Word: pattern
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...urbanization pattern is familiar. Rising population density lowers the physical standards of the city. The well-to-do residents emigrate to more attractive suburban areas. The tax base decreases, and the tax rate climbs. Industry is driven out by taxes and the environment. Municipal service grows worse, as the need grows greater. Crime and delinquency rates rise, disease increases, and schools become blackboard jungles. In short, the familiar pattern of metropolitan slum living becomes inescapable...
Reactions to this pattern are mixed. Local residents seldom complain vigorously since the situation is essentially a response to residential needs. The citizen may complain that his city is changing for the worse, but before long he moves to a better one, leaving his home to those who have created the problem...
Commercial interests are the strongest opponents of the slum pattern, because their investment is normally centered on the local market. A restaurant or haberdashery cannot simply move somewhere else, for to do so means to wipe out the existing source of revenue. Yet to remain means strangulation, as traffic slows, parking problems make stores inaccessible, and the clientele is down-graded...
This debate is, however, but a minor sign of the conflict in interest. The effect of the metropolitan pattern on an inherently suburban institution can already be seen. It seems inevitable that the problems will grow more serious as Cambridge becomes more a part of the inner metropolitan ring...
...even these changes cannot completely counteract the overall metropolitan pattern. Most people do not want to live in a slum even when their own home is a palace. The only alternative is to attack the existing pattern, trying to develop a new pattern through Urban Renewal...