I do not know—I am not a prophet—but I think I can make out that we are on the eve of great social changes, for which our democracy was meant to prepare us, but for which it finds us even now unfit.—Jacob Riis

The persistence, indeed the worsening, of America’s slum problem has been discussed in this magazine by Michael Harrington [August 1960]. Mr. Harrington noted the central fact that present housing programs are directed more toward middle-income than low-income housing. He observed also that what new low-income housing has been built—the “projects”—have failed substantially to lessen the social pathologies of slum life.

Here it is my purpose to explore the ideological basis for this failure: the enduring conception of public housing as a form of charity, the new reliance on private enterprise rather than government planning, the imminent abandonment of the very goal of slum clearance.

The slum has long been a symbol of the unfinished business of American democracy. Generations before New Dealers spoke of poverty in the midst of plenty, the festering tenements of New York’s Lower East Side provoked Henry George to write Progress and Poverty. Today, as in 1937, one-third of a nation is still ill-housed; indeed the thousands of square miles of overcrowded and decaying tenements with their population of at least 10,000,000 families make up an underdeveloped nation in the midst of America. In the centers of our cities the nation’s greatest material failure, the persistence of slums, and its greatest spiritual failure, race discrimination, are tangled together in one aching problem.

What is being done about it? Groups like the National Association of Home Builders, the National Housing Conference, and the AFL-CIO have estimated that from 1960 to 1965 at least 2,000,000 new dwelling units are needed yearly to replace substandard housing, reduce overcrowding, and house the rapidly increasing population. Since 1945 private industry has provided about 1,000,000 units each year. The Taft-Ellender-Wagner Act of 1949 provided for 810,000 public housing apartments to be built within six years, but as Mr. Harrington pointed out, less than half this number have been completed in almost twice six years: an average of about 30,000 apartments a year. Thus nearly 1,000,000 needed dwelling units are not being built each year. These are the homes that are most needed, for low-income families whom private builders cannot afford to supply, the homes for those now living in the worst housing. Schools, parks, transport, and health facilities are equally neglected.

What Jacob Rüs called “the battle with the slums” is being lost. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund sums up the situation with the statement that “the blight of slums is spreading at a rate far in excess of our efforts to remedy it.” Nathan Straus, the New Deal public housing administrator, has declared more picturesquely that America is trying to heal a cancer with a cure for dandruff.

Saddest of all, the urban renewal deficit has become a deficit of ideas and conviction as well as a deficit of parks and homes. There is a widespread sense among planning and housing professionals that something has gone wrong with the concepts which have summed up their knowledge about rebuilding cities. The very term “urban renewal” reveals the growing dissatisfaction with the old terms, “slum clearance,” “public housing,” and “master planning.”

This dissatisfaction calls for close scrutiny. For the slum has been a stubborn opponent. Demolished in one neighborhood, it springs up in the next. Repeatedly, one generation’s model tenement has become the next generation’s slum. Without well-tempered convictions as to the kinds of housing and the methods of renewal which are needed, a mere increase in the sums available to renewal programs may end only in deeper frustration.

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II

What one might call the old school of housing thought was nurtured on a deep hostility to the private businessman who made money from the exploitation of poverty and ignorance. The Chief Inspector of the New York City Board of Health found good words for this feeling as long ago as 1834, when he spoke of “mercenary landlords who only contrive in what manner they can stow the greatest number of human beings in the smallest space.” Even the mild-mannered Rüs exploded when in 1895 the owners of the infamous Mulberry Bend tenements—where the infant death rate was one in five—sought to avoid demolition of their property by proposing arbitration of the sales price. “Arbitration is good,” said Rüs, “but there are times when you have to knock a man down and arbitrate sitting on him.” In the same vein Fiorello LaGuardia once declared, “I come not to praise the landlord but to bury him.”

The most important thing about the newer or “urban renewal” approach, a quality underlying all technical differences between it and the older school, is a feeling of trust toward the businessman. Where the one sought to house low-income families through government intervention, the other relies mainly on private industry and, perforce (since private industry cannot afford to build for the poor), pays most attention to housing middle- and upper-middle-income groups. “Urban renewal” programs include projects which build homes and projects which don’t, projects which clear slums and projects which don’t, projects requiring large-scale demolition and projects involving rehabilitation and conservation; but they all have the one common denominator of relying primarily on private capital. As a result, the ratio of private to public investment in urban renewal is running about five to one.

