Harvard and Tomorrow's Community

The University is today in the position of a man about to be eaten by cannibals. If he does nothing, he will be eaten. If he resists, he will even more certainly be eaten. The only hope seems to lie in converting the cannibal to vegetarianism.

At the moment the cannibals are in the form of the Boston metropolitan area, which over the last century has gradually encroached on Cambridge until it now threatens to devour it. The first effects have already been felt. The fully matured product is visible in a slum-surrounded university like Columbia or Chicago.

The urbanization pattern is familiar. Rising population density lowers the physical standards of the city. The well-to-do residents emigrate to more attractive suburban areas. The tax base decreases, and the tax rate climbs. Industry is driven out by taxes and the environment. Municipal service grows worse, as the need grows greater. Crime and delinquency rates rise, disease increases, and schools become blackboard jungles. In short, the familiar pattern of metropolitan slum living becomes inescapable.

Varied Reactions

Reactions to this pattern are mixed. Local residents seldom complain vigorously since the situation is essentially a response to residential needs. The citizen may complain that his city is changing for the worse, but before long he moves to a better one, leaving his home to those who have created the problem.

Industry and commerce are less passive, however, because they have more at stake. A home can easily become a tenement or a rooming house, but factories and stores are not so adaptable to the new conditions. Industrialists see workers forced into often unwelcome patterns, they watch tax rates rising, transportation clogged, and find that archaic land use patterns make physical expansion difficult. But industry, like residents, can move on. The expense is great, but seldom prohibitive if the demand for the product is not lost in the move.

Commercial interests are the strongest opponents of the slum pattern, because their investment is normally centered on the local market. A restaurant or haberdashery cannot simply move somewhere else, for to do so means to wipe out the existing source of revenue. Yet to remain means strangulation, as traffic slows, parking problems make stores inaccessible, and the clientele is down-graded.

Commercial interests have already moved to counteract these trends in Cambridge. They have a program, and their efforts are now directed at inducing residents and industry to join them in the fight for a better community.

In Cambridge, as in most other cities, this program has taken the form of Urban Renewal. Last year a committee, headed by local merchant Paul Corcoran, drew up a "Workable Program for Urban Renewal", which described the existing situation, outlined the direction in which the city was moving, and suggested a possible alternative.

Two unusual factors are working in the committee's favor. First, Cambridge has a strong traditional appeal which makes even prosperous residents especially reluctant to depart. Second, Cambridge's biggest industry--education--is so deeply committed to the city that ia cannot consider emigration.

Harvard and its educational neighbors have, however, always stood in a peculiar relationship to the community. As institutions with national support, they import and spend locally a tremendous amount of capital.

As a tourist attraction, a cultural center, and an economic factor, Harvard is one of the city's most valuable assets. The annual payroll amounts to about 25 million dollars. The annual consumption of goods and services comes to another 10 million dollars. Students import and spend still more money, pouring a million dollars annually into housing alone.

Such a boost to the local economy is well worth the tax exemption which the city grants on property used for education. Harvard is still the second largest taxpayer in the city.

Considering these facts the University has a disproportionately low influence in metropolitan government, for the combination of wealth and tax exemption has created a political scapegoat, convenient for arousing voters and avoiding issues. The current parking problem is but one example. One local car in eight is owned by a Harvard student. Yet despite the fact that it has the largest off-street parking facilities in the city, the University is held responsible for the city's insufficient accommodations.

This debate is, however, but a minor sign of the conflict in interest. The effect of the metropolitan pattern on an inherently suburban institution can already be seen. It seems inevitable that the problems will grow more serious as Cambridge becomes more a part of the inner metropolitan ring.

Housing Crisis

Faculty and married students must already balance the advantages of Harvard against the disadvantages of city life--in the form of bad housing bad schools, impassable traffic, poor health, high delinquency, high taxes, and poor public services. Harvard's attraction is often insufficient, and valuable talent goes elsewhere.

Those who choose Harvard must also choose between living in Cambridge and commuting from the more congenial suburbs. More and more often, family orientation dominates, and the "academic community" becomes a myth. "The staff" is on the job from nine to five, and then retires to its separate homes, safe from the Square for another 16 hours.

The picture is not a pleasant one; there are few men willing to argue that a Boston version of NYU is a desirable end. In the face of this trend, the University has three alternatives: ignore the situation, adapt to it, or try to change it.

