In recent years two slayings have occurred on Fort Greene's doorstep-the "stomping" to death of an adolescent gang member and the fatal knifing of a sailor by teen-agers.

Low-rent public housing projects, the dreadful 100-year-old tenements of the lower East Side, the brownstone barrens of the upper West Side and the slum jungles of East Harlem are prime breeding places of the stresses, the strains that produce New York's "shook-up" generation.

ALL SOCIETY AFFECTED

These are the areas of constant population shifts and currents. Into these areas have poured a heavy percentage of the more than 300,000 Puerto Ricans who have emigrated here in the last 7 years. Into these areas have gone many of the 300,000 Negroes who have settled in the city in the same period. Here are to be found displaced and shifting white ethnic groups.

Vast sums of public funds and enormous social energy are being mustered to combat the degenerative effects of this corrupt and rotten environment upon adolescents.

"Shook-up," or disturbed, youngsters are to be found in all strata of society. They come from well-to-do areas and middle-class homes as well as from the ragged barracks of the poor.

But the heavy concentrations are found in areas of deprivation. Here the worst gang phenomena are found-the communicable conduct patterns that poison the educational system and infect many other institutions, private and public.

Many New Yorkers have the comfortable feeling that slums are a thing of the past. They whiz down the Franklin D. Roosevelt (East River) Drive and gaze at the phalanxes of new structures. They congratulate themselves upon the elimination of squalid surroundings against which Jacob Riis labored a lifetime. They spin along Gowanus Parkway and admire the neat rectangular buildings of Red Hook Houses. From the windows of the New York Central and New Haven commuting trains they marvel at the new brick towers that fringe the litter of East Harlem's tenements.

What they do not know until their nostrils ferret out Fort Greene's fetid story or until they see the inside of some apartments at Marcy Houses or St. Nicholas Houses is that in only too many instances the slums have merely been institutionalized.

The slums have been shut up within new brick and steel. The horror and deprivation have been immured behind those cold new walls.

The new tenants have not been prepared to live in their flats, nor have the neighborhoods been prepared to receive the new people. Chaos, conflict, confusion have inevitably resulted.

NEW EVILS CREATED

In a well-intended effort to solve one social ill the community succeeded in intensifying other evils and in creating new ones.

Admission to low-rent housing projects basically is controlled by income levels. Thus, these monstrous aggregates in which 1 family out of 20 in New York City now lives have tended to become new-style ghettos. Segregation is imposed not by religion or color but by the sharp knife of income or lack of income.

What this does to the social fabric of the community must be witnessed to be appreciated.

The able, rising families are constantly driven out as their incomes cross the ceiling figures. At the intake end the economic and social levels tend to drop lower and lower as inflation waters down the fixed-income levels. In some housing projects a majority of families are on relief.

At Red Hook Houses relief cases constitute about 25 percent of the 2,900 families in the project.

By screening applicants for low-rent apartments to eliminate those with even modest wages the new community is badly handicapped. It is deprived of the normal quota of human talents needed for self-organization, self-discipline and self-improvement. A human catchpool is formed that breeds social ills and requires endless outside assistance.

Indeed, the trouble starts long before.

DICKENS' WORDS RECALLED

If you examine an old slum area on the lower East Side you will see the kind of housing conditions about which Charles Dickens wrote in his American notes more than 100 years ago:

"What place is this to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies beyond this tottering flight of steps that creek beneath our tred-a miserable room, lighted by one candle and destitute of all comfort save that which may be hidden in a wretched bed * * *."

Such a description is valid today for the miserable lodging houses adjacent to the lower Bowery and in the neighborhood of Chrystie and Forsyth Streets, which are the first American resting places for many Puerto-Rican families. Here a 6-by-14 room without bath, water or toilet rents for $8 a week.

But bad as are these living conditions they have one advantage not to be found in some low-cost housing projects.

