NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS—1970 HEARINGS BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE NINETY-FIRST CONGRESS SECOND SESSION ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS PART 6—HEALTH AND HOUSING Washington, D.C., September 30 and October 1, 1970 a Printed for the use of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 42-778 WASHINGTON : 1970 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Washington, D.C. 20402 Price 75 cents SELECT COMMITTEE ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS GEORGE MCGOVERN, South Dakota, Chairman ALLEN J. ELLENDER, Louisiana JACOB K. JAVITS, New York HERMAN E. TALMADGE, Georgia CHARLES H. PERCY, Illinois RALPH W. YARBOROUGH, Texas PETER H. DOMINICK, Colorado PHILIP A. HART, Michigan MARLOW W. COOK, Kentucky WALTER F. MONDALE, Minnesota ROBERT DOLE, Kansas EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts HENRY BELLMON, Oklahoma CLAIBORNE PELL, Rhode Island KENNETH SCHLOSSBERG, Staff Director CLARENCE V. McKEE, Professional Staff Member for the Minority (11) CONTENTS V.b~ CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WITNESSES WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1970 Opening statements of Hon. Charles H. Percy, a U.S. Senator from the BE Gr IONE. lh oe a ei ee 171 Hinkle, Lawrence E., Jr., associate professor of medicine and director of the division of human ecology, Cornell University Medical College ____ Cassel, John, professor, Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of North Caroling... omc noon mrmr mo pm aie tm he DuMont, Matthew, Department of Mental Health, Boston, Mass_________ Friedan, Mrs. Betty, author and lecturer, New York, N.Y_______________ Fort, Dr. Joel, founder, Center for Solving Special Social and Health Problems, San Francisco; and author, The Pleasure Seekers: The Drug @Grigis, YouthandSoelety.... fon cone de ns LE TraURsDAY, OcTOBER 1, 1970 Spivack, Dr. Mayer, director, Laboratory of Community Psychiatry, Harvard Medlenl School... «oon ooo dni ie oom mt imi 2 brie i ee Walker, Bailus, Jr., Deputy Commissioner for Environmental Health, Department of Public Health and Welfare, Cleveland, Ohio____________ Parratt, Dr. Spencer, Department of Political Science, Maxwell School, iUniyersity of Rymioase. J. 0 aon Co off aa gn Mo kh at Knittel, Dr. Robert E., Department of Community Development, Southern Tlinois Eniversity, Carbondale, TH... oo... of did Mood, Erie, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale imivergty; New Haven, Conn... . «. nommaidmeinm mmm ee Sf Statements: Cast, JIL oe oe iio mi i trea ce erie me Br ore DuMont, Matthew. lol ene an i Hinkle, Lawrence, B., Jr... cocoa co nmin mm sim mp Sw mdm th St Prepared statement. com oom noe bir ein om i i Sa Or IE Ja0l. or ro mmm i mimi mie i ni re er Pricdon, Mrs, Betty. of nde Ses Sf A bee Kulttel, Dr Robert... ci me ll le fo id 8 Mood, Brie... cn a i nt Sst ret Stal Panett DroBPeneer. . hh wid oon iat eos art i bi i eo Og Soivack, Dra Mayer... oon ae Lt Walker, Baling Tn a Miscellaneous articles, publications, ete., entitled: Housing Codes— Their Administration and The Public Interest_______ Issue Study on Housing, Urban-Rural Problems and Sanitation_______ Mental Health Facilities—A Model for Physical Planning____________ Mental Health Implications of the Organization of the Large Scale Physical Environment... er dee eres re em mn Relies Between Housing and Health in Some Michigan Cities N68 1070% © he nmin ee Ee pm tn i Ae Hl SS Role and Training of Health Education Aides _____________________ (IIT) Page 7, 1765 1718 1728 1735 1746 1754 1766 1776 1819 1830 1837 1728 1735 1718 1722 1754 1746 1830 1837 1819 1766 1776 1823 1783 1844 1860 1893 1873 HEALTH AND HOUSING WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1970 U.S. SENATE, SeLEcT COMMITTEE ON Nutrition AND HoumaN NEEDS, Washington, D.C. The select committee met at 10 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 3302, New Senate Office Building, Hon. Charles H. Percy presiding. Present: Senators McGovern and Percy. Staff members present : Kenneth Schlossberg, staff director, John M. Quinn, majority staff, Clarence V. McKee, professional staff mem- ber for the minority, and David Cohen, minority staff. STATEMENT OF HON. CHARLES H. PERCY, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS Senator Percy. In the absence of Senator McGovern, who was detained in other hearings this morning, I will call the hearing to order. Our hearings this month, as announced by Chairman McGovern, are concerned with environment and health. This is a natural follow- up to our earlier hearings on nutrition and health. Our purpose now is to determine what needs to be done to insure that the gains we are making through better nutrition are not being lost through neglect of the environmental factors that influence health. The hearings which I have organized for today and tomorrow, at the request of Senator McGovern, are concerned with health and housing. The link between housing and health was forged many years ago. The earliest housing reforms in the United States were initiated by health organizations. The linkage has continued to be recognized in both housing and health legislation. Our housing acts call for the provision of decent, safe and sanitary dwellings, and suitable living environments. A recent health act declares that Government should assure every person an environment which con- tributes positively to healthful individual and family living. In order to avoid old myths about health and housing and to insure a proper perspective on our subject, I have asked three prominent medical scholars to discuss what we actually know about the relationship of the residential environment to health. Drs. Hinkle, Cassel, and Dumont are men with extensive experience in the field of health and the environment. In order to learn as much as we can from their brief testimony, I have asked them to come at our subject from different vantage points, insofar as possible. In this way 1 hope we will gain both a better understanding of the physical and social forces that affect us (1717) 1718 in our residential environment and a clearer idea of what we must do to make sure that they support, rather than inhibit, the health and welfare of Americans. In order to get some new insights on our subject, I have asked a well-qualified woman and a pioneering young doctor to look at our residential environment through the eyes of women and youth. Both Mrs. Friedan and Dr. Joel Fort have the capacity for challenging us to view our living arrangements in a new light. Tomorrow’s hearings will focus on action programs in the field of health and housing, and some of the specific issues that confront us. In that vein tomorrow we will analyze behavior and space and some essential requirements for planning environment. We will call our first witness now and lay the groundwork for tomorrow’s discussion without losing any further time. I would like to call Dr. Cassel. By way of introduction, Dr. Cassel is professor of the School of Public Health, the University of North Carolina. Dr. Hinkle, I understand, has just arrived. Dr. Hinkle, why don’t we proceed then according to the original plan and lead off with you. If you will take a center chair. Dr. Hinkle, director of the division of Human Ecology, Cornell University Medical College. We welcome you to these hearings, Dr. Hinkle. STATEMENT OF LAWRENCE E. HINKLE, JR., ASSOCIATE PROFES- SOR OF MEDICINE AND DIRECTOR OF THE DIVISION OF HUMAN ECOLOGY, CORNELL UNIVERSITY MEDICAL COLLEGE Dr. Hixgie. Thank you very much. I am sorry for my hasty arrival. It is a pleasure and an honor to me to be able to present this material at this hearing. It means a great deal to me. Particularly for some 16 years or more I have been concerned with the effect of the human environment upon the health of people, and it has appeared to me recently that in our growing interest in the preserva- tion of our natural environment we have been in some danger of losing sight of that part of the world around us which has the most immediate effect upon the health and welfare of people. By that IT mean that people are more affected by the other people around them and the manmade environment in which they live than in any other way. We must remember that people live in manmade dwelling units, that most of them live in cities and towns, most of them work in buildings and factories and in other constructed facilities, and that they spend most of their time interacting with other people and that they travel back and forth on a variety of means of transportation and, indeed, may spend most of their leisure time in the manmade environment. In the last analysis it is this quality of the environment which has the greatest effect on the health and welfare of people and, indeed, it is this which we must deal with if we are going to create in the future people who are healthy and productive members of society, who realize what their full potential for needful medical care may be. Medical care delivered to people who are already ill 1719 has less effect in creating healthy people than does the effect of providing them with an adequate physical and social environment, especially during their early years. Since the major part of this environment is manmade, our atten- tion to the manmade part of the environment is fully justified. I mention in the same breath the physical and the social environment because these act together in a very complex way to determine the effect of the manmade environment on health. Indeed, as you are well aware, in this country social and economic variables are the single variables which are most related to health. As one goes down in income, one goes down also in housing and one goes up in indicators of the distribution of illness of all sorts. I refer to this again as illness of all sorts. It ranges from increase in abortion and stillbirth and infant and prenatal mortality and childhood illnesses and death in families of low intelligence and lack of advancement in school and sickness-absence rates in juvenile delinquency, school dropouts, and evidence of mental and emotional disturbances. Rates for adult injuries, sickness-absence, and death are all highest in poor housing and low-income areas; and life expectancy is lower. Now the relation between economic and social variables, on the one hand, physical characteristics of the environment, on the other hand, and the health of people in the third place is not a simple one and I don’t think it should be assumed that the physical char- acteristics of buildings are in and by themselves enough to account for these phenomena of ill health that I have just described. Never- theless, the association is a very well established one and there is no doubt but that the physical features of the environment are an important part of it. The impact of these physical features cannot really be understood unless we are aware that these features in many instances have adverse effects upon the health of people not in themselves, but because of the way that people perceive them, and because of their effect upon the behavior of people, the relations be- tween people and the relation between people and their social group. For example, dwelling units of the less-adequate sort affect human health to a major extent through their size and arrangement. Crowd- ing or living arrangements which require people to interreact with and relate to others in ways that are not desirable to them, can con- tribute very substantially to accelerated intellectual and physical deterioration of people in old age, to increased aggression, to with- drawal and sexual abnormalities among young adolescents and young adults, and it is thought to play a significant role in emotional and mental health in adults. Furthermore, there seems to be an important factor in the high accident rate, which is such an important cause of death in childhood and youth and they are probably a factor in the occurrence of the infectious diseases, as well as in other diseases such as rheumatic fever. So this sort of disparity between the number of people in a dwelling, whether this be rural or urban, and the capacity of the dwelling to hold them and to allow them to carry out important human activities can be reflected through a variety of physiological and psychological processes and many disturbances of human health. This is not true solely at the lower end of the housing schedule. This is true also in modern and new dwellings which we create. I 1720 can give you some isolated examples. If one moves people from low dwelling units in which they are living side by side and places them stacked up in high-rise apartments so that mothers ten stories up are separated from their children out on the playground, this disturbs the mother-child relationship, among other things. It leads to diffi- culties with bowel training, which you can well imagine, as well as being a feature in some sort of the juvenile delinquent and aggressive behavior that can occur. This is merely one single example of how arrangements of this sort can have important effects on human health being mediated through the behavior of people and the social group. I might add also that quite over and above the effect of buildings, the transportation facilities likewise have a very important effect upon human health. In large urban areas there are many people who drive automobiles and ride in buses, trains, streetcars, and subways for periods of an hour or more as they go to and from work. Many of these people spend all or part of their time standing up. There is a good reason to believe that many of the feelings of fatigue and tension which are features of life in large cities and urban societies are engendered, in part, by this and that surely the delays and frustrations that are a part of this are also a significant feature in the lives of our urban population. In fact, the design of the cities and living spaces is thought by many to relate to the whole general pattern of illness within a society. In a modern urban society as we develop modern ways of transportation, as we have had the freedom from time constraints which is created not only by the availability of communication, but artificial lighting, activities go on throughout the week and around the day and these activities are featured by long periods of sustained purposeful activity, by contingent challenges. This is thought to have a very important relationship to the very high level of feelings of anxiety, of tension and the intermittent and chronic symptoms of asthenia, fatigue, depression, and agitation which are so widespread in our society. There are many who believe there are other functional disorders of muscle tension, of functional cardiovascular disturb- ances, of motor disturbances of the gastrointestinal tract, and of nasal vasomotor symptoms, among others, all of which are such a nuisance and which are to a certain extent more serious diseases related to the pattern of life in our society. You can imagine that the design of our cities and the places where we work and live and the capacities of our means of transpor- tation are very highly relevant. This phenomena, T might say, carries over particularly to the working environment. There are an increas- ing number of human occupations which require high levels of alert- ness and attention, long periods of sustained purposeful activity and rapid decisionmaking. The effective performance of people in these occupations may be crucial to the lives and welfare of many other people. I mention to you, for example, the air traffic controller. For many industrial workers the physiological and psychological effects of their activities and the places where they work are definitely functions that can have important health consequences. I spoke first about the fight between the manmade environment and the people who live in it and the way people perceive their environment and the way it controls human relations. However, I 1721 would not have you believe there are not direct health effects of the physical environment. Of the some 70 million dwelling units in the United States at this time, it has been variously estimated that about 11 to 19 million are low standard and should be replaced. The direct physical effects of these dwelling units are not negligible. In spite of the present concern about lead in gasoline, lead in the paint of old buildings eaten by children, is still the most common cause of acute lead poisoning. In this Nation there are many children bitten by rats, or killed by falling from unprotected windows. Although few people in this country die of direct exposure to the elements because of mmadequate dwelling units, the problems of heat and cold has by no means been overcome. In the United States, heat waves are a far more important cause of immediate mortality than are periods of air pollution. A heat wave in New York City lasting a week or more may be associated with more than a thousand excess deaths. This mortality especially involves people over 65, but people of all ages are affected. The adequate air conditioning of hot work- ing places and of dwelling units, especially those that are occupied by older people, may be a very important public health measure. 