Word: philadelphia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...like many another city, Philadelphia in its ambitious urban-renewal program (e.g., rehabilitation of downtown shops, banks, hotels; 14-acre Penn Center replacing the dowdy Broad St. railroad station) is faced with a shaky question mark that cannot be erased with just so many tons of steel and concrete. It is a human problem: more and more of Philadelphia's white families are moving out of the city, leaving behind a growing population of low-income Negro families. And the problem of balancing the population becomes more and more difficult because the Negroes are blocked from moving...
...Philadelphia's Negro population numbers about 490,000, with new immigrants -mostly from the South and 60% unskilled workers-coming in at the rate of 600 a month. Most of the Negroes are concentrated in the central sector of the city, dubbed "the jungle." There, dismal lines of grimy, red brick row houses huddle bleakly behind paneless or paper-covered windows, and tenants must sometimes use ladders in place of stairways, outhouses instead of running-water toilets. With the jungle overcrowded, other immigrants fan out into other areas in the city. Some well-off families manage to slip into...
...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...
...Negroes also vote-and in this respect, says a member of Philadelphia's Commission on Human Relations, "the danger is that it may be to the advantage of politically shrewd Negroes and white politicians to keep the Negro segregated, and to use him as a balance of power...
...What we're doing now," he says, "is deliberately making non-Negro apartments for older whites, pricing them out of the 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...