membership in this organization. Mayor Alioto is acting as cochairman of our legislative action committee, and he will make the formal statement and then call on the various members of the conference to make brief comments and then answer, of course, any questions that the Senators may have to put to us.

Mayor Alioto.

The CHAIRMAN. Very well.

MAYOR JOSEPH ALIOTO, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.

Mayor ALIOTO. Thank you very much. I want to say good morning to you, Senator Sparkman and Senator Proxmire. We are happy to see you are in good shape after the altercation that you had, Senator Proxmire.

Senator Sparkman, we are very, very happy for the opportunity to appear before your prestigious committee once more. As you know, we are no strangers to this committee. Last July, Mayor Griggs of Detroit appeared before you in connection with your community development bill and the positions he took at that time are reaffirmed by us now.

We simply want to bring them up to date.

The CHAIRMAN. Very well.

Mayor ALIOTO. The first thing all of us want to emphasize is that we desperately need action now. There is concern about the fact that there might be guerrilla warfare developing between the administration and the Congress. In that scuffle, we won't get any housing bills at all, or community development bills, and that is a major concern with us. Out there in our cities, our poor and disadvantaged are seeing this housing on an on-again, off-again basis. They hear about impoundment freezes, and the necessity to study these matters further. They are getting confused. There is a notion developing that they may all fall in the cracks, and that we are not going to get something this year. So we desperately want to urge upon this committee the importance of action now. I think this sense of urgency will temper some of the other things we have to say with respect to the bills before this committee, the administration bill and others. We are always pleased, of course, to have Senator Cranston, who has just come in, listening to our pleas of all of the mayors. He has been a good friend of the cities in the past, and we are happy that you are here.

Senator CRANSTON. Thank you very much. I am delighted to see

you.

Mayor ALIOTO. Some of us think the existing programs are working in our cities. We can make an argument. We think that any policy statement in the administration bill or by the administration which in effect states that our programs have been an abject failure of the existing programs is not correct. In my own city, we have built 20,000 units of housing. We have literally developed ghettos into viable neighborhoods on the basis of the programs we have had. Without these programs we simply would not have produced these successes. I think some of the criticism of the policy statements in the administration message really constitutes an unnecessary calumny to the philosophy of Senator Taft, to our own philosophy, Senator Sparkman. I want you to know that the mayors, the group sitting before you now,

do not share the conviction that everything has been an abject failure up to now. We just don't believe so.

Of the 20,000 units of housing in our city, approximately 20 percent of those are socially oriented housing. The rest is market value housing which grew out of urban renewal and urban housing programs. Nevertheless, it doesn't appear at this point that we are going to be able to maintain the categorical grants in their present form.

We emphasize the urgency of getting something done at the present time. We strongly support last year's community development bill passed by the Senate. We think there can't be a development bill without a housing bill. First of all, it is a matter of urgency here to get a bill passed before the end of the year. Second, the community development block grant must be linked to a housing grant which includes new construction. Otherwise, all our efforts are going to be meaningless.

We favor the block concept, the concept that local communities should make the determination of what they ought to be doing. On the other hand, we think there should be some kind of Federal review process. By this, we do not mean a stringent, bureaucratic process that would simply hold everything up while we have to go through one bureaucratic layer after another.

But we don't think the checks should be handed out in the fashion. they were, and commendably so, in the general revenue-sharing proposal. We are talking about something different now. We are talking about communities having housing plans that would be acceptable at the Federal level.

We don't think the review should be a technical review, but there should be some indication that the communities involved do have a plan where this money could be profitably spent. We are a little disappointed in some features of the administration's package, and we see hope in other features of it.

There are good concepts. The concept of a housing allowance is not a bad thing. The concept of working with developers may work out in certain situations after we have reached a certain plateau. But we don't have time for experiments now without some corresponding action that will dedicate us again to the goal of 600,000 assisted units a year as against the 200,000 units a year rate we are at now.