1 might say in this connection that an inadequate supply of electric power in a major city during a period of heat is a far greater threat to public health in my opinion than any air pollution that might be caused by producing this power. Cold also remains a problem, especially to the elderly. Tolerance of older people for cold, like their tolerance for heat, has diminished. Older people who live in poorly heated and substandard dwellings in regions where winters can be severe are often brought into the hospital suffering severely from the cold. Likewise, noise is worthy of note. From the human point of view noise is any unwanted sound. As you well know, at high intensities it can damage hearing. At the intensities at which it is found in our cities it is thought that it may affect the hearing of many city dwellers. But this is not the chief way that noise creates difficulties. It creates difficulties because it disturbs sleep, and this is a special problem among the sick and the elderly and those who suffer from sleep disturbances from other sources. The noise interferes with conversations. It makes impossible types of quiet activity within the household. It interferes with privacy. It disrupts the teaching of school children and the holdings of church services. We estimated recently that the noise from large aircraft within the metropolitan confines of a major city might have serious effects on the lives of over 700,000 people. Among these were 70,000 over the age of 65 and perhaps an equal number with conditions which make them especially susceptible to sleep disturbances. There were also upwards of 110,000 school children whose schooling was more or less interrupted by this. The cost of all this in human comfort and human development is very great. Now the burden of my presentation is this: If we are to create the conditions under which people are healthy, long-lived, and productive citizens, who live in harmony with their society, we must give primary attention to creating better places for people to live and work. This means more than simply creating cities and buildings in which children will not suffer from rat bites and lead poisoning 1722 or where elderly people die from heat waves and cold. It also means that we must learn how to design dwelling units so that there will be the room and the flexibility, so members of a family can carry out in comfort and without conflict those interpersonal relations upon which human growth, development, and health so much depend. It means that we have to learn to design cities and neighborhoods in the same way. It means that in the design of our buildings and transportation systems, we consider the physiological and psycho- logical needs of the people who use them and not just those char- acteristics which yield structural soundness, beauty, and efficiency. There is in my opinion a need for a greater proportion of funds and a greater amount of scientific interest in learning how to design manmade environments which are optimal for people. Also, within government there is a need for making sure that the environments which we are now constructing will be adequate for the people for whom they are designed. Without further knowledge of how to build and what to build, we may simply be constructing the slums of tomorrow. Even when the necessary knowledge is available, it will be necessary to have mechanisms to make sure that when we build dwelling units, these are not simply structurally sound, but they are also adequate living places for people. We need mechanisms to make sure that the new neighborhoods and new developments are not esthetically attractive, but they are also adequately designed for human functions for which they are intended. We need mechanisms to make sure that new rapid-transit systems are not simply efficient and safe, but that they are also designed to move people in adequate comfort and without undue fatigue to the places that they want to go at the time that they want to get there. In other words, it is we who are going to have to build the world of tomorrow. We need to learn more about how we build it and we must make sure that we build it effectively. Thank you. (The prepared statement of Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr., follows :) PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. LAWRENCE KE. HINKLE, JR. In our growing interest in the preservation of our natural environment, we are in danger of losing sight of that part of the world around us which has the most immediate effect upon the health and welfare of people. People live in man-made dwelling units. Most of them live in cities and towns. Most of them work in buildings, factories, and other man constructed facilities. They spend most of their time interacting with other people, and engaging in the complex activities which characterize modern societies. They travel back and forth to work in automobiles, buses, trains and other man-made means of trans- portation. Most of their leisure time they spend not out of doors in the natural environment, but in some part of the environment which is man-made. In the last analysis, the health of people, and their development into pro- ductive members of society, who realize their full biological potential, is dependent not so much upon providing people with medical care after they are ill, as it is dependent upon providing them with an adequate physical and social environment, especially during the early years of their lives. Since the major part of this environment is created by men, a major focus of our efforts to improve the environment of people must be directed toward places where people live and work, and toward the families and neighborhoods in which they grow up. There is a complex interrelation between human society and physical features of the man-made environment. Because of the association between income and housing, members of the lowest economic groups tend to live in 1723 the poorest housing in the least desirable areas of the community. Income, housing, and other correlates of the social structure act together in many ways to affect the distribution of illness of all sorts. Their effects may reen- force each other. In poor housing and low income areas in this country one finds the greatest prevalence of most of the indicators of ill health. In these areas abortion, still-birth, perinatal and infant mortality rates are higher; birth weights of infants are lower, congenital defects are more prevalent, childhood illnesses and deaths are more frequent, impairments of intelligence are more frequent, advancement in school is slower, sickness-absence rates of school children are higher, and juvenile delinquency, school drop-outs, and evidence of mental and emotional disturbances are all more frequent. Rates for adult injury, for sickness-absence, and for death are also higher. Life expectancy is lower. The relation between economic and social variables, the physical char- acteristics of the environment, and health of people is not a simple one, and there are many exceptions to the general rule that I have just stated. Nor is it to be assumed that the simple physical characteristics of buildings and neighborhoods, are in and by themselves enough to account for the phenomena of ill health which I have just described. Nevertheless, the evidence for the association is overwhelming, and we know a good deal about some of the ways in which this association may come about. Many features of the physical environment which are not in themselves hazardous to health, have adverse effects upon health because of the way that people perceive them, and because of their effect upon the behavior of people, the relations between people, and the relation of people to their social groups. The design and characteristics of dwelling units, neighborhoods, means of transportation, and even of cities, may acquire meaning as hazards to health by virtue of the socially determined attitudes, values and behavior of the people who inhabit them and use them. The configuration or design of an apart- ment building, or of a neighborhood, may determine the forms of social inter- change which take place among the people who live there. Conflicts within families and between people may be enhanced by some designs. Networks of communications between family groups may be disrupted by other designs. The isolating affect of this upon women and old people especially, may be severe. As a single example, the separation of mothers, high in apartment buildings, from children in play areas on the ground may lead to problems of mother-child relationships, and these, in turn, may lead to difficulties in maintaining bowel training in the very young, or they may create conditions facilitating delinquent behavior in juveniles and adolescents. Dwelling units and other living spaces seem to affect human health and development to a major extent through their size and arrangement. Crowding, or living arrangements which require people to interact and relate with each other in ways that are not desirable for them, can contribute substantially to emotional and intellectual incapacities among children, to failures of physical growth and development, to increased aggression, withdrawal and sexual abnormalities among adolescents and young adults, and they are thought to play an important role in the occurrence of emotional and mental illness. There is reason to believe that they are an important factor in the high accident rates which are the most common cause of death among children and adoles- cents, and they are a factor in the high incidence of some transmissable diseases, and in the occurrence of other diseases such as rheumatic fever. Crowding and isolation may also be factors in the occurrence of aggression and anti-social behavior in people in middle life, and in the accelerated intellectual and physical deterioration of people in old age. Transportation facilities, likewise, have an effect upon health. In large urban areas many people may drive automobiles or ride in buses, trains, street cars and subways for periods of an hour or more as they commute to and from work. Many of those who ride in public transportation spend all or part of their time standing up. There is reason to believe that transporation contributes significantly to the feelings of fatigue and tension which are a feature of life in urban society. The delays inherent in urban transportation systems and their associated impacts on the lives of people who must meet time schedules, enhance these effects. There is also evidence that the general patterns of illness within the society as a whole are directly determined by the general patterns of life of those who live in the society. A feature of life in modern urban society is the prevalence 1724 of certain disturbances of mood, thought and behavior which seem to be directly related to chronic arousal, and to sustained purposeful activity. In the general population, anxiety, feelings of tension, obsessive compulsive behavior, insomnia and intermittent or chronic symptoms of asthenia, fatigue, depression and agitation are exceedingly widespread. There are also widespread symptoms of muscle tension, of functional cardiovascular disturbances, of motor dis-. turbances of the gastrointestinal tract, and of nasal vasomotor symptoms among others, all of which appear to be related to the factors that are involved in the production of disturbances of mood, thought and behavior which they often accompany. In general, it has been hypothesized that modern society requires sustained purposeful activity and high levels of alertness during most of the daylight and early evening hours, sometimes continuing well into the night; that the tight scheduling of human activities, the occurrence of many challenges which cannot be met by immediate action, and the rapid changes in social forms and relationships which characterize modern society, have much to do with the occurrence of the phenomena that have just been listed. The design of our cities and the places where we live and work, and of our means of transporta- tion, may be very highly relevant to these. To these phenomena the design of the working environment may have special relevance. There are an increasing number of human occupations which require high levels of alertness and attention, long periods of sustained purposeful activity and rapid decisionmaking. The effective performance of people in these occupations may be crucial to the lives and welfare of many other people. For many industrial workers the physiological and psychological effects of their activities, characteristics of the places where they work, and the decrement in their function that may result when their activities are sustained, may have important health consequences. Among some 70 million dwelling units in the United States today, it has been estimated that there are 11 to 19 million which are so far below standard that they should be replaced. The direct physical effects of these dwelling units are not negligible. In spite of the concern about lead in gasoline, lead in the paint of old buildings, eaten by children, is still the most common cause of acute lead poisoning. In this nation there are still many children who are bitten by rats, or who are killed by falling from unprotected windows. Although few people in this country die of direct exposure to the elements because of inadequate dwelling units, the problems of heat and cold have by no means been overcome. In the United States, heat waves are far more important as a cause of immediate mortality than are periods of air pollution. A heat wave in New York City, lasting a week or more, may be associated with more than 1,000 excess deaths. This mortality especially involves people over 65; but people of all ages are affected. The adequate air-conditioning of hot working places and of dwelling units—especially when these are occupied by older people—may be a very important public health measure. Cold also remains a problem, especially for the elderly. Their tolerance for cold. like their tolerance for heat, is diminished. Many of them live along in poorly heated, sub-standard dwellings, in regions where winters can be severe. Noise is also worthy of note. From the human point of view noise is any unwanted sound. At high intensities, and especially in industrial settings, noise can produce loss of hearing. It is believed by some that the generally noisy environment of our large cities may affect the hearing of many city dwellers. But, this is not the chief way that noise creates difficulties. It creates difficulties because it disturbs sleep, and this is a special problem among the sick, the elderly, and those who suffer from sleep disturbances from other causes. Noise interferes with conversations. It makes impossible many types of quiet activity within the household. It interferes with privacy. It disrupts the teaching of school children and the holdings of church services. The noise from aircraft at a large metropolitan airport within the confines of a major city may have serious effects upon the lives of over a million people. Among these million there may be 100,000 over the age of 65, and perhaps an equal number with conditions which make them highly susceptible to sleep disturbance for other reasons. There may also be as many as 150,000 school children whose classes are interrupted. The cost of all this in human comfort and in human development is very great. 