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Trigger for the whole thing was the Housing Act of 1949, which authorized the Federal Government to pay cities for at least two-thirds of the difference between the cost of acquiring and clearing a blighted area, and the price the land brought when sold to a private developer. The act's chief aim was to clear slums, but it was quickly realized that slums were not all the city had to worry about. In successive broadening acts and amendments, the legislation has been expanded to finance the redevelopment of the heart of the city by authorizing clearance of land for "nonresidential" reuse, and setting up other funds for the rehabilitation and conservation of old houses and neighborhoods. Altogether there are today 1,634 federally assisted urban renewal projects going on and being studied in 777 U.S. cities.
Since the program's inception, the Federal Government has spent a total of $1.02 billion as of December 1963.
But this outlay is more than compensated for by the private building it has generated. Last week Urban Renewal Commissioner William L. Slayton reported proudly that, excluding the cost of land, approximately $6.90 of redevelopment investment is made for every $1 of federal grants.
Tearing Down, Digging Up. Of all the cities under the planner's knife, none has been so deeply and continuously committed to renewing itself as the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed: Philadelphia.
For twelve years, the nation's fourth largest city has been tearing down and digging up, burrowing, building, restoring, condemning, relocating, and spending what will amount to more than $2 billion in private, city, state and federal funds to carry out the most thoughtfully planned, thoroughly rounded, skillfully coordinated of all the big-city programs in the U.S.
In central Philadelphia this week, workmen were finishing two towering modern office buildings that will substantially complete one of the nation's biggest chunks of center-city reconstruction in 30 years—a $120 million complex of transit and bus terminals, hotels, shops, restaurants, offices, underground concourses, sunken gardens and pedestrian malls called Penn Center. Near by an underground garage was taking shape in a block-square crater, and a stone's throw down Benjamin Franklin Parkway a crane was hoisting marble panels onto the top floors of a new circular apartment building.
Just over a mile away, at the edge of the oldest part of town, a power shovel clawed out a hole for a swimming pool beside the most elegant recent addition to Philadelphia's skyline, the three Society Hill apartment towers by Architect I. M. Pei. Around them, through what was a disheveled market area five years ago, stretch the broad lawns of a five-acre plaza, and in this historic neighborhood, remodelers were busy restoring to their original elegance dozens of 18th century row houses that had most recently been seedy boardinghouses. To the southwest, work began on a new shopping center at Eastwick, a 2,508-acre city-within-a-city that is rising in what was recently a wasteland of marshes, junkyards, trailer camps and crumbling shacks.
The list could go on, through some 54 federally aided urban renewal projects that Philadelphia has completed or has in the works, plus 21 others that did not involve direct federal cash.