EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY ACT. Enactment of this legislation in 1964 as the opening big gun of the Administration's "war on poverty" will affect a number of situations and programs in regions and cities, for unemployment and poverty lie at the root of a variety of the more specific problems.
Still untested in practice, the Employment Opportunity Act of 1964 could become a landmark comparable to the Employment Act of 1946 and could be carried out as a complement to it. The earlier legislation appeared vague to many observers at its time of passage, but by now it seems clear that in explicitly declaring the federal government's responsibility for maintaining full employment it staked out an irreversible commitment.
Since 1946, advancing national prosperity has been interrupted by only mild recessions. The threat of extreme swings in the business cycle appears to have been greatly reduced. But prosperity for the many has not dissolved a hard core of poverty—persons who are either hard to employ, or for one reason or another unable to work at all. The Employment Opportunity Act of 1964 is aimed at this growing problem.
At this early stage the drive to reduce poverty has brought forth no striking new ideas. However, new steam will be put behind some useful old ideas—a Job Corps to instill work-discipline and teach skills to young people from poor environments; and work-study programs to offer part-time jobs to enable young persons to continue their education. The important point, though, is that a new national commitment has been made—one from which it will be as hard to turn back as from the earlier commitment to full employment.
NEW COMMUNITIES. Sometimes the very introduction of legislation, even if it fails of passage, can highlight an area of public concern. Such a piece of legislation was that proposed in 1964 by the Housing and Home Finance Agency. It would have provided extended planning assistance for "New Communities," and would also have offered liberalized credit for land acquisition and development and for necessary public works in the new communities.
The United States now is an urban nation, with over two-thirds of the people living in urban groupings. The country will become even more urbanized in the next generation. This transformation has been accompanied by major changes in the way cities grow.
Prior to World War II, most real estate developers laid out subdivisions and sold lots to whoever would buy; and most builders built a few houses each year, on an essentially handicraft basis. Since the war, urban growth has shifted to the large developer-builder. He builds up to several hundred houses in essentially one operation, thereby achieving large economies of scale.
The New Community concept made rapid strides in 1964. In a few cases this will be a wholly new city, independent of any existing one; more often it will be a large development within the economic orbit of an existing city but physically separate. It includes residences for middle- and high-income families, but rarely for low-income ones; planned commercial centers' and community facilities such as schools and parks; and sometimes industrial areas. Each development calls for a large tract of land—at least 1,000 acres—in one ownership and requires large financial resources.
HHFA has records of more than 160 such communities now being planned or now under construction. Some of the developments are excellent, others less so, and some are almost sure to fail. But clearly a major change is in the making for the pattern of urban growth.
Extension of the range of housing choice could have significant impacts on the fortunes of the central city and the older suburbs. If large numbers of middle- and upper-income families should choose to take a financial loss and move from the central city sooner than they had planned, enlarged supplies of good housing would filter down to lower income families. On the other hand, the out-migration of still more members of the central city's higher income groups would further cut into an already-reduced tax base. The dilemma could be avoided if renewal of the core-areas of our central cities were to keep pace with the construction of new detached communities, so that the central city attracted some "fair" share of the affluent.
BLUEPRINT FOR APPALACHIA. The largest island of hard-core poverty in a prosperous national economy is the mountain region of Appalachia, comprising all of West Virginia and parts of eleven other states. There depression is endemic and pockets of affluence are the exception. Chief among many causes are the failure of natural resources; the forests are cut over and the richer seams of coal have run out at the same time that markets for coal have dwindled. Physical, economic, and cultural isolation is another heavily depressing factor.
The President's Appalachian Regional Commission last May reported on the state of the mountain economy and recommended: (a) a short-run public investment program to provide facilities and programs essential to growth and (b) the creation of a permanent Appalachian Regional Commission of governors which would continuously analyze the economy, prepare the region to take advantage of federal programs, and encourage the formation of multi-county development districts.
The most striking specific recommendation calls for a system of primary roads to supplement the Interstate Highway System. The Commission thus recognizes that the small mountain economies can keep going only by strengthening their ties to the large urban economies in the lowlands on all sides.
The Commission also noted the need to shift mountain people from farms to the towns; the need to shift population from towns to cities was less recognized. But if producers demand business services available only in middle-sized or larger urban areas and the younger generation demands range of choice in occupations and consumer goods also found only in similar-sized places, a truly rational development plan may require hard choices: Should public investment and other development programs be concentrated in only a few of many communities, and; if so, which ones? A number of smaller places within forty or fifty miles of an existing metropolitan area might be revived by good roads that create an extended local labor market and shopping area. Accepting a few sites with unusual recreational-tourist potential, is there a worthwhile future for most of the smaller, really remote areas?
A version of this article appeared in print in the February 1965 issue of Resources magazine.
