September 20, 1992

After nearly a decade of scrabbling for tight Federal funds, the B'nai B'rith housing program for the elderly is rolling again. In November, a 100-unit, seven-story apartment building designed by Beyer Blinder Belle of Manhattan will open on a 43,750-square-foot site on Barstow Avenue, opposite Co-op City in the Bronx. It will soon be followed by a 97-unit building in South Orange, N.J., and a 50-unit addition to housing in Boston. And groundbreakings are scheduled early next year for 83 units in Deerfield Beach, Fla., 79 in Tucson, Ariz., and 75 in Fort Worth, Tex.

The Pine Ridge Reservation is the home of the Oglala branch of the Sioux Indians, descendants of the warrior heroes Crazy Horse and Red Cloud. It is as poor as America gets. It spreads across nearly two million acres of butte-broken plains and listless creeks, and the oyster-gray cliffs and impervious clay floor of the Badlands. It is a mean and despairing place of 16,000 inhabitants ravaged by isolation, disease, political infighting, and good intentions gone bad. Fewer than 3 in 10 of the adults have jobs, and nearly all the jobs are in government agencies.

In these hard times, no industry is laying off workers in greater numbers than weapons manufacturers -- and much public rhetoric is now being devoted to reversing this process through a policy called conversion. The idea is that workers who produced tanks will be redeployed to make civilian products like sewer pipes. But conversion is not happening. And it might never happen. William A. Anders, chairman of General Dynamics, the giant manufacturer of M1 tanks, jet fighter planes and nuclear submarines, gave fair warning of this in a little-noticed speech that has become the military industry's Gettysburg Address. That speech, last Oct. 31 in St. Louis, is now widely cited by chieftains of other big military contractors as a prudent call for a do-or-die policy: make weapons or shut down.

When members of 160 low-income families walked through model apartment 1B at 749 Jennings Street in the Bronx last week, they caught a glimpse of what it might be like to become a co-op owner through the New York City Housing Authority Multifamily Home Ownership Program. Three five-story walkups at the site, formerly burnt-out shells that cost a total of $3.9 million to rehabilitate, are to be ready for occupancy in January.

A drug company is sponsoring a nationwide effort to screen more than half a million middle-aged and elderly men for prostate cancer amid heated disagreement over whether the testing will do more harm than good. The goal of the free checkups, to be offered by 2,000 medical centers for two weeks beginning Sept. 27, is to find this cancer early, when the vast majority of tumors are curable, instead of when more than two in five are incurable, as is now the case.