Word: urbanize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...federal government, he writes, it should encourage local government to reorganize by "restoring its fiscal vitality." He recommends federal revenue sharing to make urban citizenship as financially painless as possible. His answer is only a partial one. Fiscal vitality alone would not overcome the reluctance of the suburbs to associate with the central cities. Self-interest, self-satisfaction and fear would keep them detached. They wish not only to protect themselves from crime and urban poverty but also to reduce their involvement with these problems...
...SECOND point of this policy- the reorganization of local government- might even do more to aggravate stolidly Republican suburbia. Moynihan correctly calls urban government "fragmented and obsolescent." The flight of both industry and middle class to the suburbs has eaten away at the urban tax base. This smaller tax base must simultaneously finance more and more government services for the outcast population left behind...
...base for "public goods" which benefit the whole area. Such public goods include transportation, police protection, and air pollution. The exception to these is education. Here one must accept community control as political reality. In the central city, however, federal funds should increase substantially to put the quality of urban schooling on roughly equal footing with suburban. Political control over these funds, however, is lost for good and must be accepted...
...THIRD and last tenet of the national urban policy concerns "institutional naivete," particularly as practiced by the federal government. The bureaucrats, according to Moynihan, have been neglecting the secondary consequences of their programs. This neglect has caused "sharp imbalances in the ecology of urban areas." Building highways, for example, may also depopulate the countryside, redistribute employment opportunities, or fill up the slums...
Moynihan's manifesto for a national urban policy is articulate, well documented, but ultimately divisive. It will not rouse the Administration to action: it will not rouse Congress to action; at most it will rouse a few social scientists to speculation. But it deserves a measure of appreciation. It takes a brazen man to outline policy- and national policy, at that- on problems of such complexity that their prolonged study can induce paralysis...