Word: urbanize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pattern of residential distribution by family type is entirely voluntary, deliberate and rational. It is hard to find any sound reason for the fashionable outcry 'to bring the middle-class family back into the city.' " In part, the suburban exodus reflects Americans' deep-seated anti-urban sentiment, the puritanical belief, in Poet William Cowper's words, that "God made the country, man made the town" (to which City Lover Oliver Wendell Holmes memorably retorted: "God made the cavern and man made the house...
...Nice People's Escape." Why did they go? In his 1964 book, The Urban Complex, Robert Weaver reasoned: "It is an escape from changing neighborhoods, lower-class encroachment, inadequate public services and inferior schools. It is running away from the ugly facts of urban life; facts that have always existed, but never for long on the doorstep of 'nice people' who had the option of escape...
Sledgehammer Surgery. Within the central city, the bulldozer has generally been used to better advantage. The federally subsidized ($4.7 billion since 1949) urban renewal program, also administered by Weaver, aims to do peacefully for the U.S. what World War II bombs did for Europe: to clear decaying downtown areas for new inner cities. The physical monuments to such sledgehammer surgery are many, and many are distinguished; Manhattan's Lincoln Center, Philadelphia's Independence Mall, Pittsburgh's Gateway Center, Detroit's Lafayette Square, St. Louis' Plaza Redevelopment, Hartford's Constitution Plaza. Urban renewal has worked...
City-Bred Muscle. This and most other urban problems seem almost trivial in comparison with those created by the changing race structure. Says Economist Miles Colean: "We can't get around the sad fact that middle-class families living in the city who depend on public schools have not made up their minds that they can live with Negroes." Weaver adds pointedly: "We need an open suburbia-not just an upper-and middle-income-class suburbia...
...entire white population, San Diego 15.4% , Newark 23.7% . Violence on the scale of the Watts and Harlem riots has so far been rare-partly because the heavy concentration of Negroes in Northern cities has given them powerful new political muscle. "If he hadn't been urbanized, the Negro wouldn't have become a political factor and thus able to change his status," says Weaver. "The 'Negro Revolt' is an urban phenomenon...