Hope for the Heart
(See Cover)
"We cannot all live in cities," cautioned Horace Greeley a century ago, "yet nearly all seem determined to do so." His own classic answer to the problem, "Go West, young man," was no lasting remedy--unless one can ignore Los Angeles. Though Editor Greeley disapproved of the country's rapid urbanization, he nonetheless divined accurately one of the American's most deep-rooted traits: his hankering for city lights.
In 1966, 67% of the nation's population is jammed into 9% of its acreage. In all, 130 million people inhabit the 224 U.S. communities that are officially classified as metropolitan.* By A.D. 2000, 80% of all Americans--more than today's entire population--will be city dwellers. In those 35 years, as Lyndon Johnson has warned, "we will have to build in our cities as much as we have built since the first colonist arrived on these shores."
Johnson's Great Society is in large measure based on belated governmental recognition of the complex needs of an urban nation. Indeed, the President himself, as James MacGregor Burns points out, has become the "Chief Executive of Metropolis." Not for 50 years has the heartland of America been the physiocratic demi-Eden of American myth, the pastoral paradise hymned by Jefferson and Thoreau, limned by Eakins and Wyeth. The ganglia of history's richest nation lie today in the inchoate, intermeshed agglomerations of city, suburb and country that have become Megalopolis americanus. Such is its present rate of growth that by century's end, one concrete conurbation will reach from Portland, Me., to Norfolk, Va., in the East, another from the Mexican border to San Francisco in the West.
Diversity & Verve. Vaster in size and more splendid in promise than any other form of community in man's history, the metropolitan complex is the epicenter and embodiment of American life. In its Promethean ambit of inter ests, its cultural diversity and kinetic verve, the city's heart sets the pace for the rest of the nation, and indeed much of the world. It is an unrivaled func tional framework for finance and busi ness, a rich lode of pleasure, a superb showcase for art, theater, music, fashion. At the same time, the "oceanic amplitude of these great cities," as Walt Whitman rhapsodized in 1870, has cast up a titanic tide of troubles.
If no U.S. metropolis even approaches the appalling anarchy of far-off cities such as Calcutta, Hong Kong, Rio or Tokyo, the worst areas of urban America have in varying degrees almost every ill to which the industrial society has fallen heir: unemployment, disease, crime, drug addiction, poor education, family disintegration--and slums. The middle class, the bulwark of good government in any community, continues as a result to migrate to the suburbs, helping to create the problem of proliferating racial ghettos. Almost every major U.S. city must fight advancing physical decay and increasing squalor, particularly for Negro populations, which within 15 years may outnumber whites in at least half of the North's big cities.
Predictably Unpredictable. In March 1965, President Johnson made it clear that it was time to invoke federal ac tion. "Our task is to put the highest concerns of our people at the center of urban growth and activity," he told Congress. "For this is truly the time of decision for the American city." The 89th Congress approved Johnson's request for a new federal agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to give Cabinet representation for the first time to the 130 million metropolitan Americans. The President appointed Robert Clifton Weaver, a Negro, as HUD's first Secretary last January, unpredictably tapping the most predictable candidate for the job. Weaver, 58, the portly, pedagogical administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA), had been the No. 1 candidate to head HUD ever since John F. Kennedy proposed the new agency five years ago.
Weaver's intellectual and professional credentials are impressive. He is a Harvard Ph.D. (economics, '34), the author of four books on city problems, a canny, cautious veteran of 22 years of Government manpower and housing bureaucracies. As the first Negro ever to hold Cabinet rank, Weaver reasons that his race is irrelevant: "I don't delude myself into thinking that I've ceased being a Negro because I've received recognition in the mainstream of American society and because my problems as a Negro have been somewhat ameliorated. I would like to feel that I was appointed not because I was a Negro, but maybe in spite of that fact." One of Weaver's most welcome qualifications is that he himself is a lover of cities and a connoisseur of urban living. "The American city is like a beguiling woman," he says with gusto. "Each woman has her own attributes, and each man, thank God, can make a choice." Weaver raves about such cities as New York ("You can get the best cheap meal and the lousiest expensive meal in the country"), Chicago ("Such terrific oomph") and San Francisco ("I can walk with pleasure"). But it will take more than love to save the cities. Weaver is under no illusion that the challenges that are now his will be met "in my lifetime--certainly not in my span of public office."
