Poverty was supposed to be temporary - remember?

On our block in Brooklyn in the 1940s, there was a sprinkling offamilies receiving something called "Home Relief." Everyone knew whothese families were and why they might need help temporarily. Thatwas the key word. Temporary.

Someplace between then and now, a vast new population andattendant bureaucracy have been spawned on the idea of permanentpoverty. Across the urban landsape, the towers of the housingprojects and the low-rise slums speak a different language than theirforebears. The first public housing projects in the 1930s wereQuonset huts borrowed from the military. Temporary.

The image of poverty of those days was shaped by the experienceof the Depression in the '30s. A lot of good, decent and hardworkingpeople had been thrown out of work through no fault of their own.They were down on their luck and needed some help to tide them overuntil times got better. And surely they would.

How then came we to this pretty pass of permanent pools of poorat the core of our cities? It is one of the largest ironies ofmodern American history. It began as a search for prosperity. Thatand patriotism.

Before World War II, most black Americans lived in the ruralSouth. The legatees of slavery stayed close to the land after theCivil War. A few drifted toward the cities in the '20s and '30s, butthey were pioneers.

When the war began, the defense industries were desperate fornew sources of labor. They turned to the South and recruitedthousands of workers, black and white, to migrate to Chicago, NewYork and Oakland to work on assembly lines and in shipyards in amassive defense effort that was unparalleled in history.

The money was good during the war, but when it ended, disasterstruck the new urban dwellers. The shift of postwar Americanprosperity was to the suburbs. The black defense workers were notable to migrate and soon became forgotten people in an alien land.Those were the grandparents and great-grandparents of the citizens wenow call the urban underclass. The majority of welfare recipientsremain white Americans. The majority of the permanent poor are blackAmericans.

Over the ensuing years, cities sagged beneath the weight of thisnew population that did not make it to the mainstream, only to thesidelines. The infrastructure of the cities, especially the schools,all but collapsed. For a time, it was chic to argue a new socialtheory that our society did not need cities at all.

Now it is clear we need cities and we must create ways to makethem work by finding ways to help the people within them work. Thatrequires a combination of public and private effort. Remarkably, wehave heard virtually no discussion of how to stimulate that effortfrom the presidential candidates of either party.

You would think the exciting possibilities and challenges of theurban renaissance would be high on the agenda of candidates in searchof new ideas. Yet not much seems to come out of their mouths.

In a society in which the top fifth of the population earns 46percent of the income and the bottom fifth earns 3.8 percent of theincome, you might see room for improvement if you sought to bepresident. Just think of the new consumption potential and thereforetax consequences of getting those citizens into gainful activity.

Ignoring that problem reminds me of a neighbor we had, an automechanic who constantly tossed his soiled and oily rags in the cornerof a dark closet. One night we learned the meaning of the termspontaneous combustion as we watched his house burn to the ground.

Permitting a culture of permanent poverty to take root in ourcities would be no wiser than my neighbor was.

Robert Maynard is editor, publisher and president of the Tribuneof Oakland, Calif. His column is distributed by Universal PressSyndicate.