ments. These developments should be able to pay for the infrastructure through the increment and land value.

The development of the new towns in Great Britain indicates that over the long pull, these are self-supporting. I think with a loan program, the subsidies will really be unnecessary except, of course, with the subsidies that are now provided and would continue to be provided in the categorical programs in housing to provide housing for lowincome families.

The CHAIRMAN. I wonder if I might break in right there regarding new towns. Do you think we can very well compare our new town development in this country with that in Britain?

Mr. SLAYTON. Certainly not now,

The CHAIRMAN. I am not talking about the stage of development; I am talking about the method by which it is being carried out. I am thinking primarily of the land which in Great Britain, they give the right of eminent domain and take the land. It is just automatic. We cannot do that in this country.

It seems to me that it presents a problem that is bad enough now and is bound to become worse as time goes on.

Mr. SLAYTON. Well, I do not see how we can undertake a new town program in the United States, Mr. Chairman, unless the power of eminent domain is provided to State-chartered public development corporations. Relying upon private assembly solely, I think will defeat the whole concept or the objective of the new town development program or the development of satellite communities on the periphery of our metropolitan areas.

The CHAIRMAN. Of course, that is the status of it now.

Mr. SLAYTON. The status of it now.

The CHAIRMAN. It has to depend upon

Mr. SLAYTON. Private assembly.

The CHAIRMAN (continuing). Private assembly of the land.

Mr. SLAYTON. As a consequence, our new towns are located where there is already land assembled under one ownership like Irvine Ranch or Reston. Columbia is the only new town where there has been private assembly. And, of course, this has been done by Jim Rouse. And there is one Jim Rouse in the United States, it seems to me, to do this.

It is a very difficult undertaking if there is not the power of domain. And Jim Rouse still has holes in the area in Columbia where he was unable to acquire the land. And private developers now who are interested in new town development feel that the power of eminent domain is essential if we are going to be able to undertake such developments. The CHAIRMAN. It seems to me we would run into some rather difficult constitutional problems in trying to provide for the public taking-that is, condemnation-both State level and even more so at the Federal level.

Mr. SLAYTON. Well, I think back in 1949, Mr. Chairman, when the urban redevelopment legislation was adopted and when there were only a few States that had urban redevelopment legislation and when the constitutional question was raised about public taking for urban renewal activities. And we had to go through quite a lot of State court decisions. And, of course, we had one major U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the use of eminent domain for public taking for urban renewal.

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It does require a careful statement of the public objectives. And in this respect, I think that the committee ought to look very carefully at the way the public objectives, the objectives of this legislation, are stated because it will be going through court tests without any question. And in some cases, it will require the State constitutions be changed just as in urban renewal, State constitutions had to be changed.

But now, since 1949, every State in the United States, all 50 States, have urban renewal legislation with the authority to use eminent domain to acquire land for urban renewal. This is a beginning. And I think that unless we get started, we are never going to have a program. The CHAIRMAN. All right. Thank you.

Go ahead.

Mr. SLAYTON. On the financing of these new town developments, the legislation provides for direct loans to these corporations, these public development corporations, and I guess to the private corporations as well. I would suggest that this might not be politically feasible in terms of the Treasury's attitude toward direct loans. And I should think you could achieve the same objective by having the Federal Government guarantee these loans.

There will not be any cash outlay from the Federal Government. It will not have an impact on the budget. And the only thing one would have to allow for is an appropriation to take care of some small losses that might occur.

Also, if the loans go to public bodies, they will be able to issue their bonds which will be free of income tax for those who own the bonds. And here again, since the Treasury has some concern about that, you might work out a system of providing an interest rate subsidy to these public development corporations so that you can offset the greater interest rate they would have to pay by not having the income tax provision in the bonds. I would suggest guarantee rather than indirect loans.

We would support, very definitely, the importance of the construction of public works in these new towns, free-standing or satellite new communities, whatever they are, early on so as to provide the necessary community facilities when the new towns are getting underway. I can remember as an early resident of Park Forest, Ill., when Phil Klutznick had great difficulty in providing schools within Park Forest because there was not sufficient tax base for bonding or assessment for bonding and not sufficient tax base for revenue. But Phil Klutznick provided some of the housing units for schools and actually paid money for the school board-and I was a member of the school board-to support the activities of the school operation.

It is important to have the community facilities, the public facilities, early on. And the legislation ought to provide assistance to get them started early. And the provision in the legislation which sets up fairly stringent requirements on building and housing codes, I think, ought to be modified to make them of the same nature of the existing requirements, say, in urban renewal legislation. I don't think we ought to saddle a new community development with more stringent requirements on building codes than we now have in the legislation for urban renewal. It would just make it tougher to get these underway. We ought to go at the whole question of building codes

in a comprehensive way rather than try to tack it onto new town legislation.

The inner city development portion of the proposed legislation is also, we think, essential. It is important, I think, to expand the urban renewal program to make it possible to redevelop, renew, rehabilitate, areas that might not now be eligible under present legislation, both State and Federal. But I think it is unwise to set up a new program separated from the urban renewal program for this expanded urban renewal program. They are basically the same program.

