POVERTY REVEALED

Hokitika Guardian, 24 June 1932, Page 2

POVERTY REVEALED

IN LEADING AMERICAN CITIES. AWFUL CONDITIONS DISCLOSED. LONDON, June 18. A graphic account of the appalling misery .now rampant in New York is cabled by the “Daily Telegraph” correspondent, who draws a contrast between the luxury of throe years ago and the terrible hardship of 1,200,000 men, women and children now destitute. For over a year 150,000 families, representing 250,003 individuals, have been existing, on average earning* from odd jobs of 33s a month, supplemented bv small doles.

Before the depression the average earnings of these families were £3O a month.

The transition from comfortable, well-kept homes to cheerless, dirty, over-crowded hovels in slums will, sociologists declare, leave a marked impression on the life of New York City. Poverty is claiming additional victims by the thousands daily; evictions are steadily increasing and the Courts are being swamped by cases of petty theft by men and women driven by theft to steal fotxL' The heads of 45,000 families, representing 160,000 person*, have just been told that they

must shift for themselves. The average family in want, it is estimated, is already £2O in debt. .

Desperate men and women plead for bread and medical care for tlieir children at /social welfare offices, only to be told that nothing can be done for them. Police are on duty at these centres to maintain order and eject those who threaten. The city is overrun with beggars, shelter at night js becoming a terrific problem, and overcrowding in tiny tenement rooms is now a menace to health and moral*. The park benches are fully occupied day and night, waiting rooms at railway station-s are thronged with pathetic crowds, and vacant plots throughout the city are covered with rude huts built of any o'.d refuse. Similar reproductions, says the correspondent, are in evidence in almost every big city in the United States.

The profound depths to which industry in the United States has sunk, illustrating conditions that even the most pessimistic predictions failed to foreshadow, is shown by the -statement that deficits amounting to £38,000,0C0 in the first quarter in 1932 are reported by four leading steel companies, including the United States Steel Corporation. The president of the American Federation of Labour states that industrial unemployment is increasing, instead of decreasing, as is usual in the spring, and that the number of unemployed is flow 8,000,000.