Consider, more specifically, the effects of this reliance in the rehabilitation-conservation type of urban renewal project. In criticism of the older school, urban renewal advocates point out the expense of waiting until a neighborhood becomes a slum before attending to its ills. Instead they suggest preventive medicine. Transitional areas can be saved, they contend, by combining selective demolition with rehabilitation. Moreover, the government can still further reduce its outlay by confining the public role to general supervision and to the judicious investment of “seed” capital; given the minimal aid, so runs the argument, private capital and an awakened neighborhood morale will reinforce an upward spiral of residential investment and land values. Thus, theoretically, in place of wholesale “blockbusting” demolition, which tears up neighborhoods by the roots, a gradual renovation occurs. In place of exclusively governmental programs, there comes about a partnership of government, business, and local citizens.

But in practice, benefits of this new approach are quite mixed. In the first place, the existing tenants must be relocated—as in demolition projects—since a prohibitive rent increase is usually one aspect of rehabilitation. If the displaced families were provided alternative low-rent housing in the same vicinity, all would be well, But the hard fact is that the transitional neighborhood is characteristically a neighborhood undergoing “invasion” from low-income, minority families. The citizen participation enlisted by such programs is all too often drawn from established families who seek to eject the newcomers and keep the neighborhood “nice.” For example, the University of Chicago’s renewal program in the adjacent Hyde Park-Kenwood area, while a model of grass-roots participation, resulted in a net exodus of Negro families. When urban renewal means merely kicking out the poor little by little rather than all at once, it brings dim consolation to the low-income site tenant.

Furthermore, the new concern for neighborhoods in-process-of-becoming-slums, is frequently coupled with neglect of the slums themselves. Unwilling to maintain—let alone increase—the volume of low-income public housing, urban renewal administrators have been overwhelmed by low-income tenants displaced from sites for middle-income housing projects. The relocation problem then, in fact, becomes the excuse for leaving the slums intact. The recent Panuch Report in New York City recommends that “technically substandard” tenements be left standing, because “the City not only has a shortage of standard housing, it has a desperate shortage of substandard housing.” Such a double standard of adequacy not only rationalizes the demise of public housing construction, not only passes by on the other side of the human suffering in the slums; it is also short-sighted. It overlooks the fact that the slum is at the core of all the symptoms of our metropolitan madness, that the sickness of the slum reaches out to infect all members and all functions of the urban organism. For the slum is admittedly the principal cause of the middle-class exodus to suburbia. The slum, therefore, is also finally responsible for transportation systems clogged and overworked by commuter travel; for the dwindling tax base of the central city; for the rapid transformation of the central city into a ghetto of dark skin and low income. To leave the slum intact while building middle-income housing to lure taxpayers back is to carry water in a sieve.

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Another motive behind the urban renewal programs that turn aside from the task of slum clearance is the desire to select redevelopment sites most attractive for private investment. Often sites have been chosen which are “slums” in no sense of that word, but which, by virtue of access to transit facilities, proximity to the central business district, and other perquisites, are tempting to private builders. We have come a long way from the intention of Senator Wagner when we permit the businessman to build on a site which does not decrease the slums; pick up the tab for most of his land cost with taxpayers’ money (under Title I of the 1949 Housing Act); and then let him charge up to $75-100 per room per month. Calking this “urban renewal” is just putting a fast buck between glossy covers.

In subordinating all other considerations to the happy marriage of private profit with the public tax base, urban renewal programs sometimes decrease rather than increase the housing supply. In this category are the many projects for down-town civic centers, high-rise office buildings, and industrial parks, often with cultural accessories: universities, opera houses, exhibition halls. Most of these nonresidential structures are clearly of obvious value. But all such projects erected on former residential sites, decrease the total housing supply by the simple fact that they tear down homes and put none in their place; in 1956 the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing charged that, as of that date, approved urban renewal projects would result in a net loss of 40,000 dwelling units. Thus the nightmare-without-waking of slum overcrowding is intensified.