This urban renewal expansion, I think here it ought to be just expansion of the urban renewal program. We strongly support the special assistance for land acquisition to control growth. It is very important to use any open space land program in our opinion to help guide development around metropolitan areas. Here, again, we would suggest that this be an expansion of the present open space land program.

It is not necessary to set up a brandnew program to undertake this. In fact, I would urge the legislation to include considerable emphasis when it gets to the State planning operations of requiring the States to use their public investment programs, the construction of their branches of the State universities, the construction of the major highways, the location of their hospitals, their major parks and their office buildings and things of that nature, and their airports, to use their public investment program on the basis of a development plan for the State as a whole. Because these public investments can do a great deal to encourage economy development. At the present time, their location becomes something of a logrolling operation without any base against which the location can be judged.

We would urge that the legislation, and it does include this, provide for the State to create a development plan.

And on the housing legislation, we support the concept very strongly of trying to simplify the housing program by combining many of the sections into simpler sections. We have developed a layer cake kind of housing program with so many sections and so many provisions that we have to hire a former FHA employee and consul tants to sort us out when we are trying to undertake these operations. It is important to simplify it so that more people can understand it, and it doesn't become quite as complex as it is.

We would have some reservations on the use of the term "modest design" in the proposed legislation. We feel that this might be interpreted to provide housing for low- and moderate-income families of the inferior design because of the pressure of perhaps a General Accounting Office and some of the history that we have had in the General Accounting Office on this.

We would suggest the substitution of the phrase "high standard of design consistent with prudent budgeting." The emphasis here is, of course, on keeping the cost down, but an emphasis to creating really good design.

Congress has declared itself on this subject previously, and in our written testimony we have those references which I have hoped you would take a look at.

On research and technology, we believe the general goal of section 108, the Housing Act of 1968, and we believe that there ought to be a

program that makes it possible for the Secretary to undertake continuous experimental programs using new technologies and the production of housing primarily for low- and moderate-income families. I think that this is an inadvertent omission in the legislation proposed by the administration, and I had hoped you could take a look at that. We think the Secretary ought to have that authority.

And we think also there ought to be an authorization of something like $100 million really to get into the continuous experimental housing program in order to try to develop means of producing housing at lesser costs.

We would also suggest that the housing legislation provide some assistance for the kind of community organizations, community design or development centers, that are springing up around the country which are organizations of the residents primarily of inner city neighborhoods, organizations through which the residents of those areas express their concerns and interests as to how they would like to see their area rehabilitated, renewed, or the kinds of public facilities that they would like to see installed. We think this is an important function. These are indigenous, self-created organizations, you might say. But they do reflect the interests of the community. And this is a means by which the community can express its concerns to city hall.

Well, that concludes the summary of my testimony, Mr. Chairman, and I would like now unless you would rather stop and ask me questions to introduce Carl Feiss who will present the rest of the AIA testimony.

The CHAIRMAN. All right, Mr. Feiss, very glad to have you.
Mr. FEISS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Members of the Committee on Banking and Currency of the Senate, I am Carl Feiss, fellow of the American Institute of Architects, member of the American Institute of Planners, and chairman of the Committee on National Urban Growth Policy of the American Institute of Architects. I have been for many years a consultant in State and regional planning and the large-scale planning problems of regional councils of government and official planning councils. All of these have made effective use of the section 701 grant program from the Housing Act of 1954, as amended.

It has been my privilege to testify with President Rex Whitaker Allen of the American Institute of Architects and others on September 30, 1969, before the House Banking and Currency Comittee Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Urban Growth at the time when the legislation before us today was in the process of formulation. Now that this most progresive new act has been introduced as H.R. 16647 and S. 3640, it gives me great pleasure to appear before you, in a sense to extend my remarks of last September and to develop certain specifics which were not covered by my testimony at that time.

Therefore, in order to avoid repetition, I am requesting, Mr. Chairman, permission to submit as part of the record of this hearing the printed transcript of the earlier hearings which has been reproduced by AIA. With your permission, Mr. Chairman, also, we will distribute copies of this earlier transcript to all members of this committee for its convenience at this time.

The CHAIRMAN. Very well (see p. 1161).

Mr. FEISS. I do not need to tell you that in the past 8 months historic events have occurred which have sharpened and brought into focus a number of the issues that we discussed in the House of Repre sentatives hearings. Attention has been concentrated on the pollution problem, which we raised along with others, as well as on the many other tragic and serious urban issues with which you are all familiar and which have formed the basis for this committee's debates over many years.

Gentleman, as you see by looking at me, I am a member of the depression generation. I had to work my way through the latter years of architectural school, and I worked for a time for a rural farm cooperative which went broke in Plum Bayou, Ark., sleeping out alongside the road out to California and up the Imperial Valley picking vegetables.

I can remember the frustrations of my college generation when we saw graduates of the year before, back in 1930, selling apples on the streets of Philadelphia. There were frustrations in those days, but there was also hope. There was excitement in new leadership and in new programs, exciting programs which stimulated the imagination. There was the new TVA, new and exciting public housing progenie, the CCC, the Rural Resettlement Administration, the Greened towns, all kinds of lively programs about which everybody x

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