Saving the Cities

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with America's cities that money can't cure--money in the amount that has been going down the drain in Vietnam. Thirty billion dollars a year would be good for openers. The problems of the cities--deteriorating housing, high unemployment, inadequate health care, air and water pollution, miserable mass transportation, poor education, etc.--have been cussed and discussed, analyzed and panelized so thoroughly that any mayor would be able to list them in his sleep and give you a dollar figure for solving or alleviating each specific problem in his own city. Cleveland, where I have served as chief executive since 1967, certainly has an ample share of these problems. Using it as an example should help explain the social, economic and environmental ills that plague most large American cities.

• Cleveland needs a billion dollars for housing alone. With such funds we could eliminate, by demolition or rehabilitation, the 47,000 substandard units we now have and build 20,000 more units of low-rent public housing. Rigorous code-enforcement programs to prevent neighborhoods from deteriorating and to assist property owners in repairing and modernizing their homes could finally be well funded and adequately staffed.

• Beyond money for housing, the city needs a half billion dollars to eliminate hard-core unemployment through job-training programs, to upgrade the skills of the thousands who are marginally employed at jobs paying less than subsistence wages and to enable the city and other public agencies to be the "employer of last resort" when the private sector is unable or unwilling to provide full employment.

• It would take several hundred million dollars to improve health care in the city of Cleveland, where--as an example--some 600 babies die each year at birth or in the first year of life because their mothers lack prenatal care and the infants themselves are inadequately cared for in crucial early development.

• Cleveland's air and water pollution could be abated by expenditures of 1.5 billion dollars. With an investment of that magnitude, the Cuyahoga River would no longer be a fire hazard, Lake Erie once again would be the recreational godsend it was when I swam in it as a boy--and the air would become fit to breathe again.

• A half billion dollars from the continually swelling Highway Trust Fund, now exclusively devoted to the Federal interstate-highway program, or from some other source, would enable Cleveland to complete a badly needed system of rapid transit to all parts of the metropolitan area. This money also could be used to reform and expand our bus lines, so that inner-city residents could get to the suburban industrial parks where, increasingly, jobs are concentrated. And with better transportation facilities resulting from the additional funds, all residents of Greater Cleveland would be able not only to get to the work centers more easily but also to enjoy the cultural, recreational and educational facilities that the central city affords.

• The Cleveland school system needs an additional half billion dollars a year to replace obsolete buildings and equipment and to make other long-term investments, especially in the inner city; to create programs thoroughly relevant to today's needs; and to reduce the growing number of dropouts, whose future now is hard-core unemployment, alienation from society and susceptibility to the blandishments of thieves, drug pushers and revolutionaries.

None of these elements of the urban crisis is unique to Cleveland, of course. Cleveland is not alone in losing the property-tax revenues it needs to help run--and save--the city. Nor is Cleveland the only metropolis that experiences difficulty in getting money from the state legislature, where suburban lawmakers have largely taken over from the old-time "cornstalk brigade."

Horrendous as it is, the urban crisis could be solved, in Cleveland and elsewhere, if only there were the funds to mount the programs, to staff the projects, to reverse the decay, to counterattack, to change and improve. If only there were the funds. But that is the ridiculous part. There are the funds. The richest country in the history of the world has the wherewithal, and has it to spare. In fact, affluence and waste combine here to make the poverty, the malnutrition, the slums, the ignorance, the disease--the urban crisis in its totality--cruelly unnecessary.

There are the funds. They have been poured down the open sewer of an undeclared war in Southeast Asia. They have been lifting Americans into outer space without elevating either spirits or conditions here on the ground. They have been swallowed up in military and defense budgets that have ignored the question of whether there will be anything worth defending at home. All that has been lacking is the will and the resolve to reorder national priorities. Perhaps, after Vietnam, the resolve can be made and national priorities can be established that will put first things first.

How did (continued on page 262)Saving the Cities(continued from page 148) the cities grow so sick that their very survival is now questioned by editorial writers, columnists, essayists, mayors and many others? Old age, partly; changing technology, partly; inadequate governmental structuring, partly. But the most pernicious influences of all have been chronic apathy and neglect. Obsolescence was built into the cities. Again, let's take Cleveland as an example. Two thirds of the city's housing is more than 50 years old. Most of it is frame construction. Much of it was built close to plants, factories and warehouses, ensuring its rapid decline in many cases because of the action of smoke and fumes on wood and paint. And when you have two or more generations using housing before moving on, new occupants and governments face monumental problems.