1725 The burden of my presentation is this. If we are to create the conditions under which people are healthy, long-lived, and productive citizens, who live in harmony with their society, we must give primary attention to creating better places for people to live and to work. This means more than simply creating buildings and cities in which children will not suffer from rat bites and lead poisoning, where old people and workers in hot places will not die during heat waves, or where families can have the privacy and silence that they need. It means that we must also learn how to design dwelling units so that there will be the room and the flexibility, so members of a family can carry out in comfort and without conflict those interpersonal relations upon which human growth, development and health so much depend. This means that we must learn how to design neighborhoods and cities with the same aims in view. It means that in the design of our buildings and of our transportation systems we must consider the physiological and psychological needs of the people who use them. There is need for the direction of a greater proportion of funds and a greater amount of scientific interest into learning how to design man-made environments which are optimal for people. There is need, also, for a greater concern within government for making sure that the environments which we are now constructing will be adequate for the people for whom they are designed. Without further knowledge of how to build and what to build, we may busily construct the slums of tomorrow. Even when the necessary knowledge is avail- able, it will also be necessary to have mechanisms to make sure that when we build dwelling units, these are not simply structurally sound, but they are also adequate living places for people. We need mechanisms to make sure that new neighborhoods and new developments are not simply aesthetically attrac- tive, but they are also adequately designed for human functions for which they are intended. We need mechanisms to make sure that new rapid transit systems are not simply efficient and safe, but that they are also designed to move people in adequate comfort and without undue fatigue to the places that they want to go to at the time that they want to go there. It is we who will build the world of tomorrow. We need to know how to build it, and we must make sure that we build it well. : Senator Percy. Dr. Hinkle, your testimony leads to a number of questions and we appreciate it very much indeed. I would like to ask whether or not you have done some thinking about the SST and its effect upon health and environment. If you have done some, I would like to ask you some questions. The appro- priate answer would be “yes” or “no”? Dr. Hixxkre. I have not had any particular or special knowledge of that. As far as I know about the general effect on the environ- ment, it is one of those effects which I would not regard as an apocalyptic sort; that is, that it may put enough ice in the upper atmosphere to cool off the world and give us all a hard time, but over the short-run effect on the human health is very small. Time changes associated with rapid travel from one zone to another do upset the human for those who travel, but I would not think that this is a major problem that could not be overcome by the traveler. I think the big problem would come in noise. I think if we are going to have a method of transportation which involves noise, that it is going to seriously disturb the sleep of many people. We had better think twice before we have this in and around populated areas. Senator Percy. The reason I ask it is that this appropriation will be up probably the end of this week in the Senate. We are going to be asked for another $300 million on what is now estimated to be a total cost of at least a billion and a quarter. I happen to think it is a distortion of our national priorities, a misuse of our national resources and a very unsound economic invest- 1726 ment. But from the standpoint of health, it is estimated that in order to break even on this project and to begin to get a payback, you would have to build 300 planes. Now Dr. Garland has said that the noise effect of one SST is equivalent to the effect of about 50 707s. Knowing the problems people have living around O’Hare Airport today, what would the effect be of supersonic transports, SST’s standing with the takeoft noise and the landing noise and the sonic boom problems that they would have on the human environment? Dr. Hinges. Well, I can answer this with one opinion, which is that the matter of the cure for aircraft noise in my opinion is going to lie primarily in the creation of the quieter engines and, to a lesser extent, the efforts to change the configuration of airports or move them away from cities. And it would seem to me that inherent in any development of future aircraft the Government would wish to make sure that these aircraft were not so noisy as to be a threat to the human communities around them. Senator Percy. In other words, you would not go ahead with the development of a plane, mockups of the plane and everything else unless you are assured you have an engine that will solve the noise problem ? Dr. Hinkee. I would regard the development of an engine with an acceptable level of noise as essential to the development of any such aircraft. It ought to be an essential part of it. Even at the present level, aircraft engines are far too noisy and the next genera- tion must reduce that. Senator Percy. I would like to ask about the defective housing in public housing as we have built it for some 30 years, high-rise public housing for families with children. We in 1958 wrote into the law that no high-rise public housing could any longer be built for families with children, certainly can for the elderly but not with children. Do you think this was a wise step on our part? Dr. Hinge. I would rather have Dr. Cassel and Dr. DuMont deal with that. In general, let me say that this strikes me as having been a wise thing for some of the reasons which I mentioned. It chiefly has to do with the separation of children on the ground in the play areas with the mothers high up in the building. Senator Percy. What steps do you think we should take to improve the health deficiencies that you have described as related to the residential environment ? Dr. Hingre. Well, I think the first step we need is more knowledge. In the past it has been possible to develop means of transportation or various other tools that the humans use through an experimental method in which one designs something and designed alternatives and saw which worked best. The investigative knowledge from the point of view of scientists, both in the medical and behavioral social sciences, in the past had not reached a level at which we could begin to measure the types of things we need to measure, but now I think we really need to take the opportunity, first of all, to have adequate survey information on the effects of the types of dwellings that we have built in the past. 1727 Second, where there are two alternative designs possible which appear to be equally attractive, there should be opportunities to build by these two alternative designs and to compare the effects of them. Then I think that selected schools of architecture and public health in this country should be provided with facilities which could be used, in effect, as housing laboratories in which various configura- tions and designs are tried out on experimental basis if you need to volunteer inhabitants until we can learn just what is the best way to do things. Our chief problem today is not just that we know what we do wrong, but we don’t really know how to do it right, if I can twist it. So I think knowledge 1s first. Senator Percy. I have before me some tables prepared by the National Institutes of Health on variable factors for injuries asso- ciated with home-building fixtures or structures. The total number of accidents connected with heating and cooling devices is 60,000 a year; building structure or additions, 2.5 million, 100 percent of which are all men; building fixtures, 180,000; and heating and plumbing and electric systems parts, 90,000. This seems to be a rate of injury higher than Vietnam certainly. Dr. Hingre. Oh, yes. Senator Percy. Maybe World War II. What can be done about the problems of home-connected injuries to reduce the level of injuries which we are now sustaining? Dr. Hinkre. As you correctly point out, these injuries are the major cause of death in the younger years of life and many of them do occur in and around the home. I do think that adequate safety standards for heating and cooling devices with building structures and for the other physical features of these environments which do in themselves tend to be sources can be worked out and should be prescribed fundamentally by those health authorities who concern themselves with the human health and safety. I think also there is a very strong social factor in this. Many accidents occur because children are growing up in settings in which they are not supervised or thrust into situations where there are liable features. So the first part of the equation which I gave to you is the overall provision of more adequate places for people to live. We also tend to do something about this. Our knowledge of the epidemiology of accidents of childhood is just beginning, but it is clearly an area that we will have to pay much more attention to. Senator Percy. I consider what is done in industry to protect against injury compared to what is done in, say, Vietnam to protect a young man once he is injured and the cost society incurs to fly him by helicopter to a hospital, to fly him by jet to the mainland again for his rehabilitation. The cost is tremendous. As an industrialist I just can’t remember having a few months go by without somebody coming in from the National Safety Council to present an award for another million man-hours of work without a single lost-time accident, but we had 500, 600 supervisors highly safety conscious. 1728 » \ The design of a factory, the machines and the equipment was all done from the standpoint of safety in mind. Do we do that in con- nection with the design of our homes and living environments? We sustain this high injury rate because we have not focused attention . on safety. We are just beginning to do a study of the new types of automobile bumpers and things of that type, but maybe we just simply have not been conscious enough in our everyday living en- vironment of the factor of preventing injury. Dr. Hinge. Well, I think you are quite correct that there is not that national awareness of this as a health problem, which there is with regard to many other health problems. And it is also quite correct that the organized efforts in industry to reduce on-the-job accidents, which has now been on-going for 30 or 40 years, which has led to an acute awareness both to the type of structures which cause injury and, second, the type of human behavior which causes injury have had remarkable effects on industrial accidents. It 1s not going to be possible to organize the human environment, the general public, in quite the same way the increased awareness through education will certainly be an important step. Another important step will be the still further efforts to identify not simply the physical agents which cause injuries, but the human circumstances under which these injuries occur. For example, now and later adolescents in young adult life, automobile accidents are a highly important cause of death, and these automobile accidents are not randomly distributed throughout the population. They occur especially to young men and usually to young men who have been drinking and driving rapidly. So again within human households the knowledge of epidemiology, I think in many instances especially for the very young, we will find that it is the neglected child, the child in a crowded household with a working mother or the unsupervised child as well as one that is exposed to inadequate and dangerous fixtures who is injured. Now this is, I think, going to be a major public health factor in the future. Senator Percy. Dr. Hinkle, we are very grateful for you being here. The committee expresses its appreciation. The next witness is Prof. John Cassel, Department of Epidemi- ology, School of Public Health, University of North Carolina. Dr. Cassel is an expert in the science of the incidence, distribution and causes of diseases. Dr. Cassel, we are delighted to have you with us this morning. We appreciate your appearance. STATEMENT OF JOHN CASSEL, PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF EPIDEMIOLOGY, SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA Dr. Casser. Thank you very much. Senator Percy, I am very honored to be here myself. I would like to elaborate a little and make more explicit perhaps some of the points that Dr. Hinkle raised and give perhaps a slightly different emphasis. I think it is important to recognize that throughout all of recorded history there has been a conviction that man’s health and the diseases 1729 to which he is subject are somehow related to his environment. For most of the period for which we have records, the attention has been largely focused on the physical aspects of the environment of which, of course, the quality of housing is an important component. The prevailing widespread view is that there is a direct and straightforward relationship between the structure and design of a residence and the health of its inhabitants, but the data on this relationship in my judgment are far from convincing. If we accept some’ of the more perhaps self-evident relationships, such as the relationship of lead paint to lead poisoning, of grossly inadequate physical structures to accidents and related to injury, once we have accepted those there is no good evidence that most of the poor health suffered by occupants of dilapidated houses or deteriorated neighbor- hoods is due in any major or direct way to the inadequacies of the physical structure alone. By poor health I am referring to the conditions most prevalent among occupants of such houses; conditions that range from un- acceptably high infant death rate to the chronic diseases to the mental disorders and to the behavioral disturbances, such as drug addiction and delinquency and the like. Now the relationship as I have indicated is complex. I don’t think there is a direct straightforward relationship between the physical structure and these disorders. Furthermore, attempts to reduce these health problems simply by improving the physical structure and design of the house have led in the past to equally unconvincing and contradictory results. This is particularly true when the only thing that has been changed is the physical aspect. In some instances, for example, when we moved slum dwellers into better houses, there has been an actual deterioration in health status rather than improvement. This is particularly true when the popu- lation moved happens to be elderly. In other studies that have been reported, there are no differences following improved housing or if there are differences, they are either slight or transient, tending to disappear after a few months or a year. In contrast to these findings evidence has recently been accumulat- ing suggesting that one of the more important aspects of our environ- ment that may affect health, particularly in urban situations is not so much the physical environment as the presence of other members of the same species; that is, the patterns of relationships that exist between people, or what has generally been called the social environ- ment. Now a lot has been written about this and a lot of vague and rather diffuse thinking has occurred and we are still in a stage when we cannot be too precise. But the evidence supporting this is rather intriguing if circumstantial. Somewhat paradoxically the best evidence linking social processes to health comes from animal studies. The evidence from the animal world is rather clear. It appears that if the social milieu in which animals live is modified with all aspects of their physical environ- ment kept constant, such as sanitation, heat, lighting, noise levels, and so on, a whole spectrum of diseases and disorders can be produced. 