We feel that this is very, very important, Mr. Chairman. We are going to follow a format this morning of calling upon each of the mayors involved to make a short statement. We will call on each in turn, and we would then welcome any questions or at any time any questions you want to discuss.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Mayor, I am going to suggest that we not question until the panel is completed, because we have to keep things moving, and if we start questioning now, I am afraid it would take entirely too much time. Go right ahead.

Mayor ALIOTO. To sum up the situation, we think we need action.

now.

The CHAIRMAN. In that connection, aren't you getting action now? We tried to start this thing back at the first of the year. We got the President's bill yesterday. We are moving. We are going to start next Monday marking it up, in the hope that we can get a bill out of here and through the Senate by the end of October.

Mayor ALIOTO. We appreciate everything that is being done by the committee. The action we are talking about is the action to give us something on a permanent basis and not on an experimental basis. As I say, some of the proposals of the administration are fine, but they are admittedly experimental. They don't propose to phase in their housing allowances until 1976. Some of us don't think that we can wait that long.

We think we need something for 1974 and 1975. We do appreciate the tremendous action taken by this committee, and we do favor the omnibus bill that we have spoken about.

I would like to call on Mayor Alexander of the city of Syracuse.

MAYOR LEE ALEXANDER, SYRACUSE, N.Y.

Mayor ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am here as a member of the legislative action committee, but also as chairman of the community development committee of the National League of Cities. I would like to say that I join in Joe Alioto's expression of the gratitude that Senator Proxmire suffered no harm,

I think it is symbolic that the attack was made while he was running to his office, and not from his office. I have been here before seeking help and understanding for the American cities. As a result of that, I have developed a tremendous confidence in the judgment of this committee and in its ability to respond to the problems of the cities.

You listen to us and then act with great deliberation. I think you give us a lot of patience, because very often you gentlemen are fully informed on the subject matter of these hearings from your own experiences. For your past responsiveness and the responsiveness of Congress, I want to express my gratitude.

I think general revenue sharing is going to be a landmark in the history of American cities. I would like to add my endorsement and the endorsement of the community development committee of the National League of Cities for Senator Sparkman's proposal for a housing block grant. As Mayor Alioto said, I want to emphasize my support for local flexibility, because I think cities do vary in their needs, such as the kind of construction and the site locations and the mix between rehabilitation and construction.

I think the President's proposal for housing allowances does have a place, but I am not sure it will be meaningful to the cities until we have some new construction. Very often in the housing dialog, they talk about the vacancy rate; I would like to submit for your consideration that that is sometimes distorted.

Syracuse is a city of 200,000. We have 70,000 housing units, but one out of every five houses in my city is substandard. Seventy percent of the housing units are wooden frame houses. So even where there is a high vacancy rate, housing allowances may not work. I think we must have new construction and rehabilitation as well before housing allowances can be important.

Now in Syracuse, which certainly is not the size of San Francisco or some of the other large cities represented by the mayors in this room, we have had some 2,100 subsidized housing units built in the last 5 years. That doesn't mean very much when I tell you that we have got some 1,600 on the waiting list each and every year.

There is an important and urgent need for housing at the present time.

I think what I would like to ask you to remember-and I am sure you already know as well as I do that what we mayors are talking about is not an arithemetical need, it is a very human need. In my city in the last 3 years, we lost 40 lives from fire. I can't tell you how many of those lives would have been saved had they been in adequate housing. I know you gentlemen in the Senate are just as concerned about it as every mayor in this room.

I want to add my plea to the urgency of these proposals at your earliest consideration. Thank you.

Mayor ALIOTO. We would like to call on the mayor of Norfolk, Va., Mayor Roy Martin.

MAYOR ROY MARTIN, NORFOLK, VA.

Mayor MARTIN. Thank you, Mayor Alioto. As the mayor said, I had the pleasure of having the Legislative Action Committee visit Norfolk for several days early in the week. I think we have a program there, Senator, that we can show has been successful.