Let me comment parenthetically on the phenomenon of "moving on." It always has been the function of a city to be a temporary haven for those on the way up the economic and social ladder--indeed, a place providing the employment, educational and cultural opportunities that enabled individuals and families to move on and out. It is significant, in this regard, to recall that by the time Cleveland was incorporated as an Ohio city in 1836--40 years after General Moses Cleaveland, heading a surveying party for the Connecticut Land Company, had selected the mouth of the Cuyahoga River as the site for a settlement--all but two of the original families had moved out. Years later, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., became involved in a legal dispute with the state and the city of Cleveland over tax payments and finally moved out of Ohio. So anyone who tries to tell me that whites have fled or are fleeing the central cities because of the relatively recent in-migration of black folks knows neither his history nor his sociology.

Changing technology has dramatized the obsolescence of the city as well as contributed to it. I refer not only to the automobile, which made street patterns and traffic controls in the older industrial cities obsolete and permitted people to live at greater distances from their jobs, but also to the changing requirements of business and industry. Instead of vertical plants and warehouses on railroad sidings, the new requirements were for one-story plants, served by trucks, with acres and acres of asphalted parking space for employees' cars and a bit of green grass and landscaping to qualify for a beautification award from a trade magazine and a tax write-off from Uncle Sam. Within the plants, of course, were assembly lines, fork-lift trucks and other dictators of horizontality.

The outward flow of city residents was greatly accelerated by FHA-guaranteed mortgages in the years after World War Two. People for whom the central city would otherwise have remained a haven were encouraged to leave by FHA and GI Bill guarantees. They were also captivated by the suburban vision of green grass, lesser density (you can love your neighbors if there are fewer of them), outdoor grills and the friendly cop who lived next door and sent his kids to the same school as yours. But given the small lots preferred by housing developers and the increasing tax demands for schools, transportation, sewer construction and other municipal services, it has become apparent that the suburban oasis has proved to be a mirage for many.

Those who moved out, fooled or not, were for the most part economically advantaged. And increasingly, those who remained or who were drawn to the central city were the economically dependent--the Southern Negro, the Appalachian and the Southern white, the Indian and the elderly. The Southern Negro and the Appalachian white came to the city seeking the employment, educational and cultural opportunities that the city had provided previous generations of Mayflower types, farmers' sons and daughters and central, southern and eastern Europeans. But they arrived to find the city far less financially able to deal effectively with their problems than it had with the very similar plight of their urban predecessors.

As a direct consequence of these migrations, Cleveland has been declining in population since 1950, when the U. S. census showed a population of nearly 915,000, and it has been declining as a percentage of the population of its region since 1910. Then, the central city had 84.9 percent of the population of the total metropolitan area. In 1970, Cleveland's proportion of the regional population was 36.2 percent. At the same time, the population of the central city has become ever more dependent upon government. In 1910, the U. S. census showed that 75 percent of the population of the city of Cleveland was composed of those in their most economically productive years--15 to 64 years of age. In 1965, that age group made up only 60 percent of the total and when the 1970 figures are broken down shortly, I suspect that they will show even fewer wage-earning residents and more of the very young and of the very old.

Certain economic trends are also significant, because they indicate the growing inability of the city to serve this growing concentration of citizens who most need government services. As the population has shifted outward, neighborhood retail trade has gone along with it. In 1948, there were more than 67,000 retail employees in Cleveland. Then, the central city had 81 percent of all retail employment in the region. By 1967, the number of retail employees in the city was 46,000 and Cleveland was down to 44 percent of the total regional retail employment. The trend was even more pronounced in dollar volume of retail trade. In 1958, retail sales in Cleveland were 60 percent of the metropolitan-area total; in 1967, Cleveland had only 39 percent of the total. And the trend in wholesaling has been much the same.

Although there have been substantial increases in the number of employees and dollar volume in financial and business services and in the advertising and communications fields, the over-all impact on the city of these economic trends has been a drastic erosion of the revenues from property taxes, on which the city's services and schools have traditionally relied. The city's revenues have also been pinched by freeway construction, which has removed huge areas of land from the tax rolls. Another problem is the increasing concentration in the central city of its most valuable institutions--educational facilities, hospitals, museums, libraries, churches, symphony halls and charity-supported organizations, all of which in one way or another require city services for their use and enjoyment. Yet none of these institutions pays taxes. Six hundred million dollars' worth of Cleveland real estate--25 percent of the potential total assessment--is nontaxable, representing an annual loss to the city, at present property-tax rates, of $11,000.000. As a result, the major financial burden is inevitably shifted not only to the city-based corporations but also to the individual property owners, whose tax rates must continually be increased.

