Word: slumming
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...moment the cannibals are in the form of the Boston metropolitan area, which over the last century has gradually encroached on Cambridge until it now threatens to devour it. The first effects have already been felt. The fully matured product is visible in a slum-surrounded university like Columbia or Chicago...
...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...
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...
...program itself presents many problems in Cambridge. In aiming to consolidate residential, commercial, and industrial sections, Urban Renewal would deprive some residents of their homes and would cut down on the income of a few absentee landlords. Another of its aims is slum clearance. Of the houses moved out under this program, most would be pre-1890. Many without efficient central heating and in districts where the average family rent runs around $20 a month. In these areas residents could afford better housing, if there were...
Despite the opposition that the consolidation and slum clearance projects will evoke, Urban Renewal seems the best, and perhaps the only answer to Cambridge's long range problems, the greatest of which is the steady decline in population over the last few decades. By consolidating business and industrial sections, raising and enforcing housing standards, and clearing slums, Urban Renewal should go far toward stopping the local exodus of business and residents, solving the parking problem, and making Cambridge a more attractive city...