Word: centralized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...word report finds that the number of Americans below the poverty level ($3,000 annual income for an urban family of four) fell from 39 million to 26 million between 1958 and 1966. Even so, it notes, the gaps in U.S. society continued to grow. "The central cities increasingly are becoming white-collar employment centers," the report says, "while the suburbs are becoming the job-employment areas for new blue-collar workers...
...central cities may lose 2.5 million white residents by 1985, dropping to 45.4 million, while the nonwhite population may nearly double to 20.1 million. The report somberly points out that such a concentration of Negroes could result in "a further polarization of blacks and whites, and the flight of more and more businesses, and therefore jobs, from the city. The suicidal consequences that such a possibility suggests are not pleasant to contemplate...
...heart of the matter is the financial crisis of local government. As middle-class taxpayers leave the central city for the suburbs, revenue goes down while public-service costs go up because most of those who remain are poor. Welfare costs in New York City, for example, now consume $1.5 billion annually, the largest item in the city's $5-billion-plus budget. Welfare costs in suburbia are increasing at an even greater rate than those in the central cities...
...with neat picket fences. In fact, the term suburbia has become too broad; it covers Levittown as well as Greenwich, and some of the wealthiest communities have slummy enclaves next to the commuter-train tracks. According to 1960 figures, Pittsburgh's suburbs had more substandard dwellings than the central city, and poor families around Los Angeles outnumbered those in the city's heart. With an astonishing 40% of the nation's poor now living in suburbs, crime and pollution problems are growing at the same rate there as in the central cities. Many suburbanites are without adequate...
...suburbs do not stand alone," says the report. "They are an integral part of the great metropolitan areas where two out of three Americans already live. Help to the troubled central city and the suburb must move in parallel. Without the improvement of both, all will suffer...