Slum life was not uncommon in New York City in the 1970’s. It was a time in which the “middle class” started to decline, the arrival of more immigrants, and crime started to increase. All this led to an idea that would affect a lot of people living in poverty and improve the financial situation of the government. Rodger Starr started to lay down the tracks for “Planned Shrinkage.” Planned Shrinkage consisted of getting rid of a lot of area’s that were starting to decay and with really high crime rates. When it comes to morals, this is a bad idea, but for economical reasons it wasn’t bad.
Planned Shrinkage was aimed towards Brooklyn, Harlem, and South Bronx. These areas in particular had a high crime rate and high poverty levels. Although the plan insisted on reconstruction, the main idea was to drive people out from these “slum” areas by cutting back the budget on firemen, police officers, and on health care plans. This way, a person who thought that this was inconvenient and a horrible place to live would leave.
A lot of jobs were lost during planned shrinkage. From February-March 1976, 3,432 city jobs were cut in a month. There was a 15% decrease in jobs from 1974-76. According to the Daily News dated back March 11. 1976, the most people affected consisted of police/fire department (which lost a total of 6,805 jobs all together), Sanitation department (lost 2,612 employees), Department of Social Security (lost 3,815 employees), Board of Ed/Higher Ed (lost 13,324employees all together), Parks and Recreation/cultural affairs (lost 1,097 employees) and Health hospitals Corp(lost 8,130 employees). All these jobs were lost within a 14 month period.
With the war in Vietnam happening and the fall of revenues, the United States was in debt for 14 Billion Dollars. It didn’t help that with the increase in crime rate came along with a lot of damaged property. There were a lot of buildings being burned, especially in the Bronx. The Bronx had up to 120,000 per year. Over 40% of the public housing was destroyed.
Rodger Starr, a housing administrator, promoted the idea of planned shrinkage. According to a Daily News article, he believed that a great way to save up money would be by cutting off a lot of these services offered to the “slum” areas to decrease the population of New York City. The money saved would then be used for reconstruction. There was a lot of anger amongst the people living in poverty. Instead of cutting off services from people who need them, why didn’t they cut them ones that were unnecessary? Since most of the people in poverty were minority groups, he was thought as a racist.
People were taking this very personally, but his main goal was all about business. If he stopped to think about how people would be affected, the government wouldn’t get anywhere. Rodger Starr believed that people were not always good and decent. He thought that everyone was alike. The problem is that he never took the time to get to know people before making them suffer to move out of their homes. It’s because of the cutbacks that a lot of the housing properties got destroyed in the 1st place.
In the end, I believe that his idea was a good one, but I don’t agree with the way that he set out to do so. If all people are alike, then why did he attack the minority groups? I’m sure that there were other programs that weren’t so necessary to the higher class people. According to his obituary, he got very “disillusioned by what he viewed as the flawed execution of good intentions.” To avoid this, he should have taken more time talking with others about a better solution to the economic crisis. Too many people suffered the loss of jobs around this time and they didn’t need this “cherry” on top of all the other shit that was going on in their lives.
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