Hat in Hand. Curiously enough, in the most successful democracy in history, the deterioration of the city has resulted largely from a governmental vacuum. The metropolis has traditionally be.en at the mercy of laissez-faire policies--and politicians. Too often the problems slop hopelessly across city and suburban boundaries: around New York City alone there are 1,476 separate jurisdictional districts.
The abiding quandary is financial. New York, the world's wealthiest city, has to borrow to meet its $4 billion annual budget, last week was contemplating a whole new set of taxes (see U.S. BUSINESS). Yet, as Weaver points out, "if you start talking about putting on extra taxes, you may further accentuate the trend toward businesses leaving the central city and make its financial plight even worse than it was before. The whole notion that the city can lift itself by its own bootstraps is a snare and a delusion." Thus cities have no recourse but to go hat in hand to the Federal Government, which has taken billions in taxes from them and returned only token sums.
Short Shrift. Urban needs have historically been given short shrift in state capitals and in Washington, largely because legislators are elected from districts based on the farm-heavy population ratios of 40 years ago. Reapportionment of state and congressional election districts has already begun to help balance the scales for the metropolis, but the suburbs, rather than the city, will get most of the benefit.
Urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon, and there is hardly a city from Vienna to Vientiane that is not hard pressed to accommodate swelling populations in orderly fashion. American cities face a special disadvantage, however, for they sprang full-blown from the wilderness; there was no planned base for rational expansion, as there was in Baron Haussmann's Paris or Peter the Great's St. Petersburg. In 1790 the nation's first census showed that 95% of Americans lived on farms or in hamlets.
Then the eruption began: from 1800 to 1900, New York's population increased from 79,216 to 3,437,202, San Francisco jumped from zero to 342,782, Chicago from zero to 1,698,575. With few exceptions, notably well-planned Washington, one of the world's most handsome capitals, the growth was too explosive to pause for esthetic or demographic consideration.
The train, the subway, the telephone, the telegraph, and eventually the automobile, foreshortened distances; the countryside beckoned, and people sick of inner-city congestion rushed in hordes to the cool green plots of suburbia.
"Nice People's Escape." Why did they go? In his 1964 book, The Urban Complex, Robert Weaver reasoned: "It is an escape from changing neighborhoods, lower-class encroachment, inadequate public services and inferior schools. It is running away from the ugly facts of urban life; facts that have always existed, but never for long on the doorstep of 'nice people' who had the option of escape."
Other experts disagree, arguing that the U.S. flight to the suburbs is less a status symbol for escapists than a realization of a universal human craving for a bit of green space. Says Planning
Consultant Hans Blumenfeld: "The pattern of residential distribution by family type is entirely voluntary, deliberate and rational. It is hard to find any sound reason for the fashionable outcry 'to bring the middle-class family back into the city.' " In part, the suburban exodus reflects Americans' deep-seated anti-urban sentiment, the puritanical belief, in Poet William Cowper's words, that "God made the country, man made the town" (to which City Lover Oliver Wendell Holmes memorably retorted: "God made the cavern and man made the house!").
Suburban growth has also been powerfully stimulated by the Federal Government--the FHA mortgage insurance program, which Weaver has directed for the past five years. Created in 1934, it fueled a feverish building boom that ultimately changed the U.S. from a nation of 52% renters to 62% homeown ers. Unfortunately, the housing bureaucracy has often been appallingly lacking in esthetic and environmental vision.
Millions of acres of woodland and meadowland were taken to make way for highways, shopping centers and regimented rows of crackerbox housing. The result was in too many cases a voracious sprawl of "slurbs," combining the worst elements of city and country. It is a fact of life that suburban houses are far more comfortable than most inner-city dwellings. But the suburbs have spawned their own problems of burgeoning school populations, transit, highways, hospitals, sewage and water supplies.
Sledgehammer Surgery. Within the central city, the bulldozer has generally been used to better advantage. The federally subsidized ($4.7 billion since 1949) urban renewal program, also administered by Weaver, aims to do peacefully for the U.S. what World War II bombs did for Europe: to clear decaying downtown areas for new inner cities. The physical monuments to such sledgehammer surgery are many, and many are distinguished; Manhattan's Lincoln Center, Philadelphia's Independence Mall, Pittsburgh's Gateway Center, Detroit's Lafayette Square, St. Louis' Plaza Redevelopment, Hartford's Constitution Plaza. Urban renewal has worked fiscal wonders too: tax returns on city land now completely renewed have risen 313% .
