Suburban Sprawl: Private Decisions and Public Policy: Private Decisions and Public Policy by Wiewel Wim Persky Joseph J

Author:Wiewel, Wim,Persky, Joseph J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317459194
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Federal Policy Meets Urban Sprawl: The 1960s and 1970s

In view of the current burst of interest in urban sprawl, it is sobering to note how little the policy rhetoric has changed from that of thirty years ago. In the 1960s the critique of metropolitan development gone awry came against the backdrop of economically declining central cities and, by middecade, the outbreak of racially charged civil disorders. The flip side of the “urban crisis” was uncontrolled suburban growth that sucked jobs and talent out of the city even as it also consumed meadow and farmland on the fringe at an alarming rate.

As HUD Secretary George Romney (1969) testified in October 1969 to a House Subcommittee on Urban Growth:

Never before have our people been so widely separated in space on the basis of their income and their race. And with this separation came a lessening of equality of access to good schools, to good jobs, to medical services, and to recreational opportunities. It is no wonder that we see in our country an increase in the spirit of divisiveness.

The problems of slums and blight, unequal economic and social opportunity, air and water pollution, clogged traffic arteries, disappearing open spaces, destruction of natural resources—all these have been aggravated, if not directly caused, by the way our national growth took place.

Echoing the HUD secretary, Congress declared presciently in the “Findings and Purpose” section of the 1970 Urban Growth and New Community Development Act “that continuation of established patterns of urban development, together with anticipated increase in population, will result in (1) inefficient and wasteful use of land resources … (5) unduly limited options for many for many of our people as to where they may live, and the types of housing and environment in which they may live … (8) further separation of people within metropolitan areas by income and by race; (9) further increases in the distances between the places where people live and where they work and find recreation; and (10) increased cost and decreased effectiveness of public and private facilities for urban transportation” (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 1970).

Housing policy at the federal level was importantly shaped by this context of urban crisis and suburban sprawl. Responding to housing analysts’ predictions of a shortage of new housing in the 1970s, Congress in 1968 established a ten-year numerical housing goal of 26 million units, six million of which would be federally subsidized for low-and moderate-income families. Two new subsidy programs, one rental and one for new homeowners, were enacted to further the subsidized housing goal.

The 1968 housing act also mandated that regional planning bodies must prepare a “housing element” as part of their comprehensive planning mission, a provision that HUD Secretary Romney called “extremely important and far-sighted legislation” (Romney 1970, 13). At the time, the federal government was already funding regional planning bodies for general planning and had charged these bodies with responsibility for reviewing and “clearing” all major federal grants for consistency with regional plans—the so-called “A-95 review.” Yet

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