There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.
LAST week the words that Malvina L Reynolds used in her celebrated 1964 folk song* to describe her view of the standardized world of suburbia's "little boxes on the hillside" seemed to assume new relevance. Two reports commissioned by the Federal Government—one on urban and the other on suburban problems—indicated that suburbia is hardly a refuge for those seeking escape from the blight of U.S. cities. The problems that have all but consumed many urban areas—the crime waves, the racial ghettos, the inadequate schools, the intermittent near collapse of essential services and the harshness of life—have been effectively exported to the suburbs. The troubles besetting cities and suburbs begin to look alike.
The two "are going to rise or fall together," says Walter Rybeck, associate director of the two-year urban problems study. The project's head: Paul Douglas, former Democratic Senator from Illinois. The 325,000-word report finds that the number of Americans below the poverty level ($3,000 annual income for an urban family of four) fell from 39 million to 26 million between 1958 and 1966. Even so, it notes, the gaps in U.S. society continued to grow. "The central cities increasingly are becoming white-collar employment centers," the report says, "while the suburbs are becoming the job-employment areas for new blue-collar workers."
As middle-class whites continue their exodus to the suburbs, they are more and more accompanied by lower-income whites and nonwhites who are also fleeing the cities—and bringing all their problems with them. But the black move to suburbia is much slower. Though the number of blacks living in the suburbs is expected to grow from 2.8 million in 1960 to 6.8 million in 1985, the white suburban population will grow from 52 million to 106 million. Already the suburbs lead the cities in population, 66 million to 59 million.
The central cities may lose 2.5 million white residents by 1985, dropping to 45.4 million, while the nonwhite population may nearly double to 20.1 million. The report somberly points out that such a concentration of Negroes could result in "a further polarization of blacks and whites, and the flight of more and more businesses, and therefore jobs, from the city. The suicidal consequences that such a possibility suggests are not pleasant to contemplate."
If the cities are ever to become strong enough to reverse this trend toward polarization and cope with their other difficulties, the Douglas report argues, overlapping local governments must be simplified and streamlined. There is now an average of 90 separate units of government for each urban area in the U.S. with more than 50,000 people; metropolitan Chicago has a paralyzing total of 1,113. Building codes and zoning regulations are confusing, often contradictory. Adequate housing is still a chimera for most urban low-income families (and increasingly so for the middle class as well).