There have also been some resounding failures. Overoptimistic local officials have found it too easy to wheedle funds from Washington. One of the worst--both big and little--is McKees Rocks, Pa. (pop. 13,000), a suburb bordering Pittsburgh. In 1957 county authorities decided to rebuild the town's crumbling commercial district; U.S. officials agreed to foot $2.3 million of the bill, and the destruction was done. The 24-acre site would have been ideal for industry, which could afford it, but McKees Rocks officials insisted that it be developed for commercial use only. Last week, eight years later, the land was still bare.
Badly framed laws have allowed new highways to slash senselessly through residential areas, uprooting thousands of families and needlessly destroying neighborhoods. In New Orleans, an expressway now planned over local protest will bring the roar of rushing traffic to the historic Vieux Carre. In New York City, a 20-year-old controversy still swirls about a proposed Lower Manhattan expressway while the decaying area through which it is to run decays further because no one wants to risk improving properties that may yet be destroyed.
Archaic Taxes. The trouble with the great majority of such projects is lack of vision and planning. "There isn't a metropolitan area in the U.S. that has a comprehensive plan to accommodate its growth," says Baltimore Developer James Rouse. "The best prospect we have is that we will become a nation of Los Angeleses." More than 800 U.S. cities have modernized their housing and zoning codes in the past few years, and Houston is now the only major city that has allowed itself to soar and sprawl without zoning controls of any kind.
Despite nationwide attempts to write new regulations, there are still 5,000,000 substandard houses in cities--nearly all of them without running water or indoor toilets--and in some areas the number of barely habitable homes continues to rise. In New York alone, substandard houses have increased from 420,000 to 520,000 since 1960. Archaic taxing methods actually discourage slumlords from improving their properties, since they would then be assessed at a higher rate.
Instant Slums. Washington's first answer to slums was the public-housing program, initiated 32 years ago. From a peak of 58,000 units a year in the early '50s, it has slowed to a 24,000-unit pace, partly because it soon became evident that new housing on old sites only created new instant slums, and partly because other localities refused to have them.
A recent trend among Washington housing men, encouraged by Robert
Weaver as HHFA head, is to rehabilitate existing inner-city homes instead of building anew, using federal money to buy property outright or to subsidize landlords' improvements. One outstanding example is New Haven's Wooster Square, where more than 1,000 rundown buildings were spruced up and the neighborhood's original residential character retained without the upheaval of a new project. Yet this New Haven project cost the Federal Government $19.3 million, an average of $130 per city resident. At that per capita rate of expenditure, creating a Wooster Square in every U.S. metropolitan area would cost a cool $13 billion. Another perennial headache for the metropolis is the spiraling cost of mass transportation. Simply to maintain existing systems will cost close to $2 billion a year, while only $155 million in federal money is now available.
City-Bred Muscle. This and most other urban problems seem almost trivial in comparison with those created by the changing race structure. Says Economist Miles Colean: "We can't get around the sad fact that middle-class families living in the city who depend on public schools have not made up their minds that they can live with Negroes." Weaver adds pointedly: "We need an open suburbia--not just an upper-and middle-income-class suburbia."
The color change in the U.S. city has been abrupt and traumatic. In the past 15 years alone, 5,000,000 Negroes have moved into U.S. inner-cities. From 1950 to 1960, Detroit gained 185,000 Negroes, lost 361,000 whites. St. Louis lost 22% of its entire white population, San Diego 15.4% , Newark 23.7% . Violence on the scale of the Watts and Harlem riots has so far been rare-partly because the heavy concentration of Negroes in Northern cities has given them powerful new political muscle. "If he hadn't been urbanized, the Negro wouldn't have become a political factor and thus able to change his status," says Weaver. "The 'Negro Revolt' is an urban phenomenon."
"Be Awfully Good." Robert Weaver, three generations removed from slavery, has experienced firsthand few of the Negro's problems. His maternal grandfather, Robert Tanner Freeman, was the son of a North Carolina slave who bought freedom for his wife and himself in 1830, and took his surname as the proud badge of his liberty. Freeman graduated from Harvard in 1869 with a doctoral degree in dentistry--the nation's first Negro to do so. His daughter Florence attended a Negro college (Virginia Union University), then married Mortimer Grover Weaver, a Washington post office clerk.
When Robert Weaver was born on Dec. 29, 1907, his parents lived in the hypersensitive environment of a neighborhood in which the Weavers were one of six Negro families sprinkled among 3,000 white families in northeast Washington. Florence Weaver drummed a rigid code of behavior into Robert and his older brother, Mortimer Jr., read to them the poems of Tennyson and Longfellow, repeatedly preached that "the way to offset color prejudice is to be awfully good at whatever you do." Recalls Robert Weaver: "My brother Mort was the bright one. I became adept with my hands." So adept was he that when he was 16, Weaver was a qualified electrician and set up a profitable summertime business wiring Negro homes.
