Looking toward sounder, more concerted action on the very pressing problems which have already been brought to the attention of this committee, I want to say that the American Institute of Planners welcomes the creation of the Commission on Metropolitan Problems proposed in S. 1431. Our organization, through its 17 chapters and its membership at large is ready to submit information and evidence on metropolitan problems and needs in hearings that this Commission may hold in different parts of the country. I thank you for this opportunity to present the view of the American Institute of Planners. AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PLANNERS, WASHINGTON, D.C. (Statement submitted for the record by F. Stuart Chapin, Jr.) My name is F. Stuart Chapin, Jr. I am a city planner, professor of planning in the department of city and regional planning, and director of the urban studies program, Institute for Research in Social Science, both at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C. I am a member of the legislative committee and a member of the board of governors of the American Institute of Planners. I am representing officially the institute at this hearing. The American Institute of Planners is the professional, nonprofit organization which limits its membership to professional city, metropolitan, regional, and State planners, and to those qualifying as planners working in fields directly allied to the planning profession. The institute has members throughout the United States and its Territories, including the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. For your information, I would like to identify my professional history. I received professional training in planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Subsequently, I have served on the urban community relations staff of the TVA and as the first director of planning in the city of Greensboro, N.C. I have served as an adviser to the original Division of Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal, HHFA, and on the ad hoc Committee on the Community for Action. I am the author of "Urban Land Use Planning" and have contributed articles to numerous publications. The American Institute of Planners has taken a position through statements of its officers on behalf of a better vehicle for Federal assistance to urban affairs. We recommend that further consideration be given to means for achieving overall coordination of national programs related to urban development. A study of the nature proposed by Senate bill S. 1431 would be welcomed by our organization. We would do whatever is within our power to cooperate with such a commission, both at the national and local levels, through our 17 chapters and members in practically all metropolitan areas. We believe that such a study commission should have duties and powers sufficient to make a significant and needed contribution toward recommending solutions for our metropolitan needs and problems. We are not commenting on the composition of membership of such a commission. We hope you will call upon us further if we can be of assistance. Mr. CHAPIN. Mr. Chairman, I have some personal remarks. While I have this opportunity let me add a word of my own concerning S. 1431. Speaking from my own personal observation and research (and not necessarily for the American Institute of Planners which I have been representing), I would urge that the definition of "metropolitan" as used in this bill be made synonymous with "urban." What I am saying is that there are urban areas of all sizes, and the smaller ones have problems and needs that are no less demanding to their residents than the problems of the great metropolitan areas are to their residents. Take any list of major urban problems-and I have a list here that we have compiled at the University of North Carolina of some 15 problems most frequently cited-and I think you will find most of them apply to any rapidly developing urban area, regardless of size. 1. Traffic congestion, lack of parking, inadequate street patterns, collapse of mass transportation system, and other related facets of the total metropolitan transportation problem. 2. Inadequate water supply and problems of waste disposal and water pollution. 3. Uneconomical patterns of land development, incompatible uses of land and inadequate zoning and other development controls. 4. Underdevelopment of recreation and other essential leisure-time community facilities and services. 5. Inadequate school facilities. 6. Problems of hospitals, medical care, mental health, and other aspects of health. 7. Delinquency and crime control. 8. Race relations. 9. Housing needs. 10. Urban blight and renewal. 11. Civil defense. 12. Air pollution and noise abatement. 13. The planning problem-inadequae long-range metropolitan and regional planning. 14. The governmental problem-the lack of regional and metropolitan policies and governmental devices to guide decisions and actions of local units of government on metropolitan matters. 