Symposium Told Social Problems Will Worsen

Statistics served up at a state meeting on social problems Thursday were so dismal that one speaker prefaced her talk with a warning that it would be “very depressing.”

Babies are being born addicted to cocaine, homelessness is on the rise, and the state’s poverty problem is getting even worse, said Jackelyn Lundy, associate director of the agroecology program at UC Santa Cruz.

Lundy has studied social service needs for California in the 1990s for the state Department of Economic Opportunity, where she worked until recently. The symposium was sponsored by the California Rural Development Committee, which is connected to the University of California Cooperative Extension.

Among the statistics:

- 15% of the babies born in at least one California city, Oakland, were born to mothers addicted to crack cocaine.

- The number of AIDS cases in the state is expected to triple to 1.5 million over the next 10 years.

- The number of Californians over age 75 is growing rapidly, while the number of those between 18 and 34--who could help support them--is expected to decline over the next few years.

- Nearly half of the state’s poor are children, and a third of its single women are living below the federal poverty rate. The poor, meanwhile, are getting poorer, and the rich are getting richer.

Some of the statistics, Lundy said, are “just the tip and we’re going to hit the whole iceberg later” as federal financing for local programs continues to decline.

For instance, the budget of the federally financed National Health Service Corps, which provides scholarships for medical students in exchange for their starting career in rural areas, was cut from $100 million in 1978 to $2 million this year. The number of scholarships awarded medical students has gone down from 3,347 to fewer than 40.

Federal housing assistance to the 50 states dropped from $26 billion to less than $8 billion. Lundy projected that, nationwide, there will be 3.7 million fewer low-income rental units than low-income families in 1993, and 7.8 million fewer units than families in 2003.

“So we have a housing time bomb which translates to a homeless time bomb, set to go off in front of social service workers,” she said.

Lundy said rural areas have been particularly hard hit, with the decline of resource-based industries such as agriculture, logging and mining. Agriculture, for instance, accounted for 492,000 of the state’s jobs in 1982, but only 447,000 in 1986. Unemployment is in the double digits in rural areas and two to three times that in urban areas, she said.

In addition, many middle-income jobs have been lost to foreign competition and have not been replaced.

Widening of Gap

The result, Lundy said, has been a widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, particularly in California. The percent of the population living in poverty is expected to increase to 17% by 1995.

“It’s something we definitely have to worry about. The statistics are there. They are correct,” said R. Gordy de Necochea, who is in charge of grants for the state’s Housing and Community Development Department.

“But I also think that if you were presenting the opposite picture there you have some positives coming out with the negatives.” He rpointed to new voter-approved housing bond measures and an increase in private-public partnerships.

Helen Haig, special projects director for the governor’s Office of Planning and Research, said the office is embarking on an outreach program to make sure rural areas know about what state and federal assistance is available to them.