The Federal Government And Urban Problems

Hud: Successes, Failures, And The Fate Of Our Cities

M. Carter Mcfarland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000301397
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book discusses the programs and performance of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). It deals with the present and future of HUD and the cities it was designed to serve and evaluates HUD activities in economics and housing finance, political science, and urban planning.

1
Trouble in Our Cities

Because the purpose of this book is to describe and evaluate the efforts of the federal government to cope with urban problems, it is necessary that we begin by identifying as clearly as possible the complex and closely interrelated litany of urban ills. This chapter will discuss the major problems our urban areas face today. Those that are well known will be mentioned only briefly. The less obvious urban problems will be discussed at greater length. The purpose is to provide background for the chapters that follow.

Concern with these matters is by no means new. For a hundred years, discerning people have been expressing alarm about the trouble in America's cities and forecasting even more dire problems to come. In the 1880s, Jacob Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives, a vivid and disturbing account of life in New York's slums. President Theodore Roosevelt, established a commission to study possible federal action to improve the sordid human conditions he had seen. The commission's report was published in 1908. Like the reports of many presidential study groups before and since, it produced no action. Later, pioneering urban planners began to sound the alarm that American cities were headed toward deep crisis and impending breakdown. Among these were Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin, Lewis Mumford, Henry Churchill, and J. L. Sert. Sert's book on the subject was titled Can Our Cities Survive?¹

Many of the planners writing in the first half of this century not only saw the physical imperfections of the urban scene—high densities, confused land use, clogged traffic, declining economic function, housing obsolescence, and the deterioration of urban service—but also the deep social problems that would erupt in the conflicts and riots of the 1960s.

In 1960, Catherine Bauer, one of America's most discerning students of urban affairs, wrote of "the purgatory of the immigrants, racial conflict, juvenile delinquency, the dreary lives of the aged, traffic congestion, the lengthening journey to work, the services that never catch up with needs, slums and the chronic shortage of decent moderate-priced housing, smog, crowded schools, ugliness and noise in the center, monotony and inconvenience in the suburbs, the loss of amenity and the lack of recreational opportunity."² The following paragraphs will identify the major, problems our urban areas face today.

Urban Ills

Slums and Ghettos

Slums are a familiar condition: they exist and have existed in cities throughout the world for a very long time. A century ago, Dickens wrote poignantly of life in the slums of England. A slum is a concentration of poor people living in dilapidated housing in neighborhoods with inadequate facilities and services. It means filth, debris, malnutrition, disease, and despair. It means a breakdown in family discipline and broken families. It means vandalism, violence, and excessive use of alcohol and dope. It means a feeling of alienation from and hostility to society as a whole.

It cannot be said that the slums of America are worse than, or even as bad as, those in some other parts of the world. From the standpoint of sheer poverty and physical squalor, the slums of India and Latin America are much worse.

However, slums in America have two characteristics that do not exist to the same degree in most other countries. The first is that they are intimately related to racial discrimination and segregation. The second is that they exist in a land of unprecedented material abundance enjoyed by nearly everyone but the slum dweller. Yet the expectations and hopes of the slum dweller are systematically raised by the massive impact of television, radio, newspapers, and magazines—both through the advertising they carry and the picture of life their programs and articles promulgate. In recent years, the hopes of slum dwellers have also been raised by a variety of government programs and their expansive promises. Thus, although the actual physical deprivation in the slums of America is not as great as that in some other parts of the world, the relative feeling of deprivation and the consequent tension and hostility it generates is at least as great. Households with the lowest income and the least competence are trapped in the poorest housing in the poorest neighborhoods, yet they are fully aware and constantly reminded of how the other members of American society live. This revolution of rising expectations is an important factor in producing what urban scholar Anthony Downs calls "crisis ghettos."³

Another characteristic intensifies the ghetto-slum condition. When large numbers of the poor and deprived are concentrated in a neighborhood, or even in a single large building, mysterious forces develop that greatly intensify the social and behavioral pathologies. This has come to be called the "critical mass" effect—a term first suggested by Charles L. Schultze, one of our most influential economists, now chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Critical mass is taken from the vocabulary of atomic physics and suggests that when a certain concentration of matter (or persons) is reached, something happens to change greatly the intensity of the interactions, causing a violent explosion. The analogy is an apt one, for we have often seen the explosive results of a critical mass of the poor and deprived.