15. The problem of local finance the growing disparity between financial resources and needs for municipal services and facilities. I think you will find that this list applies to any rapidly growing area. To be sure, some of them are more pressing in the larger metropolitan areas. I thank you for this opportunity to appear before the committee. Senator HUMPHREY. Mr. Chapin, we are very pleased to have you with us and your testimony has been most helpful. May I further say to you that if you have any material that would shed some light upon the work that a commission such as this might do, we would appreciate it if you will send that to us by mail. Mr. CHAPIN. Thank you. Senator HUMPHREY. Thank you very much. Senator Clark, Professor Chapin had to catch a plane so we had to put him on first. We are very pleased to have you with us this morning, the author of the bill S. 1431 to provide for the establishment of a Commission on Metropolitan Problems. Senator Clark is the senior Senator from Pennsylvania, formerly the great mayor of Philadelphia and the leading exponent in Congress on the problems of urban life in metropolitan areas. STATEMENT OF HON. JOSEPH S. CLARK, JR., U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA Senator CLARK. Mr. Chairman, first let me thank the members of your committee and your staff for your courtesy in arranging for this hearing. Next, let me say that I wish to thank you personally, Mr. Chairman, for the part which I know that you played in making it possible to have this hearing. Joined to my thanks are those of all of the other proponents of this bill who are deeply grateful to you for having taken this day out of your very busy life in order to make it possible for us to present our views to the full committee by way of the subcommittee which you head. Could I speak a moment off the record? (Discussion off the record.) Senator HUMPHREY. Now we can go back on the record. Senator CLARK. Mr. Chairman, let me start by commending to you and the other members of your committee the splendid memorandum which Mr. Shriver of your staff has prepared titled, "Staff Memorandum 86-1-41 on S. 1431, To Provide for the Establishment of a Commission on Metropolitan Problems," dated July 17 of this year. I think that memorandum really states the case for the bill just as well as it can be stated and I do hope that all members of your committee will be urged to read it and study it. For myself, I would like to point out very briefly some things which I know the chairman of the subcommittee is as aware of as I am, if not better, but which I think would be helpful to have in the record. At present 60 percent of all Americans are living in metropolitan areas. That is about 100 million individuals and if the Census Bureau forecasts are right, the present population will double within the lifetime of most people now alive, and the percentage of those living in metropolitan areas will increase. I would think it a conservative estimate that by the year 2000 there will be more than 300 million Americans living in metropolitan areas. I think we are all aware of the fact that in many ways we now have one vast metropolitan area stretching in a narrow ribbon from Portland, Maine, to Alexandria, Va., along the Atlantic seaboard embracing parts of 11 States and the District of Columbia. Now to be sure, there are gaps, but the gaps are getting smaller all the time; the congestion is getting greater; the inner relations between the people who live in that narrow strip are becoming more and more complicated and to me at least, it seems quite clear that present programs at the local, State, and Federal level, and present governmental organizations are unlikely to be able to continue to meet the strain of providing needed services and needed taxes unless we do some new and hard thinking as to how we are going to handle these problems. Of the problems which we have in mind, just to kick off with and without any elaborate explanation, perhaps the most important one is transportation. How can we move cheaply and quickly into, out of, and around these metropolitan areas, the millions and millions of people who must move from home to job and back home again, and who will want to move around their home areas for dozens of perfectly legitimate purposes. We see mass transit and suburban rail traffic withering on the vine because economically they cannot be run at a profit and because with rare exceptions, municipal government are either unable or unwilling to take them over and run them on a governmental basis and pro vide the subsidy which would properly be needed in order to put them in shape to provide the necessary transportation. Now in the meanwhile, without much thought to that mass transportation and transit problem, we have embarked in the most expensive highway program in the history of man. The Federal Government is putting up for the interurban highway program $9 for every $1 the State puts up. The trust fund has run out of money. We are engaged in a political controversy, although a bipartisan political controversy, as to how we are going to refurnish that fund. There is one mile of badly needed highway on the urban and interstate highway system which is presently estimated to cost $17 million. Now there I think we ought to stop, look, and listen. How much more of the countryside can we or should we carve up at huge expense for super highways? How much more of our urban families must be displaced in order to make room for these highways to go through congested areas? How much Federal, State, and local taxpayers' money is it wise to spend in this