A New Skid Row

At 23, Bruce Reed has a thin, wasted face and the appearance of a man twice his age. A welfare recipient, he spends his days wandering down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Calif., with a bottle of cheap wine or a marijuana cigarette in his hand. Tom Finley, 21, also a Telegraph Avenue regular, earns a scant $40 a month, mostly by selling his blood. Annie Peters, 17, lives off the refuse in Berkeley garbage cans and occasionally peddles dope. Though their names have been changed, their stories are very real and typify the plight of what two social scientists at the University of California in Berkeley call the Skid Row of the '70s.

This, say Jim Baumohl and Henry Miller, is a chain of ghettos stretching across the nation's college towns from Cambridge, Mass., via Ann Arbor, Mich., and Madison, Wis., to Santa Barbara and Berkeley, Calif. The youths who wander from one tolerant university town to the next are "street people," who bear a superficial resemblance to the hippies of the late '60s. Yet unlike the flower children (of whom only a few remain), the new group of itinerant youths have not rejected the Establishment out of ideological beliefs. They are authentically poor, and though most say they want to work, they have no skills and can get only occasional marginal jobs.

In a study of 295 street people in the Berkeley area, Baumohl and Miller found that the majority are young (median age: 24) white males. In general, they are poorly educated (32.5% never graduated from high school; only 9.2% from college) and, contrary to the national pattern, received considerably less education than their fathers, who, for the most part, work at blue-collar and low-level white-collar occupations.

How did this generation of young has-beens come to exist? "For some," say the researchers, "there were serious family problems or limitations in psychological and intellectual abilities." But above all, these youths shared "a subliminal or barely articulated knowledge" that, at least for them, the possibility of "'making it' in America had become more fantasy than reality." The nation's unemployment rate (4.4% overall and as high as 17% for teenagers) makes the struggle seem fruitless to those unwilling or unable to put in the rigorous educational apprenticeships now needed even for ordinary jobs. Many youths therefore give up, drop out, and become hobos before they are yet old enough to vote.

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