The slum condition has been further intensified by the relatively new phenomenon of housing abandonment. Fifteen years ago, it was widely accepted that urban slums were overcrowded with too many people occupying too little dwelling space. This situation has changed drastically in the last fifteen years. The cause is housing abandonment. This development has been studied most intensively by George Sternlieb of Rutgers University.⁴ But it is still not well understood. In addition to thinning out the population of declining central cities, it seems to reflect purely economic factors related to the low-income tenant's inability to pay rent sufficient to cover the landlord's financing and maintenance costs (both of which tend to be higher in low-income areas); it also seems to be related to tensions between landlord and tenant, particularly if they are of different races; it is certainly related to the tenant's antisocial behavior and his tendency to be destructive of the property in which he lives; it also reflects the landlord's neglect of maintenance and services.

According to Sternlieb's 197S estimates, New York City has lost approximately 2 percent of its structures by abandonment. In the worst parts of St. Louis, about 16 percent of the structures have been abandoned, and in the Woodlawn and Lawndale sections of Chicago, as high as 20 percent have been abandoned.⁵ The acres of boarded-up, empty buildings in many of our cities vividly reflect the growing magnitude of residential abandonment. They show, also, that the thinning out of our urban slums has intensified rather than ameliorated the squalor, hopelessness, crime, and other characteristics of slum life.

The social tensions that all this generates were demonstrated in the urban riots of the 1960s. The riots have now subsided, but the tension and violence in the ghetto slums have not. The rising rate of mindless crime—murder, rape, mugging—in nearly every large city in the country shouts this ominous fact. In February 1976, the magazine New York published excerpts from a book about street violence in New York's South Bronx and the inability of the police to keep up with it, much less control it. The book was written by a policeman stationed for several years in a precinct serving a South Bronx neighborhood. It draws a chilling picture, appropriately titled The Siege of Fort Apache. The story grimly concludes that this New York neighborhood "may be the closest that men have yet come to creating hell on earth." Unfortunately, Fort Apache is by no means unique among the ghetto-slums of this country.

Racial Apartheid

No less alarming than the explosive ghetto-slum, and closely connected with it, is the fact that the urban blacks and whites live apart from one another. Most blacks (as well as Chicanos and Puerto Ricans) are clustered in inner-city neighborhoods; most whites live largely in the suburbs. Despite twenty years of court decisions, laws, and executive orders aimed at eliminating racial discrimination, and despite some real progress toward this goal, we have made startlingly little progress in achieving an integrated society. The apartheid pattern of settlement was as severe in 1970 as it was in 1960. The percentage of blacks in the suburban population was only slightly greater in 1970 than it was ten years before.⁶ It seems clear that less progress toward equal opportunity has been made in housing than in education, jobs, and access to public places.

Urban Sprawal

As everyone knows, our urban areas have grown at a staggering rate since World War I. When large numbers of new residents must be accommodated, cities can either grow up or out. Practically all have grown by spreading. The pressure of a rapidly mounting urban population has created the suburbs and exurbs that stretch for miles and miles around every American city of any size. The growth was inevitable. The character of that growth was not.

The shape, or lack of shape, of suburbia and its sheer size have produced some unpleasant and some ominous results. One of these is "strip development," consisting of streets with a melange of automobile dealers, used car lots, various quick food establishments, gasoline stations, and other assorted commercial enterprises. Most are embellished with glaring lights, gaudy signs, and billboards, which many tolerate but few admire. Commerce is important to any human settlement. It provides jobs and essential services. But the form it too often takes unnecessarily demeans the environment.

Another aspect of unplanned urban growth results from the private holding of vacant land for speculative profit and the search of developers for the cheapest land on which to build, usually further out from the central city. This leaves hundreds of acres of intervening land unused and vacant, thus stretching suburban development much farther out than required. The result is wasted land and a great increase in the length of such essential municipal services as water and sewer lines, storm drainage, gas pipes, electrical lines, streets, and roads. As Doris B. Holleb has put it, "Urban sprawl is a very costly form of settlement."⁷

This is not to suggest that the expansive and expanding suburbs are always very unpleasant places in which to live. Suburbia has provided millions of Americans who can afford it with what they regard as very pleasant living. Moreover, by any reasonably objective standard, they are right. Their houses are relatively spacious and well equipped. The bathrooms are clean and functional. The kitchens and laundry rooms are marvelously equipped with labor-saving gadgets of many kinds. They often have a plot of ground with grass, shrubs, trees, and flowers. Shopping and recreation are usually easily accessible. Jobs are often nearby, too. So are libraries, schools, restaurants, and even good music and theater. Never, indeed, have so many lived so well, in purely material terms. Even the much-maligned monotony of the speculatively built subdivision with its row upon row of essentially similar houses seems to bother the architects and city planners more than it does the residents, as a study of New Jersey's Levittown revealed some years ago.