"Even a ghetto," notes the Reverend Jerry Oniki of the Church of the Master, "after it has remained a ghetto for a period of time builds up its social structure and this makes for more stability, more leadership, more agencies for helping the solution of public problems."

But when slum clearance enters an area it does not merely rip out slatternly houses. It uproots the people. It tears out the churches. It destroys the local businessman. It sends the neighborhood lawyer to new offices downtown and it mangles the tight skein of community friendships and group relationships beyond repair.

It drives the old-timers from their broken-down flats or modest homes and forces them to find new and alien quarters. And it pours into a neighborhood hundreds and thousands of new faces-often of a race or nationality different from that which lived there before.

This is a human revolution. But too often the social effects are ignored.

The lines for conflict between new residents and the old are drawn at a time when agencies that might conflict and ease transition have often been destroyed. "Wherever you have great population mobility and disrupted population areas," reports Hugh Johnson, the director of street club work of the New York City Youth Board, "gangs spring up to replace the broken stability of the group. Wherever the pattern of life breaks down kids form gangs to give themselves a feeling of protection and stability."

The process is intensified because housing projects inevitably set up what the Chicago sociologist Frederic M. Thrasher calls "interstitial areas"-lacings of different ethnic and social groups that generate conflict and growth of gangs. Color is not a primary cause of such conflict—although it may play a secondary role. This is attested by the experience of Walter J. Weinert, director of the Riis Community Center in Red Hook.

Before Red Hook Houses were built nearly 20 years ago the neighborhood was predominantly Irish-Italian. The first tenants of Red Hook Houses were mostly Jewish. Conflict quickly broke out between native Irish and Italians and the incoming Jewish residents. There was hostility on the part of adults and gang fighting by adolescents.

THE CASE OF RED HOOK

Today the population of Red Hook Houses has changed completely. It is largely Negro and Puerto Rican. But the hostility persists.

The ethnic lines have changed. The combat has not. The Negro leader of one Red Hook gang learned street fighting as a member of an Irish neighborhood group. The Puerto Rican leader of another was recruited to the gang by an Italian group. But now geography and housing pits Negro and Puerto Rican against Irish and Italian.

Some social observers believe that the gang warfare of adolescents mirrors adult antagonisms between new and old residents of a neighborhood. And, occasionally, adults become directly involved when one of the street gangs starts who they call "mother-and-father stuff." This means random attacks by a predominantly white gang upon any Negro, adult or child, found on the "turf" of a rival predominantly Negro gang—or vice versa.

The Red Hook neighborhood is comparatively fortunate. It has a well-run community house. It has Youth Board street gang workers. It has a Catholic Youth Center. But these agencies stepped into the breach because of lack of leadership or organizational abilities on the part of residents.

Only now-20 years after the housing project was erected-the Youth Board is trying to get a community organization going that would bridge the gap between project residents and natives.

Other areas are deserts so far as social facilities are concerned. Perhaps the worst is the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn.

NO SOCIAL CENTERS

In the heart of this slum area there are no community centers for the desperately poor and deprived residents. There are few churches of the conventional type but within two blocks of the 79th Precinct Police station there are more than 20 of the store-front variety.

Here the only facility available to take adolescents off the street is an improvised "lounge" set up by the Youth Board in a couple of converted stores. It is a dismal place of concrete and scarred beaverboard with a bare linoleum floor, a borrowed portable phonograph and a couple of table tennis courts. But as one youngster said:

"At least the police don't beat us up when we get together in here." Heavy police reinforcements have been concentrated in this area for some time because of the violence of gang outbreaks. When a squad car spots six or eight adolescents on a street corner they are ordered to move on, often with the encouragement of night sticks.

In contrast, the lower East Side as an old slum area has a variety of active and energetic social agencies organized in LENA (Lower East Side Neighborhood Association). Such the same is true of the Chelsea area, where the Hudson Guild Neighborhood House has actively met the problem of changing neighborhood composition.

