My CTA bus stopped running last week and this got me thinking about the future.
Nothing like a brisk, one-mile walk from the train station to get the insights flowing.
For inspiration, on the way to Tribune Tower, there are the green waters of the Chicago River and the glassy skyscrapers of Wacker Drive. And there are the brass plaques honoring little Ira J. Bach, a planning giant who, before his death in 1985, talked City Hall into making that stretch of sidewalk a scenic overlook.
Things could be a lot worse. Besides, I need the exercise.
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So I walk and try not to think about next winter, when I’ll miss my old bus. Then I’ll have to charge past the new bus-boarding canopy at the train station (where a bored CTA dispatcher still sits, timing a dwindling number of buses) and shiver with the huddled masses on a nearby curb. We’ll wait there for the “local” that crawls across the Loop and up Michigan Avenue.
But hey, what’s another 10 minutes of commute? Pity those for whom a lost bus means a lost job.
Still, all that fresh air produces great thoughts about not-so-great things. I fear, you see, that the CTA cuts are the canaries in our coal mine. They foretell worse to come. Much worse, I’m afraid, because in these flush economic times, what with all the commotion about Monica Lewinsky and Ken Starr, there’s a general lack of awareness about what’s really going on in Washington. And how decisions there do, in time, leave people in the cold, wondering what happened.
Take those CTA cuts. It wasn’t front page news four years ago when a newly elected Republican Congress decided to phase out operating subsidies for urban mass transit systems. There was a conservative revolution afoot and a lot of Americans liked the looks of House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America.”
But now, if you do the math, you discover that the $37 million a year that Congress yanked from the CTA is about what’s being saved by canceling all those bus routes and cutting back on overnight elevated train service.
(This isn’t to say the CTA spends all of its money wisely. My old bus driver seemed like a fellow who could read a wristwatch. Why did he need that dispatcher at the train station? Or, for that matter, the fare-takers/bus-loaders at the evening stops? They spend most of their shift smoking cigarettes and gabbing with one another.)
The point is, too few of us connect the dots over time. Congress begins phasing out transit operating subsidies in 1995, and four years later, the bus doesn’t show up. So people get angry. Leftist organizers and anti-Daley politicians march on City Hall because they’ve always marched on City Hall. Rightist thinkers and politicians wag their fingers at the CTA and lecture about the need to “think outside the box,” by which they usually mean privatizing the bus service. They know the buses used to be owned by private companies until the impossibility of making a profit caused them to be turned over to tax-subsidized public agencies. They hope the rest of us have forgotten. And most of us have.
The same cause-effect disconnect happened after the State of Illinois ended general assistance welfare payments for 68,000 single adults. The deed was done in 1992 and, surprise, by 1994 there were large numbers of unshaven men on the sidewalks, in the parks and under the aforementioned Wacker Drive. In 1995, the “Gingrich Congress” followed up by eliminating Social Security disability payments for dysfunctional addicts and alcoholics. No doubt some of that money was spent on malt liquor and methamphetamines, but it has become fairly apparent, with all the Streetwise vendors crowding the sidewalks, that most of those canceled payments had been used to buy food and shelter. Apparent, that is, to those who connect the dots.
Last week federal housing officials released their biannual count of low-income families who spend more than half their incomes in rent. Despite the economic boom and Dow 9000, the number of housing-poor households continues to climb, this time to 5.3 million. The reason? It depends who you ask, but Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo explains that the federal government used to budget for construction of some 200,000 low-income units a year, but in recent years has virtually stopped adding to the nation’s supply of subsidized housing.
“There are many new $6-an-hour jobs in America,” Cuomo said. “But there’s no new $6-an-hour housing.”
The heaviest shoe, however, has yet to drop.
On Aug. 22, 1996, President William Jefferson “Flexi-Bill” Clinton signed into law the Republican-backed Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, known euphemistically as welfare reform. This means that, a few months from now, thousands of welfare mothers who failed to find work within the law’s two-year grace period will begin losing their monthly public aid benefit. Thereafter, welfare payments will stop for thousands more as they hit their five-year lifetime eligibility limit.
My hunch is the public will be shocked when these mothers and children hit the streets, doing whatever they need to do to eat and survive. Leftist organizers and politicians will, of course, march on City Hall. Rightists will call for more private charity and personal responsibility.
Others will see children in the cold and wonder what happened, having never connected the dots.