CITIES AND SUBURBS: MORE AND MORE, THE SAME PROBLEMS

There's a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one,

And they're all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all look just the same.

LAST week the words that Malvina L Reynolds used in her celebrated 1964 folk song* to describe her view of the standardized world of suburbia's "little boxes on the hillside" seemed to assume new relevance. Two reports commissioned by the Federal Government--one on urban and the other on suburban problems--indicated that suburbia is hardly a refuge for those seeking escape from the blight of U.S. cities. The problems that have all but consumed many urban areas--the crime waves, the racial ghettos, the inadequate schools, the intermittent near collapse of essential services and the harshness of life--have been effectively exported to the suburbs. The troubles besetting cities and suburbs begin to look alike.

The two "are going to rise or fall together," says Walter Rybeck, associate director of the two-year urban problems study. The project's head: Paul Douglas, former Democratic Senator from Illinois. The 325,000-word report finds that the number of Americans below the poverty level ($3,000 annual income for an urban family of four) fell from 39 million to 26 million between 1958 and 1966. Even so, it notes, the gaps in U.S. society continued to grow. "The central cities increasingly are becoming white-collar employment centers," the report says, "while the suburbs are becoming the job-employment areas for new blue-collar workers."

As middle-class whites continue their exodus to the suburbs, they are more and more accompanied by lower-income whites and nonwhites who are also fleeing the cities--and bringing all their problems with them. But the black move to suburbia is much slower. Though the number of blacks living in the suburbs is expected to grow from 2.8 million in 1960 to 6.8 million in 1985, the white suburban population will grow from 52 million to 106 million. Already the suburbs lead the cities in population, 66 million to 59 million.

The central cities may lose 2.5 million white residents by 1985, dropping to 45.4 million, while the nonwhite population may nearly double to 20.1 million. The report somberly points out that such a concentration of Negroes could result in "a further polarization of blacks and whites, and the flight of more and more businesses, and therefore jobs, from the city. The suicidal consequences that such a possibility suggests are not pleasant to contemplate."

If the cities are ever to become strong enough to reverse this trend toward polarization and cope with their other difficulties, the Douglas report argues, overlapping local governments must be simplified and streamlined. There is now an average of 90 separate units of government for each urban area in the U.S. with more than 50,000 people; metropolitan Chicago has a paralyzing total of 1,113. Building codes and zoning regulations are confusing, often contradictory. Adequate housing is still a chimera for most urban low-income families (and increasingly so for the middle class as well).

The heart of the matter is the financial crisis of local government. As middle-class taxpayers leave the central city for the suburbs, revenue goes down while public-service costs go up because most of those who remain are poor. Welfare costs in New York City, for example, now consume $1.5 billion annually, the largest item in the city's $5-billion-plus budget. Welfare costs in suburbia are increasing at an even greater rate than those in the central cities.

Among 150 specific recommendations in the Douglas report, the biggest and costliest is a revenue-sharing plan that would turn back to state and local governments 2% of federal revenues, some $6 billion a year. Says the report: "The federal tax system, with all its faults, is more progressive and equitable than the systems currently used by the state and local governments."

The President's Task Force on Suburban Problems made a separate but parallel report, with the aid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In suburbia, it says, "the dullness of existence is acutely felt by many older suburbanites and is often tragically reflected in the behavior of their children. Suburban vandalism, drug offenses and larceny by the young are on the rise." The report makes clear that it is no longer justified, if it ever was, to think of suburbia only as a split-level heaven with neat picket fences. In fact, the term suburbia has become too broad; it covers Levittown as well as Greenwich, and some of the wealthiest communities have slummy enclaves next to the commuter-train tracks. According to 1960 figures, Pittsburgh's suburbs had more substandard dwellings than the central city, and poor families around Los Angeles outnumbered those in the city's heart. With an astonishing 40% of the nation's poor now living in suburbs, crime and pollution problems are growing at the same rate there as in the central cities. Many suburbanites are without adequate sewers, police protection, garbage disposal and public transportation.

The report's recommendations: construction of some 6,000,000 housing units for lower-income families moved from the inner city; experimental Government-subsidized insurance for home owners against loss in property values caused by integration; establishment of an urban-development bank to aid cities and suburbs, much as the World Bank finances growth in underdeveloped nations overseas.

"The suburbs do not stand alone," says the report. "They are an integral part of the great metropolitan areas where two out of three Americans already live. Help to the troubled central city and the suburb must move in parallel. Without the improvement of both, all will suffer."

An earlier presidential task, force, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, concluded that the U.S. was increasingly becoming two nations, one white and the other black. Douglas also sees a growing bifurcation, but it is primarily an economic rather than a racial one. There is, he says, "a sickness in American society that is dividing the nation into two classes, the poor and the not-poor. The division is especially sharp between the whites and the blacks. It may tear our country to pieces." To prevent this from happening, Richard Nixon has promised to create a Council on Urban Affairs with the same high White House priorities that only the National Security Council now commands. But it remains to be seen whether the council will wield sufficient power--or control sufficient funds--to make an impact on the problems of urbs and suburbs. The omens are not promising, particularly in the area of increased cooperation between the two in seeking improvement. A case in point: for more than a year, the National Commission on Urban Problems and the Task Force on Suburban Problems covered ground that was often identical; yet neither seemed to know what the other was doing.

* Inspired by the view of Daly City from San Francisco's Skyline Boulevard.

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