But in general, as Mr. Oniki points out, there is little central planning in social work. The areas of greatest need are often neglected. Churches tend to cater to their own congregations and with rare exceptions (such as the parishes of Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church, East Harlem Protestant Parish and a group of upper East Side churches) the churches are reluctant to assume responsibility either for the whole community in which they are situated or for any deprived areas elsewhere.

Only the Pentecostal pastors seem interested in whether Bedford-Styuvesant livess by the Gospel or not.

The

Housing projects are rammed into one neighborhood after another. primary concentration is on providing new walls, floors and ceilings at the cheapest possible cost. But the social consequences are bypassed.

YOUTH BOARD EXPERIENCES

Ralph Whelan, director of the New York City Youth Board, reports that experience shows that there is an invariable rise in delinquency rates in the first 6 to 18 months of any new housing project.

Social scientists are convinced that most, if not all, destructive effects accompanying poulation changes can be avoided by proper planning, proper conditioning of the new populations and the old.

But such efforts are usually omitted or are carried on in so primitive and ineffectual a manner that, for example, children are permitted to turn the elevators of Fort Greene into public toilets.

Perhaps Fort Greene provides accommodations as good as the typical small flat near the docks in Red Hook. But the Red Hook dock area has a structure of a kind that most projects lack. There the candy store proprietors know the youngsters who hang out in their shops. There is an unwritten but well understood agreement between gang youngsters and businessmen.

Bad actors are kicked out of the candy stores. They must stay out for a month or even 3 months. And the gangs will not support the mavericks. It is too cold on the streets at night. If there is a "bad" candy store in the neighborhood (and there was one, described as a "real old-fashioned New York candy store" a bookie joint, a place where you could get narcotics, bootleg whisky and liquor during Sunday closing hours) the parish priest knows about it and sees that the police close it.

Conditions in these areas are no secret to the agencies that must deal with them. The youth board is active in 15 metropolitan areas. It is working with 82 street groups and is actively concerned about a total of 100. It thoroughly

understands the relationship between the composition of a neighborhood and the social problems that result.

The problems may not be so bad as they were generations ago. Indeed, Capt. Frederick J. Ludwig, commanding officer of the Police Juvenile Aid Bureau, reports that New York City's peak arrests of juvenile and adolescent criminals occurred in the 1910-20 decade-another period of social change and mobility.

But figures of recent years show a steady rise in all delinquency indexes. They also show a patterned spread through the city, a spread from the most deprived areas into those of greater well being. Last year, Captain Ludwig's figures show, there were 16 New York police precincts with more than 1,000 arrests and referrals of adolescents-6 more than the previous year.

There were more than 56,000 arrests and referrals of juveniles and adolescents in New York City last year-a rise of 4,500 over the previous year. In part the total may be attributed to greater community concern with youth problems.

But no matter how explanations differ there is no question but that the number is a shocking one for the world's richest community. Particularly since a substantial segment of the problem is the product of a compartment-like approach to social thinking and blindness to social realities.

Senator SPARKMAN. I thought you might have reference to that. Also you will have the privilege of submitting any comment you care to make on that or any other matters before us. Senator Bush?

Senator BUSH. On page 17, Mr. Severin, just below the middle of the page you get into this question where you say:

We do not believe the best interests of home buyers are served by the current attempt to force a return to outmoded and uneconomic practices in equipping a home with those items which have come to be regarded as an integral part of the modern home.

Will you expand on that and tell us what you mean?

Mr. SEVERIN. I would be glad to, Senator. First of all, you are probably aware of the effort I am talking about of restricting the Commissioner's right to include such items as stoves and permanently attached ovens and garbage disposals, and even to window shades and blinds. These are items which in modern living everyone apparently desires and must have. The system of allowing them to include this in a mortgage of many, many years rather than the former method for financing it over a period of maybe 3 years at the maximum, is certainly a beneficial thing and a less costly way of financing them to the home buyer.

Senator BUSH. In other words, you would favor the inclusion of window shades and other perishable or nearly perishable items like that in a long-term mortgage of 40 years such as you are now advocating. Is that what you are saying?

