The Urban Child

59 Presentation THE URBAN CHILD BARBARA I. SABOL Commissioner Human Resources Administration City of New York 250 Church Street New York, New York 10013 If you don't do childhood right, you don't do adulthood right —No Time to Lose1 OUR cnTES contain MILUONS of children at risk. Given the epidemic of drug abuse and the rise of violent crime, only two of the problems which confront them daily, one might wonder why any family would choose to live in a major urban center. There are advantages—for those who can afford them. New York City, for example, has more cultural and educational opportunities than any city in the world. Think of the museums and art gaUeries, the Bronx Zoo and Brooklyn Botanical Garden. There are city and state coUeges, private universities, a public school for the performing arts next door to Lincoln Center, and the Bronx High School for the Sciences, a public school for gifted children which has produced Nobel Prize winners. Think of the array of live theater available every week, of the city's two opera companies, and of its world famous dance companies, including Al vin Ailey and the Harlem Dance Theater. A child growing up in New York City could even discover the amazing diversity of the world's population. In lower Manhattan, Chinese, African-American, Italian, Jewish, Latino, and Polish people work and reside within blocks of each other. For any famUy with the necessary financial resources, an urban center such as New York offers a wealth of experiences to enrich a chUd's life. But relatively few of the families Uving in our cities have these resources. For the poor, cities are often a prison. Many have no choice about Uving where they do. Poor families have little substantive access to the cultural and educational riches surrounding them. Their neighborhoods consist of deterioJournal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, Vol. 2, No. 1, Summer 1991 60 The Urban Child rated tenements, many of them abandoned and surrounded by vacant lots filled with garbage and rats. Yet these lots and crumbling buildings are often the children's only playgrounds—if the drug dealers and users have not taken over first. Too many of their schools, with barred windows and high fences, resemble jails, and too many of their educators are demoralized by overcrowded classrooms and scanty resources. In this environment, it is profoundly remarkable that chUdren survive at all. I believe this fact alone is proof of the monumental strength of families and communities. The children of the poor are our urban children at risk, and today they are predominantly children of color. More than half of all African-American and Hispanic children in this country Ii ve in cities (as compared to only one of every four white children). In 1987, nearly 40 percent of New York City children were poor, and of these 86 percent were African-American and Latino. There are currently 43,000 children in the city's foster care system, more than 6,000 children reside in the city's homeless shelter system, and almost half a million children live in households which receive public assistance. We estimate that over 90 percent of these children are children of color.2 As the administrator of the largest human services delivery system in the country, I know there are many human services providers who can alleviate somewhat the conditions these children face daily. Years of struggle with these problems have taught us certain principles and practices which work. But there is a limit to what service providers can accomplish alone. Public delivery systems and private social service agencies can only treat the symptoms. With foresight and resources we might even prevent some of the symptoms from escalating, from creating other problems. AU too often, however, practitioners fail to examine or challenge the conceptual underpinnings of legislation and economic policies which produce the problems—and even when we do, we are unable to mobilize a response that makes a difference. Meanwhile, policy makers and legislators generate broad-stroke policies affecting thousands of lives, without focusing comprehensively on what will be needed programmatically to implement those decisions, or on...