HUD's Romney: What Are We Doing?

IN a speech before the Detroit Economics Club two days before the latest housing scandals broke, George Romney, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, made a remarkable admission: he suggested that his agency did not necessarily know what it was doing. There is no agreement, even in principle, about how to deal with ghetto neighborhoods, Romney indicated. Said he: "We need to make the hard analysis that we don't yet know how to solve this mounting crisis of people with problems in our central cities--but we must find out before it is too late. Failure to do so could result in a fatal national crisis."

He also conceded that in practice there have been "flagrant abuses" of housing programs in ghetto areas of large cities. He blamed "speculators and fast-buck artists" but accepted some of the blame himself for the failure of the FHA, which his department supervises, to combat them. Said he: "I am angered and determined to eliminate incompetence, conflict of interest, favoritism, graft, bribes, fraud, shoddy workmanship and profiteering."

Romney defended the FHA for its willingness to insure home mortgages in high-risk areas when private lenders had long refused to do so. "Our department has made mistakes," Romney said, "but we will not abandon the central city as so many have done." HUD, he insisted, will "not abandon even a single house--we either rehabilitate and sell it, or we demolish it."

Romney argued that housing is not the cause of urban decay. "We will not solve this crisis if we pretend that it is just a housing crisis. Housing didn't take the jobs away. Housing didn't reduce the population. Housing didn't bring the drug addiction."

One of the major agonies of inner cities, Romney said, is that "a new barrier of fear has emerged" between the cities and their "balkanized suburbs." This is because the cities contain a "confined concentration of people with problems." He added: "A small section of our population has become a real menace to their neighbors. We have not been able to get at the social causes of this socially demoralized group--and we do not know how to protect the much larger group of working poor and dependent poor, as well as moderate-income families, from these everyday experiences that generate fear."

Romney suggested that this "real menace" of a few may lead others to consider all ghetto dwellers as similarly fearsome. There is a danger, he said, that the cities may be left with only "a black minority held back from entrance into broader society, not only by racial prejudice and economic classism, but by the growing fear stereotype that unfairly labels them with social menace." None of that, said Romney, can be dealt with "by hiding behind scapegoats --whether Secretary Romney, HUD, the Nixon Administration or any other available target."

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