Page images
PDF
EPUB

asking about this-was that, as I recall, the subcommittee recommended an allowance to the full committee, but the full committee declined to accept the recommendation. I believe it ended with that. All right, sir. Go ahead.

Mr. LEE. Question No. 9: Is the public housing program doing the job that needs to be done?

Millions of low-income American families in all parts of the country cannot afford to buy or rent housing of minimum decency. I believe all Americans have a stake in getting these families out of the slums and into decent housing in good neighborhoods. So far, private enterprise has not been able to provide such housing.

I think we must face the fact that public subsidies are required in the public interest. However, I also think we must face the fact that changing urban patterns have made large-scale public housing projects entirely obsolete.

We need public housing, but we need it in small projects of 25 to 50 units. I personally like the scattered approach with new housing in Atlanta and rehabilitated housing in Philadelphia, particularly if provision is made for eventual purchase of such units as the lowincome family is able to do so.

I ask your committee to encourage the PHA to engage in and support more of these new kinds of projects and to make whatever changes in the law are necessary to accomplish them easily.

Senator CLARK. Before you get off that paragraph, what is the status of public housing in New Haven? Do you have a need for further public housing? And are you going to be able to meet the need out of the existing authorization?

Mr. LEE. No. We do have a need for more public housing. We are in the process now of getting ready to build 150 units of moderate rental housing. We have accomplished the relocation problem out of Oak Street with good success, but we have 600-odd families in the path of Church Street program, and then in the path of the Worcester Square program, which is now being reviewed in New York, we have something like 2,000 families. It may be even more.

Senator CLARK. Does not this relocation from both urban renewal and the highway program face you up to the fact that there is not any real answer to where to put many of those people except in public housing? Where else are you going to put them?

Mr. LEE. I think that is true.

I would like to see in New Haven, if I may be parochial, Senator, some cooperative housing sometime, where the people who are able to afford a small down payment can buy an apartment and build in an area like Worcester Square. I think the income level is high enough in our city where they might be able to do that. And that, of course, would be preferable to public housing.

But that still would need some State legislation in order to make it attractive enough to an investor.

Senator CLARK. Are you not going to run into family after family where the income is $3,000 a year or less and they are not going to be able to afford even State-subsidized moderate housing?

Mr. LEE. I agree. They cannot afford even a $500 deposit.

Question No. 10: How adequately is FHA performing its assigned role in urban renewal-the section 220 and 221 programs?

Although much progress has been made in the past year, there is still evidence that these programs are step-children in the overall FHA program.

We had an auction for a section-220 project in May 1957, a year ago-May 12, to be exact. I hope we will break ground this summer15 months late. The mortgage application, after all the preliminaries, was only filed in Hartford this morning. And other cities have had the same experience.

You in this committee want us to include housing in our reuse plans. We in the cities are eager to have such housing. But you cannot expect us to seek section-220 housing if it means tying our urban renewal projects into knots. We have to show results, and, thus far, section 220 is of no help.

Senator CLARK. Now, why?

Mr. LEE. Well, red tape, for one thing. Fifteen months from the time of the auction which the URA wanted. And we had a difference, as a matter of fact, after we had set the price of the land, the beginning price of the auction, at $750,000. When we sold the land at auction, we sold it for $1,150,000. And then the FHA wanted to give us a mortgage commitment for only $750,000, which was the beginning price of the auction, even though the land sold for $1,150,000.

Senator CLARK. That trouble is administrative, not legal, is it not? Mr. LEE. Yes.

Senator CLARK. Then is there anything about the section-220 program that you think the Congress ought to do? Or is this primarily a matter of better methods of administration in HHFA?

Mr. LEE. This is my next paragraph, Senator. I would suggest that a special unit be set up for section 220 directly under Mr. Cole. It could call on FHA for needed technical services, but it would be able to make decisions quickly on housing for urban renewal projects.

This is a subject, as a matter of fact, on which we had a meeting this morning at 9 o'clock with the URA.

There are too many good points in the section-220 program to throw it away or ignore it because it is too much trouble to handle.

