tion composition is preserved, at least half of the new residents of the Louisvillearea community would be drawn from the unemployed or underemployed.

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. A costly. publicly subsidized strategy for relocation of industries 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 marketabiltiy or political expediency as the essential criterion.

CON

1. The proposal would foster an experiment in living that would bring together. arbitrarily, two groups for whom there have been no markedly successful patterns of neighborhood coexistence; poor rural whites and poor urban Negroes. The meager record of relationships between these population segments doesn't inspire hope. Though they never materialized, there were fears that a clash between Negroes and southern Appalachian whites might escalate 1967 rioting in Cincinnati's Avondale district, according to the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Monroe Karmin of the Wall Street Journal found evidence that white Appalachian migrants in Detroit shrank from participation in the model cities program, in the face of superior organization by blacks.

2. Despite the plan's "hospitality system," an outcry can be expected from the towns and rural areas surrounding the new community. There is a hint of such a reaction in this statement by a rural-county state senator quoted in the Louisville Courier-Journal's account of the passage of the bill authorizing-community districts: "I can appreciate in starting a new city they might go into the ghettos and bring the meanest people out of one section of the country [into the new town] . . ."

3. Plans to finance the physical developments are hazy. The planners talk in terms of contracting with a single large firm for construction of housing, roads, sewers, and utilities. This raises the question of whether the planners-or the residents could retain the kinds of control necessary to carry out their plan. 4. Because it relies for public support on many agencies of federal and state government, it would be difficult to coordinate. This could be an extremely serious handicap if there is no entity at the Washington level charged with marshaling federal resources for new communities.

5. The new community would "cream off" the population of Appalachia, taking the most promising of its residents and leaving the aged and infirm. This would accelerate an already strong trend which Harry Caudill has dramatized by noting that all those who graduated from one East Kentucky high school during the past three years now live out of state.

6. There have been inadequate planning inputs from representatives of the two large low-income groups for whom the community is designed. (This criticism persists despite Maloney's insistence that identification of actual future residents would raise expectations which could not be fulfilled for years. He also questions the validity of involving a panel of advisers who merely fit the demographic profiles of the two groups.)

The Louisville proposal comes into the marketplace of ideas at a time when an urban growth policy, placing heavy emphasis on new-town development, is evolving. A bill sponsored by Congressman Thomas Ashley (D., Ohio) and most of the other Democrats on the House Banking and Currency Committee would provide an increasing volume of funds for planning grants, land acquisition, and slow-payback development loans to public and private new-town developers. The bill, which has the endorsement of the Democratic leadership in the House.

would set up, at the White House level, a council on urban growth, and create a community development corporation in HUD to provide a range of financial services to eligible developers, including state-level agencies. It would provide no federal land-condemnation authority. Senators Edmund Muskie (D., Maine) and John Sparkman (D., Ala.) are expected to offer almost identical legislation in the Senate.

Policy to be incorporated into Administration-backed legislation on national growth is being considered by the Cabinet-level Urban Affairs Council. There have been few clues to the direction of the council's thinking, but the final proposal is expected to adhere to the Administration's overall principle of maintaining a low budgetary impact. This would suggest a heavy reliance on private enterprise and state govermnent in implementing provisions of new-town development.

The absence of a national urbanization policy has not prevented the growth of a loosely knit constituency for the new town movement within the federal government. In the spring of 1969 a considerable body of literature on the subject was making the rounds of federal decision-makers and their memo-writing aides. Both the American Institute of Planners and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations had completed detailed studies. And in late May, the bipartisan National Commission on Urban Growth Policy recommended the creation of 100 communities averaging 100,000 population each and 10 communities of at least 1,000,000.

