Correspondents' Correspondence

...Having stressed in vain that the "real city" encompassed the suburbs, and that the poor needed to be dispersed, he threatened to stop building in the inner city...

...The Maine Shakers have said they would like to use some of the capital during their lifetimes to restore their village...

...Moreover, a smaller-scale program of housing allowances for the elderly was apparently backed by Romney's replacement, James T. Lynn...

...The Shakers themselves, however, explain that sex merely leads to families, and that these, in turn, create dissension and envy in communal situations, thereby interfering with a single-minded devotion to God...

...These steps, coupled with the proposed elimination of "points" that sellers must pay on such loans, were aimed at loosening up the mortgage market...

...Ironically, while they prepare to go out of existence, the Shakers have received about 100 new requests for membership, often from young people who want to groove on the group's communal, self-sufficient, rural, artsy-craftsy life-style...

...All are women, ranging in age from 45 to 96 (the last male died in 1961...

...As Eldress Bertha Lindsay told a reporter: "There were in the old days what were known as 'winter Shakers'—men who would come in the winter and live and then leave in the summer...

...Dedicating themselves to lives of prayer and hard work, the Shakers established rural communes with schools and farms...

...Unfortunately, the power of that message was undermined in 1870, when the Second Coming that Ann Lee predicted for that year did not occur...

...Though even their staunchest defenders conceded that the time had come for a thorough reassessment, the promise was greeted with much skepticism in housing circles...

...The sect is encountering other problems, too...

...In the low-to-moderate-income homebuying programs, Department of Housing and Urban Development (hud) appraisers had been bribed to inflate the costs of inferior housing to the poor...

...In short, for all its fine rhetoric criticizing the housing efforts of the past, Nixon's message was devoid of substantive programs for the present and future...

...Families who qualify receive cash payments equal to the difference between one-fourth of their income and the cost of reasonable housing...

...Nonetheless, even in the best of economic times, the Shakers have had to struggle to maintain their number, for one of the tenets of their faith is sexual abstinence...

...The President did announce a partial thaw in the housing freeze, authorizing public agencies to rent 200,000 new units at market rates and sublease them to the poor at reduced rates...

...But present adherents suspect the newcomers are only interested in getting their hands on the trust fund...

...But consequently, after nearly 200 years of disinterest in material things, the group now finds itself embroiled in questions of money and property...

...Since 1964, when the sect decided to self-destruct, it has been plagued by a variety of problems that simply won't allow it to expire in peace...

...These survivors still cling to their old ways, wearing high-necked print dresses and baking their own bread...

...By the 1950s, even the orphans who had been left with the communes (an important source of new members in the last century) were deserting their foster homes after they grew up-Only 14 Shaker adherents are still to be found, nine in Poland Springs, Maine, 60 miles north of Portland, and five in Canterbury, New Hampshire, outside of Concord...

...At the religion's peak in the mid-19th century, there were 18 Shaker communities altogether, with a total of about 6,000 members...

...Even before the freeze, George Romney, then Secretary of hud, had all but thrown up his hands in despair...

...Perhaps the most grating issue has been the handling of the million dollar trust fund accumulated from sold-off land...

...Their furniture, acclaimed for its simple lines, currently fills such residences as Fieldwood Farm, the Westchester estate of John D. Rockefeller III...

...Thus, the faithful in Canterbury and Poland Springs are holding fast to their dead-end course...

...It was suggested, too, that housing payments might be tied into a new welfare reform package...

...What finally emerged in President Nixon's September 19 housing message, however, was merely an endorsement in principle of cash assistance, without any commitment of significant funding until the idea receives more study...

...A hud task force that worked through the spring and summer seemed to be favoring the direct-payments plan...

...complained, "This long-awaited announcement is mostly sound and fury signifying nothing...

...In fact, it may work to displace people of limited means by upgrading blighted neighborhoods to the point where only the affluent will be able to afford to live in them...

