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>Paul Ylvisaker, 45, New Jersey's commissioner of community affairs, was busy last week trying to repair the damage wrought by the Newark and Plainfield riots—and ran into jeers of "Communist!" and "Nigger lover!" from some Northern rednecks when he restrained National Guardsmen from tearing apart one neighborhood in a search for arms. As a Ford Foundation director for twelve years, he distributed more than $200 million to city and state governments. Now, on the other end, he is attempting to show that states can play a vital role in uniting cities and suburbs. To take care of its growing urban population, the U.S., he says, must build the equivalent of "100 Clevelands" by the end of the century. Instead of merely placing ever wider suburban circles around present cities, he would build new cities. Not only would they take care of expanding population, they would also ease pressure on the ghettos. The ghettos grow by 500,000 Negroes a year, thanks to their high birth rate and migration from the South—which continues at much the same level as in the late 1940s and 1950s, despite the well-publicized difficulties of Northern-city Negro life. And the suburbs now absorb only about 40,000 Negroes a year nationwide. "If we don't change this," says Ylvisaker, "our major cities in 15 years will be predominantly Negro. The cities may well become a kind of Sherwood Forest, a prison for the people who live in them and a dangerous place for outsiders."
All of the urbanologists agree that one of the most important ways of saving the cities is simply to have more cities. Ylvisaker has proposed that New Jersey create a city of 300,000 out of a vast, 21,300-acre swamp across the Hudson River from Manhattan—a "TVA in the meadows"—and has his eye on other undeveloped areas.
The U.S. has no overall "new towns" policy. While about 300 planned communities are now under way across the country, most are merely glorified housing developments. Only three—Reston, Va., Columbia, Md., and Irvine, Calif. —are nationally recognized as new towns. Because they must show a profit, however, even these will not be able to soak up more than a handful of low-income people. Without eminent domain and the resources of a government, the obstacles to building a new city are enormous. To acquire land for Columbia without driving prices to the sky, for example, developers had to use all kinds of cloak-and-dagger techniques in making 169 separate purchases.
Another means of relieving congestion in the big cities is to establish alternate points of concentration in nearby existing cities. One plan, originated by Greek Planner Constantinos Doxiadis, recommends that Port Huron, Mich., a Great Lakes town of 38,000 people, 55 miles from Detroit, be developed as an alternate magnet, to draw business and population from Detroit before the city strangles.