October 4, 1967
Page 27599
HUD UNDER SECRETARY ROBERT WOOD'S
"REDISCOVERY OF THE AMERICAN CITY"
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, Under Secretary Robert Wood, of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, recently delivered one of the most balanced and most cogent statements on the American city that I have ever read. Entitled "The Rediscovery of the American City," this fine speech is one of constructive criticism and cautious optimism. At a time when urban critics abound, it is particularly refreshing to find these qualities in an advocate of the cities. Mr. Wood's thesis is that, contrary to general impressions and current controversies about our urban ills, the potential for building great new cities in the United States has never been brighter.
Mr. President, I commend Mr. Wood for his excellent statement, and I recommend it to the Senate. I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE REDISCOVERY OF THE AMERICAN CITY
(Address by Robert C. Wood, Under Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, MIT Alumni Seminar, 1987, Cambridge, Mass., September 8, 1967)
Good evening. It has been twenty months since my sabbatical year was suddenly transformed from one of political speculation to political experimentation – and extended somewhat in duration. But three times since then one group or another on this lively, diverse and changing campus has welcomed me home again. I appreciate every opportunity.
Early in my Washington days, I explored with undergraduates the new career challenges urban affairs offers young scientists and engineers.
Later on, I talked with faculty friends as they took up Jim Killian's and Howard Johnson's charge to bring the resources of this great university to bear on urban problems in a major new commitment. And I salute the program's first great accomplishment, persuading one of the country's great urban leaders, John Collins, to join MIT's ranks.
Tonight, I meet with this distinguished group of alumni and alumnae – hoping to help make clear how your fortunes and interests are intertwined with the American urban community and to encourage the use of your talents and energies in its behalf.
From each visit to MIT I take more than I give. There are older universities in this nation and some that profess a more cosmopolitan style. But none can claim to be in closer touch with those distinctive features of the American character and culture that have generated this nation's uniquely successful development:
A reliance on reason in place of emotion or illusion as a means to solve problems both human and material;
An emphasis on productivity, on action, on work, on results – not talk – as the measure of competence;
An insistence on quality in the application of reason and the execution of tasks, so that the mark of the professional stamps the men and women of MIT from their freshman year onward.
It is worth recalling these characteristics. They underlie the Institute's reputation. They are also qualities sorely needed in our present struggle to build cities that reflect the best of America's aspirations.
For, since the time I accepted Bob Bishop's invitation to join this Seminar today, we have passed through a series of calamitous events in our cities. In President Johnson's words, "We have been through a time no nation should endure." Since last May, storms of urban discontent have broken over Cincinnati and Tampa, over Newark and Detroit, here over Boston – indeed over more than a score of American cities.
This is the fourth consecutive year of urban violence and the intensity is increasing.
These outbreaks were not unexpected. Nor were they, to the professional observer, inexplicable. But they have produced the torrent of commentary and explanation that now swirls around us and the sense of urgency and concern with our urban civilization that was lacking in earlier years.
All of us in the urban business welcome every indication of the public's sense of heightened urgency and broader concern. However, the solemn predictions of disaster, and the panicky search for panaceas is another – and disturbing – matter.
Urban problems we have aplenty – an inventory of ills assembled over years of indifference and inattention. Yet the potential for city-building in the United States – grand in scale and fine in quality – has never been greater.
Indeed, my central theme is that we are in fact further along in understanding the urban system, developing the capabilities to direct it, and deciding in what direction it should go than most Americans. appreciate – or, given the decades of neglect, than we probably deserve.
This thesis runs contrary, of course, to the cloudburst of criticism that now falls on our city policies. The urban Wailing Wall is lined today with eloquent communicators urging us in this direction or that. Some of these are old colleagues who only a few short years ago wrote learned treatises entitled "There is no Urban Problem" or "Cities are Better Than Ever" Others are the experts who called for the abolition of the automobile as a practical solution to the unspecified ills of suburbia.
Now while these observers come forward with a different set of opinions and assertions, prescriptions and philosophies, let me present some evidence for long-run confidence in Americans as urbanites. The foundation for this optimism is principally that the characteristics of reason and problem solving which give validity to this Institute's approach, are now being applied to urban affairs.
