(2 of 3)
The heart of the matter is the financial crisis of local government. As middle-class taxpayers leave the central city for the suburbs, revenue goes down while public-service costs go up because most of those who remain are poor. Welfare costs in New York City, for example, now consume $1.5 billion annually, the largest item in the city's $5-billion-plus budget. Welfare costs in suburbia are increasing at an even greater rate than those in the central cities.
Among 150 specific recommendations in the Douglas report, the biggest and costliest is a revenue-sharing plan that would turn back to state and local governments 2% of federal revenues, some $6 billion a year. Says the report: "The federal tax system, with all its faults, is more progressive and equitable than the systems currently used by the state and local governments."
The President's Task Force on Suburban Problems made a separate but parallel report, with the aid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In suburbia, it says, "the dullness of existence is acutely felt by many older suburbanites and is often tragically reflected in the behavior of their children. Suburban vandalism, drug offenses and larceny by the young are on the rise." The report makes clear that it is no longer justified, if it ever was, to think of suburbia only as a split-level heaven with neat picket fences. In fact, the term suburbia has become too broad; it covers Levittown as well as Greenwich, and some of the wealthiest communities have slummy enclaves next to the commuter-train tracks. According to 1960 figures, Pittsburgh's suburbs had more substandard dwellings than the central city, and poor families around Los Angeles outnumbered those in the city's heart. With an astonishing 40% of the nation's poor now living in suburbs, crime and pollution problems are growing at the same rate there as in the central cities. Many suburbanites are without adequate sewers, police protection, garbage disposal and public transportation.
The report's recommendations: construction of some 6,000,000 housing units for lower-income families moved from the inner city; experimental Government-subsidized insurance for home owners against loss in property values caused by integration; establishment of an urban-development bank to aid cities and suburbs, much as the World Bank finances growth in underdeveloped nations overseas.
"The suburbs do not stand alone," says the report. "They are an integral part of the great metropolitan areas where two out of three Americans already live. Help to the troubled central city and the suburb must move in parallel. Without the improvement of both, all will suffer."