Burning up the Snowbelt

A revealing report favors more migration to the South and West

"Ridiculous!" scoffed Jake Godbold, mayor of Jacksonville. "Idiocy!" exclaimed Robert McCabe, president of Detroit Renaissance, the city's urban revitalization organization. For once, the contentious spokesmen for the Snowbelt and the Sunbelt were agreed on something: they were outraged by the draft of a presidential report on urban policy that was leaked to the press last week in an obvious attempt to discredit it. Probably the most controversial of a package of proposals to be presented to President Carter on Jan. 16 by the President's Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties, the report calls the decline of the Snowbelt cities inevitable and urges the Government to assist the urban poor to migrate to the Sunbelt, where jobs are available. Says the analysis: "Contrary to popular wisdom, cities are not permanent."

Such provocative prose is not usually found in blue-ribbon commission reports, which are generally filed away and forgotten. But this commission, set up by Carter in October 1979 at the recommendation of Retired Time Inc. Editor in Chief Hedley Donovan, intends to have impact. Its chairman, former Columbia University President William McGill, admits that his 50-member group wants to "think the unthinkable." Says McGill: "We forecast for the '80s a very difficult era in which [U.S.] resources will not be equal to demands. If there is anything we have attempted to do, it is to force the people who establish policy to make hard decisions on priorities. We are suggesting things typically not done because of short-term political perspectives. So, of course, parts of the recommendations are bound to yield political uproar."

The draft on urban policy states, essentially, that the traditional big Northern city has outlived its usefulness. Contemporary trends in the economy have rendered it largely obsolete. Because of revolutionary changes in production and communications, there is no need for industries to huddle together in a single congested setting. They have dispersed to the suburbs and the Sunbelt, leaving behind a much altered and diminished city.

The Snowbelt city can best maintain its viability, says the report, by specializing in service functions, which are increasingly dependent on better-educated employees. Thus a traditional means of upward mobility for the poor has been blocked. The report states that it is self-defeating to try to reindustrialize the central cities; too much federal aid is given in a vain effort to sustain them, and not enough is given directly to the poor. According to the report, the poor should be helped by a guaranteed minimum income, by job training and by assistance in migrating to areas where work is available. Instead of trying to bring jobs to people, the Government should take people to jobs. The report contends that the Government should support the "historical role of migration as the dominant means of linking people to opportunity."

Fearful of losing federal dollars for their hard-pressed communities, Northern mayors charged that the report was yet another example of federal bias against their region. It is their citizens' taxes, they argued, that helped build the military installations and technological institutions that have contributed to the boom in the Sunbelt. Complained McCabe: "It's as if we should be Arabs and fold up our tents to move South." Protested Cleveland Mayor George Voinovich: "We're dealing with human beings, not checkers."

Meanwhile, Sunbelt residents envisioned a second Yankee march through the South: hordes of the poor descending from the slums of the North. Fumed Jake Godbold: "The report seems to be saying, 'Let's pack them all up in buses and ship them down to the Sunbelt like refugees.' "

Amid the catcalls, there were also some cheers for a report willing to break fresh ground in such blunt fashion. Said George Sternlieb, director of urban policy research at Rutgers University: "The proposal says that cities have ended up as sandboxes for the poor. It faces up to the reality of migration of jobs and people and says Government should help those who can't make the shift on their own. A new land of opportunity has opened up, and we should give poor people a chance to share in this opportunity." The report is only a draft, but already a hurricane seems to be brewing. qed

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