Sensing Administration and Congressional support developing for some form of urban growth strategy, ambitious administrators in a number of federal agencies began to reach out for a piece of the action. Long before the present ground-swell of interest, the Economic Development Administration of the Commerce Department was cooperating with the State of Kentucky on plans for a new town in the east-central part of that state, about 150 miles east of the Louisville area. Unresolved drainage problems are said to be stalling the project. The Interior Department, custodian of vast tracts of publicly held Western land, has the responsibility of making equitable disposition of tracts for development over the years. Some of its bureau heads foresee the need to revise legislation under which the United States has made land available for some 400 cities, including Chicago and Phoenix. They expect their cooperation with the Urban Studies Center to be a help in improving criteria for disposal of the land. One study, which could have broader implications in reshaping the use of publicly owned land, projects the growth of expanding metropolitan areas near the large Western land-holdings and estimates the potential of those areas for new town development. It was done for the Public Land Law Review Commission by a research team of Urban America Inc., which has since merged with the National Urban Coalition.

The Department of Transportation is interested in seeing that major new urban developments fit into existing and future regional transportation networks. An aide in DOT's Environmental and Urban Systems Division cited the location of Reston as one of the kinds of pitfalls the department would hope to avoid through coordination of urban growth programs. Disregard of existing and planned transportation facilities in the siting of that northern Virginia new city is certain to place a heavy financial burden on the region, he predicted.

Under Title IV of the National Housing Act, HUD is empowered to underwrite loans to private developers of large tracts which meet certain criteria. In February the department announced that it was approving insurance for a loan of up to $21 million to the developer of the Minnesota new town of Jonathan, the first it has insured under that authority. Since then HUD has been deluged with applications for loans.

The Administration has established a new-community division in HUD and merged with it the existing surplus-land program which has jurisdiction over the scymied prototype of a "new town intown" planned at Fort Lincoln in the District of Columbia. The merger is one of a number of indications that HUD will have the chief coordinating role when a national growth policy is spelled out.

This flurry of departmental activity, generated sporadically by middle-level bureaucrats for the most part, has been kept alive by the little-noticed advocacy of an urban growth policy on Capitol Hill. The picture is one of a disparate group of actors and activists in search of a strategy. The nation still awaits a clear answer to a question posed last fall to HUD Secretary George Romney by Congressman Ashley: "Do you foresee a national urban policy evolving in the near future?" Romney could foresee one, but did not trace its details very clearly for Ashley's subcommittee.

What might survive such an evolution is the fittest of several species of urbanization patterns now being advanced throughout the country. It is in this experimental arena that projects such as the proposed Louisville-area community can make their greatest impact on national policy. Because only a fraction of their support is supplied locally, Dr. Maloney and his team have had to become consummate grantsmen, knocking on every promising door in Washington to keep their project alive. Their proposals present a stiff challenge to the New Federalism, to Kentucky's tempestous political system, and to the goodwill of the potential pioneer residents of the proposed new city.

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 process of pursuing these goals, the planners and countless other public entrepreneurs have performed an intellectual crosspollination of Washington bureaucracies that might hasten a national new community policy in a way that debates in Congress and the executive agencies of government are not doing. By Simpson Lawson.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. John J. Gunther, executive director, U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Mr. Gunther has been before us many, many times, and we welcome you back.

STATEMENT OF JOHN J. GUNTHER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, U.S. CONFERENCE OF MAYORS, ACCOMPANIED BY ROBERT E. JOSTEN, LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL, NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES AND U.S. CONFERENCE OF MAYORS

Mr. GUNTHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am John Gunther, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. I appear before this committee on behalf of the more than 14,800 cities in all 50 States which are represented by the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

It is my pleasure to bring you our endorsement of S. 3460, a bill to provide for the development and implementation of a national urban growth policy. We feel that this bill could be one of the most far-reaching pieces of urban legislation ever developed and that it has tremendous possibilities for rescuing our deteriorating central cities.

We agree that a national policy is needed which will focus Federal programs and funds to encourage the orderly and balanced development of all urban areas of the country. Because of our strong belief that this kind of policy should be developed, our organizations agreed in 1968 to sponsor the work of the National Committee on Urban Growth Policy.