Specifically, we come increasingly to understand the city as a system of many variables in precise and accurate terms, as a complex set of relations of people and space involving many dimensions. This may sound theoretical, but an accurate description of the phenomenon is a prerequisite for guiding it. Until very recently in urban scholarship there was a clear and present danger of committing the single-factor fallacy in diagnosing our cities’ ills. The special error was a tendency to analyze them solely in terms of race.
Second, we are beginning to develop a balanced capacity to design and build better city systems. We are learning that, as in all great national endeavors, manpower, knowhow, talent, and commitment are as important as dollars. We ignore any one component at the peril of the total enterprise. And when we emphasize only one, we invite waste and error.
Third, our national policy states clearly that the task is still city-building in the broadest sense of the word everywhere across this continent. It is not only the ghetto and the ghetto resident that concerns us, but all urban dwellers and all parts of the urban complex. This means we must develop a broader system and direct it toward goals we identify and come to agree upon more clearly.
Let me expand on each of these points. The first reason for some confidence in our urban future is that, despite the spate of Sunday supplement commentary, we are beginning to define and study urban behavior systematically. It has been ten years since Raymond Vernon began directing the New York Metropolitan Study. This was a truly extraordinary nine volume inquiry into the economic functioning of our largest metropolitan area.
This thirty-man professional group effort established a new direction in urban scholarship. It shifted the study of the city away from the emotionally oriented, intuitive, historical and architectural approaches of the lonely-scholar tradition. It moved urban scholarship toward a carefully designed, multi-disciplinary exploration of the varied relationships between the location of jobs and households in urban space.
The economic focus of the New York Study had its limitations. Vernon's policy conclusions were largely comforting and reassuring. They gave heavy emphasis to the fact that relatively speaking city dwellers are better off in material terms than ever before.
With ten years' hindsight, it is possible to identify some critical missing elements of analysis. They include the failure to recognize that there is a psychological identity crisis among the new migrants from rural American circumstances; that we wrote off too quickly the potential role of government in the process of urban development; that we did not take into account the full meaning of changing technology.
But the foundations of urban systems analysis were clearly set by the Study. They still stand in stark contrast to some contemporary diagnoses by latecomers in the field who even now persist in treating multi-variable situations in single cause and effect terms. The Study carefully avoided any simple classification of a special category of urban people, a single source of discontent, or a particular kind of family problem.
As we build on the work of the 1950's we have come to know that urban conditions of stability or instability, squalor or decency, efficiency or inefficiency, beauty or ugliness, are not the function of single factors.
They are not the result of just obsolescence of our housing supply; just the changing requirements of industrial location; just a radical change in the character of the jobs technology makes available; just the vast migration of rural citizens to strange and complex urban circumstances; just discrimination; just the desire of new urban residents to be heard; just hostility between generations; just the increase in sheer numbers.
The urban condition is all of these. The issue is not the intuitive search for the single thesis, be it anomie, or the unemployment rate among central city residents, or the family structure of poor people. The issue is how to balance and take into account, on some weighted basis, the play and pull of all these varied forces.
The Woods Hole Conference which the President's Science Advisor, Donald Hornig, and Secretary Weaver sponsored in the summer of 1966 marked the first official effort to move in this direction. Walter Rosenblith, Chairman of the Faculty at MIT, led some fifty largely "hardware" researchers in the search for simultaneous equations to locate and remove the sources of urban discontent. That summer study began the process that continues today within the Department. Its work was the basis that led the Congress to approve our first meaningful research and development budget.
Where one appreciates that a problem is complex and subtle, not responsive to massive undirected applications of energy or simple professions of good will and heartfelt concern, one is likely to search for a reasonably comprehensive and carefully-developed response. This is the second reason for some optimism for urban America. Our public policy today, proposed by the President, enacted by the Congress, is of that character.
In the tumult of this summer, it is easy to forget – but vital to remember – that urban aid legislation enacted in 1965 and 1966 was designed to remove the causes of the tumult. We have many new efforts underway to provide more housing for those who desperately need it. For the first time we are seeing the leaders of private enterprise focusing their talents and energies on the nation's most pressing urban problem. Here I mean the involvement of private industry in the Rent Supplements Program which makes privately developed housing available to low-income families by helping them to pay the rent. I also mean the new program of leasing private housing which increases our supply of low-cost public housing. I mean the Turnkey process by which private enterprise uses its ingenuity and efficiency to build low-cost housing for sale to local authorities. And I mean the new refinement of Turnkey – we call it Turnkey II – in which private management firms will operate public housing.