Senator CLARK. Now, as I understand it, you have not specific legislative recommendation on section 220?

Mr. LEE. I have none-unless Mr. Logue wanted to make an additional comment. Do you?

Mr. LOGUE. Well, I think that our experience, Senator Clark-Coming down on the train yesterday we were very pleased and cheered to see four buildings in the North Triangle project. But I think that is 5 or 6 years old. To get the construction through

Senator CLARK. Of course, it is pretty expensive housing, too.

Mr. LOGUE. Well, a lot of section-220 stuff is. But our concern is that every single time that we have had to take another step forward in the Oak Street apartment housing project we have had to get, in effect, a special task force formed out of Washington to go either to the regional office or to the Hartford district office to move it along.

This is the only section-220 project in the whole State of Connecticut. They are not familiar with it. It requires a specialized approach. Because section 220, no matter how big it is, is still just a drop in the bucket in the overall FHA operation.

Frankly, we feel it is lost there, and this administrative change, which would require a change in the law, we think would make quite a bit of difference.

Mr. LEE. If I can conclude the point on the section 221 program, essential to the success of the section 221 program is the adoption of the $12,000 ceiling and the removal of the requirement of special local consent. With these two changes, which I understand are supported on all sides, we may see some section 221 construction on a significant scale.

Senator CLARK. You have not had it yet, have you?

Mr. LEE. No.

Mr. LOGUE. No.

Mr. LEE. That concludes what I would like to say on the legislation before you.

I would like to add this final comment on urban renewal as it relates to the recession.

Urban renewal in New Haven-and I must be parochial about this for just a couple of minutes; I can speak only for New Haven-is proving a real help, because it is in the construction stage. Our urban renewal activity and the public projects connected with them today in New Haven account for 1,500 jobs in the construction industry, which support a payroll at the rate of $11 million a year. And off the site there are three jobs for each job on the site.

With the projects we have underway, this activity will continue and expand for at least 5 years, and by next May there will be 2,500 jobs in New Haven on this program, with an annual payroll of approximately $18 million.

I think that is certainly a real answer to the recession, at least from our standpoint.

More important for the future economic stability of our city, we can look to the permanent jobs which will be provided in our new commercial center and all the new uses which are now being built. Urban renewal should stand on its own merits. It is absolutely necessary if American cities are going to be able to be lived in in the years ahead.

As presently administered, urban renewal cannot be too effective as an immedite stimulant to the Nation's economy. But this does not have to be the case. If the regulations and procedures were discarded and new ones were adopted designed to carry out urban renewal as a top priority antirecession program, it could be done.

To give you an example, it took us two dozen detailed maps and 30 pages of reports and months and months of tedious work to prove according to the regulations that our Oak Street area really was a slum. As any citizen of New Haven could tell you, a walk through the area was all the documentation needed.

And, as a matter of fact, in 1910 a report by a city planning group, headed by a man named Olstedt, called Oak Street a slum 48 years ago.

Urban renewal administered as a crash program could work wonders for the economy. I think it is worth a try, and I hope you gentlemen will consider it.

I am honored to be here this morning. I deem it a privilege to be able to testify, and I thank you for the wonderful help you have initiated for our cities in the past.

I would hope you will provide us with the help which added to our own can clean the slums and blight from the face of America.

Senator BUSH. Mayor, you mentioned Oak Street toward the endis it not true that you made a lot more rapid headway with the Church Street program than with the Oak Street? In other words, Oak Street was sort of a pioneer thing in the State really?

Mr. LEE. It was.

Senator BUSH. I think there was not the facility of moving ahead which has been developed since then.

I would think that from what one has seen in New Haven and other cities in the State too, now the projects have been speeded up considerably-approving plans for urban renewal. Is that true or not in your observation?

