitment? In any case, 'hold harmless' clauses would only delay the day of reckoning. Add into the equation the holdback on HUD monies, and it is easy to understand why Bill Staehle, the Model Cities man, predicts that "there are going to be an awful lot of sick cities about a year from now."
'The President has been reelected by people who have no serious concern for cities," says Richard Hatcher, not bitterly but as a fact of life. He acknowledges that the concept of revenue sharing looked good to many mayors when it was first talked about, although he maintains that he personally had reservations about it from the start.
"Some mayors I know have the feeling of having been sucked in," Hatcher remarks. Indeed, about a dozen mayors said as much recently before hearings of the Senate Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee.
"They're beginning," says Hatcher, "to realize a couple of things: that if they go on the basis of what might be the popular will, they're going to be building a lot of small boat harbors and marinas, but the festering problems of poor people are still going to be there, and they're going to be the guys that are going to have to take the brunt of the reaction. And, secondly, they now realize that if you add general revenue sharing to special revenue sharing, it's going to add up to less than what the categorical programs would have been."
For two reasons, this will be especially true for a city like Gary. First, the Great Society programs were deliberately tailored for the needs of places with a disproportionate concentration of poor people. Second, cities like Gary, with administrations responsive to the poor who elected them, were able to go after federal programs aggressively, to develop expertise in getting the most the law would allow them, and get proportionately even more money than less poverty-conscious administrations. "Our ace in the hole," Hatcher says, "was the fact that we could move to the federal level and get resources that were not available to us locally." Equitable in theory, the shift to revenue sharing thus will be regressive in effect.
In the five years he has been in office, in fact, Richard Hatcher has come to understand the limits of black power. This is not only a question of money. The Hatcher administration does not really control the economics of the city, as Chuck Allen said. But that is not the end of the problem.
"The police commission is run by an independent commission," Hatcher notes. "The fire department is run by an independent commission, the health department is run by an independent board, the park department is run by an independent board, the redevelopment commission office is run by an independent commission." Hatcher estimates that it will be seven years after he was first elected mayor before his appointment power would give him control of one vital commission.
Originally, Hatcher concedes, these citizens' commissions were brought in to eliminate corruption. "But what it makes for today is simply a mess. It means that you cannot make concise decisions as the chief executive of a city like Gary, because all those decisions are tempered by what this board or that board will do." The police civil service commission for example, was brought in back in 1939 as a reform measure. But what it means today is that, even when a policeman was found up to his neck in a stolen car ring, the mayor had no power to discipline him. The man in question reached retirement age and qualified for a pension before the commission took disciplinary action.
"Secondly," Hatcher goes on, "some very critical functions are not even handled by the city." The county sheriff's department does not operate within the city, but Gary taxpayers contribute to its support. The city ought to have power to persuade private financial institutions to cooperate, both with loans, and, for example, with bonding for minority contractors. But, under state law, the city is not even free to decide where it deposits its own funds.
At the state level, Hatcher complains, "a rural-dominated legislature has now formed an almost unbeatable alliance with the political representatives of the suburbs – to the great detriment of the central city."
Can Gary make it, then? "It's a very fair question," says Hatcher, "and a very important question. My answer would be, at this point, yes, we can make it, but not without some very significant changes in how we relate to Washington, and how we relate to U.S. Steel, and in how U.S. Steel relates to us, and how Washington relates to us."
Hatcher and the black majority in Gary are discovering, in short, that black power at the lowest tier of a federal system doesn't amount to much unless the white majorities at all the higher tiers are willing to help.