The Model Cities Program of the 1966 Act is designed explicitly to bring comprehensiveness to the rebuilding of older portions of older cities. It will provide more housing. But, more than that, the Model Cities Program seeks to restore all aspects of the neighborhood environment – by merging social, physical, public and private programs from many sources into a total attack. For the first time, it introduces quality control into urban rebuilding. For the first time, it offers bonuses to stimulate local innovation, local ingenuity, local solutions of local problems.
Then there is the Metropolitan Development Program of 1966. It would reward, and therefore, encourage collaboration between local governments. Finally, there is the new program to stimulate the development of entirely new communities. This offers the hope of providing fresh alternatives to urban living.
Taken together, these new efforts represent a reasoned strategy. They will expand the freedom of choice for urbanites. For all of us, they will increase our options for where we seek to live, to work, and to invest our leisure time.
These, among others, are programs now on the statute books. Now they are all in the process of first funding.
They already authorize many of the programs proposed in the 30-odd new bills introduced in the Congress in the aftermath of Newark and Detroit.
Their principal limitation at the moment is the size of the investment they call for.
But here, amid calls for billion dollar emergency funds, and a thirty billion dollar housing investment, three comments are in order.
The urban professional recognizes that all three levels of government and the private sector as well must be involved in the process of rebuilding our cities. The Federal investment is not the total investment, as it is in space or national security programs. Those who make facile comparisons of just the gross Federal budget figures are either amateurs in urban affairs, or worse, they are actors engaging in political chicanery.
The urban professional also recognizes that the investment of economic resources alone does not assure effective capacity. Talent and knowledge are equally essential components and our shortages in each are awesome. This year is the first year of urban planning fellowships supported by the Federal government. Our $500,000 authorization this year will support 95 fellowships against an estimated shortage in urban planners of 1,500 to 1,700. This is also the first year of operation for our new Office of Urban Technology and Research in HUD. At a time when Federal Research and Development expenditures were 16 billion, we in HUD have spent only $70 million. Though we have begun the development of a genuine research program, we remain woefully behind other areas of national concern.
Meantime, the popular battle cry of many local officials remains: "Give us the money and we will do the job." This does not ring so true when they cannot show that they have people to spend the money on programs and enterprises that are well designed, carefully tested, and certain to achieve the purposes for which they were intended.
Finally the urban professional recognizes that the true test for an effective urban response is how it helps people. An effective program, at a minimum, involves an appreciation of the needs of the human personality and the human spirit. There is an oftquoted line of Martin Lomasney, the old political boss of Boston, to the effect that "there's got to be in every ward somebody that any bloke can come to and get help. Help, you understand, none of your law and justice, but help."
But, it is no less true today than it was at the opening of this century that "the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty." Help these days is more than more urban renewal funds, more jobs, more housing. Help is all of these and law and justice, too. But, help is first communicating with those who now feel debarred from our society and consequently debased. Second, it is assurance of genuine participation in the process of city rebuilding and neighborhood restoration. Access to those in authority, a share in decision-making – these are the vital components today.
It was this desire to show tangible, visible concern for the current conditions of the poor – and to take at least one specific step to eliminate at least one shameful condition – that led the Administration to propose the so-called Rat Control bill to the Congress. Those members of the House of Representatives who thoughtlessly laughed it out of the chamber, and those outside observers who wrote it off as budgetary trivia, and therefore, of no consequence, underestimate grievously one whole dimension of the urban challenge.
The same drive for action underlies our new program of making Federal surplus property available for new community development. Our first project is building a new town in town for 25,000 people on the site of the National Training School in Washington.
Admittedly, human concerns are the most elusive elements of a truly capable response. Effective programs and activities are evolving slowly from the trial and error, and success and triumph, in our economic opportunity programs. But they are vital components and those who would have us return to New Deal days – of simply providing dole for the poor until their children or their childrens' children struggle forward to a state of middle class blessedness – place more faith in economics and less faith in other social skills than I do.
At rockbottom, I cannot believe that we do not have the ability to engage our urban poor in democracy today nor any prospect of increasing their competence to deal with urban life today.