Mr. SEVERIN. Perhaps I should not mention the window shades but by custom this is one thing which has always gone into our new house. In a sense it is perishable.

Senator BUSH. Has the Commissioner been excluding those under existing legislation?

Mr. SEVERIN. No, sir. They are now a requirement in a completed house, and I think properly so. I would like to direct your attention to an article that appeared in House and Home magazine in September 1956, which very clearly sets forth the problem that is involved, and I think gives the pros and cons. I think you might find it of interest to look at that and I will be glad to file this with the committee if such is the desire.

Senator SPARKMAN. We will be glad to have it.

(The article referred to follows:)

[From House & Home, September 1956]

THE PACKAGE MORTGAGE GAVE HER THIS WORK-SAVING PACKAGE KITCHEN

The package mortgage has made housework easy for millions of busy women. It has sold millions of appliances. It has helped sell millions of new houses. It has helped sell millions of better kitchens into older houses.

The package mortgage lets home buyers finance almost all the equipment needed for the house the same way the furnace and hot water are financedunder the mortgage.

The package mortgage has taught millions of families to want all the best new labor-savings aids now, creating far quicker acceptance and demand-in homes both new and old-for new products like dishwashers, disposers, clothes washers, clothes, dryers, freezers, built-in ovens, burner tops, intercoms and exhaust fans.

Now the package mortgage is in danger

The package mortgage is caught in a sudden and surprising crossfire from two smart Washington lobbies. One is a retailer lobby, fighting because retailers do not get a big markup on appliances sold to builders. The other is a furniture lobby, fighting because up to now the appliance industry has made better use of the package mortgage to sell its product.

Their double attack on the package mortgage almost succeeded, for it caught the home building industry unawares. It came so near success that the Senate Finance Committee almost voted a package mortgage ban for VA and FHA financing. It came so near success that FHA has in fact been told to show cause why the package mortgage should not be banned by the next housing act.

Before Congress makes any such mistake, let's take a fresh look at the package mortgage. Whom does it help? And how true are the arguments against it?

THE PACKAGE MORTGAGE IS GOOD FOR THE HOME BUYER BECAUSE

1. The package mortgage is the only way most families can afford to buy both a good house and a good kitchen

On short term credit at the usual 9.6 percent-or-more interest, the monthly payment on a $1,500 kitchen doubles the monthly cost of owning a $12,000 homeincreasing it from $72.42 per month to $144.32 per month for the critical first 2 years. By FHA minimum income standards not 1 family in 10 can afford this double cost-for FHA will not let any family whose No. 1 breadwinner makes less than $7,800 a year take on a monthly home-buying payment of $145 a month. 2. The package mortgage saves home buyers hundreds of dollars in installation costs

Every major appliance except the refrigerator involves installation expenses which often run over $100 and sometimes $200 for a single unit. The washerdryer must not only be connected up to the plumbing and the electric or gas lines, but also be vented outdoors. The dishwasher and disposer need both plumbing and power connections. Stoves need gas connections. Ranges require heavy electric wiring. Exhaust fans should be built into the wall. Even freezers need separate circuits to the entry box.

All these installation costs are four times as big if the home buyer has to pay for them after the house is finished. The installation saving made possible by selling the house fully equipped is often more than the whole difference in interest cost between 2-year short term credit and 20-year mortgage credit.

3. The package mortgage gets the home buyer a good price on his appliances

FHA makes the builder pass on to the buyer most of the discount he gets on his volume purchase of appliances. (Usually FHA includes in its valuation only the average price builders in the area pay on each, plus 10 percent for overhead and 5 percent for profit.)

In practice many builders offer home buyers an even better appliance deal. For example, Builder Wilson Brown in Dallas puts only $1,700 into the price of his $13,200 house to cover the installed cost of seven built-in appliances whose list price totals $2,500. California Builder David Bohannon takes no markup