New Towns in Trouble

"We don't have anything to hide or anything to fear," said a spokesman for Soul City, N.C. His confident declaration was in answer to a recent call by two members of Congress for a Government audit and investigation of the federally assisted "new town." Developers of the community, led by former CORE Director Floyd McKissick, may indeed have nothing to hide--although critics question how some $5 million in federal funds have been used on the project. But Soul City, which now consists of a few roads, some mobile homes and a nearly completed industrial building on a 5,180-acre tract 50 miles from Raleigh, may have something to fear. If it follows the pattern of most other Government-aided new towns scattered across the nation, it faces deep financial troubles.

Giant Labs. Such new towns, conceived in more affluent and idealistic times, were intended to absorb the U.S.'s inexorable metropolitan growth without creating urban blight or suburban sprawl. Each was also supposed to have become a self-sufficient community --sometimes even within a city--where good schools, green parks and clean industry would be within walking distance of attractive homes. Imbued with that hopeful vision, Congress passed laws in 1968 and 1970 that 1) offered federal funds and technical aid to approved developers, and 2) guaranteed up to $50 million worth of each developer's bonds, plus the interest on those bonds, to make them more attractive to buyers. In return, Congress required that the new towns be, in effect, giant laboratories to test new ideas in land planning, home building and design, mass-transit systems and even in government cooperation. Furthermore, the law demanded that the communities be racially and economically integrated and virtually pollution-free.

What Congress did not foresee was the downturn in the U.S. economy. The developers have been painfully squeezed between spiraling building costs on one side and dwindling mortgage-money supplies on the other. Making matters worse, many developers were so anxious to try out their brave new ideas that they lost sight of marketing realities. To take only one example, Riverton, ten miles from Rochester, N.Y., built town houses in tight clusters surrounded by open space. But would-be home buyers in the area were not impressed by this good planning precept; they wanted separate houses with spacious yards. Says Otto Stolz, director of the new-communities program of the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department: "Only a limited number of people want to be guinea pigs."

Another part of the problem is that the Nixon Administration did not live up to its side of the bargain. It withheld funds from the program, and HUD therefore gave the developers no technical assistance, no planning grants, no help in starting up schools or transit systems. In processing applications for bond guarantees or for federal subsidies for low-income housing, HUD also ensnarled the applicants in reams of unnecessary red tape. "Decisions are made, unmade and obfuscated to a degree that makes the imperial Chinese bureaucracy appear decisive and swift-moving," says Mark Freeman, executive director of the League of New-Community Developers. The effect has been to stifle the very experimentation that Congress had called for in its law.

Even so, some of the federally assisted new towns have struggled ahead, proving, says Developer Lewis Manilow, that "there is more to this program than just dollars and cents." A big selling point of his Park Forest South, being built 35 miles south of Chicago, is innovation. The vision of a new kind of community has already attracted 5,500 residents (20% of whom are members of minority groups) and several industries. A handsome school system, including a state college for adults who lack undergraduate degrees, is being built.

Among the notable experiments in other new towns:

> The Woodlands, 28 miles north of Houston, has used advanced land planning (by Ecologist-Planner Ian McHarg) to preserve existing forests and conserve water (ponds collect water that then slowly replenishes underground supplies).

> Cedar-Riverside is generating needed new life in the heart of Minneapolis. Some buildings in this 90-acre project also integrate low-income families with the well-to-do--an economic mix that is hard to achieve in established communities.

> Roosevelt Island, being built in New York City by the state's financially beleaguered Urban Development Corporation, has planned a pneumatic waste-disposal system to whisk garbage from homes to a central collection center, electric "people movers" to get residents around, and an aerial tramway, much like a ski lift, to carry them across the East River to Manhattan.

These innovations give ammunition to proponents who argue that the newtown program still represents a noble experiment that should be fostered as actively as it has been in England, Germany and the Scandinavian countries. But critics insist that smaller planned communities can do the same job of serving as models of enlightened land development for a smaller total cost. Under the Ford Administration, HUD is seeking a compromise. At least for the time being, the department has announced, it will not accept any new applications from developers who want federal help in building new towns. But, promises Stolz, HUD will now, finally, support the existing communities.

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