Word: urbanize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Government's housekeeping agency. Business vice president of the University of Pennsylvania since 1954, Moore has been a prime mover in the university's building program. Moore leaves Penn with his biggest planning job still on the drawing boards: the West Philadelphia Corp., a $50 million urban-renewal project undertaken by Penn and four other Philadelphia institutions to rehabilitate their ramshackle sections of the city...
Racial prejudice is another serious difficulty in urban renewal. Some Negroes, economically able to live elsewhere, are forced to stay in the slums because they cannot find other housing. Private developers are reluctant to enter into Government-sponsored renewal projects, because the Government insists (quite justly) on racially integrated housing and realtors fear that integrated property won't rent. And, of course, the whole slum creation process often starts when a respectable Negro family moves into a white neighborhood: the whites move out and landlords divide the houses into smaller, more crowded units and reap the profits of a slum...
Although there are many pitfalls in any urban renewal program, important opportunities remain. Many of the major advances must take place on the local level, to prevent the growth of new slums; then the Federal government can put in money to clear the old slums and replace them with government-owned or subsidized housing...
...Kennedy Administration, then, either through the present Housing Administration or through a Department of Urban Affairs (the latter might ultimately be more desirable), should actively encourage municipal governments to take the following steps: strengthen and enforce building codes, to make slum-owning a less lucrative proposition; pass and enforce legislation similar to the New York City ordinance prohibiting discrimination in private housing; explore the possibility of metropolitan area government to handle slums outside the city limits...
...efforts of his administration can halt the deterioration of the American cities, Kennedy will be doing far more than paying a campaign debt to the urban voters...