A Symbolic example is the project in southeastern Washington, D.G., just next to Capitol Hill. This was the Negro slum of which one used to see so many pictures with the dome of the Capitol rising in the background. Here slums have been cleared and new homes built. But the new homes are luxury apartment buildings with doormen, terraces, and splashing fountains, housing in place of the former Negro population (so I am told) a single, token Negro family.

The housing philosophy which leaves the slums alone because it cannot handle relocation, which argues that to build offices we must neglect homes, is a philosophy of scarcity altogether grotesque in the richest country in the world. The housing philosophy which builds luxury housing on low-income sites and provides no other housing for the former residents, is a philosophy of inhumanity which puts the metropolitan tax structure ahead of human need and so builds homes according to the saying, “to him who hath decent housing already more shall be given, from him who hath it not even that which he hath shall be taken away.” Urban redevelopment is undertaken, presumably, to escape from the human suffering and the functional chaos of cities built solely by the profit motive. Why then begin our urban surgery by injecting the patient with the virus which made him ill?

This is not to say there is no Value in the urban renewal approach. But What it emphatically is not is a substitute for the older techniques of slum clearance, public housing, and master planning, or for the role of government in rebuilding our cities.

Because urban renewal is not a conception adequate to the task at hand, the city as a whole is the ultimate loser. The immediate loser is the man for whom, one might have thought, Urban renewal was intended: the man living in a slum. Urban renewal, by and large, takes away this man’s home without giving him another. This is why relocation has hit the headlines all over the United States, why the displaced site tenant—in the words of a study of Cincinnati housing, the “refugee from civic progress”—is the new forgotten man of urban America.

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III

In their Exploding Metropolis, the editors of Fortune observe that urban renewal was initially conceived as a new approach to the whole task of urban redevelopment, but that private capital has not been attracted in significant volume and the entire program has therefore been redirected toward rehabilitation, which is less expensive than slum clearance. Urban renewal would seem to have failed as a technique for clearing slums on any significant scale. Yet wholesale slum clearance remains a xsnecessary objective of any humane and comprehensive approach to city redevelopment.

Slum clearance is impossible unless new homes are available for the tenants who are displaced before demolition occurs. In relocation, administrative good will just cannot take the place of vacant apartments. When these do not exist, demolition shifts slums rather than clearing them; for site tenants spill over into adjoining neighborhoods and by overcrowding start them, too, on the downhill road to “transition” and blight. The National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials puts it bluntly: “the heart of a relocation program is an adequate housing supply.” The editors of Fortune echo: “new housing is the sine qua non of any successful slum program.”

When vacant apartments for relocation are not available, those in charge are obliged to wink at the quality of relocation housing. In Title I projects, it is a legal requirement that the new dwellings be “decent, safe and sanitary.” Yet in relocation from Title I sites in New York City before 1959, city inspectors did not check a new apartment’s adequacy until after the relocated family had moved in; and it is still the case that families are relocated to neighborhoods marked as blighted and suitable for clearance on the Master Plan map of the City Planning Commission.

Title I law also requires that site tenants be relocated to apartments “within their means.” This, too, the absolute shortage of housing of many cities—and of low-rent housing in particular—makes impossible. Half of the families throughout the United States now living in slums have gross incomes under $4,000 a year. Planners, themselves drawing middle-class incomes, are often insensitive to what moving involves for a family living on seventy-five dollars a week. Public stipends for moving expenses, when available (as they are not for tenants displaced from sites for non-subsidized luxury housing) are inadequate; relocation housing almost invariably involves higher rents than the tenants formerly paid; the journey to work usually becomes longer and may require an extra fare; complex informal arrangements for child care may no longer be available and make a cash substitute obligatory. Moreover, more than one move may be forced on a family within a matter of months. The Philadelphia planner Aaron Levine tells that “When the first redevelopment project was completed in 1952 some of the families who had to be relocated have been encountered as many as four times as we moved in redevelopment from block to block.” And money cannot measure the effect of frequent, unsought uprootings from a familiar school and neighborhood environment on family morale and especially on children.

