THE NUMBERS GAME: Sums for Slums

WHILE they may disagree on nearly everything else, the experts who diagnose the nation's urban ills agree that more--much more--federal money is needed if.the U.S. is ever to cope effectively with the problems of the slums. How much more? No one can say for sure. Incredibly, in the age of computerized government, the Administration cannot even offer a reasonably accurate accounting of the amount it is spending now to alleviate the malaise of the central cities.

Testifying before a Senate committee last year, then Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach officially put Government spending in the cities at $14.7 billion. In the same week, Robert Weaver, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, reckoned that it actually amounted to $28.4 billion; and Lyndon Johnson, with lightning application of both old and new math, set it at $30 billion. This year, Budget Director Charles Schultze admitted to a Senate subcommittee, the Government is giving out only $10.3 billion in "federal aid payments in urban areas." Even this more down-to-earth figure is probably far too high an estimate of the amount being spent on programs that are actually aimed at slum environments.

Definition Gap. The problem is mostly one of definition. Johnson and Weaver defined aid to the "cities" as any federal expenditure in any community with a population over 2,500--not omitting $14.6 billion for such items as Social Security and railroad-retirement payments. Katzenbach somehow managed to include in his sum federal grants for agricultural-experiment stations, commercial fisheries, and the systematization of weights and measures. Schultze was a more scrupulous bookkeeper, but even his more modest reckoning includes $2.1 billion for construction of urban expressways, which hardly help and often visibly harm the poor whose neighborhoods lie in their path. Proposals for two interstate highways that would displace 20,000 of Newark's Negroes were among the most serious grievances of slum dwellers before last month's disastrous riots in that city.

Urbanologists have differing ideas about which Great Society programs most benefit slum dwellers, but all admit ruefully that they have little concrete evidence to back them up. Partly because administrators have been extremely sensitive to criticism, partly because of political pressure for instant successes, "none of the programs have really been evaluated," says William Garrison, head of Northwestern University's Transportation Center.

Project Head Start, which has put 2,000,000 three-to six-year-olds into the classroom in the past three years, comes as close to having universal approval as any of the dozens of federal programs, and has already "had a very major, very deep" effect, says Werner Hirsch, director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at U.C.L.A. But even Head Start money "goes down the sewer," notes Chicago Urbanologist Philip Hauser, if Head Start graduates are then put--as they usually are--into classrooms that are not prepared for them. Most job-training projects also receive high marks. Four Government "skills centers" in Los Angeles have provided training for 840 slum residents, finding jobs for 85% of them since the 1965 Watts riot, while Boston's ABCD (Action for Boston Community Development, Inc.) has put 2,800 people into jobs or training since it began its drive a year ago.

Dribble Here, Dribble There. The Administration's model-cities and rent-supplement programs are generally regarded by experts as imaginative ways of getting to the ghettos' problems. However, both have been so meagerly funded that no hard assessment is yet possible. Given the funds available, suggests University of Chicago Historian Richard Wade, it might be better to concentrate on a few projects, rather than scattering money on more than a hundred. "There are so many programs," he says, "that there's no real way to monitor them and tell what they're doing. So we end up dribbling money into this or that, funding a program for a year or two, then dropping it." Daniel Moynihan, head of the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, uses the axiom: "The more programs, the less impact." Coordination is almost as sorely needed as money if federal efforts are to succeed--and both, so far, have been in short supply.

Exaggeration is as much a part of politics as it is of advertising, and ordinarily the Administration might be excused for a little political puffery. There is every reason to believe, however, that it has hampered its own attempts to pry money out of a parsimonious Congress by claiming that it is already spending vast sums in the cities--when in fact it is not. Worse still, it has unrealistically raised the expectations of the poor, most of whom have yet to see much real benefit from Uncle Lyndon's 30 billion green bills.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.