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> Mitchell Sviridoff, 48, head of New York City's Human Resources Administration, is attempting to bring all of the city's "human" programs together in one coherent plan. On the theory that welfare recipients will cheat no more than ordinary taxpayers, 300 welfare families have been allowed to receive money on their own signed certificates of need, without the extensive and costly bureaucratic checks normally required. When welfare recipients go to work, many cities dock their welfare payments by the amount of their earnings, thus destroying the incentive to work. New York plans to allow welfare recipients to keep the first $85 of earnings, 30% of the remainder. Sviridoff suggests a thorough reorganization of the educational set-up that would break huge city school systems (New York, for example, currently enrolls 1,100,000 students) into "small, more manageable units" of 10,000 to 20,000 children each.
>Philip Hauser, 57, a sociologist at the University of Chicago's Center for Urban Studies, the second most important urban research center in the country, advocates a federal "Human Renewal Administration." "All of the welfare and educational provisions today," he declares, "are only a Band-Aid on a gaping, massive wound. Should the present trends continue, we can expect guerrilla warfare on a scale terrible to contemplate." Hauser contends that a great deal of effort is being dissipated. "What is the point of putting children in a Head Start program," he asks, "and then into a conventional school system not designed to build on what he acquired?"
> Edward Logue, 46, of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, is both the most persuasive defender of urban renewal and the chief mover behind several of its successes. In New Haven's Wooster Square and Court Street projects, he proved that old neighborhoods can be rehabilitated, thus helping to end the indiscriminate razing that had hitherto prevailed. He applied his New Haven techniques to the "new Boston," is now running for the mayoralty. Urban renewal would work better, says Logue, if the Federal Government gave "more dough, less advice." Logue would also decentralize city government so that neighborhoods could make many local decisions.