Answer to Decay

The No. 1 economic problem of many U.S. cities is downtown rot. As middle-and upper-income families move to the suburbs, property values decline. Businessmen find themselves shouldering an increasing share of taxes while the shoppers they lost throng suburban shopping centers. Often the attempted remedy, subsidized public housing, turns out to be little better than the disease: the untaxed projects house people on relief.

Planners have long known that a far better answer to downtown blight is to attract higher-income families back to town. Many cities have pondered how to do this, and some have tried. In one of the best efforts so far, Detroit last week opened the first unit of Lafayette Plaisance University City, an all privately financed and operated $30 million development of 1,029 rental and 938 cooperative apartments in a onetime slum area. When completed. University City, only half a mile from the heart of downtown Detroit, will occupy a 55-acre park with six 22-story glass-and-aluminum tower buildings and several score one-and two-story buildings nestled among the trees.

High Objectives. Planned without through streets, the development includes a swimming pool, ice-skating rink and private clubhouse for residents, a four-acre shopping center, barber and beauty shops. Rental apartments start at $85 a month (a few de luxe penthouse apartments will rent for up to $235), while a three-bedroom cooperative will sell for $23,850, with $5,240 down, $163 a month for principal, interest, insurance, taxes, janitor service and heat. Of this $163 payment $94.54 is taxdeductible.

The project was launched in 1945, when local merchants pressed the city to do something drastic for the slum area. It took until 1952 for the city to condemn the land and put it up for sale, but no builders would buy, because the city's plans for the project seemed too high-class for the moderate rents it wanted to charge. Finally, in 1954, a group of citizens, ranging from Henry Ford to the U.A.W.'s Walter Reuther, obtained a 90-day option. With James W. Bell, Detroit City Planner, as coordinator, the group raised $450,000 in loans, set itself a high goal: no regimentation, no restrictions, the most advanced technology and design ("We must be mindful that we are building for 50 to 100 years"), yet a range of prices that would permit middle-income families to rent or buy.

High Return. Accepting the challenge, young (41) Detroit Builder Herbert S. Greenwald and famed German-born Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe turned out a design that won architects' praise, bank loans, FHA mortgage guarantees. As fast as they complete one building unit, they pay the city an average of $125,000 for the land. The city then buys more slum land for urban renewal. Not only merchants will profit from the redevelopment; city real-estate tax collections from the area will jump 1,000%.

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