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Income is only one barrier in successful relocation. Membership in a minority group is another. The President’s Commission on Civil Rights estimated in 1953 and again in 1958 that more than 50 per cent of site tenants were non-white. Two simple facts are relevant here. In 1950, 70 per cent of the non-white families in the U. S. lived in substandard dwellings; of the private dwelling units constructed between 1935 and 1950, one per cent went to non-whites.

Mr. Harrington stated—and it is worth emphasizing—that no one really knows what happens to relocated site tenants because the percentage of “self-relocated” tenants is always so large. These are the tenants who on project reports are marked “refused to cooperate,” “disappeared,” or “moved—address unknown.” In view of the income and discrimination barriers, chances are good that they have moved on to another slum.

Thus it is not enough that there be available for relocation a number of apartments equal to those demolished. Relocation housing must also be: (a) low-rent, and (b) available to minority groups. There is only one kind of housing which consistently meets both these specifications, and that is housing built by the government. Only public housing can make possible the relocation which can make possible slum clearance.

This simple fact is repeatedly lost sight of in discussions of relocation. True, public housing is not the whole answer. Another essential is a central relocation agency to supervise all kinds of public and private relocation and make sure that moving expenses and benefits are adequate. Important also is sufficient staff to make repeated personal contacts with displaced families and help with the infinite problems which can attend such a forced move. Yet in the absence of a public housing program very nearly equal in volume to the volume of slum clearance, relocation must remain chaotic and cruel.

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The small businessman on a slum clearance site today sometimes suffers even more than the site tenant. He receives nominal sums for his fixtures and moving expenses. He gets nothing at all for good will, which may comprise not only a familiar clientele but the provision of specialized commodities for a distinct cultural group. Even more, the law makes no provision for the fact that a slum building’s low rent may have made his business possible. Without a subsidy to help with the inevitable higher rent in new premises, without recompense for good will, the small site businessman is often literally forced onto relief. His plight is increased by the fact that stores are not allowed in public housing projects. Ground-floor stores and shopping centers are a common feature of private housing developments; they should become standard in public projects too. Besides helping the businessman, such stores would make the bare, cavernous walks of our housing projects more pleasant and more safe. Jane Jacobs of Architectural Forum has repeatedly pointed out that the small storekeeper looking out until late at night around his shop is an unpaid, informal neighborhood policeman.

The most minimal program of slum clearance demands vacant land. Without building on vacant land, cities can rarely supply enough housing of the right kind to meet the relocation needs of an active slum clearance program. Such vacant land need not be at the edges of the city. Many municipalities possess a sizable inventory of small tax-delinquent parcels suitable for “vest-pocket” public housing. Blighted or under-utilized commercial land may also need to be converted to residential use. Thus San Francisco, with its usual good sense, has selected a blighted warehouse area for a major downtown renewal project.

An ideal or maximal program of slum clearance would aim at more than making sure people were not homeless. The difference between the minimal and maximal programs is the difference between trying to make slum clearance hurt as little as possible, and trying to make it a positive social experience for the people involved. The habit has grown of assuming that slum clearance must be socially destructive, up-rooting people and institutions and so weakening the social fabric of the city. What if we interpreted the common need for rebuilding, as some European cities did after the last war, as a precious opportunity to knit closer together the scattered fragments of our urban communities?

Such an approach would, first, make sure to maintain on slum clearance sites the churches and settlement houses which help to create neighborliness out of mere proximity and which exist in the darkest slums; and second, it would contrive the possibility for those site tenants who so desired to remain on the rebuilt site. Each of these steps might be more expensive than conventional bulldozer techniques: the cash cost of construction might be greater if one went around neighborhood focal points rather than through them; or built section by section rather than all at once, to permit relocation within the site. But many planners and social workers are convinced that these initially greater outlays would be more than made up for by lower long-run social costs. Relocation itself would be far less expensive if site tenants could move across the street to a new home. The after-effects of relocation which ultimately manifest themselves in police and welfare budgets would also be minimized.