way, when in the old days people used to be able to move around pretty well by rail, and the rights-of-way are still there, the potential of recreating mass transport, whether by bus or by rail is still there, and yet we are up against this problem where it seems to be admitted that the highway system is a public problem which should be paid for by the taxpayers' money. The rail and transit, and to a large extent business problem, is within the private sector of the economy, and yet the services are admittedly inadequate and the private operators are saying that they have to be inadequate because they can't run these things at a profit. Now I don't pretend for a minute to say that I know the answer. I don't. If we don't look out, our cities are going to be strangled by the inability to get in, around and through them with the speed and safety which modern civilization demands. The next and very obvious problem in metropolitan areas is shelter. I won't elaborate on that because at the present time a subcommittee on housing is dealing with the housing bill which is the Federal Government's effort to help solve the shelter problem. I don't know what is going to come out of that, but I think it is clear that there is substantial dissatisfaction with the way the shelter problem is presently being operated, not only in our poorer cities where we have the slum problem and the race problem and the public housing problem and the urban redevelopment problem, but in our suburban areas, the feeders to the economy of the city, where the ranch-type home is spreading rapidly with the assistance of Federal guaranteed mortgages and is always ahead of local government. All services such as sewers and roads and schools must follow. Again, I say that I don't know the answers to these problems, but somebody ought to think pretty hard and pretty deeply about them. Water resources are no longer a western problem. We on the Delaware River have formed a four-State group to deal with water resources. First at the governmental level, we have formed a committee of representatives of the four Governors of the States that abut on the Delaware and the mayors of the two large cities, New York and Philadelphia. Second, we have a research corporation in which many of our prominent businessmen have joined and put up money and for which a Ford Foundation grant has been obtained and an Army engineering study is underway to study the all-purpose use of the Delaware River. Twenty-three Federal agencies are cooperating in that study. Syracuse University is about to issue a report on what governmental changes and organizations will be necessary to implement the recommendations of the Corps of Engineers. This is only one relatively small river. The same problem exists to a greater or lesser degree with respect to the water supply of all of our metropolitan areas. How much further can we continue to rely on wells and ground water? What is the limit in densely populated areas on the increase in population with lack of water? Both the Senators here are familiar with the enormous effort which Los Angeles made to bring water across the mountains from a river valley far from the city limits in another watershed area. Today, the city of New York, which is on the Hudson River, is taking the major part of its water supply out of the head waters of the Delaware. These problems are staggering, and the difficulty of solving them can be comprehended fully only if we realize that the metropolitan population is going to grow at the rate I have indicated. We know that in California and in Pennsylvania, people have died from the effects of the poisons of smog which have entered their lungs and killed them and yet, we have no adequate program of air pollution control. We have city ordinances, and some States have laws, most of them without adequate enforcement provisions. The Federal Government is making available small amounts of money for research in this problem. This gets us into the question of the extent to which the automobile with the emission of carbon monoxide gas has raised the incidence of lung cancer in the metropolitan areas and downtown regions. If American civilization is going to survive, in health, we are going to have to come up with some answers to these problems. I need not speak more than briefly about the massive welfare problems which are straining State and local facilities to the breaking point. Already the Federal Government has expended billions of dollars to assist local welfare efforts. The chairman of the subcommittee has pending on the calendar, and I hope we are going to pass it, a bill to create a youth conservation corps, many of whose members will come from the congested areas of the city. We hope that that corps, if it is set up, will have a very real impact on the spread of juvenile delinquency. I have brought out of a subcommittee of the Labor and Public Welfare Committee a bill to provide Federal assistance for study projects, training, and research in the field of juvenile delinquency. Every police chief in the country is worried about the delinquency problem as are the district attorneys and the social and health workers. This is another problem but by all echelons of government-local, State, and Federal-we don't really know the sound, long-range solution. 44127-59- |