March 6, 1973
Page 6593
THE DISAPPEARING CRISIS
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, this morning's lead editorial in the New York Times commented that:
President Nixon's series of messages on the State of the Union is turning into a prolonged flight of fantasy.
I can add little to that judgment, and I ask unanimous consent that this editorial, "The Disappearing Crisis" appear in the RECORD at this point.
There being no objection, the editorial was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE DISAPPEARING CRISIS
President Nixon's series of messages on the State of the Union is turning into a prolonged flight of fantasy. Having proclaimed in a previous installment that environmental problems are well in hand, Mr. Nixon announced on Sunday that his Administration has caused the urban crisis to disappear.
"The hour of crisis has passed. The Ship of State is back on an even keel, and we can put behind us the fear of capsizing," the President asserted.
There are two unfounded assumptions underlying this cheery remark. The first is that because riots are not burning up the centers of cities, those cities are in good shape. The second is that this Administration never recognized, understood, or responded to the urban crisis.
This Administration has primarily focused on two aspects of the urban problem. One is crime and the other is transportation. With regard to crime, the Administration has made little headway.
Violent crimes increased 30 per cent in the last four years. The most that the White House can claim is that crime is not increasing as rapidly now as in the late sixties.
On transportation, the Administration under prodding of former Secretary of Transportation Volpe gradually came to support the opening of the Highway Trust Fund for mass transit expenditures and to take a sympathetic posture toward urban transportation problems. In his address, the President reaffirmed his support for opening up the highway fund, for which we commend him.
But when one acknowledges that crime is worsening at a somewhat slower rate and that mass transit needs have been recognized if still far from being met, one has exhausted Mr. Nixon's meager list of urban accomplishments. The other staggering problems remain: the physical decline of many older business areas; the abandonment of housing in decaying residential neighborhoods; the persistence of huge slums where unemployment, broken families, crime, drug addiction, and other miseries prevail and interact with one another.
A series in this newspaper recently described such a slum in the South Bronx. Mr. Nixon could visit another by traveling a few blocks up 14th Street from the White House where the ugly scars of the 1968 riots are still plainly visible. The mayors of Newark and Gary and Chicago and half a hundred other cities could show him comparable neighborhoods.
When these conditions of social pathology are so widespread, it strains credulity for Americans to be told that the urban crisis is now happily in the past. What is needed is a message which analyzes how difficult these urban problems are and honestly assesses the successes and failures of the various efforts over the last 35 years to cope with them.
No one can deny, for example, that sections of downtown Boston and New Haven or the southwestern area of Washington, D.C., are much handsomer than they were twenty years ago before renewal programs rebuilt them. But cities have had to face up to how hard it is to relocate residents and small businesses in slum districts and to provide low-cost housing where land prices and labor costs are high.
Instead of concentrating on the problems and the hard-earned wisdom which mayors, city planners, businessmen, and Federal officials have accumulated concerning those problems, the President, over and over again, blames the scarecrow of Federal interference: "No human being, accountable only to an office in Washington, can successfully plan and manage the development of communities which are often hundreds or thousands of miles away ... The time has come to reject the patronizing notion that Federal planners peering over the point of a pencil in Washington can guide your lives better than you can."
It has repeatedly been pointed out that urban renewal, public housing and every other program in this field are locally initiated and, in most essentials, locally controlled. But the scarecrow continues to bob up and down in every Presidential speech. Its purpose is to distract attention from the embarrassing fact that the Administration has no urban programs or ideas of its own. Its only idea is to shove the whole responsibility back to the states and the cities – now to be known as "grassroots government" – and let them wrestle with the same old dilemmas with less Federal money.
The crisis will not have been solved. On the contrary, it will be getting worse but at least it will be out of sight in Mr. Nixon's Washington.