The advantages of retaining the population of a neighborhood during the redevelopment process are incalculable. If the people on slum clearance sites could stay and live in the new buildings, they could take part in the planning and execution of the project from start to finish, and build on this group experience in entering into the management of the completed project. The intangible social fabric of a neighborhood would not be torn to bits but helped to grow stronger. Here, in effect, is a way to apply the social sensitivity of the rehabilitation-conservation approach to areas where every residential structure must come down.

Idealistic? It would only make real the stated goals of our housing legislation: to foster citizen participation and “help communities help themselves.” Citizen participation cannot be expected from sites where the citizens have all been scattered to the winds and are no longer there to participate.

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IV

Urban renewal is no substitute for slum clearance, and slum clearance requires a vast increase of public housing: this is the gist of the argument up to this point. But public housing, the key to effective urban redevelopment, has become so unpopular that, according to the editors of Fortune, the private real estate interests no longer bother to attack it. Federal appropriations for public housing have all but ceased. Municipalities commonly fail to build even the units for which funds have been allotted. Professional opinion, as illustrated by Professor Ernest Fisher’s 1960 report to the FHHFA on “Housing Programs and Policies,” begins to hint broadly at substituting public-financed rehabilitation for new public housing construction.

It is hardly too much to say that a noble experiment is dead. The buildings for which so many labored for so long have been adjudged to bear a bitter fruit.

In my view this conclusion is both suicidal for the possibility of comprehensive urban redevelopment—as the discussion of slum clearance attempted to show—and altogether premature.

What is wrong with the projects? In a word, they have not fundamentally altered the social pathology of the slums. A committee from New York City’s Harlem, which probably has had more public housing for a longer time than any other area in the United States, asks these questions:

Why hasn’t the immense concentration of housing projects in East Harlem resulted in significant social gains? Why, in fact, do stores go broke and good housing units go to seed in areas adjacent to projects? Why, with passing time, do the projects themselves show evidence of ever greater social weakness until the older projects become appalling case studies, not of community growth, but of community disintegration?

Elizabeth Wood, planner, social worker, former project manager, and long-time advocate of public housing, regretfully corroborates the decline in project morale. She describes the plight of the project manager in trying to cope with it:

Every good manager knows that when a project goes sour, he can never hire enough janitors or guards to police all the little boys committing nuisances in corners or making warfare on windows with BB guns; or to keep up with the not so little boys and girls hanging around the hallways, writing dirty words on the wall; or the older boys and girls stealing up to the roof at night; or the gangs on a schedule of stealing expensive door checks.

He knows that what really makes or breaks a project is what the women say to one another as they sit on the benches with their babies; what they talk about in the laundermat; what they call out to the children digging holes in the grass; what they say when they see the dirty words on the walls.

The tragedy in terms of the public housing community is that no longer can managers count on leadership from the tenants or from tenant-directed activities for the community good. Managers cannot count on that great number of unidentifiable pressures for good behavior which exist when people are proud to live in their homes and where they feel free to work for the fulfillment of their ambitions.

Many explanations have been advanced as to why projects “go sour.” Mr. Harrington noted several of these, one being that the early housing reformers were prone to blame all social ills on dirt and overcrowding. They tended to believe that simply putting a new physical shell around the lives of the poor would cure, for example, juvenile delinquency; they overlooked the continuing effect of low income and race discrimination in limiting the alternatives from which slum children, even those who live in public housing projects, can choose.

A second explanation points to the federal requirement compelling tenants to leave the projects when their income rises appreciably; in 1957 only 2 per cent of all the families in low-rent public housing projects had incomes of $4,500 or more. The underlying concept of this regulation regarding incomes is that the project should serve as a kind of family welfare shelter where the erstwhile slum family “gets on its feet” before moving on to an assumed-to-be-more-desirable suburban home. Thus the project is prevented from becoming a healthy and normal neighborhood of mixed incomes.

