Word: dilworth
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...create new ghettos, drop real-estate values, drain tax revenues, lift the crime rate,† and overburden public schools (18 are all-Negro; in 50, Negroes comprise from 50% to 90% of the student bodies). "There are 60,000 units housing 200,000 people today," says Mayor Dilworth, "that are unfit for human habitation...
...Density. Why not tear down the slums and simply replace them with public housing units? Says Dilworth: "Already, 60% of public housing is located in the Negro slum areas. It would take $800 million to rip out the Philadelphia slums. You'd reduce the density by one-half, and you'd have no place to put the rest of the people." Adds Bill Rafsky: "As soon as we displace the Negroes, we run up against discrimination in housing." Example: South Philadelphia, where the big Italian communities are fighting Negro inroads...
...Plan. Dick Dilworth is rated as the Negro's good friend (30% of City Hall employees are Negroes). But he has an unorthodox answer to the city's problem: more segregation. His plan: induce white families in the city to stay put in their neighborhoods, urge white suburban families to move back to the city. (He has built his own $164,000 home in what formerly was a run-down area...
...Negro range. We're designing the Eastwick project [2,500 acres, 12,000 units, in southwestern Philadelphia] the same way. We hope that no more than 10% of Eastwick will be Negro. We have to give the whites confidence that they can live in town without being flooded." Dilworth is against an anti-discrimination ordinance for the city, since he believes that it would only serve to panic the whites all the more...
Another way to fray the noose, says Dilworth, is to encourage more Negro movement into the white suburbs. Once, when a Negro family in suburban Levittown was hounded by white neighbors (TIME, Oct. 7), Dilworth gave his full approval to Quaker groups who were helping the besieged family with food and moral support ("If we lost that one," says he, "we would never again be able to get another foothold there"). He also admits that "we're mighty anxious to get Negroes into the Main Line. We'd be happy to finance a house for somebody...