Local Government Balkanization

One serious result of urban growth is that our urban agglomerations have long since reached beyond the jurisdiction and responsibility of the central city's governmental mechanism. As our cities have grown, very few, if any, have been able to annex the great stretches of suburbia and exurbia that have grown up around them. Instead, many small suburban governmental jurisdictions have developed, along with various special districts with responsibility for water, sewers, roads, schools, bridges, and other essential sources. This bewildering multiplicity of urban government jurisdictions possesses a wide variation of fiscal and managerial capacity. It creates extreme difficulties in coordination of public services; it diffuses responsibilities to the point of unaccountability.

To say that there is no local government in America that corresponds with, or has effective control over, the intimately intertwined physical, social, and economic unity of our urban areas is to state the obvious, but telling, truth. The consequences of local governmental balkanization are farreaching and severe. They weaken the capacity of our urban areas to operate effectively, to provide and coordinate services, to plan, and to balance the fiscal books.

The present threat of bankruptcy of New York City, a plight that many other large cities have nearly reached, reflects bad and sometimes reckless management. But it goes deeper than that. It is a sad symptom of the multiplicity of local government jurisdictions plus the large concentration of the poor and deprived in the central city and the dispersal of middle-class families and many business firms to the suburbs. Many large cities have lost much of their industrial and commercial base to the suburbs. This produces high centralcity expenditures for welfare, police, fire protection, and other services in the face of sharply declining income from taxes. The central city has to serve not only its poor but also thousands of commuters from the suburbs who pay little or no taxes for the central city services they use.

The Automobile

The present shape of our urban areas was made possible by the flexible mobility provided by the automobile with a big assist from our huge public investment in urban highways and freeways. The cities are also, in many ways, the victims of those powerful and ornate products of Detroit. The way our urban areas are deployed—their wide dispersal of housing, jobs, shopping, recreation, and just friend—makes the automobile virtually essential to most Americans. The poor, who cannot afford one, and the very young and old, who cannot drive one, are correspondingly penalized. But the automobile is to many of us much more than a necessary convenience. It is a status symbol, at least as important to our self-esteem as the clothes we wear, the important friends we know, the jobs we hold, or the clubs to which we belong. Beyond that, the automobile has, in some psychological way, become a means by which we release our deepest drives. America's attachment, some call it marriage, to the automobile has been frequently noted and often decried. But it appears to be one of the most intractable and basic urges of our society. Use of the automobile is pervasive and increasing. Total travel time increased substantially between 1960 and 1971.

Some of the consequences of America's love affair with the automobile have received much attention. An obvious consequence of increased use of the car for travel to work, for shopping, and for recreation (about 85 percent of the time with only the driver and no passengers) is congestion. In most central cities, many streets and freeways are clogged nearly to the point of immobility much of the day. In both central city and suburbs, the morning and evening rush hours' congestion slows traffic movement to the speed of a walk, and lengthy stoppages are common. The commonest untoward event, such as heavy rain or snow, or a large public gathering, can immobilize an entire city for hours. The building of more urban freeways designed to relieve congestion simply generates more of the same.

The automobile is also responsible for much of the pollution and smog that hang heavy over many of our urban areas. (Other villains are industrial pollution, the generation of electricity, and the airplane.) At the beginning of this decade, pollutants in the air equaled about 281 million tons a year, according to Barbara Ward.⁸ This is more than one ton for each citizen. It is not surprising that more people are dying of respiratory disease each year.

Another consequence of an auto-dependent urban civilization generally goes unremarked or accepted with equanimity. This is the incredible loss of life and limb produced each year by street and highway accidents. If as many persons were killed and maimed from any other cause—say, a new form of virus—it would be considered a crisis, and the citizens, press, and politicians would demand that something be done. Yet, we have such an affinity for the automobile and such a tolerance of its consequences that the highway carnage hardly stirs public reaction, even when the annual fatality toll is reported in the press, as it frequently is.

Our use of automobiles, both in driving and perhaps even more in idling while we wait for the traffic to move, consumes about 25 percent of our domestic petroleum supply (trucks, air travel, and the generation of electricity take an additional large share). Having begun to recognize that the w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Trouble in Our Cities
• 2. Cabinet Status for Urban Affairs
• 3. HUD's Performance
• 4. Shaping the City
• 5. Renewing the Inner City
• 6. Housing Needs and the Housing Market
• 7. Financing Housing Construction and Exchange
• 8. Housing the Poor and Near Poor
• 9. The Housing Roller Coaster
• 10. Reducing Housing Costs
• 11. Equal Housing Opportunity
• 12. Urban Research
• 13. Policies and People
• 14. The Underlying Impediments to Urban Improvement
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index