City Challenge Draws Liberals

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31226, 25 November 1966, Page 13

City Challenge Draws Liberals

(From N.Z.PA. special crspdt. FRANK OLIVER) WASHINGTON. November 24. The new challenge for young American executives and intellectuals is the city problem. When President John F. Kennedy came to power the young intellectuals flocked to Washington, thrilled by the challenge of the vistas opened up by the young President’s New Frontier. They never have been on quite such a happy footing with Mr Johnson. . . A number are giving up important jobs in his Administration and transferring to New York, where they are enlisting under the banner of Mr John V. Lindsay, the. Republican Mayor of New York City. New York, like other cities,

is in desperate straits, with almost unlimited needs in reorganisation, housing, transportation and a dozen other fields.

Mr Lindsay is young, enthusiastic and far-sighted. He is one of the leaders of the up-coming generation of liberal Republicans. He is determined to put the country’s greatest city back on its feet. His enthusiasm and drive have brought young Democrats as well as Republicans to his banner from their positions in Washington. They appear to feel that it is in the great cities that the foundations of the Great Society must be built and they are willing and eager to help the young Mayor tackle a job of fantastic proportions. Thus New York now has the unusual spectacle of an ardent group of young Democrats clustering around a young and enthusiastic Republican Mayor determined to rescue-the city from the chaos which seems to some to be uncomfortably close.

There is a new idea abroad in the land as to how city slums should be attacke.d The old style was known as the bulldozer method. People were moved out, the bulldozers moved in and levelled everything, after which new buildings were put up. The new word is rehabilitation. Many buildings levelled by the bulldozers were basically sound but had been allowed to run down to the point of dilapidation by slum landlords, notoriously careless about keeping property in repair. The new idea is to repair and rehabilitate buildings without dispossessing people and forcing them to become nomads.

This policy coincides with the slump in the construction of new homes across the nation. Builders have the supplies, the labour and the time for this rehabilitation work. In New York city alone, 58,000 buildings are in need iff rehabilitation. They need

800,000 new kitchens and bathrooms, millions of windows and doors, billions of square feet of walls and floors. The cost over 10 years would at least be five billion dollars and probably seven billion dollars, said Mr Robert Weaver, Secretary of the Urban Affairs Department. Mr Weaver estimates that in the great cities eight million homes are dilapidated or deteriorating.

“To project these figures for the nation as a whole raises the prospect of dealing with numbers of walls, windows and kitchens so astronomical that only a computer could comprehend them,” Mr Weaver said. This is the size and nature of the challenge bringing young intellectuals to the banner of Mayor Lindsay—and this covers only slum dwellings, transportation problems, renewal and extension of schools, street paving and the provision of recreation areas.