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To many urbanologists, the problems of the city will not be solved until closer links are forged between core and suburb. University of Chicago Historian Richard Wade speaks of a "crabgrass curtain" dividing the two, declares: "Two divisive elements frustrate at tempts to master the metropolis—division of the metropolitan area on the basis of race, and division on the basis of city and suburb." Agrees New York's Lindsay: "Whatever strengthens the core city strengthens the suburbs, and vice versa." The problem, as Columbia University Urbanologist Charles Abrams puts it, is one of resources. "The wealth has gone to the suburbs," he says.
U.S. cities have deteriorated considerably, but not irreparably. Money can help to salvage them. Chicago's Hauser figures that an additional $20 billion a year in federal funds over the next decade should do the job; Harvard Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew sets the sum at $25 billion a year; the Senate's Ribicoff subcommittee puts it at a neat $1 trillion. That kind of money, of course, even over a long period, does not come easily—nor is it all that easy to spend it wisely.
Whatever the level of federal bil lions, the U.S. is going to need the kind of overview offered by urbanologists like Moynihan if its cities are to survive and thrive. Last spring, Rhode Island's Providence College awarded Moynihan an honorary degree that was accompanied by a particularly apt citation: "You have dared to throw light on some of the most frightening problems facing urban dwellers, not to elicit common agreement with your solutions so much as to force us to look where we would rather not." Moynihan and the other urbanologists may not have all the answers for the crisis of the cities, but they are at least forcing America to peer into the frighteningly dark corners in search of them.
* Defined as "center cities," each "with a population of at least 50,000, plus that of its adjacent suburbs," the nation's metropolitan areas house 140 million Americans in less than a tenth of the country's acreage. † There are others at Columbia, New York and Boston Universities, Northwestern, the Universities of Chicago and Illinois, two branches of the University of California, and San Francisco State. Yale and U.S.C. are planning to establish centers.