The Urban Growth and New Community Development Act of 1970 is an outgrowth of the work of that committee. That committee, Mr. Chairman, was chaired by our friend from Alabama, Mr. Rains, former chairman of the Housing Subcommittee of the House of Representatives. And it was the work that he led for us in that study that changed the position, as a matter of fact, of the league and the conference from one great doubt and skepticism about a new community program to one of very strong support for the balanced kind of program included in your bill. Regrettably, however, the importance of this bill in achieving a national urban growth policy may be overlooked. The mayors of our Nation's cities struggle daily with the problems which have resulted from the rapid expansion of urban populations. "ey are well aware that their communities need adequate tax bases, proved community services and increased job opportunities. They

A national tro grvi poleg should be Etened toward three major goals:

1. Alleviation of central erty proviens and creation of an enhanced quality of life in urban areas

2. Encouragement di popritom reistribuno vingi will alkat congestion and absorb new population Govt.

3. Guidance of the derelogiment of regional economic and employ

ment centers.

These goals cannot be actiered mess national economic policy is an integral part of a national tria mwit strategy. There are three elements of economic policy which adet urban growth; increases in income, distribution of income and stability of income and employ ment. The first two elements Lave become the sole responsibility of the Federal Government. Only national fiscal strategies can affect the level of income and its distribution. The third element is the only means local government has to influence growth within its own boundaries-the encouragement of industrial, commercial, and economie diversification and increased local employment.

From the day he takes office, a mayor must determine a rational plan of priorities for the economic, social, and physical development of his city. Growth planning, including the encouragement of local indus trial and economic expansion, is the urban development strategy at the local level. Urban development takes place on many fronts at once; economic, social, and physical problems are interrelated. A mayor must develop a coordinated strategy through which progress in one develop

ment sector assists progress in others. In addition to developing a program of action in urban growth, a mayor must also develop a strategy of leadership to implement that program.

The function of a national growth policy should be the development of a rational strategy for priorities and action in economic, social, and physical development and a strategy of Federal leadership in national urban development. Because of the many Federal activities which influence urban growth, it is the responsibility of the Federal Government to exercise a leadership role in establishing a national growth policy.

Our organizations have called for positive Federal action dealing with urban growth, and as early as 1966 the Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution which called on Congress to enact legislation looking toward:

1. The conditioning of Federal grants for community facilities such as sewage and water systems, parks, open spaces, and hospitals on provisions for a reasonable share of low and middle income housing in the building and zoning codes of all municipalities applying for such grants.

2. The conditioning of Federal aids to education on some responsiveness to pupil exchanges or other measures designed to reduce the social and economic stratification now prevalent as between city and suburban school systems.

3. The revision of FHA and other home financing policies to favor and encourage the building of low- and middle-income housing in all municipalities of metropolitan areas.

4. The removal of statutory limitations on non-residential renewal to increase employment opportunities and the city tax base.

The need for action on such legislation is even more critical today than it was 4 years ago. We think S. 3640 makes an important start in this direction.

We are particularly enthusiastic about title III of the bill, which provides a new vehicle for inner city development. Existing Federal law limits local redevelopment and urban renewal activity to programs which largely involve "slum and blight elimination." While this goes far in assisting cities generally to improve the most serious of their physical deficiencies, it does not encourage or permit cities to continually adjust to changing conditions and to make the most rational and economic use of urban land, especially for residential

purposes.

Since most of the Nation's major cities have an immediate need to increase their housing supply, particularly for low- and moderateincome families, and since these cities have virtually no vacant land upon which to build needed housing, some new program approaches are needed to help provide the required land.

Action should be taken, as title III contemplates, to assist cities in acquiring land for residential purposes which is presently occupied by functionally obsolete and uneconomic industrial or commercial uses. Assistance should also be made available to acquire land which is not usable in its current condition because of natural hazards. The land under consideration here would not qualify for assistance under the present urban renewal law because it is technically not "blighted". The bill lists several categories of land and space which would be eligible for assistance:

(1) Infrequently used rail yards and rail storage facilities.

(2) Air rights sites over streets, expressways, railroads, waterways, and similar locations.