Word: urbanize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Federal Bulldozer is really two books, uncomfortably contained within one cover. One book, by Anderson the scholar, is a Ph.D. dissertation written under the auspices of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies. It presents a systematic, statistically-backed case against the existing federal urban renewal program. The other book, by Anderson the sensationalist, would have more appeal to a Sunday afternoon crowd in Hyde Park. It declares simply that private enterprise can do everything that federal planning has so far failed to do, and can do it faster...
...unfortunate that The Federal Bulldozer suffers from this schizophrenia, because as a first in its field it could be quite an important book. No major work before has attempted to analyze the 15-year history of the federal urban renewal program, and Anderson has used previously-unpublished data from Urban Renewal Administration files...
Having carefully built his case against federal urban renewal, Anderson pauses a moment to brush away any possibilities of modifying "an inherently bad program," and then launches into his soapbox appeal. For obvious reasons, he doesn't waste much time trying to defend empirically his gospel that "private enterprise can." Such defense as he offers--in the chapter on "The Quality of Housing"--rests on statistics showing that the greatest improvements in the overall quality of city housing between 1950 and 1960 came from the efforts of unaided private builders...
Anderson the scholar implies that they wouldn't. In his chapter on the private developer, he says that free enterprise naturally builds where building is profitable. Urban renewal construction is potentially quite profitable, but it usually involves a high degree of risk. "It seems likely," he sums up, "that what has been accomplished so far by private enterprise in urban renewal has been largely a result of the government's decision to underwrite a substantial amount of the risk involved." One can only conclude that the author of the second book hasn't followed the arguments of the first...
Futile Sanctions. So-called public intoxication accounts for almost 50% of criminal arrests in U.S. urban areas-or roughly 1,000,000 arrests a year-and for more than 50% of the inmates in U.S. county jails. These statistics do not include arrests for drunken driving or assaults caused by drinking. Arrests for plain public drunkenness total about 26,000 a year in San Francisco, 66,000 in Chicago, 80,000 in Los Angeles-while chronic drunks travel an endless circuit from gutter to cell to gutter before their final trip to the morgue. "It is hard to imagine...