accomplishments
and opportunities

The size and detailed contents of the text and appendices of this report on the New Community and Family Mobility System should not disguise the distinctive character of the USC-OEO project. In the first (June-July 1970) issue of "City" magazine under the sponsorship of the newly merged National Urban Coalition, editor-writer Simpson Lawson summarizes some of the unique national contributions of this project.*

"The new-community proposal of the University

of Louisville Urban Studies Center is not just another
new-town project. The primary purpose underlying the
thinking and the planning that have gone on thus far
is not merely to develop a new town as such; rather,
to provide new techniques for solving the problems of
poverty both in rural and urban areas."

new

The scene was one of a number of conferences on communities sponsored by the Urban Studies Center to generate both exposure and constructive criticism for its unconventional and controversial ideas. The speaker, a member of the center's staff, was addressing an interdepartmental assortment of 100 federal and state officials and other professional practitioners in the field of community development.

As the article points out, the Urban Studies Center's research originated out of concern for the disruptive results of

*The full text of the article appears as Appendix D

of this report.

rural-to-urban migration and was expanded to encompass the plight of the poor in the inner-city.

Out of its early research the center deter-
mined that while migrants need assurance of jobs and
good housing at their urban destination, they need
more. They need what the center's director,

Dr. Joseph Maloney, calls a "total supportive social
environment.

་་

The quest for ways to steer migrants to such
an environment led the planners to the conclusion
that it could best be provided in a new community.
This would be a community that would smooth the en-
try of chronically unemployed into the "world of
work," as the practitioners of the Puritan ethic con-
ceive it. The strategy envisioned an intervention
that would prepare whole families in some cases
whole communities - for urban living, but one which
would let the mountain people retain their traditions
of independence and the black inner-city dwellers re-
tain their emerging racial identity.

Maloney and his associates envision their
"total supportive environment" as a separate entity,
developed by a nonprofit corporation in which new
residents would be members and which would evolve
into a municipal government. The new community
would have its own taxing authority, would operate
an independent school system, a sanitation system,
and a law-and-justice system, and perform other
essential services, as well as some supplementary

ones.

The legislative groundwork for this develop-
mental-governmental mechanism was laid in March when
the Kentucky General Assembly passed a bill
first of its kind in any state authorizing new com-
munity districts...

the

The statute establishes the kind of organizational framework that many experts on urban growth consider essential to orderly development... (It) permits, with the consent of existing county and school governments, the establishment of new community districts which can exercise general governmental authority, including planning and zoning, within the designated development area. The new district may acquire by condemnation land for public uses

such

1. The needs of the AV Nav Apm ****** eminence, yet steps are to be taken du 414* tion of a "one-class" community While th

of some large-scale communities have encouraged the construction of lower-income housing, few such units have actually been built. If the present formula for population composition is preserved, at least half of the new residents of the Louisville-area community would be drawn from the unemployed or under employed.

A

2. It would rely heavily on the expansion of a strong existing base of private industries to provide jobs to which new residents would commute. costly, publicly subsidized strategy for (plant) relocation would not be necessary at the outset.

3. Development of the new community would provide a means for aggregating housing demand. The first steps in the development, scheduled for 1971, would coincide with schedules for completion of the current series of tests of industrialized housing systems under HUD's Breakthrough program. Under a charter authorized by Kentucky's new-community statute, there would be no barriers to new building technology, such as the restrictive building codes and zoning regulations that now exist in many urban and rural areas.

4. The community could serve as a testing ground for other kinds of new technology. Computerized job-matching systems, already tested in Maryland and Utah, could be further demonstrated. The results of a HUD-sponsored study of telecommunications now being conducted by the National Academy of Engineering might be applicable.

5. It would provide a new model for the selection of sites for new towns and other generators of urban growth, one that would recognize suitability rather than marketability or political expediency as the essential criterion.

In conclusion, Lawson adds:

It is in this experimental arena that projects such as the proposed Louisville-area community can make their greatest impact on national policy...

It may not be fair to measure the program's total contributions in terms of whether it alters the map of Kentucky and redirects the flow of migrants from crowded Midwestern cities. In the pro

cess of pursuing these goals, the planners and count-
less other public entrepreneurs have performed an
intellectual cross-pollination of Washington Bureau-
cracies that might hasten a national new community
policy in a way that debates in Congress and the ex-
ecutive agencies of government are not doing.

This is the only New Community project that has been primarily designed to insert into the evolving national urban strategy social considerations that transcend such quantitative problems as the magnitude of population growth and the number of new housing units required for lower middle Americans. It attempts to insert qualitative elements providing for the movement of a million families from poverty to the mainstream of American society by providing a class and racial integrative and supportive envi

ronment.

Further, this project is not limited to the dramatic and obvious circumstances of the East and West Coasts of the United States. The project assumes that a national strategy should include intervention in the process of urbanization to channel national development to achieve a healthier and more balanced national society, rather than merely provide accommodation for increasing the impaction on the already over-burdened megalopolitan

sectors.

As a consequence of Urban Studies Center activities the OEO has already identified a wide variety of more practical and effective devices for channeling impending urbanization in ways that will exploit otherwise neglected social opportunities. A partial list of such articulated opportunities and accomplishments includes:

The system itself is a method to achieve class and racial residential and community integration, voluntarily and with the full consent of local governments and communities. For example, the willingness in inner-city poor, black and white, to move into an integrated New Community is described in the C (blue) Section of this report. This willingness has been determined in part by

special Urban Studies Center surveys.

New corporate organization forms that provide for many large-scale, socially-integrated New Communities without major reliance on expanded federal construction subsidies, especially in