Private Enterprise in City Rebuilding

Report Outline
Funds for Low-Cost Housing in Cites
Private Experiments in Urban Renewal
Schemes to Boost New Jobs and Business

Funds for Low-Cost Housing in Cites

The johnson administration has decided to seek help from private enterprise in meeting the urgent requirements of urban slum areas. This is the import of President Johnson's Oct. 2 announcement of a federal test program to attract more private help in creating jobs in areas of hard-core unemployment. Businesses willing to build or expand in a ghetto will find some of their risks reduced by a number of types of government assistance. To succeed, the President said, the venture will require “the concerted action and involvement of the private sector working closely with the federal government.”

Riots in a number of cities this past summer make it clear that measures to better the quality of life in slum districts are desperately needed. Yet federal funds are severely limited by the costs of the Viet Nam war—and by the unwillingness of the 90th Congress to step up federal appropriations for antipoverty programs. Under present conditions, the only alternative may be for private business interests to lend a hand on a multi-billion-dollar scale. David Rockefeller, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, told the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Senate Government Operations Committee in November 1966 that it was “well to recognize that, in improving our cities, capital investment is needed on an immense scale—an estimated $5 of private capital for each dollar of public funds.”

At the same time, Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York City has insisted that no one forget that “We need vigorous national support if we are to redeem the debt the nation has incurred through a century of neglect and oppression.”