42-778—71—pt. 6——2 1730 This modification of the social milieu has usually been accom- plished either by increasing the number of animals housed together or by interfering with territorial control. Under these circumstances infant and maternal death rates rise the occurrence of various chronic diseases like heart disease increases and the susceptibility to a spec- trum of other agents like X-rays or poisons or bacteria or toxins or even to such things as noise is markedly enhanced. These are not just small effects. A rat, for example exposed to a given dose of X-rays, has a shortened longevity of say “n” days. Exposure of genetically speaking identical rats to the same dose of X-rays but under crowded conditions, decreases longevity by 2 “n” days. You double the effect of X-rays by crowding. The phenomenon, as I have said, is fairly well established in animals. The question is What is the human analog and how should we investigate this? Most approaches that I am familiar with have taken the rather simplistic view that if it is crowding in animals it must be crowd- ing in humans. This, too, has not been a very profitable line of investigation. Studies on the effect of crowding and population density have led to completely contradictory and often confusing results. It is perfectly true that under crowded conditions evidences of ill health increases, but under equally crowded conditions it is possible to find conditions of excellent health. There are islands in the South Pacific, for example, that have been very adequately studied where some 700 people are living on 11 acres of land, in which there is almost no evidence of any ill health. Holland is supposed to be the most densely populated country in Western Europe and has one of the best health records. These ex- amples can be multiplied. So personally I don’t think that the process we are talking about is necessarily crowding, per se. There is a greater likelihood that the relevant processes in humans will revolve around the quality of relationships between individuals in their social groups. Such notions as group cohesiveness, integration of individuals within the group, and group supports have been found useful in explaining many current health phenomena. Let me give you a few examples. One of the things that is quite intriguing has been some of the data coming out of disaster studies. It has been found after a natural disaster like a flood or a hurricane that after the initial impact of the physical trauma when people, with their houses and their cities in ruins come together in an in- tense effort to rebuild them, morbidity rates fall practically to zero despite the inadequate water supplies, the exposure to the elements and the undesirable physical environment. Some studies were done on the concentration camps during World War II. In Holland where a number of Jews were incarcerated in concentration camps, one of their number happened to be a physician who previously had been treating them in private practice. In civilian life peptic ulcers had been a very common complaint but in the intensely cohesive society that developed in the concentration camp and despite the tremendous anxiety and deplorable diet peptic ulcers disappeared, only to reappear once more in civilian life. 1731 The same sorts of things have been found in a number of other studies in this country. A series of studies, for example, on tubercu- losis has found that people who are most likely to develop tubercu- losis are those who for one of several reasons are unable to form meaningful relationships with other people in their environment. These are people who are either living in an area in which they are a distinct minority group, excluded by the dominant majority, or who have multiple residential and occupational moves or who are living in broken families or living alone in one room, without kin, without neighbors, without opportunities, for meaningful social action. Another lead that comes from these studies is that the degree to which individuals can understand and up to a point manipulate the system is important in terms of health status. That is the degree to which individual actions lead to understandable and predictable consequences with some feedback. I am talking here about the degree to which people do or do not have control over the elements in their own destiny. This notion, too, receives some circumstantial support from a number of different types of studies. One set of studies, for example, was exploring the effect of noise levels on the ability to concentrate and the physiological expense of such concentration. Volunteers in this study were hitched up with a series of wires so that they could measure the effect of trying to solve some mental problems in the presence of noise that came through earphones. It was found that the unpredictability of noise markedly interfered with the processes of concentration, as may be expected and if one did concentrate, this was done at considerable physiological expense. They were given a red button to push and told if they pushed this button the noise would be reduced. They pushed the button, but even though the button was not connected the physiological expense was considerably reduced. Perhaps even more important, when they were given a telephone and were told that a call to the individual at the other end of the line would modify the noise the physiological expense all but dis- appeared even though the noise level did not in fact change. Now I am not suggesting this be done in the way of trying to cheat people, but I am just saying that people need to have control of their situation to a degree which the actions are predictable. The animal studies that I quoted before tend to bear on this as well. Under the conditions of crowding where you find health effects in animals, one also finds almost inevitably there is the development of unpredictable, inconsequential and bizarre behavior reactions. For example, in the wild state, if an invading animal comes into the home base of an animal, a series of ritualized movements take place with the home animal performing a set of movements and the other animal performing a set of reciprocal movements. They rarely come into actual conflict, and depending upon the distance from the home base it is possible to predict how and when or under what circum- stances the invading animal will retreat. Under conditions of crowding this breaks down. The defending animal might start his movements and the invading animal does 1732 something quite unrelated; he may lie down, sleep, eat, walk past the animal, or just retreat. In other words, it does not seem possible for the behavior of an animal to modify the situation in ways which would be anticipated. Under those circumstances it has been noted that there seems to be three choices of action available to the animal. One is to continue these behaviors; to repeat and repeat them without modification of the situation. This is accompanied by marked and powerful changes in the nevro-endocrine system, which in turn is related to suscepti- bility to disease. In place of repeating these fruitless behaviors the animal can then either retreat from the scene and become, if you will, a hermit, or failing that, form a new group which completely ignores the norms of the larger society. Under such circumstances, for example, rats tend to band together and become completely antisocial, attacking female rats, invading nests and eating the young, engaging in homosexual activity, and bizarre behavior. This failure of one’s actions to lead to predictable reactions is most intense in people who are less well prepared for the situation in which they find themselves as would be the case, for example, in migrants to an urban scene. We have done some studies ourselves in this line and so has Dr. Hinkle. ~~ We have found, in short, if you examine two groups of people, both working in industry, one group being the first of their families, the first generation ever to leave the rural mountain areas in which they were located and work in an industry, the second group being the sons of previous factory workers in the same factory, working side by side, doing the same job for the same pay under the same company policy, the first generation workers have more evidence of ill health of all sorts under all circumstances than do the second. So I am suggesting, Senator Percy, that to the extent housing is related to those aspects of health which we think are urgent and important today, particularly in the urban slums, the relationship is probably going to be mediated by the influence of the residence and residential environment on the social processes, of which I have given a few illustrated examples. I am not saying that the information is locked and firm. I am saying these are profitable lines of further exploration. Now I believe the questions we are facing are too urgent to wait a number of years for further observational studies to confirm or refute these notions. My feeling is that what we need to do should be in the form of a type of intervention research. I am suggesting that there is ample justification for housing and neighborhood im- provement today other than for health reasons. Such improvements might well be started, but they should be deliberately used as opportunities to try and modify some of aspects of the social environment as they are being developed. One would, for example, attempt to improve a residential neighborhood with the deliberate intent of either trying to involve the residents in the decisionmaking process in the one case and not in another. On a continuing basis, two sets of measures should be instituted: The success of such efforts to modify the social environment and, 1733 second, to the extent that some of these social protests are modified, the consequences of such modification on the health and well being of the residents. Finally, we need to recognize that the very solution of some prob- lems are likely either to create new ones in their wake or bring to the surface those that have been previously submerged so that there is a need for continuity of effort. A need to depart from the practice that has been common of identifying a problem, mobilizing our resources to meet this problem—Ilike urban renewal—and then de- parting from the scene until a new explosion occurs. We need to have continuous contact with and surveillance over these actions. Now I don’t believe it is a function of research scientists and academic institutions to initiate social change. I think this is more properly the function of governmental agencies. But I do believe that there is a need for a partnership—a partnership in which some of these innovative agencies can have, as advisory boards, the proper mix of behavioral scientists and health scientists to provide the surveillance and health monitoring, to provide the research input to tell us if it is making a difference, and to what extent it is making a difference in the health field. Thank you. Senator Percy. Thank you so much. I am glad that Chairman McGovern is back in the Chair. The Crammax. Senator Percy, I would appreciate it if you con- tinue with the questioning. I am sorry, Dr. Cassel, that I didn’t hear your statement. Senator Percy has been instrumental in arranging not only for your ap- pearance, but for the other witnesses we have on schedule today, so I am going to defer to him, not because I am not interested in what vou have to say, but because I did miss the early part of your statement. Senator Percy. If I could summarize, I would personally relate some of your testimony. The fact is that I was raised as a Christian Scientist. I have, therefore, always believed there is a deep social relationship between a person’s mental attitude and his physical well- being, and you certainly corroborate that. I am probably the first Christian Scientist that has ever arranged medical hearings and I am not sure I will get Brownie points in Boston for that. We have heard a good deal about lead poisoning in various com- mittees. However, there is one phenomenon which interests me. In the large Chinese community in San Francisco, which has a terrible condition of overcrowding, you have a very rare incidence of lead-paint poisoning among the Chinese-American children. Could this be some form of cultural factor that is operative? Do you have any idea why the rate among black children is so high and, say, among Chinese children so low for the same kinds of physical environment ? Dr. Casser. I was not aware that they differed. That is very in- teresting and fits in with some other observations that have been made. As you know, sir, the infant death rates from all causes are 1734 somewhere in the order of two to three times higher in black slum dwellers than in more affluent white and black dwellers. But now among the Chinese and Japanese and inhabitants of the west coast, for example, who are also living in slum conditions, who are also living under extremely poor housing and poor neighborhoods, their infant death rates are somewhere in the order of one-quarter to one-third of those of the more affluent segments of our society, twice as high in blacks and Puerto Ricans mixed, and so on. It would tend to suggest speculation that the degree of parental supervision of children and the degree to which the women have the time and by virtue of their culture, the inclination to provide super- vision has a tremendous influence over the health of their child. This seems like common sense. I don’t think it is carefully documented, but I could not agree with you more that you can get tremendous differences in health conditions. Senator Percy. Because of the consideration for our other witnesses and because we are running a little late, just a couple of short questions. What social factors in the environment of the poor do you think are critical in insuring that improved nutrition will lead to better health ? Dr. Casser. I would suspect that there are two or three sort of general factors that may be taken into account. The one would be the degree to which the recipients are included in the decisions about their food are themselves aware of and convinced of the need for ms in and the degree to which we in turn understand their views of food. We found in studies across the world that most people in the world have some notions about what food is for, but they may not coincide with ours. They may not necessarily be eating food because of its presumably healthful or lack of healthful characteristics, but for other reasons. These need to be understood and it is quite a sophisticated fashion, not just making the diet available. Second, there is some good evidence, I believe, that would suggest that unless one starts with an adequate diet at the very earliest possible time, that is at the time of conception, damage will be done to the metabolism of that organism for which a subsequent improved diet cannot remedy, so it has to be started early and it has to be continued. Third, there is some evidence also that even if you satisfy these conditions—that is, you have people convinced they want a good diet, they started early—severe emotional disturbances and trauma can materially prevent the metabolism of the food even in the presence of a good diet. So it is once more no single factor, but a consolidation of factors which may be taken into account. Senator Percy. We heard testimony yesterday from OREO officials as to the problems involved in getting a community to fully support an OEO health center where it was imposed from the top down rather than arising from the needs in the community. There is a vast difference in success depending upon the source of the impetus for the project. In the field of housing we proposed in the Banking and Currency Committee of the Senate a National Home Ownershiv Foundation 1735 which would help nonprofit groups, church groups, labor groups, and so on, to identify structurally sound, but badly run-down, housing, acquire it, rehabilitate it, select the families to