While ignoring the trend may appear ludicrous, it is all too natural. The tendency to call Harvard an educational institution and let education end at the classroom door is strong, especially when a partial solution for undergraduates has been found in the House system.

On the other hand, the teacher shortage makes such a position tenuous. It is hard enough to find good teachers. Inducing them to live in slums is next to impossible. The University has already made tentative efforts at providing housing for faculty and married students, and hopes to do more. Likewise, the school problem could perhaps be solved either by experimental classes operated by the School of Education, or by raising salaries enough to pay for private education.

But even these changes cannot completely counteract the overall metropolitan pattern. Most people do not want to live in a slum even when their own home is a palace. The only alternative is to attack the existing pattern, trying to develop a new pattern through Urban Renewal.

The need for such an effort is made dramatically clear by the existing conditions:

One house in five rents for less than $25 a month, which, according to the Corcoran Report, "provides a cold-water, stove-heated flat in a substandard pre-1900 building which the landlord cannot afford to maintain." More than one house in three lacks central heating. One house in four is classified as "dilapidated" by the city. 16,000 of the 33,000 Cambridge homes are either threatened by, or engulfed in, blight.

Half of the houses in Cambridge were built before 1900. Such buildings need, but do not get, continual maintainance and renovation if they are to provide safe, healthy homes. Yet at the present rate of replacement, the last will be torn down in 2380.

The school situation is no better. Cambridge High and Latin enrollment has dropped 32 percent in the last ten years. Four out of ten children born in Cambridge to local parents will be attending a non-Cambridge school by the end of elementary school. Of those who graduate from one of the two local high schools, fewer than one in three will go on to college.

Traffic Troubles

Traffic patterns, laid out in 1840 when Cambridge had 6500 residents and Longfellow was inspired to write about the spreading chestnut tree, are today hopelessly inadequate. There are 33,000 registered motor vehicles. There are another 5,000 University-registered cars, and many more unregistered or indirectly connected with the University. Both numbers are growing daily.

Added to the local problem are the hundreds of thousands of commuters who pour through Cambridge streets daily, often clogging them further by parking and taking the subway to work. Co-ordination between state, metropolitan and local authorities on rerouting this through traffic has been halting at best, and more often non-existent.

Despite this situation, the city has no traffic director. Having trained a member of the police department for the job, the city tied itself in civil service knots, and cannot appoint him. The only consolation is that, if appointed, he would have no power anyhow.

The parking problem has already begun to hurt Harvard Square merchants, and it is not much better in Central Square. The only hopeful factor in this field is that the much-discussed overnight parking problem is really not a problem but a political football. The planning board has advocated alternate side overnight parking for years. But the planning board does not legislate.

The tax situation is also discouraging. The influx of ill-paid workers only partially compensates for the steady procession of wealthy citizens creeping towards suburbia. Likewise, industry is on the march--towards Route 128, where traffic is not clogged, expansion is not blocked by overpriced low grade housing, and taxation is not determined by a declining tax-base.

Not the least of the city's problems is the change which such a pattern effects on the education industry. Their tax-exemption has long been compensated by the importation of capital. But as the community becomes less appealing, employees and faculty emigrate; their paychecks pass in and out of Lehman Hall without even slightly stimulating the local economy. Similar factors apply in a lesser degree to all University expenditures.

But these problems are only a manifestation of the overall illness of a city which has not adapted wisely to changing conditions. Harvard cannot be fitted to a slum community, and Harvard cannot move. The same applies to a number of other industries and institutions.

Thus far, their efforts to adapt the city to their scheme of living have been largely ineffective. Indeed, until the Federal Government gave such demands workable form as an Urban Renewal Program, they were almost non-existent.

Although the word is new, the theory of Urban Renewal is as old as New Lanark. At heart it is only the proposition that slums are not the only response to the demand of industrial society for concentration of population. Behind the statement lie two facts.

Basis for Renewal

First, that efficiency crowds large numbers of people into a small area close to the center of a city. Those who wish more space must pay more and live in suburbia. Thus, when the area of crowding increases, it encroaches on former suburbs, and homes designed for comfortable family life are subdivided into rooming houses or tenements.

Second, that while such slum adaptation is natural, and requires little capital, in the long run it demoralizes both the economy and the society. The theory of Urban Renewal is that if the initial energy and capital are found for efficient assimilation of large numbers, the economy will get a boost, and the society will become healthier.