Actually this redevelopment program, which was started back in 1949, has never had any scandal or failures. It has been a complete success. When we started this program, over 40 percent of our housing was substandard. Today we have gotten it down to 15 percent. We have built over 5,000 low-rent units of houses. We have put over 4,000 more in rehabilitation. We showed our program to these gentlement in Norfolk yesterday when we took a tour. We showed them a project where the housing authority had acquired 40 to 50 percent of the land. Then the moratorium came, and there was no way to complete the project.

Here we have properties that have been acquired and the national program has been stopped. I want to emphasize what Mayor Alioto has said. We feel there is an urgency in trying to see that, while the administration and the Congress are working out the details on an overall program, we not be left in a position whereby we cannot continue with the programs we have underway.

Again, I would like to say for the city of Norfolk, I will put up one example of a housing program, Senator, one that you have supported during the years. It has been successful. It is a program that can work if it is properly handled. I would like to urge in every way that Congress consider carrying on many of these programs until we can work out a permanent program that will be acceptable to Congress and the administration.

Mayor ALIOTO. The cochairman of the Legislative Action Committee is the distinguished Mayor of Gary, Ind., Mr. Richard Hatcher.

MAYOR RICHARD HATCHER, GARY, IND.

Mayor HATCHER. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I would like to be as brief as possible, because you are going to hear several mayors here this morning, and we don't want to all repeat the same words. Basically, our message is the same. I would like to very briefly tell you about a few of the things that are happening in Gary and that have been happening in Gary.

In 1968, our community renewal program indicated that about 30 percent of all of our housing in Gary was substandard. We set a goal at that time to build about 15,000 new units of low- and moderateincome housing over a period of some 10 years, about 1,500 units per year. We have been doing pretty well under many of the programs that presently are under attack.

We have had some outstanding successes with some of those programs. Public agencies and private developers working together in all of the Federal programs such as 235, 236, multifamily rental housing, 221(d)(3), and ̄ many others, including leased public housing. At the same time, it was impossible to develop an effective housing program without an effective community renewal program going right along with it.

Under renewal, we were able to install sewers to develop other facilities such as neighborhood facilities at the same time. In 1972, that whole process was slowed down by changes in national policy, and we have only been able to continue with those projects that were in the pipeline since 1971.

Today, that process is in danger of coming to a complete halt, as are many other social and economic programs with which we have been working very hard at the local level in the hopes of correcting many of our problems, problems of long standing. What does that mean for us, and what does that mean for the people of Gary?

First of all, it means that we have been producing somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1,000 new units of housing a year. We won't be able to come anywhere close to that under the present circumstances. Second, of course, it means that jobs that were created by that kind of building will be lost. Third, it means that many, many people in that community, unfortunately some of whom have suffered many frustrations in the course of their lifetime, will have one more frustration to live with. Of course, to the city itself, it means that we will lose substantial tax revenues as a result.

It seems to me that all possible efforts are needed at this time to shore up our national housing program. We need, as has already been suggested, a program that looks to our long-term needs. Perhaps there are things in the administration's bill that might work for us. We don't know, and apparently not too many other people know, at this point. But our problem, I think, is a more immediate one. We cannot wait until 1975 or 1976. We need some kind of interim programing that will not allow us to lose the momentum that we have been able to build up over the last few years. We are certainly here this morning urging this committee to give serious thought to that particular factor.

It seems to me that we are now in a position where we have lost about 6 months in terms of timelag, and it seems that we may even lose more time. Most housing programs require anywhere from 6 to 12 or even 18 months or longer leadtime before the program in fact can be effectuated. So from that standpoint, I am hopeful that we can see some immediate action that will allow us to continue with the

successes.

I know there have been failures around the country, Mr. Chairman, but I suspect that for every failure in these programs, in any one of these programs, you can find at least 100 successes. I know that in