I cannot accept the proposition that there is no hope for my contemporaries in this urban world who did not have the luck of a good education and equal opportunity for a job.
I cannot believe that the only way to assure eventual economic well-being for all Americans is to relive the miseries, pain, despair and human costs of the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century.
Understanding the pattern of urban development as a complex system, fashioning a capacity with manpower and know-how, as well as money, to respond to the urban challenges, these two processes are well underway. But unless we are prepared to deal with our urban future as well as correct the mistakes of our urban past, they will not be enough. That is, no genuine urban response is sufficient that focuses solely on the American core city or identifies only the urban poor as the beneficiary of our public and private policies.
The truth is that the entire pattern of urban development, from central city to suburb to exurb, is robbing us all of genuine freedom. We are all losing the choice of a clean, healthful and pleasing environment – with pure air and water, a landscape unimpaired by destructive building processes.
We are all losers when we are hit in the pocketbook by excessive and unnecessary costs in the construction of housing and provision of community facilities and services today. Unplanned, unguided, sporadic urban development cheapens our common environment and places prohibitive prices on land and improvements.
As we prepare for the generation of city building that lies just ahead – when we distribute 100 million more Americans across the continent in the next 30 years – these spiraling costs, this waste, and the despoilation are common concerns. They shape a common cause among the urban poor, the urban middle class, the urban rich – Caucasian, Negro, Mexican-American, and Puerto Rican.
There is a final common concern and challenge. How do we build our new urban communities on a geographical and numerical scale unanticipated even twenty years ago and still retain a sense of genuine community? What modem counterparts do we have for barn-raisings, street dancing, Fourth of July celebrations? Where are our new village greens and town commons?
To rediscover community on a larger scale will surely mean making real again the old colonial adage, "you are as good as any man – and better than none." Today, this means, at a minimum, freedom of choice for any family to live anywhere that its home economics makes possible. Open occupancy is a rudimentary necessity of an urban civilization today. Our increasingly urban character only serves to make more compelling than ever the fulfillment of the promises of democracy.
But genuine community building in our urban circumstances will require more positive action. Urban and suburban communities must recognize more explicitly that they have common concerns and common obligations.
We now, for example, at HUD are using some of our assistance grants in mass transportation to carry workers from poor neighborhoods in the central city to factories on the suburban fringe.
This is, we believe, a socially beneficial and well justified policy. It is, however, only a substitute for workers freely following their jobs and taking up residence close to where they work. If that freedom already existed, we could use this investment for other vital transportation needs.
Indeed, if we provide genuine variety in occupations, in income, in race and religion in cities and towns across our metropolitan regions, we accomplish two other things simultaneously, we insure that no single part of the new urban community has to care for the majority of the poor, the old, and the helpless; we provide the excitement of variety and complexity to the human experience in all parts of the community. For our children, free exchanges and encounters in early life can prevent prejudicial confrontations later on.
These are aspirations of community life yet to be realized of course. Major changes in public attitude, in private industrial performance, in labor practices, in governmental patterns of behavior must occur before these aspirations are realized. But they are the objectives to which present, established national policy is committed.
Let me add that one of the most encouraging developments of this summer has been the unmistakable evidence of the community commitment by the private sector. Representatives of business associations, of individual industries, of community enterprises: group after group have been visiting with us in Washington. They all seek effective ways to expand their commitment to our urban communities. They no longer withdraw, retreat, or simply complain about the urban condition. We welcome each and every step in the direction of massive commitment by private enterprise.
Those, then, are the bases for urban optimism. Urban programs fashioned by reason and not illusion, emphasizing practical and tangible results, committed to quality, are now underway.
They will not immediately quiet urban discontent nor instantly make competent citizens of the newest migrants from rural circumstances. They will not magically introduce effective local land development and tax policy nor will they easily eliminate hazards to health and beauty. They never will – without expanded and sustained commitment from the private sector and the academy on a scale never before undertaken. Thus, in the unspoken words of Franklin Roosevelt, "The only limit to their realization will be our doubts of today."
But given such commitment and common effort the America of the 21st Century can offer its urbanites greater hope than the newly urbanized nation entering the 20th Century offered earlier generations.
This nation will have come to peaceful terms with the urban destiny that it now no longer refuses to acknowledge. It will have arrived at the time the President pictured when he said: "Those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world.... let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say, 'It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.’"