The Federal Housing Act of 1954 gave this proposition a new twist. The government an- nounced, in effect, that if the forces opposed to slums got the upper hand, they could work largely with Federal funds.

The plan is simple, but not easy. First, the opponents of slums must formulate an alternative to slum life: a long range plan for balancing commerce, industry and residence, creating adequate schools, parks, playgrounds, streets, parking space, and civic centers, and putting the community on a sound financial footing.

Outlaw Slums

This done, they must, in effect, make low grade housing illegal, by writing a housing code, with inspection and powers of enforcement.

Finally, when these steps have been taken, they must implement their overall plan for the city. Where the plan calls for new land uses, they must buy up the land, clear it, and resell. Where the plan calls for spot clearance for municipal proects, they must clear and build. Where the plan calls for housing, and owners cannot bring existing slums up to standard, the land is condemned, cleared, and resold to real estate interests or used for public housing.

Council Approval Needed

The final phase can be executed in stages, doing a little at a time, so long as each step conforms to the overall plan. Each move must, however, be approved by the City Council, which means that the opponents of slums must continually keep the upper hand.

To finance this operation, the Federal Government will cover two-thirds of all city losses. The city must make the plans and enforce the laws at its own expense, but two-thirds of the bill for redevelopment goes to Washington. The remaining third is floated as a bond issue, and normally the increased tax base will more than compensate for the expenditure.

Local Choice

The entire operation presupposes, however, that the city wants to get rid of its slums. This is not always true, and it is especially unlikely when it is a small city, run by the voters and not the business interests. It is hard for many to visualize big business boosting better government, but this tends to be the case.

The reason is not hard to find. While people do not like to live in slums, they would rather live in slums than gutters. Tearing down a tenement means displacing families. Eventually they may be able to find and afford a better house, but it is hard to live in a promise. And so, the politicians become representatives of the status quo.

Reluctant Landlords

This problem of existing interests occurs in other forms. The non-resident landlord wants to keep milking his holdings. He is vehement when the city offers to tear them down. But he is not nearly so outspoken as the resident who is told to fix his home, at his own expense, in order that its value, and its taxes, should rise. In Boston, Mayor Hynes has promised not to raise taxes on rehabilitated housing, but he will not be mayor forever.

In short, while a city faced with crowding has to raise capital for intelligent adaptation, a city like Cambridge which has already progressed a long way into slum life must also face the opposition of those who do not want to go back.

Discouraging Struggle

Thus far, the opponents of slum life have had a discouraging fight. The City Council and the HHFA have approved the "Workable Program", first step in putting renewal into action. But before anything can be done, the city must appoint an Urban Renewal Coordinator and a Redevelopment Commission. City Manager Curry is still looking for the right man to fill the coordinator's post. Nothing has been done about the Commission.

As for Housing, the city has a code, given force of law by the Health Department. But the Health Department has no means of inspecting houses and enforcing its rules. The city has done nothing to help.

Planning Board

An underpaid and overworked Planning Board has made some progress in working out an alternative to slums. The budget is, however, so low that finding competent men is nearly impossible. Director Mark Fortune, on leave of absence at the moment, will return at least temporarily this spring.

Rogers Block

Nothing can be done to implement these plans through Urban Renewal until Housing Inspection is established and the administrative mechanisms are in working order. As yet they are non-existent.

Perhaps the most encouraging sign is the Rogers Block project. Displacing 133 families, 357 people, this clearance program comes under the Housing Act of 1949. It is now nearing reality, which means that the slums will be replaced by industry. But if the fact that something was done looks hopeful, the stumbling, hesitant, often ludicrous incompetence with which the program has been carried out should also serve as a warning to those who see Urban Renewal as a panacea. Inexperience, administrative red tape, and sheer incompetence almost killed this project and the problems will redouble if a really substantial is initiated.

Throught this struggle, Harvard has had the good sense to speak only when spoken to. Asked for advice, they have given it. Asked to cooperate, they have cooperated, local politicos to the contrary notwithstanding. In any expanded efforts, the University could be even more useful, for its financial and technical resources are tremendous. Whether such help means selling a tenement on Banks Street, or offering expert advice on public health, education, or planning, it could be invaluable.

But Harvard, like the Federal Government, can only support the program. It cannot put it over. The city must choose for or against the slum pattern, and if they are to choose against, they must choose soon, before there is no room for choice.

How they will choose nobody yet knows, but it is already clear that the choice will have a profound effect on the future character of the University. The cannibal has not yet turned vegetarian.