Mr. LEE. Well, I would say, Senator, that in part it is true. The Church Street program, however, is a project where one of the reasons that we were able to do so well on it-I do not mean to pay you any compliment which is not deserved-was the help that you gave. But at the beginning of our Oak Street program-the Oak Street program goes back, I believe, to 1951-we got no action, as hard as we worked on the thing. I think the first building we demolished was in February of 1957, which was 6 years from the time that we began the program. It was 3 years from the time-or 32 years from the time I came into city hall with urban renewal and redevelopment as my prime target.

Would you like to add to that, Mr. Logue?

Mr. LOGUE. I was thinking about the Church Street project. Our experience in Worcester Square is, for a variety of reasons, not as happy, as you know. But even in Church Street we had our approval last June. We have yet to tear down our first building, and we will not begin construction until next spring I guess, next May.

Senator BUSH. What are the reasons for that?

Mr. LOGUE. For one thing, we were not allowed to get our second set of appraisals until the loan or grant contract was actually executed. We could not get the title-searching work done, could not get negotiated prices approved and start to buy.

For another, we were not exactly encouraged to make a contract with the sponsor which would give him something he knew he could tie onto until we had the loan or grant.

So that it is a tendency, Senator, if I may put it this way, to take these important steps one at a time instead of all together. The URA is improving that, but I think they can do still more.

Senator BUSH. I had forgotten the precise details of the 1954 legislation on urban renewal, but it gave it a big push forward as I recall. And I think it was about that time that the mayor came in to New Haven. You remember we had a meeting up at the State capitol and presented the changes in the law and what was really offered. It seems to me that right then in our State generally there began a vigorous interest in it, and things have moved ahead since then.

This was partly due, I believe, to changes made in the law in 1954. Is that not true?

Senator SPARKMAN. Yes. We rewrote the law in 1954 based upon the experience that we had gained under the 1949 act.

Senator BUSH. Which had resulted in very little urban renewal going on.

Senator SPARKMAN. Not a great deal, because there was such a big time lag.

Senator BUSH. Yes.

Senator SPARKMAN. But we had moved along as far as we could. We saw what some of the bugs were, and we tried to take them out in 1954.

Mr. LEE. I would like to make this comment, Mr. Chairman. In my 42 years as mayor, I think on the level of the Federal agencies there is a failure to recognize that the contribution which we make on the local level is all-important and tremendous in the success of this program.

Now, I do not mean to say for 1 minute that we are regarded suspiciously and that every act is suspect and that we are looked at overtly by the Federal people. But the point is this: The real problems in this program are on the local level, and who knows more about solving these problems or who knows more about these problems than the people in the communities themselves? We are the ones who have to organize the local support for this. We have to organize the risk capital. We have to do the job with private enterprise. We have to tamper with people's habit patterns. We have to take the calculated risks that are built into this program.

And we feel that if we are willing to do all these things as mayors that we should be treated as adults by the FHA and HHFA when it comes to the Federal participation, which in our opinion would mean that a lot of this red tape and prolonged interchange from one office to the other could be eliminated.

Senator BUSH. Mr. Chairman, I would like, apropos of some of the mayor's testimony, to ask consent to include in the record here or at the conclusion of his testimony three bills that were passed by special session of the general assembly in Connecticut just recently. One authorizes the State to pay one-half of the local share in connection with urban renewal projects. The second authorizes the State to pay one-half of commercial or industrial redevelopment projects for which Federal help is not available.

The third enables the State Development Commission to provide technical assistance in the preparation of capital improvement programs by the cities.

These three bills may be of some interest to the Senators and others who may read this record.

Senator SPARKMAN. They will be included.

(The bills referred to follow :)

[March Session, 1958, Substitute for House Bill No. 70]

PUBLIC ACT No. 24

AN ACT PROVIDING STATE FUNDS FOR REDEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Assembly convened:

SECTION. 1. It is found and declared that there exist in the municipalities of the State substandard, insanitary, deteriorated or blighted areas, that the existence thereof is impairing and arresting the sound growth and development of said municipalities and is inimical to the public health, safety, morals and welfare of the inhabitants of the State, that said municipalities are unable to rehabilitate such areas without State financial assistance as provided by this Act, that the granting of such assistance is a public use and purpose for which

« PreviousContinue »