"It Depended on Me," Not until the Weaver boys entered Washington's rigidly segregated public-school system did they find themselves in an all-Negro world. The educational standard was high, however, and Robert had no trouble getting into Harvard. His brother, just graduated (Phi Beta Kappa) from Williams College, was also there, taking graduate work in English, and when Robert was refused a room in a freshman dormitory because he was a Negro, the brothers took a room off-campus. They decided to attend law school together, but in 1929 Mortimer died of an unexplained illness. Life suddenly took on harder lines for Robert Weaver. "I always felt I had a smart brother, so I didn't have to do much," he recalls. "But now I had to say to hell with law school. Everything depended on me."
Weaver got his master's degree in 1931 and a doctorate from Harvard in 1934, returned to Washington and was hired by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes as a race-relations officer. Weaver decided that race relations begin at home. Traditionally, Negroes were expected to eat in the Interior Department's non-white "messengers' lunchroom." Soon after Weaver arrived, he and a friend strolled into the whites' cafeteria and ate lunch. A group of enraged white women flounced into Ickes' office to ask him what he was going to do about "the niggers." Infuriated, the Old Curmudgeon bellowed back, "Not one damned thing!" The cafeteria remained integrated.
Ultimately, Weaver held several New Deal jobs dealing with discrimination in employment and housing. Possibly more important than his official duties in those days was his role as a leader of "The Black Cabinet," an influential group of tough-minded young Negroes in F.D.R.'s Administration--among them U.N. Under Secretary-General Ralph Bunche, U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William H. Hastie, N.A.A.C.P. Executive Secretary Roy
Wilkins. They did much to bring full integration to Government offices.
Top Dixie Student. Though he was chairman of the policymaking N.A.A.C.P. board of directors in 1960, Weaver has never been a picket-line, front-line fighter in the civil rights movement. His role has been, in his words, that of "a liberal rather than a Negro; I feel that black chauvinism is no bet ter than white chauvinism."
Weaver is a sybaritic, wholly citified man who loves Broadway plays, savors his stereophonic collection of Liszt and Chopin piano concertos, relishes Italian food (favorite is shrimp marinara), sips twelve-year-old bourbon when he works at home at night. He dresses in banker-conservative clothing, favors dark suits and dark Homburgs at the office, a plum-colored smoking jacket and black leather slippers at home. When he became HHFA director, Weaver promptly moved into an urban-renewed Washington apartment ("I wanted to put my money where my mouth was"), but within a year put his money into more luxurious accommodations ($300 a month) on fashionable upper Connecticut Avenue.
Weaver's wife Ella is an auburn-haired, fair-skinned North Carolinian who has a University of Michigan master's degree and a Northwestern University Ph.D. in speech. She did her undergraduate work at the Carnegie Tech drama department from 1929 to 1932 despite an unwritten policy that no Negroes were allowed. Everyone thought she was white--including the all-white Southern Club of Pittsburgh, which awarded her at the end of her sophomore year a scholarship for being the top Dixie-bred student.
Before Mort Weaver's death, Ella was his steady girl; afterward she began to date Robert, and in 1935 they were married. Ella is still frequently mistaken for a Caucasian and seldom volunteers a correction. "I don't say, 'Hello, I'm a Negro,' just as you wouldn't say, 'Good morning, I'm a Catholic' or whatever you are," she says. The Weavers have no children; an adopted son died three years ago in a game of Russian roulette.
Monstrosity Unassembled. Weaver's professional career has been a shining example to U.S. Negroes. After leaving New Deal Washington in 1944, he worked for the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, taught at several colleges, ran a fellowship program for the lohn Hay Whitney Foundation, was picked in 1955 by New York's Democratic Governor Averell Harriman to be State Rent Commissioner--the first Negro to hold a cabinet post in state history. In December 1960, lohn Kennedy, whom he had advised on civil rights during the presidential campaign, named Weaver director of HHFA--at that time the highest federal post ever held by a Negro. Said Weaver then: "I want to be the best possible administrator. Incidentally, I'm a Negro."