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Both these explanations appear to be valid as far as they go. Yet the fact is that the early housing projects, despite the high expectations of their sponsors and despite the crippling income limit, were often “green communities” which made the reformers’ dreams come true. During the 1930’s, project managers encouraged tenant maintenance of properly, and tenant organization to present and negotiate grievances. Committees flourished to deal with child care, hobbies, social events. In the project, wrote Nathan Straus in 1944, “neighborliness is awakened and civic pride grows apace.” Two historians of the Public Works Administration’s experience with projects (Michael Straus and Talbot Weg) said still more emphatically that the “very nature of the large-scale housing project fosters natural group action, which in turn leads to community strength. In such projects . . . civic interest is effectively aroused and easily maintained.” And again:

The physical environment induces a neighborliness like that of a small village. Whereas, in recent years, life in our cities has grown increasingly impersonal, the large scale housing project turns the tide in the other direction. . . . In these projects, democracy survives. Tenants, in their previous homes, were individuals whose voices were drowned in the noisy turmoil of cities which had long ago lost the spirit of community. Only the well-to-do were able to make their desires known and to maintain their identity. In these projects the collective voice of John Smith and Mary Brown is a potent factor in the city life. . . . In the large scale housing project . . . democracy is being reborn.

Evidently, whatever went wrong with the morale of public housing projects happened after World War II. Elizabeth Wood and others, noting the change, now blame it on a “small hard core” of multi-problem families too casually accepted as project tenants. Usually on relief, often with only one parent, these are the families which have inwardly given up the task of coping with modern urban life. Miss Wood recommends a saturation of social work services for them: the adding, as one social worker put it to me, of a “soul” to the project’s “brick and mortar.”

However well-intentioned, this explanation is a variant of the old, old chestnut that people make the slums. Nathan Straus called it one of the “seven myths of public housing.” And it seems odd that dependent, multi-problem families should pose more of a problem now than in the lean years of the depression when so many more persons were on relief. Perhaps the answer lies elsewhere. I think it lies in the fact that the typical tenant who enters a low-income public housing project has been unwillingly displaced from a site for middle-income housing. As under the Eisenhower administration, emphasis has shifted away from publicly- toward privately-constructed housing, public housing has come to be used as a receptacle for tenants relocated by other programs, not those who have voluntarily sought a change in housing. They are unwilling, resentful, gathered from the four winds, herded into projects and then expected—in Miss Wood’s words—to be proud of their new homes and to feel free to work toward the fulfillment of their ambitions.

The “hard core family” hypothesis is advanced to explain not only the decline in project morale but also the undeniable fact that today many low-income slum-dwelling families do not want to live in public housing. The project has not taken hold of the public imagination as a desirable place to live. Its population, like the population of the slum it replaced, is a residual population: a population of people who cannot go elsewhere. This is perhaps the most cogent reason why projects initially integrated fail to stay that way. The minority-group families stay on because they are the ones who have nowhere else to go.

The “hard core” families stay on for the same reason. But their presence far from explains the current unpopularity of project life among potential project tenants. To understand this, one has to go back to the conception—implicit in public housing legislation—that public housing is second best, that for normal families it is a temporary, charitable makeshift rather than an attractive, permanent home.

Physically, public housing has been minimal housing. Closets without doors are only the most familiar symbol of the successful effort to keep public housing from competing with private housing for the rent dollar of the average American family. Projects have been built as mere collections of dwellings, with little or no provision for playgrounds, meeting rooms, small stores, and other informal social centers.

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This bareness—Jane Jacobs has compared it to a well-kept cemetery—reflects a lack of imagination as well as a lack of funds. Why make lawns to give a sense of suburban spaciousness and then chain them off to keep them from being trampled into dirt? Why put mothers who cannot afford to hire nurses in high-risers which prevent an informal supervision of childrens’ outdoor play? Why conceive projects as self-sufficient, inward-turned super-blocks, with peripheral streets acting as barriers rather than meeting places? Why not, instead, build community facilities along the peripheral streets to be shared by the project and the surrounding neighborhood? (At present, the expansion of community facilities such as schools is notoriously un-coordinated with project construction.) Indeed, as Mr. Harrington suggests, why not scatter vest-pocket public projects throughout a redevelopment site, interspersed with differently financed buildings and housing different income groups?

