urban life, take the lowest status jobs, settle in the worse neighborhoods, and lose the confidence of their children.84

The chairman of Atlanta's Crime Committee had further evidence of this from his own business experience. As the developer of Highpoint, a middle-income housing project occupied by 452 Negro families, many of whom came from areas having "incredibly high" crime and delinquency rates, he had reason to be concerned. But the delinquency rate at Highpoint has turned out to be "no more than in any other respectable middle-class community." 85 He concluded that, "Personal cleanliness, sex habits, and propriety of home life are all factors which are almost absolutely controlled by the amount of and quality of housing available to the family.”

87

99 86

While that statement probably places too much emphasis on housing, there is no doubt that lack of privacy and lack of a home in which one can take pride is a major cause of family and social demoralization. In a home where the parents care for the child and have a sense of purpose or achievement, there is seldom serious delinquency. The poverty, overcrowding, sordidness, hopelessness, and constant discouragement of slum living dangerously augment the other daily irritations and frustrations that contribute to family conflicts and the broken home.88 When success in the form of increased income does not enable a colored American to escape from these overcrowded areas, the impulse must be powerful to seek escape and immediate satisfactions outside the home, whether it be through an expensive car, drinking, or other displays and diversions. When the satisfaction of obtaining or making a better home for one's children in a good neighborhood is denied, the incentive for sacrificing immediate pleasures to achieve more lasting satisfactions is undermined if not destroyed.89

Justice Justine Wise Polier, for 23 years a judge in the Children's Court and Family Court of New York City, emphasized the close relationship between the housing and family conditions of young people and their misconduct. In a study of 500 children who came into her court, she found that the majority of these were living in substandard housing areas, and an even higher percentage came from broken homes.90

A common denominator of the defendants in her court is "fear of the real world, an awareness of low family status, beyond anything that people who do not meet with these little children may realize,

Id. at 561, 570-72.

Id. at 568, 570.

* Id. at 569.

St Id. at 203. Id. at 206. " Id. at 207. * Id. at 202.

little sense of personal worth and terrible discouragement as to their own future." "1 Living in a slum, knowing that it is a Negro area and that Negroes are kept out of good neighborhoods, seeing all around him badges of inferiority and discrimination that "violate a child's sense of justice, certainly his respect for himself," the young Negro loses his ability "to reach out and function up to his capacity," Justice Polier testified.92

Thus their housing conditions are a major factor in the vicious circle in which most colored Americans are caught. Increasingly they are "the only large groups remaining in our city slum areas" and as such they are "subjected as no other groups to the fire hazards, the dirt, the ugliness, and the sordid influences characteristic of slum areas." Colored children notice all this and see that they are "surrounded by people who have failed or seemed to fail in terms of our competitive society." It is not surprising that the defeatist attitudes toward life all around them are impressed on these children.93

94

Rising out of these circumstances, according to Justice Polier, is a "sense of hopelessness about what education can mean when they go to work." " Though a few gifted individuals may surmount it, slum life is not conducive to good work in school. From the Negro slum dwellers' viewpoint, education is not readily seen as a passport to a better life. The sense of futility is manifested in low achievement.95

To make matters worse, the schools available to slum dwellers are usually inferior. Located in the oldest sections of cities, they are likely to be antiquated and overcrowded as well as segregated in fact although not by law.96

In Chicago the Commission was told that as of the February 1959 semester, 26,155 grade school children in 44 schools were on double shifts, and that no less than two-thirds of these children were Negroes. Yet the Negro children represent the minority of Chicago's public school students. The grade and grammar schools with the largest enrollments are either all-Negro or practically all-Negro." Rabbi Richard Hirsch asked: "To what avail is the principle of nonsegregated education when, because of segregated housing, 100,000 Negro children attend Chicago public schools where there are no white children?" 98

In New York there are 16 junior high schools where 85 percent or more of the children are nonwhite and 52 junior high schools where 85

91 Id. at 203.

Id. at 202-204.

9 Id. at 204-205.

4 Id. at 204.

Id. at 205–206.

Id. at 322, 325.

" Id. at 822. Id. at 812.

percent or more are white, in many cases 99 percent white.99 A member of the New York City School Board testified that in junior high schools composed of minority-group students, "the facilities are often the oldest, the background of the children the poorest, the learning motivation the weakest, the teaching the least efficient and thus because of these overcrowded housing conditions . . . children who are already disadvantaged from the beginning have laid upon their future and their hearts the insuperable burden of the evils of inferior schools." This School Board member testified that children from the areas of Negro concentration are two and a half years behind other children in reading.1

Because the predominantly nonwhite schools are located in undesirable areas, where few teachers are likely themselves to live, the task of enlisting teachers for these schools is difficult. The percentage of substitute teachers in predominantly Negro schools is 30 percent higher than in other New York City schools. The School Board member summed up this aspect of the vicious circle thus:

Teachers do not want to go into these areas because the children have not had the advantages of other children-and so the children who have not had the advantages of other children are doomed to continue to be disadvantaged because they have not had the advantages.❜

The whole city suffers from these effects of minority housing inequalities. Disease, fire, building deterioration, and crime create major items in any city's budget. The movement of higher-income residents to the suburbs, leaving the lowest income groups in the central city, increases the city's costs while cutting its revenues. It is estimated that the substandard 20 percent of our urban centers, containing some 33 percent of the urban population, accounts for 45 percent of the total city costs but yields only 6 percent of the real estate tax revenues. Moreover, the low income concentration in the center hurts the city's economic life. In Atlanta, the U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that some 60 percent of consumer buying is done outside downtown areas. An Atlanta official concluded from all this that:

There is an immutable law of social accounting. By this law communities pay the price of good housing and a decent social order always and inevitably. The only question is whether the community gets the housing and proper social order, for pay for these the community will, whether it obtains these blessings or not. The failure of a community to discharge

99 Id. at 209.

1 Id. at 322, 325.

* Id. at 209, 322.

