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The National Commission on Urban Problems, headed by former Senator Paul Douglas, has castigated urban renewal as "a failure quite irrelevant to the housing needs of the poor." Some projects have turned into slums as squalid as the shanties that they replaced. St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe project, hailed as an architectural gem when it was built in 1954 for $117 million, has become a center of vandalism, muggings, dope, sexual perversion, rape and homicide. Stairwells and hallways reek of old garbage and excrement. Recently, elevator repairmen refused to work in the buildings because of repeated sniping incidents. Despite low rents, the project today is 43% vacant. Says the Rev. Buck Jones: "People are moving out because they are scared to death."
Because of soaring operating costs, 55 of the 85 largest public housing authorities in the U.S. face a financial crisis. Instead of raising rents, the authorities have been neglecting maintenance; now Congress is considering a bill to increase federal subsidies. Over the past three decades, the Federal Government has put more than $7 billion into housing subsidies and urban renewal. Still, one-sixth of the U.S. population lives in overcrowded or substandard housing.
Romney's Promising Plan
What can be done to bring down the costs and expand the supply of living space? Housing Secretary Romney figures that one solution would be to enlist industrial expertise and capital to improve the technology of subsidized housing for low-income and moderate-income families. Though his program goes by the corny name of "Operation Breakthrough," it is nonetheless quite promising. Under it, 650 companies have submitted proposals for mass-producing houses or component parts. Many of the entries come from big firms that have hitherto been little involved in housing, including Republic Steel, General Electric and Union Carbide. Next month ten or 20 of the Breakthrough proposals will be selected by the Housing and Urban Development Department to share $15 million in research grants. Prototypes will be built on eight sites to be chosen from among hundreds that have been eagerly offered by 170 state and local governments.
Romney's program is no panacea, but it is likely to attack some of the real obstacles to better and cheaper shelter.
The new technology may help builders to avert an almost certain shortage of skilled labor in the years ahead. More important, the localities offering sites have agreed to suspend their building codes and zoning laws for the Breakthrough models. Nothing quite like that has happened before, and Romney obviously hopes to use the program for a persistent attack on local barriers to housing. Later on, he expects localities to combine their building plans into giant orders so that industry can justify capital outlays for factory-produced housing. To induce municipal officials to get together, he can offer them favorable treatments on their bids for other HUD grants, notably for renewal, planning, sewers and public housing.
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