As HHFA director, Weaver headed a complicated conglomeration of agencies--FHA, the Urban Renewal Administration, the Public Housing Administration, the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae"). Weaver himself labeled it "an administrative monstrosity," but he did little to pull it together. In too many cases, city officials complained, it seemed that the Congress would pass a housing bill, the President would sign it, and then Weaver's agencies would immediately wrap it in red tape. Yet it was one of the Government's biggest financial operations, with a capital outlay of investments, grants, mortgages and housing subsidy contracts totaling close to $73 billion.
Human Renewal. In the past, HHFA programs had dealt essentially with money-bricks-and-mortar policies. But Weaver, who has said repeatedly, "You cannot have physical renewal without human renewal," attempted from the first to instill a more humanized philosophy. He stimulated better-looking public housing by instigating awards for design. He improved relocation policies by increasing funds available to help small businessmen displaced by urban renewal. He saw to it that the Housing Act of 1961 included grants for recreational and scenic open-space areas. And he pushed through in that bill controversial Section 221d3, which gives nonprofit corporations cut-rate (31%) mortgage loans at the Treasury's expense to provide housing for displaced families of low or moderate incomes.
Weaver also revived the long-dormant idea of federal rent subsidies for the ailing and aged. That proposal narrowly passed the Congress last year, but the eligibility regulations were so carelessly written by the HHFA that "hardship" cases with as much as $25,000 in net assets could have qualified for rent help. Congress refused to appropriate funds for it, and many people thought that Weaver had thereby destroyed his chances of becoming HUD Secretary. Weaver now airily dismisses it all as "purely a printer's slip."
Strength & Diversity. Weaver's appointment as head of HUD did not bring universal joy to municipal officials, many of whom were hoping that a mayor might get the job. His academic background and experience in Government housing clearly made him better qualified than any city official. Nevertheless, he has a reputation for being professionally cautious and personally aloof--a man more comfortable with ivory tower theoreticians than with city hall politicians.
As HHFA Director, Weaver followed an essentially inner-city-directed policy rather than attempting to deal with the metropolis as an entity. That approach has attracted criticism. Argues Harvard Business School Economist Raymond Vernon: "To talk about rebuild ing central cities for re-use by people there now is a good political move and a bad social one. Our Eastern cities were built around 1800. What a remarkable coincidence it would be if the density established for those patterns of life happened to be right for 1965!" To such barbs, Weaver retorts frostily: "I'm all for letting people who want to live in the suburbs do it. But if people want city living, I want to improve our cities and I want them to have city living. This is a country whose strength is diversity."
Expanding Empire. The same could be said of HUD. Weaver faces the task of coordinating diffuse and disorganized federal programs ranging from sewage-disposal research (under the Public Health Service) and the location of new inner-city schools (Health, Education & Welfare) to the design and route of metropolitan freeways (Bureau of Public Roads). He has no charter to annex other agencies' territories; rather, it will be a matter of deft and exceedingly diplomatic manipulation aimed at finding some semblance of cohesiveness.
The HUD empire is certain to expand. Says Weaver: "There are certain functions which must in time be placed in the department. The problem now is to identify these and encourage the Administration to sponsor reorganization plans to bring them about." One big, politically sensitive area that will almost certainly be identified as HUD property is Sargent Shriver's poverty-oriented community action program.
Understandably, Weaver has picked academic experts and Government careerists for several top jobs. His Under Secretary is Robert C. Wood, a brilliant Massachusetts Institute of Technology expert on metropolitan government, who helped draft major task-force reports on cities for the President. Assistant Secretary for Metropolitan Development is Charles M. Haar, 45, a Harvard law professor who headed the President's task force on natural beauty.
Creative Federalism.The final definition of HUD's responsibilities may spring from the President's "demonstration" program for cities offered to Congress in January. It calls for a $2.3 billion, six-year pilot project aimed at encouraging broad, unified plans that will prod suburban and inner-city governments into the cooperative ventures that they have so assiduously avoided in the past. Though its initial appropriation of $12 million is scarcely enough to buy 1 1/2 miles of Manhattan subway, the program at last--and at least--recognizes that the metropolitan crisis demands a coordinated, scientific approach to quicken civic consciences and radically improve the total context of city living.
Underpinning this imaginative concept lies Lyndon Johnson's oft-repeated --and more often misunderstood--de mand for "creative federalism." Its simple essential theory is that Washington has the power and the money, but that its application can be most wisely prescribed by those closest to the problem--the municipalities themselves. There, ultimately, lies the greatest if not the only hope for the American city.
* By U.S. Bureau of the Budget definition, a center city with a population of at least 50,000, plus that of its adjacent suburbs.
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