reside in it, educate the residents in health, and train them for living in urban com- munities. As I take it from your testimony, the whole therapeutic effect of involving people in rebuilding their own environment will lead substantially toward successfully maintaining them in the new environment which they create; is that right? Dr. Casser. That would be my notion. I would be the first to say this was based more on speculation and inference than hard data, and my plea is that while this seems like an intelligent and worthwhile approach, can we not, as we are doing this work, direct our efforts to document whether or not these notions are correct, whether they have led to the expected outcomes, so that we can make knowledge cumulative, so we can learn by our failures as well as our successes and so that 5 years from now we can provide answers to these sorts of questions. Senator Percy. So that really in the Federal Government’s area of responsibility we should give very careful consideration to not just the physical rebuilding of our environment, but also to creating the proper social environment? Dr. Casser. Correct; not allow this to happen by happenstance, but make a deliberate attempt to use the entry provided us by the obvious need for physical improvement the leverage to try and modify some of the social aspects. Senator Percy. In other words, social scientists might have been able to predict what would have happened more accurately to the human soul in high-rise public housing some 30 years ago and we might have saved thereby the great physical problem created within our cities? Dr. Casser. Particularly we recognize that there are more cultural differences in the ability. Senator Percy. Thank you very much, Doctor, for your testimony. The CaaRMAN (presiding). Our next witness is Dr. Matthew DuMont, formerly Chief of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at NIMH. Dr. DuMont has recently completed a book on community mental health and has combined public health functions in govern- ment along with private practice. We are very pleased to welcome you to the committee. Proceed in any way you see fit. STATEMENT OF MATTHEW DuMONT, DEPARTMENT OF MENTAL HEALTH, BOSTON, MASS. Dr. DuMont. These remarks will reflect a mixture of my current responsibilities as the director of the State agency in Massachusetts concerned with the rehabilitation of drug addiction and my former role, which was as chief of studies for the metropolitan problems to the National Institute of Mental Health, which was a focus of re- search on the relation between urban life and mental health. I am going to be brief. I don’t have a formal statement. I thought I would try to tie together some thoughts that I came with and that 1736 were the result of what I heard from Dr. Cassel and Dr. Hinkle this morning. I think we need to identify two premises of these deliberations, one of which is profoundly important and laudable and the other of which may be somewhat hazardous. The first premise seems to be that if we continue as a society and as an array of institutions to pick up the casualties of social forces that we have little understanding of and less participation in, we are not going to make it. That is to say, if as health professionals and as policy planners and decisionmakers we simply go about picking up the mentally ill, the physically ill and the socially disabled without addressing any attention to the contexts and social forces that led to those casualties, we are going to be in the position of bailing out a sinking ship with a thimble. It just does not work. Actually this is not a new revelation. It is as old as medicine, cer- tainly as old as psychiatry. Approximately 100 years ago the father of pathology, a very famous physician by the name of Rudolf Virchow, during an epidemic of typhus in the Crimea, stated that he was convinced there was something like an organism or microbe that was possibly responsible for the transmission of the disease, but if we want to stop the epidemic we need to eliminate poverty. That was in 1870. We are still talking about that idea as if it were a revelation. Another bit of relevant history is that the circumstances surround- ing the discovery of public health in medicine came about in 1845 when, during an epidemic of cholera in London, one physician, who was going about doing his business picking up the casualties of this epidemic and doing what physicians did in those days, found that most of his patients were dying. He did something unusual. He went back to his house one night after visiting the ill and decided to put a little red dot on a map of London wherever he knew a case of cholera to have been contracted. Quite to his surprise he discovered a pattern. There semed to be a clustering of these red dots around a particular street corner. He went down to try to figure out what it might be to explain this and came to the conclusion that the only thing that dis- tinguished this street corner from the other street corners was a water pump. This was before we knew anything about transmission of cholera through water and the organism that caused the disease. He went the next day to see the commissioner of water of London. He said: “Commissioner, you may think I am crazy, but if you want to do something about the cholera epidemic, you have to close that pump down.” The commissioner, in characteristic bureaucratic style said, “Thank you very much, Doctor. Water is my business, cholera is your business.” Being determined, late that night Dr. Snow crept up on the Fleet Street pump and broke the handle. He stopped the epidemic of cholera by engaging in what was considered to be a criminal act and created public health. He was redefining the role of the physician. Psychiatry, too, has been saying this over and over again, but un- fortunately has not been listening to itself. The man who is con- sidered to be the father of psychiatry, a physician by the name of Phillipe Pinel, in 1794 became the medical director of the general hospitals of Paris. He was confronted with thousands of enchained 1737 lunatics living in incredibly animal-like, conditions. He felt, because he came out of the tradition of the enlightenment and was a member of the revolutionary Government, that these chains should come off. Of course he was confronted with a whole array of middle manag- ers in the hospital who said typically, “Thank you, Doctor, but you must understand our problems in running this organization. These are lunatics. Look at them, they are like enraged beasts. We cannot take those chains off.” Dr. Pinel insisted with a slight edge to his voice. This was the year after what was called the “terror” in France. The chains came off. What he said was if these patients were treated more like human beings, they will act like human beings. The explicit statement which we are still trying to discover the implications of is that not all of their illness, not all of their mental disease, resided within them. In fact, there is currently a revolution in psychiatry called “com- munity psychiatry” which is an attempt to understand exactly how much of what we call mental illness resides outside of the individual. The premises, then, of this discussion that we have to understand is that what is in the physical and social environments of the illnesses is very much to the point and, in fact, long overdue. There is, how- ever, another premise that I want to question. There is an assumption in this particular deliberation that if the people who are responsible for making decisions about buildings and about communities turn to the acknowledged experts in medicine, in ecology, in mental health, and social science, they will develop an array of performance specifications about the physical and social en- vironment that can be translated into design. If only we have the right answers from the people who are supposed to know that, we can then develop buildings, neighborhoods, and communities, and maybe whole cities that will be healthier than they are now. I would like to suggest that is quite dangerous and is going to lead to a great deal of frustration and dissatisfaction. Dr. Cassel very nicely indicated that some of the superficial and facile ideas about health are unwarranted, that crowding as an independent variable as related to health or illness may have very little or no meaning. The studies about such issues as crowding, and other noise influences on physical, mental, and social health are ter- ribly complex, terribly conflicted, terribly fragmented. If there is any illusion that the scientists are going to emerge at some point in the near future with a harmonious array of facts about how big bathrooms should be to make healthy children, we should dispell it. The respect for social scientists, mental health professionals in their capacities has a great many other hazards as well. There is no reason to believe that we professionals are any less of a vested interest than any other segments of the society. I think the assumption that we basically represent a kind of highly refined, objective, compassionate and dispassionate perspective on social issues is going to be frustrated as well. There is however, a growing conviction on the part of these profes- sionals that if there is any issue in the environment related to health, welfare, and, well-being of individuals, it is precisely that point that Senator Percy was alluding to a few minutes ago, the participation 1738 of the individuals involved. If we know anything about mental health, we know that the issue of self-esteem 1s not a nicety of the human condition. It is a matter of survival. That is to say, how well people feel about themselves is a matter of life and death. An acute loss of self-esteem is a major reason for suicide, which is one of the major public problems. The CaammaN. Could I interrupt you momentarily ? The reason Senator Percy left is there is a live quorum in the Senate. They have now reached the point where the Sergeant-at- Arms is after Senators who have not answered. I am going to have to report in and one of us will get back here just as quickly as we can, but I don’t want to get arrested. So we will be back here just as soon as we can. Dr. DuMont. Shall I continue? The Cramman. No, I think you ought to hold your testimony. Either Senator Percy or I will be back very shortly. If T leave a second time, it is because the Taos Pueblo Indians want that bill reported out today and that is going to be a very close vote in the Interior Committee, which is also meeting at this same time. So if people are walking in and out Dr. DuMont. It is more important than what I have to say. The Cramrman. No, I would not say that, but just some conflicts we cannot avoid. (Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.) Senator Percy (presiding). Dr. DuMont, we are very sorry for the interruption. Will you go ahead. Dr. DuMont. I understand. I was in the midst of suggesting that the investment decision- makers make in behavioral sciences and health professionals as a source of expertise in making decisions about the environment may be an investment of limited liability. My feeling was that there is likely for a long time to come to be a great deal of fragmentation and con- flict among the experts and that there is going to be a great deal of frustration if it is assumed that an integrated, harmonious, dispas- sionate, objective answer is going to be forthcoming. I was furthermore suggesting that what we might do in terms of looking at an interface between behavioral science and the decision- makers would be to have a greater investment in the initiative of the people. We must find new ways for incorporating the desires of the needs of the people being planned for in the planning process. What I am suggesting is that the methods by which we must in- volve the people in the planning and decisionmaking of the environ- ment must be more sophisticated than market research and asking the people what they like. I do feel, however, that in the long run if we are concerned with social, physical, and mental health, that the participation of the people is going to be far more important than any variety of design specifications that emerge from the experts. TI have a sense, as I indicated before, that self-esteem is critical to mental health. T have a greater sense that something that we might call freedom may, in fact, be what mental health is all about anyway. Senator Percy. Thank vou very much, Dr. DuMont. 1739 I asked before of one of the other witnesses, Dr. Hinkle, about rehabilitation and rehabilitative housing. Do you feel that taking into account our slums today that we can use the rehabilitation route in housing to good advantage or must we just start over with new housing ? Dr. DuMont. I don’t think there is an easy answer to that. I do understand that the costs of rehabilitating houses are incredible and from a pure cost-accounting point of view, it is going to be easier for those of us concerned about resources and needs to destroy and to rebuild. My feeling, however, in the long run is if we rebuild, build whole new cities, rebuild neighborhoods or rehabilitate housing, that it is not really going to make much difference unless the people them- selves are meaningfully involved. We do know that from a number of studies that people who are involved in the planning and who have an investment in the house have greater influence on their satisfaction and gratification from that environment than people who are not involved regardless of sizes or locations or positions or functions of the environment they are living in. In other words, it does not seem to make much difference how big the bathroom is. What seems to make a difference is whether that bathroom indeed belongs in some meaningful way either financially or emotionally to the people living there. Senator Percy. I can certainly corroborate that. I spent my first 2 years here developing a procedure whereby we could offer home- ownership to the type of low-income individuals and families that I visited a year or so ago only 2 miles from the Capitol. A Negro woman had eight children and lived in slum housing that she rented. Her description of what happened to her children and her own feelings as she moved to rehabilitated housing across the street that was her own was very moving. Every month she said— I am not paying that slumlord, I am paying down to own this and someday I will tell my oldest boy he may own it because I am going to pass it on to him maybe. What a difference it made. Absolutely true. Dr. DuMont. That is right. Senator Percy. I would like to ask you about the health of the residents of our cities. Is there a difference between the health of an individual living in a city in Europe, such as London, and one living in New York City? London is a much older city. Is there a correla- tion between the age of a city and the health of its residents, or is it possible for residents of older cities to remain as healthy as residents of newer cities? Is there a difference between the health of an individual living in London and one living in New York? Dr. DuMont. That is a very important question. I am not sure we can answer it meaningfully. It is very difficult to come up with some meaningful measures of what communities are healthy and what nations are healthier than others. In general, as I think you know, although we are the most advanced and civilized nation in the world, we do not have a very good record 1740 of health as measured in terms of infant mortality and other such measures. I cannot tell you exactly what the comparative figures are between any particular city in Europe and the United States. Senator Percy. A person coming out of a rural community moving to an urban community—Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York—is there a difference in the effect of that environment on his health as compared to his former rural community ¢ Dr. DuMont. Yes. We have some data on that. It appears that mobility itself—that is, shifting from one environment to another— is a noxious influence on the mental and physical health of the indi- vidual. This appears to be true regardless of whether they are moving within an urban environment or between an urban and rural