Help for the Cities

In his Great Society speech at the University of Michigan last May, President Johnson stressed the problems of U.S. cities, said that "it is harder and harder to live the good life of American cities today," warned that "our society will never be great until our cities are great." Last week the President set forth his plans for reviving the cities in a special message to Congress.

"The problems of the city are problems of housing and education," Johnson wrote. "They involve increasing employment and ending poverty. They call for beauty and nature, recreation, and an end to racial discrimination. They are, in large measure, the problems of American society itself."

By 2000 A.D. Outlining the task ahead. Johnson said that "in the remain der of this century, in less than 40 years, urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build in our cities as much as all that we have built since the first colonist arrived on these shores. It is as if we had 40 years to rebuild the entire urban U.S." Compounding the burden, he explained, is the present distressed state of U.S. cities: over 5,000,000 run-down or deteriorating homes, pockets of deCay in the heart of most cities, and suburban crawl creeping into the countryside at a rate of 1,000,000 acres a year.

Johnson proposed a Cabinet-level Department of Housing and Urban Development, which would serve as "a focal point for thought and innovation and imagination about the problems of our cities." The new department would absorb the present Housing and Home Finance Agency, help cities draw up metropolitan-area plans for orderly growth, train local planners, administer federal grants to states and cities for planning studies, and support research into new building techniques to reduce overall construction costs.

President Kennedy proposed a similar department in 1961 but announced that he would name a Negro to head it; he thereby antagonized many members of Congress, and the House voted the plan down. President Johnson may very well appoint a Negro--Federal Housing Administrator Robert C. Weaver--but he is not particularly advertising the fact, and Congress seems certain to approve the plan.

$750 Million by 1968. To bring order to the crazy quilt of building codes, zoning restrictions and tax policies that have long made the U.S. housing industry a nightmare, Johnson suggested a commission to consider uniform standards. He urged matching federal grants for the construction of city water and sewerage systems, direct financial aid for cities trying to acquire land for future development, special grants to cities for landscaping, tree planting, park improvement "and other measures to bring beauty and nature to the city dweller." He also asked for continuation of the public-housing program, at the rate of 35,000 new units a year, and an increase in the federal outlay for urban renewal to $750 million annually by 1968, with an accompanying shift in emphasis from business and industrial districts to residential neighborhoods.

Much of the President's message was devoted to housing for low-income (up to $3,000) families. He sought authority to use urban-renewal and public-housing funds to rehabilitate existing housing, which would then be made available to such families. He also requested permission to use urban-renewal funds to help low-income homeowners repair their homes.

$8,000 a Year. By far the most controversial part of the President's program was a plan to provide direct subsidies, for rent or mortgage payments, for some 500,000 city families with incomes as high as $8,000 a year. Initially, the aid would be limited to families displaced by Government projects such as urban renewal and highway construction, to those presently in substandard housing, to the impoverished elderly, and to displaced or ill-housed families capable of increasing their income in the future. In general, the formula would call for such families to pay 20% of their income for housing--and the Government would make up any necessary difference. Critics might wonder if an $8,000-a-year family really ought to be on a dole, but the President insisted that this section might "prove the most effective instrument of our new housing policy."

In all, the Johnson program would call for expenditure and loans of some $6 billion over the next four years.

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