Id. at 325. See also Toward the Integration of Our Schools, Final Report of the Commission on Integration of the Board of Education of the City of New York, June 13, 1958, pp. 7-9.

4 Id. at 301.

Id. at 524-25.

its responsibilities in housing and leadership will inevitably produce high taxes in the form of police and prison charges, the toll of disease, and the cost of added health services."

The deepest injury to the city, however, is not measurable in money. "All of our community institutions reflect the pattern of housing," said the president of the Protestant Council of New York. "It is indescribable, the amount of frustration and bitterness, sometimes carefully shielded, but the anger and resentment in these areas can scarcely be overestimated and can hardly be described; and this kind of bitterness is bound to seep, as it has already seeped, but increasingly, into our whole body politic." He said he could "think of nothing that is more dangerous to the nation's health, moral health as well as physical health, than the matter of these ghettos.

Some of these effects are long in coming to the surface. Justice Polier testified that "over and over again in our complex world of urban areas one finds the child who has been suffering deprivation and hurt for years not known to or not noticed by neighbors, teacher, or minister until finally the child turns upon and acts against some other person or against the community by which he has so long been neglected." 8

So another effect of this pattern of restricted and inferior housing for minorities is a lack of sense of personal responsibility, an almost inevitable moral callousness-in both suburbs and slums. Disraeli is said to have remarked that there was hardly a woman in England who would not be more disturbed by the smashing of the joint of her small finger in a carriage door than by hearing that a million children had died of famine the preceding week in China. The distance between a green suburb of white people and the city slums of Negroes may be as great as that between England and China. As Justice Polier said, "We rarely have enough imagination to understand or to be moved by the suffering of others that we either do not see or know about directly." She added: "We have in New York today, in this great city, over 1,600 children almost on every night known to be in need of placement outside of their own homes, for whom we have not got adequate foster home care." A large proportion of these children are Negro or Puerto Rican. The lack is not of families willing to take the children, but of homes that can meet the minimal requirements of adequate housing.10

999

Thousands of children, Justice Polier testified, are left "in shelters month after month and year after year, and even in well-baby wards and hospitals," prevented from "having their childhood experiences

Id. at 572.

Id. at 325. See also 812.

8 Id. at 207.

• Ibid.

10 Id. at 208.

in a happy family." " The Justice concluded with the question that rises out of all this: What kind of a citizen will the child become who grows up seeing or suffering these inequities?

...

We have talked a great deal . . . about freedom, equality, the human dignity, the fact that man is made in the image of God . . . what happens to the inner values of the child which constantly sees this conflict, this process, this vast gap?"

This leads to the most tragic part of the vicious circle. The effect of slums, discrimination, and inequalities is more slums, discrimination, and inequalities. Prejudice feeds on the conditions caused by prejudice. Restricted slum living produces demoralized human beings and their demoralization then becomes a reason for "keeping them in their place." Negro communities in the central city slums, a New York State housing official warned, are developing "into a kind of social and economic limbo from which there will be no escape."

Not only are children denied opportunities but the city and nation are deprived of their talents and productive power.13 The former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare estimated this national economic loss at 30 billion dollars a year, representing the diminution in productive power of those who by virtue of the status imposed upon them were unable to produce their full potential.14

11 Ibid.

1 Id. at 216.

13 Id. at 152.

14 Regional Hearings, p. 250.

In response to written questions from the Commission, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare submitted information pertinent to the housing study, from which the following excerpts are taken:

"Communicable diseases, such as the respiratory diseases, especially tuberculosis and pneumonia, and enteric diseases, such as dysentery, are increased in low economic groups living in crowded conditions where sanitation is poor.

"It has been very well established by numerous studies that certain areas, particularly in urban communities, characterized as over-crowded, with dilapidated and substandard housing, produce a disproportionately high number of delinquents. These same areas show also a disproportionately high degree of other health and social pathology such as disease, crime, economic deprivation, infant mortality, illegitimacy, etc. Also, many studies have shown that delinquents live under bad housing conditions to a greater extent than non-delinquents." (Department of Health, Education and Welfare, reply to questionnaire of Commission on Civil Rights, July 1, 1959, pp. 2, 3.)

The Department cited several "outstanding studies or reports that support these findings": Shaw, C. R.; McKay, H. D., and others, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas, University of Chicago Press; National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, Report on the Causes of Crime, Vol. 2, 1931, especially p. 108; Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, Housing Division, The Relation Between Housing and Delinquency, Washington 1936; Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor, Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency, The Commonwealth Fund, New York 1950; Children and Youth at the Midcentury; A Chart Book, U.S. Children's Bureau, 1950 (one chart "shows that juvenile delinqueney was 20 times more abundant in four slum areas than in four good areas; tuberculosis, 12 times; infant mortality, 21⁄2 times"); Juvenile Delinquency Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Report No. 130, Washington 1957.

The Department's reply concerning housing is printed in the appendix of the Washington Hearing.