environ- ment. This, added to the knowledge we have that it is the healthiest and most competent individuals who tend to migrate anyway, suggest that migration represents a severe health crisis. This is true of all social classes. People purchase homes in the suburbs and plant trees and plant lawns not because it is their home, but it is a negotiable investment and they will be selling in 3 to 5 years. There is some evidence to suggest that indeed this vast mobility and this investment of limited liability in community and in home does indeed take its toll on the mental health of individuals. Senator Percy. Can we do much to make our existing cities healthier places in which to live and, if so, what specific steps can we take? Dr. DuMont. You are asking the $64 question and it would demand volumes. I can’t resist the temptation to give you some responses, although I don’t like the idea of coming up with maxims to deal with what I think is the problem of the century. If we had to do anything, I think what we have to do is resist the temptation to turn to esoteric professionalized, rationalized ex- pertise to come up with answers. If we do anything, we must find ways of enhancing the involvement, the investments, the participa- tion of the people who live in those communities and whether it is through mechanism of model cities boards or community action agencies, or maybe a more responsive system of local and other gov- ernment, I cannot say. I am not a political scientist but I can say that from a mental health point of view unless people feel that they have some environmental mastery, that when they push on the universe it is going to respond, that somehow the institutions around them acknowledge their identities and are responsive to their needs, there is nothing we can do for the urban environment that is going to make the slightest bit of difference. Senator Percy. Can we organize our cities better? Mayor Lindsay had a concept of little city halls. When I visited Berlin not too long ago I was extremely interested by the fact that the town has, I think, nine or 10 subdivisions of the city, each of which has a very large complete city hall of its own with its own head and which governs 100,000 or 125,000 people. One would go to that city hall to get his marriage license, one would not go all the way down to the central area or whatever might be the counterpart. One had a sense of be- : 1741 longing to a smaller community even though he lived in a city of over a million residents. One felt as though he was a part of some- thing else. We do have neighborhood centers but they are not part of the structure of government. Would we do better to reorganize the cities on a decentralized basis even though there would be no official boundaries between whatever subdivisions might be established ? Dr. DuMont. I think that is going to be one of the illuminating steps for the future, but it has to be done with integrity. One of my concerns about New York, which is a very difficult city, is that at the same time that the mayor is trying to decentralize the city halls, at the same time that he is trying to at least pay some ideological fidelity to the idea of citizen participation, he has also signed a major contract with the Rand Corp. to help him organize the systems analysis and operations research and long-range planning of the administration of that city. I would say that these are irreconcilable forces. You can not turn something as esoteric as systems analysis from the Rand Corp. if you are at the same time trying to bring the administration of the city closer to its people. I would say that the comfort with which he talked about those two forces in his book, “The City,” was a little facile. Senator Perey. Dr. DuMont, we thank you very much indeed for being with us. We very much appreciate it. Dr. DuMont. Thank you. (Attachments follow :) VARIOUS VARIABLES FOR INJURIES ASSOCIATED WITH HOME BUILDING FIXTURES OR STRUCTURES Heating, Building plumbin Heating or structure Building or electrica cooling device or addition fixtures system parts BY AGE BOE ab N 60, 000 2, 500, 000 180, 000 90, 000 3,000 130, 000 10, 000 5, 000 19, 000 770, 000 56, 000 28, 000 13,000 570, 000 40, 000 20, 7,000 * 285, 000 20, 000 10, 000 9, 000 370, 000 + 26, 000 13, 000 6, 000 275, 000 20, 000 10, 000 3,000 100, 000 8, 000 , 000 BY SEX ” OI sr me a 60, 000 2,500, 000 180, 000 : 90, 000 Male. 38,000 1, 600, 000 "*. 115,000 © 58,000 PAIR sd eerie 22,000 900, 000 65, 000 32,000 BY COLOR/RACE oa eT is 60, 000 2,500, 000 180, 000 90, 000 Spanish American 2,000 90, 000 "6,000 3,000 Other white___ 45, 000 1, 880, 000 134, 000 68, 000 anal 10, 000 400, 000 29, 000 14, 000 i 2, 000 100; 000 8, 000 4, 000 1,000 30, 000 3,000 1,000 Persons Injured in Thousands 1742 INJURIES ASSOCIATED WITH HOME BUILDING FIXTURES OR STRUCTURES 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 PERCENT “OF INJURIES 100 20 80, 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 1743 INJURIES ASSOCIATED WITH HOME BUILDING FIXTURES OR STRUCTURES FEMALE MALE hie RY 5 ee SEX PERCENT OF INJURIES 100 20 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 1744 "INJURIES | ASSOCIATED WITH HOME BUILDING FIXTURES OR STRUCTURES Under 1 Yr. 1-4 5-14 15-24 AGE 25-44 45-64 T 65 and Over 1745 INJURIES ASSOCIATED WITH HOME BUILDING FIXTURES OR STRUCTURES 100 90 80 70 Other White 60 50 40 30 PERCENT OF INJURIES 20 ® American Indian All Other Spanish American § COLOR - RACE Senator Percy. Our next witness is Mrs. Betty Friedan, well known author and lecturer, founder of the National Organization for Wo- men, which I understand is under attack by a more militant women’s liberation movement, and author of the book “The Feminine Mystique.” We are delighted to have you with us. Proceed as you see fit. 42-778—71—pt. 6——3 1746 STATEMENT OF MRS. BETTY FRIEDAN, AUTHOR AND LECTURER, NEW YORK, N.Y. Mrs. Friepan. I am delighted to be here, Senator, and to speak for the truly silent majority in this country who have no voice at all in the conditions in which they are housed, whether we are talking about city slum, inner city ghetto, or the sexual ghetto of the suburbs. Women who are defined as housewife, whether they are bright housewives on the census blank and work only inside the home with- out pay and without protection, or whether they also work outside the home. But every woman in America is expected to be a housewife —these wives of houses have no say whatsoever in the houses that they live in in the definition of the options by which they have to live, or in any of the basic decisions that are going to affect so much of their lives. Just as I and others in the new movement of women on the unfinished business of equality have said for the last year or so that it is obscene in matters regarding the role of women in the reproductive process, laws for instance regarding birth control, and abortion, to be decided by men, and old men at that. So it is equally immoral for the houses that define so much of women’s existence to be all decisions to be made without women being consulted or having any say or participation in the whole question of minimal standards or funding or design architecture planning, urban or suburban. More than that, I submit that an obsolete concept of women, a very dangerous and injurious concept of women that I call the femi- nine mystique, is structured into the stones and wood and concrete block and steel girders of every suburb of private housing and public housing, of high-rise expensive new buildings, and decrepit high rise, humanly inadequate public housing in this country; that the assumption beneath our architecture and of the funding of housing, public and private, in this country, the assumption of the rubrics are based on the concept of woman that is something less than a full person whose time is valueless, who is somehow still defined in terms of her sexual relation to man and service of the physical needs of husband, of children, of home, even though in fact the pace of tech- nology of the society and the world, the evaluating human world that man has created, has so far gone beyond this that all the big decisions and most of the really necessary work that use human abilities and are creating the human future now go on outside these homes which become in a sense a prison or a concentration camp, comfortable or uncomfortable, for the suburban housewife and city woman alike. I would like to substantiate this in some ways. You have, as you know by census statistics in recent years, the great movement of Americans both to the cities and to the suburbs. These are the greatest movements of our population. The choicest for hous- ing, you know, are either the high-rise isolated city apartment with the built-in unanimity, alienation, and loneliness for the women whose presence is required for instance in the apartment if there are little children. If a woman is suffering from loneliness and lack of a sense of participation in society, inevitably the children and the husband suffer too. Amenities of the city and the amenities of the housing which are decided by minimal physical standards, the concept of a 1747 place good for people to live in and for women and children as well as men to live in, this concept is not confronted by those who are making the decisions regarding the housing in the inner cities, whether we are talking about = very profitable luxury housing or the public housing or urban renewal. Alternatively, you have the flight of the middle class into the suburbs in the sense that the suburban dream house is what every woman really dreams of and longs for, and the only way woman is taken seriously in America is by all the manufacturers of appliances and other appurtenances of that suburban dream house who keep trying to sell her the accouterments thereof, whether wall-to-wall carpeting or a new washing machine every year, where somehow by throwing the right powder into it will make her relive her wedding night. All television is based on the concept of a woman as this sort of a moronic little happy housewife whose greatest thrill is to get the kitchen sink or shirts pure white. This woman whose time is worth nothing, whose ability indicates she has never gone beyond the fifth grade, this woman is so somehow been soothed, analyzed, and kept with the illusion of being busy, but operating machines that could be operated perhaps by inmates of institutions for the feebleminded or robots or well trained monkeys unless you spend millions of dollars in market research to kid the woman by saying that by breaking an egg in the biscuit mix she is doing something creative, and if they wear eye makeup while she is operating the washing machine or running the vacuum cleaner she is somehow fulfilling a humane, womanly destiny. The basic assumption is that her time is worth nothing, that she herself is pretty moronic and she is useful and perhaps merely in service of the needs of others and in doing chores in isolation that nobody in the country would do for money if they had the education or the opportunity otherwise, and yet every woman in the country is expected to do for love and without any benefit of social security, old age retirement, or survivors benefit, if the marriage is broken up by divorce if not death. Now housing of the suburb and the planning of the suburb assumes that woman will be isolated from the activity of industry, of the profession of politics and that she can be occupied and should be occupied day and night chauffering children, taking clothes to the cleaners, picking up husband at the station, and so on. Housing in the city is based on the idea that if there are young children that the woman also must be at their complete service taking them to the park and back for them to get any fresh air whatsoever, and again spending most of her time in the isolation of the four walls where except for the few years where the little children are at home —whether again you are talking about city or apartment or suburban house, unless the woman works outside the home, she is there with those boring machines, with the television set and with no human activity going on. In the schoolbooks reflecting this she is shown waving goodbye, kissing goodbye, husband and children leave for the outer society, school or work and the woman is supposed to be like a sort of gas station or service station and wait for them to come home. 1748 Studies such as the Midtown Incentive Manhattan study done in New York in the 1960’s or the many studies of mental and physical health in Bergen County, N.J. in the late fifties and 1960’s indicate that there is enormous effect on the physical health of the woman by living in the kind of sexual ghetto, in the kind of isolation involved either in the suburb where the obsolete Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval of Mama and Papa, Junior and Janie kind of marriage is at least lived out while people are still there in the suburbs and in the city where though the housing does not reflect the living, is still based on some anemic city version of that Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval of the suburban greenhouse. In fact, most people live in the units quite other than that provi- sional family unit, whether they are women alone, divorced, widowed, separated, or unmarried women responsible for their children without a man in the home, women and men coming into the city for jobs, unmarried and living together in apartments that were geared for that sort of family, or we are talking about the very unsatisfactory public housing which is still based on a Mama and Papa, Junior and Janie kind of family where the support, and here I talk specifically of the black community where the support in the real roots that would give vitality and sustenance are in a kind of extended family where not because anyone wanted it that way, but because where black men were so castrated by white society and by the perpetuation of institutions that resulted from slavery and following that the strength of women was the basis of the family survival and ties of multi- generation grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins—these roots that can be confined in Mama, Papa, Junior, and Janie kind of apartment that is built and the vertical high-rise slum, the very roots that give the family stability and that are not based on that middle-class white analogy are not recognized and violence breeds, as you know. A different kind of violence is bred in the suburb, a different kind but somehow similar in the end resulting in the same effect, alienation of women and the loneliness and frustration in conflict and hostilities that we found in the family. ~ As a result the Bergen County, N.J., studies showed for instance in housewives is isolated in the sexual, what I call the concentration camps no matter how luxurious, the wall-to-wall carpeting or appliances. Go to any suburb between the hours of say 8 and 6 and the only people over 3-feet tall are the clerks in the supermarket and mail man, the elementary school teacher. Knock on any door, as I did when I was doing research, and talk to the woman behind that door and see what they are doing. They are listening to the television set or perhaps begin drinking early in the day or start taking tran- quilizers just simply to endure the monotony and the boredom and the great loneliness. According to the ads in the Medical Journal, the sale of tranquilizer pills is based on the awareness of the housewife’s isolation and her frustration. Then think of the violence that is bred thereby. I submit to you that as anthropologists know of other societies what is happening today in America indicates that where you have the isolation of the sexes, the polarization of the sexes, the separation and the barring of women from participation in the activities of society, is considered important as happens today not only from the 1749 overt ‘discrimination against women that our movement is fighting in its fight against sex discrimination and in employment and in education, but in the fact that all of our structures and institutions, including the very physical design of houses in cities, is really de- signed in terms of man, conceived by man in terms of man’s world where important things