...As Senator William Proxmire (D.-Wis...

...Such a study had been talked about, but not produced, throughout the first Nixon term—a period marked by scandalous mismanagement of some of the projects President Johnson initiated in 1968...

...Urban homesteading may prove successful in bringing back to the cities the white upper-middle-class families who can raise the money to finance extensive repairs, but it will not help the poor...

...Shakerism was founded in England by Mother Ann Lee and a band of dissident Quakers...

...While critics are legitimately concerned about the inflationary effect this approach may have on a tight rental market, it has the virtue of eliminating fat for the traditional middlemen—mortgage bankers, lawyers, contractors...

...The simple rocking chairs that fetched $2 in the '20s and '30s, for example, are now being offered by antique dealers for up to $120...

...The Canterbury Shakers, though, want to retain the fund's principal in order to preserve the communities after the last Shaker has passed on...

...Recently, it began trying to buy back some of its furniture to include in the legacy, but found it had to pay high prices for pieces that once sold for nearly nothing...

...That has already happened in several cities under the name of private rehabilitation...

...For the low-income family, the government is still needed as the houser of last resort.—Eugene L. Meyer End of a Faith Canterbury, N. H.—Starting a religion is easy enough these days, but, as the Shakers are discovering, ending one can be rather difficult...

...As a result of the impasse, the Maine group set up a nonprofit corporation last year to funnel donations into reconstruction projects...

...later they added factories...

...For much of their history, these settlements were practically self-sufficient, and quite innovative: Shakers invented the buzz saw, the clothes pin and the apple parer...

...Altogether, 200,000 units were foreclosed and wound up in hud ownership...

...He also offered a deceptive show of relief to the beleaguered middle-class home-buyer by pumping $2.5 billion from regional Federal Home Loan Banks to savings and loan institutions for 8.75 per cent loans, and urging Congress to raise the present 7.75 per cent interest ceiling on mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration...

...In 1774, the tiny group moved to New York, where it soon became one of the most successful of the many Utopian faiths that flourished in the northeastern United States during the late-18th and early-19th centuries...

...On the surface, the housing allowance idea looks like an attractive alternative to the programs that have been piled layer upon layer since the 1930s in the national quest for a decent home for all Americans...

...And watching their efforts are the museums waiting to be born after the present curators die.—Harvey D. Shapiro...

...But he did initiate a new scheme, giving direct cash assistance to low-income tenants, and the subsequently expanded experiment will include 20,000 families in 12 metropolitan areas by the end of this year...

...Baltimore, Philadelphia and Wilmington, in particular, have received wide publicity for pioneering this approach...

...And it has been downhill for the Shakers ever since...

...With the Federal government out of the housing business for all practical purposes, some cities are turning to urban homesteading...

...Patterned after the 19th-century Homestead Act, this concept involves virtually giving abandoned inner-city houses to persons willing to renovate and live in them...

...Unfortunately, the impact of the reforms—if Congress adopts them-will be blunted considerably by the 8 per cent mortgage interest ceilings still effective in 18 states and the District of Columbia...

...This doctrine, according to many historians, is the outgrowth of Ann Lee's unhappy marriage and divorce —which preceded the launching of the sect...

...Housing Hassles Washington—When the Federal housing programs were frozen last January 5, the Administration promised to set up a task force to review them and decide their future...

...Run more by bureaucrats than businessmen, public housing became a hopelessly deficit-ridden operation, heavily criticized for concentrating low-income families in concrete reservations...

...In any case, the restriction has not only deterred outsiders from joining the group, it has also meant the Shakers have had to rely on winning converts through the message they preached...

...It wasn't so much the religion as a place to live and be secure...

...Ten years ago this Shaker's dozen agreed to terminate their faith by refusing new members...

...In subsidized rental apartment buildings, fees for consultants, lawyers and other middlemen had raised the cost per unit to the taxpayer above that paid for privately built housing...