Some very small changes in federal regulations regarding the physical aspects of public housing projects could make possible some very big changes in their attractiveness. New ideas are already on the drawing board. The Harlem committee earlier mentioned has produced a revolutionary site plan which would house in four-and-a-half story walkups as dense a project population as contained in the conventional skyscrapers. In this plan, open corridors and small courts combine with low buildings, making possible both supervision of childrens’ play and an easy sociability. The designers contend that at present projects

are designed for a kind of sophisticated family individualism which is beyond the range of social opportunities and the financial resources of their tenants, and which is the opposite of the highly communal and cooperative society that exists among families in the old slums. Moreover, the projects exclude the constant, informal social controls needed by every society including that of the poor; they fail to observe the vital difference between privacy and isolation; they sacrifice the constant human contacts which provided not only the controls, but also the avenues to opportunity in the old slum. Only the most artificial, institutional, and impersonal substitutes have been supplied instead.

But the deepest reason for the public rejection of public housing lies not in its physical inadequacies—after all, these pale beside those of the slums—but in the spirit of its administration. The complex requirements for admission, which in some cities extend to inspection of the applicant’s housekeeping ability; the reporting of changes in income and the snooping into bank accounts; the manager’s ability to walk into any project apartment at any time; the tenant’s inability to do the smallest remodelling of his apartment without official permission: these make the project tenant feel he is treated like a child. Living in a housing project has become one more badge of inferior low-income status, along with the drab waitingroom of the public clinic, the overcrowded “shift” at the local public school.

The morale of public housing projects and the popular attitude toward them are not likely to change until low-income families come to know that urban renewal is for them, too. Tenants outside projects must feel that urban redevelopment is something they help to shape; tenants inside projects must be able to regard project management as “we” and not “they.” Perhaps our managers could learn from the Yugoslavs, who permit project tenants to allocate as they wish a portion of the project’s income from rent to social services. So long as project tenants feel buffeted about by a distant bureaucracy, so long will they think of government in the sense of an Italian proverb quoted to me by a Lower East Side housewife: “a fish starts to stink at the head first;” and will treat their government-built and government-managed homes accordingly. So long as planners talk about “citizen participation” but in fact consult only the neighborhood banker, newspaper editor, and politician, so long will the displaced site tenant react in the words of a Puerto Rican friend of mine: “You are standing on my foot and telling me to be reasonable” ; and carry this attitude into the public project where he is relocated. No quantity of the “social work component,” no increase of project police, can be a substitute for a basic regard of the public housing tenant as a responsible citizen whose income happens to be low.

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Despite the requirement of federal housing law that individual projects be integral parts of a “workable plan” for the city as a whole, projects are rarely considered to be part of anything more than a neighborhood. It has become fashionable” ; and carry this attitude into the pub-like the moose head on a sportsman’s wall, they actually function as little else than symbols of civic virtue. Of late even verbal obeisance to master planning has been qualified. Norman Mason, the top federal housing administrator, testified to a Congressional committee in 1960 that he opposed an annual estimate of national housing goals as too much like socialism. J. Anthony Panuch in his recent report to New York City wrote with heavy sarcasm that “One may prefer the ivory tower of ‘master planning’ to the arena of purposive, driving action. But New York’s dedevelopment effort cannot wait for Utopian blueprints.”

Nonetheless the need for master planning remains. So far-from-radical a group as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has stated that “the piecemeal approach to date is inadequate and self-defeating.” Perhaps the best example of the need for master planning is our transportation problem. Some day the 20th-century suburban American’s journey to work will be seen as an anthropological curiosity. Just as bizarre is the transportation “planning” which goes through the motions of de-congesting traffic while permitting unrestricted construction of high-rise office buildings in the heart o£ the city. The planner Albeit Mayer has compared such “planning” to building higher and higher levees on the Mississippi while refusing to regulate the flow of water.

Another unplanned muddle is the barbecue in suburban land use. The endless, homogeneous suburb is a parody of unplanned development: each individual desperately seeking his own backyard haven while the thousands around him doing the same destroy the very spaciousness and isolation for which he left the city. Seemingly no unit of metropolitan government considers itself responsible to preserve woodland and park areas for the recreation of suburb and central city alike. Likewise the migration of industry from the central city is viewed by both city and suburb from parochial points of view, and no one considers what makes sense for the metropolitan region as a whole. Thus Boston, which built an encircling highway to ease traffic congestion, was dismayed when the new road attracted $8,000,000 of city industry.

