Pairing the Old and New

The suburbs burgeon while America's central cities decay, and no one has yet devised a solution to the complex of economic, racial and environmental issues involved. Last week a group of Detroit planners unveiled a radical attempt at an answer: a symbiotic linking of the center city with new towns in the suburbs. The plan, which was developed by the Metropolitan Fund of Detroit, a nonprofit research corporation in Southeast Michigan working with a $100,000 appropriation, envisions the pairing off of nine redeveloped inner-city areas with ten undeveloped suburban locations. Though each pair of sites would be geographically separate, from 20 to 40 miles apart, they would exist as political, social and economic entities. The pairs would be connected by mass transit lines and bus services; housing would be built in both places to attract various income levels.

The city locations would range from 635 to 2,000 acres, accommodate 25,000 people and strive for the kind of cosmopolitan atmosphere that once made the city an attraction for middle-class whites. The suburban sites, covering between 3,600 and 8,000 acres, would house 75,000 people, with generous green space and good low-rent housing.

The plan is essentially a compromise between city residents unwilling to see money spent solely for suburbia and suburbanites cool to helping foot the bill for city urban renewal. It will take 20 years to complete, and the price tag will be $1 billion in public and private funds for each paired town. But Dr. Hubert Locke, the project's director and an associate at the Urban Studies Center at Wayne State University, thinks the plan is worth the money.

"Pairing the two sites will give the city a stake in development of new communities outside the city," said Locke. "We're trying to develop a new lifestyle to overcome social problems. This entire region will stand or fall together. Today, there are people living in a sea of social and economic decay while affluence blooms around them. If the present situation continues, the city will be dead in ten years, and the suburbs will go in the eleventh."

The "new town" offers some promising relief from the growing troubles of the nation's cities. Last week David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, urged that a federal agency and a private corporation be created to develop 110 new towns and cities. The aim is to create a series of racially integrated complexes of villages similar to that of Columbia, Md., a community that Chase helped develop. Under the plan, the corporation would raise a minimum of $10 billion in seed money to finance the communities, and the agency would acquire the land. The two agencies, Rockefeller said, "could create a whole series of new independent communities, providing adequate housing at reasonable cost, and bring together both the white- and blue-collar work force for industrial expansion."

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