New Towns U.S.A.

The quest for a means of structuring urban development in the United States continues. Past efforts such as public housing and urban renewal have not been conspicuous successes. A new overture was made in 1971 as the federal government launched a program for the development of new towns.

New-community legislation made its first appearance in the last days of the Johnson Administration. The most recent act, passed at the end of 1970, established a bureaucratic apparatus for the idea and authorized broad credit, loan guarantee, and grant assistance to qualified developers of new communities. A New Community Development Corporation in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is responsible for the new-communities policy, and an Office of New Communities Development has been built up to provide staff support for it. Half a billion dollars of loan guarantees, $250 million in interest payment loans, and $168 million in supplementary public facility grants (through fiscal year 1973), along with other forms of assistance in the act, add up to roughly a billion dollars of assistance authorized for new-community development. Although Congress has failed to appropriate loan and grant funds for the program thus far, the loan guarantee program is well under way with over a hundred million dollars in guarantees already approved.

The U.S. new communities policy takes its inspiration from the postwar British experience in planning and building new towns. A ring of new towns around London was conceived as a means of controlling the city's growth. By now the United Kingdom can point to 15 new towns designed to accommodate more than a million people and a dozen more under development that will absorb another one and three-quarters million. British new-towns policy has been modified over the past 25 years but is generally adjudged a success.

New towns in America will be quite different. While the British new town is a deliberate creation of the national government with close control over planning and development, the American new town typically is a private large-scale development scheme aiming to make a profit. The justification for public policy in this field is not to enhance the profitability of the enterprises but rather to ensure that public interests are realized in the course of development.

Four kinds of new communities are to be considered eligible for aid:

1. Economically balanced new communities within metropolitan areas.
2. Additions to smaller nonmetropolitan towns and cities.
3. Major new town-intown developments.
4. New communities away from existing urban centers.

This list allows for new-town assistance to just about everyone. Developer interest will be mostly in the first category—new towns in metropolitan areas where demand is strong. Reston and Columbia (near Washington, D.C.) fall in this group, as do four projects for which HUD has approved loan guarantees—Flower Mound New Town between Dallas and Fort Worth, Park Forest South near Chicago, Charles County Communities near Washington, and Jonathan near Minneapolis. Categories 2 and 4 are designed to appeal to nonmetropolitan areas, including depressed areas. The new town-intown concept qualifies central cities for support under the act, thereby forestalling their opposition to outlying development.

The new town-intown idea—the term itself was first advanced by Harvey Perloff of RFF in 1966—aims at creating upgraded urban environments focused on community centers and schools and extending on into adjacent shopping and work environments. The idea was embodied in 1968 legislation and has become part of the new-communities policy. The first serious proposal for a new town-intown is Fort Lincoln New Town to be built on the largely undeveloped site of the old National Training School for Boys in Washington, D.C. Deep seated divisions within the community over political control have delayed development, although planning continues.

HUD made its first entry into the new town-intown field in the summer of 1971 by approving a loan guarantee to support the Cedar Riverside high-density new community southeast of Minneapolis' central business district. The project covers 340 acres dominated by the University of Minnesota Medical School. It is coupled with a large-scale urban renewal program in the area to provide 12,500 dwelling units and related services and institutions.

Most of the current new town-intown projects have been advanced without explicit promise of HUD support, and they do not fit any common model. One of the most exciting is the New Town proposal for Welfare Island in the East River off Manhattan, which is being planned by a subsidiary of New York's Urban Development Corporation. A densely developed, auto-free layout to be interlaced with parks and served by an electric minibus transportation system, the Welfare Island project will seek to show what high-density living under ideal circumstances can be like when the total environment is well designed and the tyranny of the automobile is overthrown.

New York has two other new town-intown proposals. The most politically controversial is the South Richmond Development Plan for the Raritan Bay area of Staten Island. Prepared at the request of Mayor Lindsay by mortgage banker James Rouse, the builder of Columbia, the plan proposes to more than double the island's population. It would cover 10,600 acres of undeveloped land on the island and require 6.5 billion dollars of public and private capital over a 20-year period to provide housing for 420,000 people and jobs for 180,000. However, many Staten Islanders see this monumental development overwhelming their quiet neighborhoods of single-family housing, and resent it as intrusion by Mayor Lindsay into local matters.

While the Staten Island proposal is far enough from the city center to make it debatable as an intown project, there is no doubt about the second proposal. At the southern end of Manhattan, the Battery Park City Authority, a state corporation, is quietly planning the redevelopment of 91 acres at the tip of the island; concepts and details are unavailable at this point.

Privately sponsored new town-intown efforts are represented by the proposed Franklin Town project in Philadelphia. Five private corporations and a major Philadelphia bank have replanned 22 city blocks northwest of the City Hall around a new central boulevard lined with shops and connecting a residential development of 4,000 units with a major commercial development at the downtown end of the project. The public contribution to the project is to consist of title to the streets closed in the replanning and use of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority's powers eminent domain, if necessary, to acquire some part of the 11 acres not owned or controlled by the sponsors.

In Hartford a different approach is being tried. James Rouse and a business civic group, the Greater Hartford Corporation, have joined in a broad-scaled regional diagnosis and planning effort known as Greater Hartford Process, whose major immediate objective is to effect community redevelopment of Hartford's North End. Working with a strongly established community development group, Hartford Process is seeking a development scheme that will mean not only a better living environment for the community, but also a return on the investment to support further development work. While public planning agencies watch from the sidelines with some skepticism, the business community is trying to find way to link up with "grass root" institutions to show that community development is good business.

Other more borderline new town—intown developments could be added to this list without adding materially to the perspectives that the new community movement has opened up for the redevelopment of American cities. In the United States new communities are largely a metropolitan phenomenon: they seem to depend on established labor markets and strongly structured regional economies. While suburban new towns represent a natural evolution of large-scale suburban housing developments, the new towns—intown owe little to their urban renewal antecedents in the central city. Their sponsorship, concepts, and approaches are varied. Bypassed underdeveloped land has been an important factor offering opportunities at costs that were acceptable. Versatile as the new town—in town seems to be as a development tool, its main impact is likely to remain in those areas where land assembly and preparation costs are moderate, as where historical accident has preserved a Welfare Island or a National Boys Training School site undeveloped while the tide of urban development swept around it. How much a national new-communities policy can contribute to this approach to central city redevelopment is yet to be discovered.