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Those who fear the destruction of freedom by bureaucratic central planning should take a hard second look at the eminently bureaucratic character of our present half-private, half-public arrangements. Would outright federal control be more tedious, more expensive, or more out of the public eye than the year-devouring shuttlecock between half a dozen bureaucacies now required for approval of an urban renewal project? Again, what more bureaucratic arrangement can be imagined than the relocation process in, say, New York City, where at least three public agencies carry out their own relocation programs (each with a different schedule of fees), while relocation from Title I sites is done by a private relocation company supervised by a private sponsor supervised by the city Department of Real Estate supervised by the regional office of the FHHFA? People who talk about spontaneous or grass-roots redevelopment are usually people with sufficient means to make substantial real estate investments. A good zoning ordinance may be all the help they need to change the face of their neighborhoods. But for the poor the greatest possibility of freedom lies in strong central public control.

Perhaps it would clarify the debate on planning if that word were dropped entirely, and if one asked instead whether the time has come to regard land and housing in our cities as public utilities. Education, fire and police protection, water and sewage systems, transportation have all come to be regarded as services which the people should supply through their government to themselves. The creation of public agencies for each of them always evoked cries of “socialism,” just as public housing and master planning do today. What conclusions should be drawn from the dictum of Professor Fisher, in his review of federal housing policies, that “the public interest is paramount to any private property rights”? Does this mean that the time has gone by when children of low-income families should have less space and light to grow up in than the children of the well-to-do? Does it mean that government should intervene to protect site tenants even in projects which receive no public subsidy? Does it mean that public housing, like TVA power, should exemplify the newest and best methods, materials and designs, and so serve as a yardstick to the building industry as a whole? Does it mean that vacant suburban land should become a public land reservoir requiring specific public permission before it is put to any new use?

I can only say that could I vote in a referendum on these questions, I would mark my ballot “Yes.” And if “Yes” is the answer to any or all of them, then master planning—which simply means the public taking charge—is the inevitable next step.

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V

Metropolitan problems are always said to be very complex. A good share of the complexity arises not from the problems themselves but from the perennial public reluctance to allot sufficient funds, and from an over-tenderness toward private interests when they conflict with the public good. If you insist on tying a foot and a hand behind your back, of course it will be hard to walk. But the essentials of an effective program for urban redevelopment can be written on the back of a postcard. They are:

1. We must make up our minds to spend as much money on urban renewal as we now do on defense. This means sums on the order of 10 per cent of the national income.
2. We must build something like 1,000,000 units of public housing every year.
3. We must put as much energy into enlisting the cooperation of ordinary citizens as we now put into enlisting the cooperation of private investors.
4. We must begin to regard metropolitan land as the heritage of all the people, to be used by private individuals at the discretion of the public. Given a real commitment to these principles, technical solutions in particular cases would follow without great difficulty.

These proposals are little more than common sense. For a society struggling to control nuclear fission and space satellites, they should be routine housekeeping matters. It is truly a case of poverty in the midst of plenty. Were we to devote to our cities sums as large as we now spend on national defense, the seemingly insoluble slum problem could be licked almost overnight. Less than 5 per cent of the annual defense budget could re-house every family on New York’s Lower East Side in one year. The total cost (private as well as public) of the 2,000,000 new dwelling units which America needs yearly would be less than what government alone now spends on defense. The American Committee to Improve Our Neighborhoods has estimated that slums could be wiped out in ten years by the expenditure of $100,000,000,000, a sum now spent every two years on defense. The federal share of the two trillion dollars which urban renewal in all its aspects has been estimated (by Dean Reginald Isaacs of the Harvard School of Design) to require by 1970 would be no greater than probable defense outlays in the same decade. As of today, however, less than one per cent of the federal budget goes to housing programs, and the nation spends roughly twenty-five times as much money on building highways as on urban renewal.

What is lacking is not resources, but desire, and the power to make desire into reality. Only the massive pressure of common citizens can bring an end to the shame of our cities; and so make possible an affirmative answer to T. S. Eliot’s question :

When the Stranger says: “What is the
    meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because
    you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell
    together
To make money from each other”? or
“This is a community”?

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