National Policy For The Urban Crisis

The year 1969 was marked by a sharp increase in the malignancy of what has come to be known as the urban crisis and by rising demands for a "national urban policy." Until 1964, in the popular mind there were no "urban" problems: there were housing problems, and slum problems, and unemployment problems, and social welfare problems. Some of each had an urban context, but each was handled by its appropriate federal agency. To the extent that an "urban" problem was recognized, it was seen as a problem which in a federal system was most properly dealt with by the affected local and state governments with such aids as the current structure of federal programs would permit. Indeed, Congress rejected President Kennedy's request to create an executive department to oversee a coherent national response to the cities' rising demands for national involvement in their problems.

On January 20, 1969, President Nixon inherited the Department of Housing and Urban Development formed by his predecessor around the old Housing and Home Finance Agency. As head of the department he appointed George Romney, known primarily as a production man. The President's first official act signaled a new view of the urban crisis—he established an Urban Affairs Council on the model of the National Security Council to ". . . advise and assist him . . . in the development of a national urban policy. . . ." The new administration apparently took the view that the Department of Housing and Urban Development was best suited to focus on housing as a national policy issue and on those parts of the urban crisis directly concerned with housing. By implication, the urban crisis itself was taken to be greater in the scope of its program requirements than could be properly structured in any single government agency, and the problem of generating "national urban policy" accordingly came to be an issue of joint policy formation and coordination among affected executive departments.

The first major result of this new approach to urban policy making was Operation Breakthrough, announced by Secretary Romney May of 1969, which strengthened the impression that henceforth Housing and Urban Development was to be more housing and less urban development. The statutory basis for Operation Breakthrough was Section 108 of the Housing Act of 1968, a congressional addition to the housing and urban development recommendations laid before Congress by President Johnson. In that Act the declared goal of Congress was a decent home in a decent neighborhood for every American family by 1978—an objective that would require construction of about 26 million new or rehabilitated dwelling units in ten years. In 1968 less than 1.6 million dwelling units were constructed.

The assumption behind Operation Breakthrough is that the gap between the 1968 figure and the annual goal is mostly a result of structural inadequacies in the national housing market which can be tackled only through a coordinated effort spearheaded by the federal government. A further assumption is that the market is there, once the federal government commits itself during the next decade to 6 million new publicly assisted housing units for low-income families, and that the total objective can be realized with broad reform of the housing industry; mobilization of state and local, as well as federal, potential contributions; and reorganization of consumer demand.

Key elements in improving the performance of the housing industry include greater versatility of institutions for financing development of prototypes that lend themselves to widespread mass production, assembly of housing sites in several parts of the country where pilot phase construction can be carried out, recruiting the cooperation of labor in eliminating union practices that have contributed to rising costs and constrained productive capacity in the housing industry. In the public sector, the objective is to swing the authority and power of the governors' offices behind the program in the individual states and to launch a frontal attack on the planning, zoning, housing, and building codes which complicate new housing construction and make it excessively costly. To reorganize the market, more standardization, large new housing settlements, and substantial reductions in the costs and complications of new home purchasing are expected to convert the pool of potential house buyers into effective demand at an earlier moment.

The impression that development of the national housing stock has become HUD's central mission is reinforced by Secretary Romney's statement on model cities, issued last May on behalf of the President and the Urban Affairs Council. In it he announced the transfer of basic policy formation responsibility for this key HUD program to the Urban Affairs Council. The statement went further to break up the old alliance between HUD and the cities by providing for a greater involvement of the states in planning and executing local model cities programs. Thus, in the first six months of the new administration the role of HUD in the nation's urban policy making had been changed from one of director to that of actor.

The role of the Urban Affairs Council was indicated last summer when the council's executive secretary, Daniel P. Moynihan, stated: ". . . the quality of urban environment . . . must become a proclaimed concern of government . . ." and in pursuit thereof laid down in order of urgency and importance ten guides to urban policy.

He pointed out (1) that the poverty and social isolation of minority groups in central cities is the single most important problem of the American city today; (2) that economic and social forces in urban areas are not self-equilibrating; (3) that the ineffective response of local government to urban problems derives from the fragmented and obsolescent structure of urban government itself; and (4) that the primary object of federal urban policy must be to restore the fiscal vitality of urban government. He then suggested that federal urban policy should (5) seek to equalize the provision of public services as among different jurisdictions; (6) assert a specific interest in the movement of people; (7) support and encourage the state governments to carry out their role in urban affairs responsibly; (8) develop and put into practice more effective incentive systems for states and local governments; (9) provide more and better information concerning public affairs; and (10) develop a heightened sense of the finite resources of the natural environment and the fundamental importance of aesthetics in successful urban growth.

These broad guidelines suggest that the aim of the Urban Affairs Council is to develop general perspectives and bring them to the attention of national legislators and the federal agencies. Great gaps were left between these general objectives of public policy and the policies themselves. What was positive in the newly developed role of the council was its attempt to define for federal policy the scale and content of the urban crisis and to search out the entry points toward which solutions can be fashioned.

In November the evolution of urban policy making underwent yet another transformation. During the summer the Urban Affairs Council had been divided over the administration's social welfare policy, specifically over whether the President should pursue a policy of reducing economic dependency of the nation's poor with a program more costly than Arthur Burns, the President's Counsellor, thought wise. The question was resolved essentially in favor of the larger effort, but the episode suggested one of the weaknesses of the council: while it provides a useful forum for interagency discussion, it does not necessarily represent a forum for reaching an enforceable inter-agency consensus.

With the appointment of Burns to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board and Moynihan to the position of Counsellor, the chief contenders in the welfare debate have been removed from the Urban Affairs Council. Simultaneously, the President appointed John D. Ehrlichman to preside over a new domestic affairs staff to generate policy ideas, test them out with the agencies, reconcile conflicting points of view, give them legislative form, and put them before the President for his consideration. This staff will work with six "project groups" drawn from the Budget Bureau and the White House and covering the following areas: welfare and education; justice; urban affairs and post office; civil rights, youth, and culture; finance; and natural resources and environment. The Urban Affairs Council still exists, but it seems clear that its role and significance, measured in terms of an exclusive responsibility for policy directed to the urban crisis, has been substantially diminished. It is too early to take any measure of the domestic affairs staff's performance as a strategy board with broad responsibility for generating new approaches to problems of the cities.

One year ago federal urban policy was largely the property of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Chained to its history as a housing agency, it could not achieve the scope that the cities demanded to meet their problems. A year later, with problems no less pressing, the proper machinery for development of a federal urban policy is perhaps yet to be invented. What does exist is yet to be tested.