Many of these difficulties--particularly the crucial financial problems--continue to exist because the structure of government has impeded efforts to meet the urban crisis. State legislatures have continued to reflect formulas that favor rural or suburban areas in the distribution of money for education, housing, welfare and health care. The Baker vs. Carr decision of the U. S. Supreme Court--the one-man, one-vote ruling--gave great hope to mayors of big cities that we would be delivered from rural domination at the statehouse. But it came too late. The population, as indicated, had shifted from the city proper to the suburbs and exurbs; thus, even with reapportionment, central cities are far from adequately represented in the state legislatures. The legislator from the suburb usually has no more concern for the ghetto--the problems of welfare recipients, the aged and the other minority groups who are imprisoned there, the complex problems of educating the economically and culturally disadvantaged--than did the farmer whose seat he took.

So I am not very optimistic about any plans for Federal-revenue sharing that would permit governors and/or state legislatures to oversee the distribution of funds piously earmarked by Washington for the cities. Revenue sharing is sound in principle, however. That is the direction in which we must go--and go far in order to meet the problems of the cities. Thirty years ago, local government collected two thirds of all tax revenues. Today, the situation is exactly reversed: The Federal Government collects two thirds of all tax revenues and local government only one third. That is why it is so important to reorder our national priorities. That is why the Federal Government must come to realize that 70 percent of the population of the country now lives in urban areas, and that what this country needs is not a good five-cent cigar or a "Southern strategy" but an urban strategy--one that will preserve and strengthen the democratic processes and make the American dream of equal opportunity more real for those of our citizens who are locked in the ghettos of our big cities.

I am tempted to propose that state government be done away with and the Congress be reconstituted. Instead of a Senate composed of two members from each of the 50 states, I would propose an upper House composed of 100 representatives from the 50 largest metropolitan areas, one to be elected from the central city of each metropolitan area and one at large. For state government--an obvious anachronism--I would substitute regional government, which could address itself properly to area-wide problems such as water pollution, intercity transportation, economic development and planning.

But the form is not really important. What is essential is to find ways and means to end the apathy and neglect that have permitted, even encouraged, the decline of the city and the quality of urban life. Solutions will come only when Americans realize that they have no alternative to saving the cities. Suburbia is no escape. Suburbs become cities, with all their needs for municipal services, with voter resistance to tax measures, with sewage-treatment and garbage-disposal problems, with rising crime rates and with schools to be built and staffed. I don't think new towns are an alternative, either. Like suburbs, they, too, become cities; and although they may be better planned initially and benefit at the start from a peculiarly American pioneer optimism, they will find it impossible to create overnight or even over decades a Cleveland Orchestra, with its Severance Hall, a Columbia University, a Golden Arch, a University of Chicago or a Golden Gate Bridge.

The cities of America represent such a tremendous investment of time, energy, talent, ingenuity, hope and human resources that they cannot and must not be written off. Their decline must be arrested. They must be restored, revitalized, improved and strengthened so that they can fulfill their destiny, their mission--aiding the weak, enriching the spirit of all and ennobling civilization as we have inherited it and contributed to it in this second half of the 20th Century.

A few strides in the right direction have been made in Cleveland. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, technical and professional people from throughout the metropolitan area sat down with my cabinet to devise a program to meet immediate, pressing problems. The result was the Cleveland: Now! program, which allocated $177,000,000 over the ensuing 18 months in the areas of housing, employment, summer youth programs, urban renewal and neighborhood conservation, small-business assistance and development and policy planning and evaluation. We established specific goals in several areas--4600 new or rehabilitated dwelling units for low-and moderate-income families, 11,000 jobs or job-training opportunities for the hard-core unemployed, summer youth programs that would reach, or attempt to reach, the most alienated. We reached these goals in most cases--and surpassed them in some.

Although the bulk of the money, more than $140,000,000, came from the Federal Government, the private sector was directly engaged. We sought $11,250,000 from corporations, foundations and individuals in a uniquely successful campaign for seed money from private sources for governmental programs. School children gave nickels and dimes; corporation executives living in the suburbs gave hundreds and hundreds of dollars; a retired couple contributed $1,000,000 in stocks. Because local government was offering and providing the leadership and direction that had been wanting before, the result was total involvement of the broad community in the city's future. Because of the success of this program in reordering priorities to put first things first, I am compelled to suggest to the Nixon Administration and to the Congress a simple and obvious extension, in spirit and slogan, of the Cleveland experience--"The Cities: Now!"