Woes of Living in Big Cities Show Emergence of Two-Tiered Society : Lifestyles: More and more, America’s urban areas are divided between the prosperous and the poor. Population shifts follow economic trends.

For the Turners, there could be no place to live but the city.

Their condo has everything: a harbor view, a Jacuzzi, proximity to dozens of chic restaurants. It’s a short walk to work for John, a venture capitalist. Carole sells Japanese art prints from the building. Their sailboat is moored outside, ready for a weekend ride to Marblehead.

“We all like city life,” Carole says. “The suburbs are too stifling, too boring. Here, there’s everything.”

Crime is mostly a rumor. Some cars have been burglarized, but there is a guard downstairs and a neighborhood network of doormen and valet parking attendants to keep watch. Brian Turner, 14, rides the subway to private school. His closest brush with trouble came when he saw a shoplifter arrested at Filene’s.

“He was very shocked by it,” his mother said.

Three miles and a world away, the Rev. Bruce Wall takes four boys, ages 14 to 16, to a pizza parlor in the city’s violence-scored Dorchester section to hear what they have to say about their lives.

“Did they talk about basketball or girls, jobs, cars or their future? No. They said, ‘We know that we’re either going to get shot or stabbed,’ and they discussed which they’d rather have happen to them,” said Wall.

“Their choice in life was to be shot.”

More than 20 years ago, after riots scorched Detroit, Newark, Los Angeles and other cities, the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders--the Kerner Commission--issued a warning.

The cities, it said, were “moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.”

After two decades of waxing and waning federal aid to the cities, the warning seems prophetic. “Now it is coming true,” said Fred Harris, who, as a senator from Oklahoma, served on the Kerner Commission.

Two years ago, Harris, a University of New Mexico professor, headed a private commission that reviewed the condition of cities. It concluded that instead of street rioting, urban centers are now undergoing “quiet riots,” daily encounters with poverty, crime, family dissolution, housing and school deterioration.

Disproportionately, these riots hurt the minorities and poor of the city; battle lines are set along neighborhood boundaries of wealth and race.

Amid the new office buildings and million-dollar condominiums, pockets of poverty are growing deeper and wider.

Amid the explosion of technology, school facilities are crumbling and literacy rates falling.

At a time of life-saving techniques such as organ transplants and laser surgery, life expectancy is becoming shorter for those in the inner city.

The two societies are separated by income, opportunity, even, in a sense, by language.

William Labov, a University of Pennsylvania linguist, has made a study of urban dialects. While the verbs and nouns sound the same, the polarization within the city is causing two separate languages to develop, Labov said.

Labov cites as an example uses of the word be , as in “She been married.”

“To most white people it means she was married; to most blacks it means she was married and has been married a long time,” he said. “The machinery of language is changing and the differences can lead to misunderstanding.”

This social fragmentation is most glaring in the once-muscular industrial centers of the North and East, which have seen declines in population or little growth. Cities of the Sun Belt and the West are gaining population, with the exception of oil region towns such as Denver, Dallas and Houston. Yet all urban centers share some problems.

One is migration of the middle class, both white and black, from inner-city neighborhoods to the suburbs and beyond.

They leave behind neighborhoods that are poorer, have less political power and fewer resources.

Statistics illustrate some of this trend. Gary Orfield, a University of Chicago political scientist, said that many northern cities have lost a sixth of their white populations and 1/20 of their black people. The number of Latinos in many urban areas has doubled.

As a result, nearly 40% of all minority students and 30% of all poor children now go to school in urban districts.

While much of the nation prospered in the 1980s, many inner-city neighborhoods headed in the opposite direction. Poverty rates in the central cities rose from 12.7% of the population to 19%.

The effects of widespread poverty can be seen during a drive through the city.

“In Chicago, there are neighborhoods where you can count up the number of bank branches and retailers that have closed up and five liquor stores have taken their place,” said Greg Duncan, program director of the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center.

“You can clearly see neighborhoods shifting from working class to hard-core poverty.”

Harris cited Detroit as another example. Throughout the 1980s, the city lost many jobs and nearly a third of its population.

“People, black and white, who could, moved out to the suburbs,” he said. “A lot of poor blacks have moved in. The movement of blacks and whites to the suburbs and the middle class has been a very good thing for them, but it hasn’t been that good for the city.”

Which part of the city?

Each city contains many different cities: the city of neighborhoods and the city of business and shopping districts, some sparkling and rich, some decaying and poor.

Many downtown areas have blossomed with new office towers, new jobs, and stores and restaurants catering to the urban professional, from Neiman-Marcus to Mrs. Fields’ cookies.

“The city offers more,” said George Jedlin, a Boston real estate agent who lives in a downtown condominium. “I’ve been to the theater 15 times this year, and I love to eat. In the suburbs, there are no restaurants.”

While many cities have seen commercial construction booms, residential building has remained static or fallen. Most of the deficit has been in affordable housing.

The nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported last year that, while the number of renters earning less than $10,000 a year rose to 11.6 million from 8 million between 1978 and 1985, the number of low-rent units available decreased by half a million.

“Chicago has had an incredible investment in the Loop at the same time we have many dying neighborhoods,” said Orfield. “The way things are going,” he warned, “we’ll have people living not too far apart from each other, but in different worlds.”