Cities: No Haven

In the past decade, New Haven has pioneered nearly every program in the Great Society's lexicon. Months and years before the Federal Government showed any interest in the cities, it had its own poverty and manpower-training projects, a rent-supplement demonstration, and a promising Head Start program. Washington has rewarded the city's imaginative urban-renewal administration with a greatly disproportionate share of federal renewal money—$852 per capita (given or pledged), or six times as much as Philadelphia, in terms of population, 17 times as much as Chicago, 20 times as much as New York. Indeed, Robert Weaver, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, once observed that New Haven (pop. 142,000) came closest to "our dream of a slumless city." Yet last week the model city was racked with the same virus of ghetto discontent that has plagued scores of other U.S. cities this summer.

Global Promises. Compared with Detroit or Newark, New Haven's four troubled nights constituted only a miniriot. Not a shot was fired, no one was seriously injured, and damage was probably not more than $1,000,000. But the psychological damage was immense. "I seriously thought," said a shaken Mayor Richard Lee, "that something like this wouldn't happen here." Yet happen it did, and officials across the country, shuddering at the prospects for their own cities, could only wonder why. The reasons were not all that obscure. Much had been done, but much more remained to be done.

The unemployment rate of the city's 36,000 Negroes and Puerto Ricans is still nearly three times (8%) that of whites. The schools are still heavily segregated, and the white majority, largely of Irish and Italian background, is reluctant to integrate them. The Irish-dominated police department still shows hostility toward the newer migrants, and badly needs reorganization—as urged in a recent report to the mayor.

New Haven's very success, together with the glare of national publicity, may have contributed to the sense of frustration. People who lived in dilapidated housing in the largely Negro Hill and Dixwell areas may simply have grown tired of hearing that their city was doing more than any other to house its poor. To many, the gap between Weaver's dream and everyday reality became intolerable. "We've been telling the Negro that there's a new day," notes Mitchell Sviridoff, who left New Haven's poverty program last year to become head of New York City's Human Resources Administration* "But there is no new day. He gets big, global promises, but nothing happens."