WASHINGTON REPORT: The City Delivered?

...But the root pattern is that the upwardly mobile in our urban societies have also been the outwardly mobile, in part at least because they recognized a good deal when they saw one, including good deals underwritten by federal laws...

...And that's not the half of it...

...And so it went...

...Perhaps even: anything more than modest would have been unsound...

...To accept all this as simply the natural course of history or something is to ignore the positive tax-breaks and exemptions the federal government has systematically provided for suburbs, systematically denied to the cities that produced the wealth of the whole area...

...The antagonism between city and suburb is hardly the only one highlighted by the new Urban Policy...

...One highly relevant staffer said it seemed to her the White House staff was saying, Well, you wanted an Urban Policy, here it is, please take it and go away...

...The congressional briefing was abruptly canceled on the transparently false excuse of Commonweal: 261 the dread Middle East crisis, which turned out to be last-minute disagreements within the administration...

...That recognition is behind the shiver in the Newsday headline...

...Industries have fled the Snowbelt into the Sunbelt for, it has been felt, sensible reasons: cheap, non-union labor in states which have traditionally and effectively discouraged union organization, the climate, the decaying state of the older cities with their welfare burdens and rising crime, declining school systems, declining tax base, increasing demand for social services and so on and so on...

...FRANK GETLEIN...

...Even the assumed conflict between Snowbelt and Sunbelt will be resolved eventually as unions catch up with the decampers and as sunbelters demand the urban amenities that make municipal life in the North so expensive...

...It has indeed been universally recognized that many of our cities are on the rocks, particularly those in the Northeast and Midwest, the Snowbelt, as it has been called in distinction from the Sunbelt...

...Against such modest short-term hopes, the long-term soundness of the Policy is its recognition of a handful of facts never yet universally acknowledged in our recent domestic history...

...All of this, however, did not by any means take place just by some kind of natural law working itself out...

...When they are so translated, they will be sent to Congress and assigned to, probably, at least two or three committees in both Houses...

...Item: following World War II, the nation was seized with the idea that, Hitler defeated, every American, but especially every American who had fought against the monster, was entitled to a home of his own, with financing backed by the government...

...those left behind have been the losers...

...The country's most influential suburban paper, for instance, Long Island's Newsday, senses sharpened by a special readership different from that of the Times, headed the story "President's National Urban Policy called 'Disaster' for Suburbs" and said in the lead that the new Urban Policy had "a clear message for the suburbs: the years of federally encouraged suburban growth are over...

...There is also a relatively new conflict between City Hall and neighborhood leaders, the latter hardly recognized in formal political structures at all, yet already wielding political power and now demanding to be treated by the Feds on terms of equality, even better than equality, with the cities...

...In translating this idea to reality, the idea shifted subtly to every American was entitled to a new home of his own federally financed...

...This means there is very little realistic chance of final legislation on Urban Policy getting framed, recommended, 28 April 1978:260 passed, compromised, repassed and signed into law by the end of the 95th Congress, now scheduled for the end of August...

...Taken all in all, you have to hand the palm to Newsday as getting closer to what the Urban Policy is all about than the Times...

...Of much more immediate interest is the conflict between cities and states that goes back to the days when, in most states, cows and haystacks had better representation in state governments than did the human residents of the cities...

...To begin with the announcement was put off and put off and put off until it came four days after Congress adjourned for the Easter recess, as it used to be called, and one day before the President took off on the trip to South America and Africa...

...The figures for new expenditures in the Carter set of papers are indeed' modest, but the implications are far-reaching...

...At a less lofty level than that of structural analysis and historical change, the handling of the Policy by the administration was, alas, another example, of clumsy ineptitude in all directions...

...The new highways greatly aided the growth of the suburbs, making motor access to them on the basis of one-car-one-rider infinitely more comfortable and convenient than any existing or planned public transportation...

...At the business and industrial briefing, the representative of a leading motor company, inquiring for clarification on the $200 million city contest feature, got contradictory answers from Eizenstadt and another White House aide, Jack Watson...

...The New York Times lead editorial on the administration's new, first-ever National Urban Policy summed it up in a headline which raises interesting questions even as it answers the basic one: the new policy is, said the Times, "Sound but modest...

...There are metropolitan areas here and there across the country...

...Another interpretation is that the policy is sound as far as it goes, but would become even sounder if it were less modest...

...At the same time, the new highways amounted to federal subsidy of the trucking industry, with consequent deterioration of the rail system, deterioration of central city industry grouped around railheads, the springing into being of suburban warehouse systems and, by easy stages, of new suburban industrial "parks," which were greatly encouraged by: Item: tax advantages for new commercial and industrial construction, which, naturally, could be undertaken much more advantageously in somebody's cow pasture than downtown...

...The mayors of America would undoubtedly have preferred something a little less modest and there is a~nple reason to believe there are a lot of people out there who would have preferred even more modesty if necessary at the cost of less soundness...

...Much of it took place as the result, inadvertent for the most part, of the application of a wide assortment of government programs having assorted other things in mind...

...City land being mostly already occupied, this alone would have accounted for the suburban growth of the last thirty years, but there was more: Item: Hitler having invented the autobahn system and Americans abroad having" observed it, it was determined that such a system of highways would make the coast-to-coast defense of the country ever so much easier and so that, too, was undertaken...

...If the Urban Policy does get itself condensed into law and the law dealt out for enforcement with appropriate agencies, we shall be in for some interesting times...

...If the policy is sound and modest, then the urban situation needed but a modest policy in order to have a sound policy...

...The congressional staff briefing, billed as featuring Stuart Eizenstadt, the presumed impressario, featured instead, with no advance notice, Bert Karp, an underling...

...This meant the announcement fell into a double void, with neither response nor follow-through and a general air of ho-hum...

...To say the Urban Policy means anything is a little premature, because the President's expressions of good wishes for cities have not yet been translated into proposed legislation...

...The Carter Urban Policy, if it did nothing else, would merit praise simply for its recognition of the history of suburban boosterism and its devastating effects on cities...

...Newsday went right to them...

...The city has continued to produce all or most of the income in a given metropolitan area but the winners have carried it off to the suburbs to pay taxes for superior schools, police, fire and other forms of protection and life-enhancement, leaving the losers in the under-financed, decaying central cities...

...In short, the federal government and the federal treasury have been skewed against the American city for the last thirty-plus years...

...There are exceptions...

...Again granted exceptions, suburbs are preselected populations of winners in the urban race...

...That opinion was widely shared, but it suggests a couple of assumptions not necessarily in the mind of the headline writer nor even in that of the editorial writer...

...The free ride for suburbs is--at least potentially ---over...