take place and then a kind of woman’s world, the home, where the children and the women are kept out of sight, you know, in the sexual ghetto and where the only appearance is in enhancing the profit of business now, not the quality of life that is lived there. So that finally these structures, the suburban house or its equivalent in the city apartment, become in a sense physical traps keeping the woman in a sexual ghetto and enhancing the polarization between woman and man. Anthropologists such as Jeffry Gore and others know that where the sex roles are thus polarized, where the women are barred from whatever activities society defines as human, there you have sex automatically defined as dirty, as it must be if women are not human, as it must be finally if hostility, the war between the sexes is engen- dered as it is by these definitions today and by the embodiment of these sex roles, masculinistic and feministic. There also sex is either repressed or an obsession, dehumanized obsession. Playboy is an example of a point of puritanical repression, reversion of sex in an earlier society and violence breeds. I submit that the loneliness, the conflicts, the burdens imposed on men and women today by an equality between the sexes as embodied finally in concrete blocks and steel and stone in the design of our cities and of our houses and a lack of alternative life studies based on something between the sexes, that this somehow is very much linked up with either eruption of violence in our cities and our suburbs of sexless violence and the violence that our Nation is perpetrating on the world. If we are talking about national priorities, as I believe you men- tioned earlier, and if we are going to reflect how we are going to use the great technological skills of this Nation in a way conducive to the human life and enrichment of our own people, and our own responsibility to the world from which we cannot be isolated, then somehow our approach to housing and to cities and to the planning of cities and suburbs must not be as it is today in terms simply of mini- mal physical standards and minimal or maximal return on profit investment—the protection of the banker who gives the loans, you know. The guarantee to the builder of a certain return, a profit, you know. The insurance, the mortgage to which a man and a woman might be saddled for the rest of their lives. You know that he is not a man progressing. And here, incidentally, there is an awful lot of diserimi- nation of women who are automatically assumed discriminated against in housing in mortgages, and even in obtaining rents. But that the standards must be in terms of a new set of standards for human life and dignity and masculine personal freedom, personal self-fulfillment in realization of human potential for women and men, of basic human needs of men and women and children for intimacy and privacy, for dignity and for participation in society that are not met today and in fact are blocked today by the very design and possi- 1750 bilities or lack of possibilities in housing to choose from in suburb or city. Senator Peroy. Mrs. Friedan | Mrs. Friepax. I will be finished in a minute, Senator. And somehow we must break out. As a sort of guarantee of that women are 53 percent of the adult population of this country and have to spend so much time in houses represented on these boards of minimal human standards of life and decency that should be operated in the funding of housing programs and the passing on of design of houses but that innovation, not so much studies that are abstract sociologically conducted in terms of a group but in terms of an actual recognition of the needs of people. For instance, you have a whole generation of children brought up in the most affluent suburbs as well as those brought up in city slums fleeing to communes on ramshackle farms and turning their backs on the 20th century and technology and our whole system because they sense that neither the suburb, you know, nor the possibility of life in the city will meet their needs for intimacy that were not met by the nuclear family of Mama the housewife and Papa the breadwinner and Junior and Janie. But why should there not be a kind of housing, a kind of community planning, if you will, that doesn’t require the young to flee to these communes in New Mexico ramshackle farm houses and to turn their back on the kind of farmer that no self- respecting farmer would do today because it does not meet the reali- ties of the 20th century. Let there be in our cities a kind of experimenting with the building projects in housing which for instance understand that people need people in relationships less impersonal than the autonomous big city, that people need participation, that their needs for intimacy should not be wholly geared to the bedroom and in fact even the sexes have a need for intimacy the way they are today but that the needs for intimacy and for community should be met by institutions, child-care centers, community facilities and housing, not that locking the door on the isolated family that reached its own caricature in the fully equipped bomb shelter where you would shoot down any native that came in but beginning to experiment beyond these concepts based upon a kind of family that most people no longer have today. Senator Perey. Mrs. Friedan, IT am perfectly aware that vou feel very deeply about the subject and that you are quite knowledgeable. I would like to be quite specific and T will just pull out of the air three types of individuals with whom we might have problems, and see whether you can give us a specific approach or answer for each of these individuals. IT will take the unwed mother on ADC, the “swap” marriages in the suburbs and those suburban youth who are addicted to drugs. Can we find some answers for them ? Let’s take the unwed mother first. T have seen them and Senator McGovern has seen them as we have gone around in hearings. In Tast St. Louis, a woman that has seven or eight children, tied down in a fairly ramshackle apartment with them, to a degree illiterate, no skills. She can produce children and that is about it, and she does it with considerable frequency and just feels unwanted and unneeded by society. 1751 What can be done by society to help that woman, and isn’t it worth our investment? We now have the proposed family assistance program which would mean a great investment. But isn’t it going to be worth it to us to build the day-care centers, to educate that woman so she appreciates the value of education in her children and to take her out of that home environment for 8 hours a day, give her a sense of belonging so she can earn a living and learn a skill and feel wanted and needed. And won’t she be a better mother at night when She believes that her children are cared for in the day-care center ¢ Mrs. Frizpan. You create Topsy and the whole burden on society she represents by the various assumptions that I am talking about. If the only avenue of status or even a sense of self-respect for a woman in the society is having children, if for instance that is the only way she can get subsistence from the welfare system is by having children, and if in addition the very educational system and the way she is counseled is geared against her getting a sense of herself as a useful participant in society, it will be a valuable contri- bution she can make herself. Furthermore, you make it almost impossible for her to earn a living or otherwise participate in society and any other way. Small wonder that she will continue simply having children because it is the only way out. I saw in Sweden where there is no stigma against the unwed mother, where any woman is considered to have dignity in her own right and not to be defined primarily in the number of children or even in sexual relation to man. All adult women are called the equiva- lent of Mrs. such as adult men in this country are called Mr. In Sweden they are far ahead of us not only in their definition of sex roles and in the question of women but in creating of new social institutions such as you suggest and in even a new look at housing. I went into something called the service houses in Sweden where they are aggregates of apartment buildings, quite pleasant, not enormous or luxurious, but good middle-class, upper middle-class kind of housing, not geared primarily to the kitchen or expecting that every woman is going to define herself to what she does in the kitchen, though there is a kitchen in every apartment. But the whole place in a sense that would mean who happen to be the people who give birth to children, and abortion of course is available in Sweden. Birth control, there are no restrictions on this but many women married or unmarried may choose to have children but also the con- cept that women will participate in society. Therefore, in these apartment complexes are beautiful. beautiful day-care centers right there on the grounds in front of the building with gardens outside them where children can be left for as many hours or at any hour of the day and night by not only the mothers but the fathers and the mothers are considered equally responsible for the upbringing of the children in Sweden. Of course, the laws recognize this and men are prohibited from doing too much over- time work in that it will interfere with their duty to the children. There are after school programs for the children who come home from school if both parents are at work or at study, well cared for. 1752 There are furthermore dining rooms which the only equivalent here would not be the kind of expense account restaurants that we have but more maybe like some college dining rooms, or it is really hard to find the equivalent here but where there would be central kitchen facilities where the families under their relative apartment contract would be required to take certain numbers of meals there per month for it to be economically feasible. If they wanted to they could call from the office or downstairs and say, “I won’t be eating in the dining room tonight but I will pick up my five meals in heated baskets and take it up to my apart- ment. In fact, they found that the families ate more meals than they were required to at mealtime and in the evening because it was such a good atmosphere for everybody. For the children there were worthy uncles and aunts, even though they were not blood relatives, that the nuclear age does not provide in the American society today. For the divorced women, unmarried women and single women there were the sustaining relationships that today we are expected to find in only that two-by-two family that is so often, you know—you surely are aware also, I think man is a fellow victim of much of what we are talking about here. I indicate the studies of how bad the health of men who are widowed or divorced or separated or living alone is. Really their health meals are not met by housing, so it is not just women we are talking about here. If the day care centers are provided, if there are communal facili- ties for certain things—I mean if Sweden can do it and if this is so much better for women and men and children and if this encourages and permits women to take a good hard look at society and to con- tribute to it, not to stray from it, why can’t we begin to use these concepts in planning housing here? Middle-class housing or housing should not be segregated by class. Day care centers should not be ‘started in ghettos for children of welfare mothers. Day-care centers should be Tike parks and libraries and public schools, provided in the residential complex or the apart- ment development or the suburb or near the place of work, and open to children of all parents and good for the children. Our technology should also have an inducement not to keep women busy by selling vacuum cleaners without obsolescence built in that have to be traded every year or so because they cannot be repaired and just keep the woman busy, but by using our technology really to free women from the menial labors that occupy much of their time and to help them participate in rewarding areas of society and also in politics. Senator Percy. Mrs. Friedan, we only covered a third of that question and we have one more witness left. I am going to suggest that possibly if you could give us an answer in about a minute and then if you want to amplify it you can extend your comments. Your comments are exceedingly interesting but we are not going to cover enough of the ground. I will yield happily to our chairman who has returned, and then T will come back for just one or two short questions. Thank you. 1753 The Cuamrman. Mrs. Friedan, you have already touched in part upon the question that I wanted to ask, and if it is too repetitious you can boil it down. If we move into the day-care center, that concept that you have suggested, are you concerned about the fact that in liberating the mother you may put the child into what amounts to a kind of an unliberated experience where he in a sense is in a prison with other children, that in a sense he is abandoned almost like the mother is under the present concept that you are talking about? Is that a concern, or 1s that a possibility ? Mrs. Friepan. Senator, the image that you portray of a day-care center sounds to me like some Sing-Sing. The Caamrman. It is not my image. Mrs. Friepan. No, it is the image that mothers will abandon the baby in his diapers in the impersonal cold walls of a prison cell where this child will be brought up without love or human contact or warmth, and the whole point would be just to get rid of the chil- dren, but this is not it at all. There is an enormous research now on employed mothers in America that show that women who have some choice and who work from choice or participate in other choices and do not define themselves solely as full-time housewife mothers and don’t feel married to their back, they make very responsible choices about their children even without the lack of day care centers and that these children are on the whole much better off than either the children of full time housewife mothers who so often feel martyrs by their children and begin to feel up a rage against them in the batter syndrome, or women who have no choice and are forced to do the most menial work as most women are in America for reasons of desertion or economic deprivation, and who have really no way of looking after their children. A child care center means a good growth center, a good nursery school, if you will, where children for some hours of the day may in the company of other children and with trained teachers get growth experiences that are much better for the child’s development that can no longer be afforded, the stimulation that is no longer afforded to growth for the child on the apron strings of the isolated mother in the suburb and house in the small family of America today or in the isolated city apartment. Whether you are talking about project Headstart or whether you are talking about studies done in the university communities or in the upper middle- class suburbs, it is quite clear today that in those years before five when so much of a child’s mental growth is stimulation as well as physical growth takes place, that under stimulation is a great deter- rent in suburb or city, and that day care centers, child care centers are good for the child but they do not substitute for the love of both parents, and it takes two to make a child. We believe that mother and father should share equally in the responsibilities and joys of bringing up children, that children in the American suburb and slum today suffer more from paternal depriva- tion in a community suburb where father is never there except terribly tired at 7:30 at night and drinking his martini. But if the mother and father love the child there is no question who is the parent, you know; the child has these parents and these parents are free to love the child and have the responsibility of the child in a better more freer, 1754 more joyous way than if they are chained to the service of the child. _ The youth centers, the child-care centers add a new dimension that 1s enriching for the child in that it provides in effect more love, more respect, more reliance for the child to move and adapt to the chang- ing environment. The enormous pace of change today to the mobility they was spoken of earlier that requires tremendous ego strength to endure. These situations, these new institutions, these new social structures that we need here, and I repeat again what is needed also—this is your concern in this committee in these hearings—is a look at the needs of housing and of the design of cities and even of urban renewal, if you will. We understand that in the mobility of a mass society and in the fast pace of change that is giving so many of us future shock, the needs for roots, the needs for long-term continuity, intimacy, are not really met by that suburb and home with the trees where the roots can’t really be planted and they are certainly not met by that city apartment or public housing today but they can only be met by the creation of new social institutions and the creation of Ch and designs and planning and housing that will reflect those. I thank you for asking me to these hearings and being so under- standing that perhaps in some of the thinking of women and of youth, questioning the rubrics on a new set of standards, new set of values may become a germ of ideas of what the future might look like and I hope that you will have many more successes. The CrarMAN. Thank you very much, Mrs. Friedan. Mrs. Friepan. Thank you. Senator Percy. Our last witness is Dr. Joel Fort, a physician with considerable experience dealing with youth in trouble. Dr. Fort has created and directed centers for treating delinquents, drug abusers, alcoholics, and criminal offenders and specializes in public health and youth problems. He has been a special advisor to the President’s Commission on. Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime. Lecturer in the school of criminology and school of social welfare at the University of Cali- fornia, Berkeley. Dr. Fort operates the center for solving special social and health problems at 199 Tenth Street in San Francisco, an innovative clinic for persons with drug problems, sex, suicide, weight, or other prob- lems. Its theme is “At Fort Help there are no patients—there are only young people who share responsibility for who and what they are.” Very happy to have you, Doctor. STATEMENT OF DR. JOEL FORT, FOUNDER, CENTER FOR SOLVING SPECIAL SOCIAL AND HEALTH PROBLEMS, SAN FRANCISCO; AND AUTHOR, THE PLEASURE SEEKERS: THE DRUG CRISIS, YOUTH, AND SOCIETY Dr. Fort. Thank you, Senator. It has been a long morning and you have other commitments. T will try to be concise and brief. 1755 I do want to say in a lengthy experience of testifying before com- mittees it is a rare privilege today to be talking to two of the Senators that I most respect and are dealing with some of the root problems of our society. I want to deal first with some parameters that I think are important for understanding this whole issue and then get into some specifics. Since you had asked me to relate to environments and youth health, I think we are talking here about another very much oppressed and large minority group in American society. I do not intend to be the spokesman, by any means, for young people, IT do not believe there is a spokesman for any large group in our society, that they are all very heterogeneous groups. Unfortunately, the rhetoric of some people in our society makes it seem as though all young people are simul- taneously rioting, smoking pot, and copulating in the streets, and that communicates a very false concept in the beginning as to what the problem is and what should be done about it. I think we start off our problem by labeling young people as juve- niles, adolescents, teenagers, all of which conjures up a stereotype of a pimply-faced, gangling adolescent, somebody that is better seen and not heard, and then we go on to do a variety of other things to them. The main point is we don’t know what the age range is when we are talking about youth. We all agree that we are talking at the beginning about 15 or 16, but as we ourselves grow older the upper boundary of youthfulness steadily increases and what is the youth problem as it relates to environment might therefore be indefinite. Now five or six basic parameters that T think we have to look at are first, the social-cultural which would include religion, economic status, and moral culture. Second, family. Third, the physical environment, including neighborhood as well as specific residence which should be subdivided at least into poor, middle class, and well to do. Next would be the biological or hereditary aspects. Finally, a psychological parameter which deals with the subjeec- tive or internal environment. That is, what is perceived by that indi- vidual as opposed to what we might see. Now our standards and definitions of physical and mental health are often very vague. Often when people are inclined to ask what health is they speak of the absence of disease, which is a very circular definition. I prefer to think of it as not only the absence and preven- tion of disease, but self-maximization making sure that everyone has the opportunity to develop their potential and I prefer to think of social health instead of mental health. I do not know and I do not think anybody else knows what good mental health is in a society where we have so many irrational, bizarre acts going on by people that are ordinarily thought of as perfectly normal, acceptable, mature, responsible human beings. So it is a very subjective concept and many of the things we talk about as psvchopathology are social pathology. ; Now as to the specific points I want to raise about the relationship of the environment to youth health, IT think it might start out with the availability of housing to that family even before the child is 1756 born into the family; that is, patterns of segregation, racial or economic, mainly enforced by what we might call the merchants of segregation, the real estate industry that has led to the ghettos of many of our big cities. All of this has drastic implications in terms of future school envir- onments. The de facto school segregation problems that we are trying to do something about now stem from this housing segregation and it also determines what vocational and health opportunities are made available or made known to the young person as he or she grows up. I think redevelopment is a good example, and I want to be respon- sive to some of the things you raised earlier in the morning; redevel- opment in general has been a fraud in America, the housing that has been created has forced many low income people out of potentially good environments and has created monstrosities within the city which give no access to recreational facilities, crowds people together without positive outlets, and creates many of the problems that we call deviant. At the very least, there is an enormous difference between having a private home with some grass around it in some concept of human dignity and individuality as opposed to living (or working) in an enormous high rise structure. The internal residential environment is the next thing I want to discuss, beginning with the number and nature of family members. I think this has great significance on the young person as he or she grows up, whether there are two, four, or 20 people in that family and how close they are to each other in age as well as emotional relationships. The fragmentation of the family is one of the big components today of what I am talking about beginning with the exclusion of elderly people in the same way that lepers are sent off to colonies. Of course, nobody grows old in America, they simply move to “golden” villages or other special communities. The next step was the father and mother becoming overly involved in a diversity of work and play activities that do not allow for family communication or family interaction. This is far more significant than the more obvious thing, the high divorce rate we practice in America, and ‘the other things that have very much affected the environment of youth. The next point is the rooms and beds: Whether five or six people have to sleep not only in one room but in one bed, whether you have some degree of privacy, whether you can be yourself and have some chance to think, whether you are constantly surrounded by a kitchen or a living room. All of these things make great differences in your environment. Poverty or affluence obviously affects this. Then recreation is important, the presence or absence of facilities and opportunities. For most young people growing up in America today, particularly before you become 14 or 15 and even afterward, television is the primary source of recreation. Even the poorest home has one or two television sets. The average American child, it has been found, spends 22,000 hours in front of a television set between age zero when they pop out of the birth canal and are placed in front of one in the maternity room, and age 18. That 22,000 hours exceeds 1757 all the hours spent in school. What it does among other things is to create what I call the age of chemistry, the concept that people can not relate to each other without using alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs; that you cannot deal with pains, problems or troubles without dropping a pill, taking a drink or smoking a cigarette; that you are somehow crazy if you do not fall asleep within the first 10 minutes of hitting the bed, and should rush out to the all-night drugstore to get some magical chemical that will put you to sleep. This 1s the main factor in creating the drug ridden society; it is not overpermissiveness or any of the other cliches of this era, but the institutionalization of the desirability of relating to other people and of dealing with tension or problems solely through chemicals. Additionally sexual attitudes are communicated to the young person very markedly by television. The main sex education or sex miseducation is coming through that medium. The emphasis is on sexuality in every product that is sold. The average woman today knows that she cannot possibly be successful or get through the day without applying a vaginal deoderant, using the right kind of sexy toothpaste, the right Maidenform or other kind of brassier, and so on and so forth. Everything is sold through sex. Particularly when schools are not permitted to give sex education, some people claiming that that is a Communist plot (and thereby increasing the interest in communism of young people), you have more and more conveyed through television and toilet walls. Another important thing that comes through TV is passivity. It builds in a passive dependent kind of relationship which is one of the core problems of our society, increasing apathy and spectatorism where we prefer to watch others play football or baseball or engage in activities on the TV sereen rather than become involved ourselves in intramural sports, neighborhood rebuilding, or whatever. TV also creates false expectations of what they should have if they are a normal American, and these are particularly dangerous in a society where most people have the means to get many of those things but a significant minority cannot possibly get them because the chan- nels of economic and social growth are blocked for them. Then of course television and the other media communicates that marihuana is more important than racism, education, war, poverty, and disease; it communicates many absurd and irrational priorities like this that cause most young people to react with frustration and despair. Moving beyond these “recreational” things to the internal environ- ment we have the presence or absence of love and compassion within the home as a key influence; whether you learn how to love through being loved by others and by having a receptive kind of atmosphere for open communication. The moral and cultural climate is very important. In some ways we communicate that crime pays, for example. The old adage that crime does not pay no longer holds. If you communicate moral corruption and a payoff from criminal activity it is very hard to communicate ideals of honesty and altru- ism. The peer group influence is very important, and more broadly the character of the neighborhood that goes beyond the internal or private environment—gangs, slums, ghettos. Other factors are 1758 involved but the main thing without belaboring the point is that we live in a society where being accepted or being popular comes to be more important than anything else. Therefore when the peer group defines for you acceptance or popularity in terms of a particular kind of drug use or other behavior that we might call deviant, most young people as well as older Americans accept that peer definition. The presence or absence of parks and playgrounds in the neighbor- hood have a lot to do with this whole concept of the environment and youth. One thing that we could immediately do without any money or really without even much imagination is to open up schools after hours and during the summers. We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on very elaborate recreational facilities in the public schools, and at 2:00 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon they are all locked up and for 3 or 4 months each summer (and holidays or week- ends) they are totally locked up. They should be made immediately available to young people to participate in a wide variety of recrea- tional activities because for many young Americans there is “no hope but dope” as they see their lives, and unless they have positive alter- natives, including a mind expanding education experience they are going to continue to preoccupy themselves with a variety of drugs. Observable life styles in the neighborhood is extremely important in influencing the course of a young person’s life. That is, do you see that everybody around you just shines shoes, cleans streets, and collects garbage, or do you see that some people are teachers, doctors, nurses, businessmen, and so forth ? What communicates in terms of aspirations and opportunities as you grow up in your neighborhood? What inspires you? Transportation is important : whether you have access to museums, musical events, a diversity of things in your city. Many people do not. Pollution of course is a factor in the neighborhood environment of many millions of the young. The way schools operate is of vital importance. Many young people see going to school as a form of slavery today. The amount and rapidity of social and technological change; the movement from rural to urban areas; and the general mobility of families particu- larly in businesses where fathers are abruptly transferred are signif- icant influences. The final point IT want to comment on is the availability of health facilities as it relates to ill health or unhealthiness of young people. We are terribly lacking in these facilities. The ones that are available tend to be governmental and highly bureaucratic, or in the case of private medicine, generally inaccessible to a large minority of Ameri- cans, or controlled in a way that is not trusted by most young people who do not see the American Medical Association as particularly dedicated to altruism or the well-being of the American people. Also preventive treatment is sadly lacking and that is far more important than direct services. Prenatal care is absent in the neighbor- hoods where many people live. You have to travel long distances for immunizations or other important rights. Public facilities generally do not make themselves known; in fact, as typical bureaucracies they seek to do as little as possible except to grow and increase the status of the organization and its administrators. 1759 There is a displacement of goals. They have to reach out and increase their mobility and accessibility. Most of all, innovative pro- grams are needed: Private, human, decentralized programs that do not process people or treat them as some kind of inferior because they have some kind of problem for which they are seeking help. One piece of Federal legislation that would be very useful is direct Federal grants to private programs. One of the things that ruins much of the poverty program, and ruins so many innovative things, is the politicalization of the whole thing where it has to go through local health or mental health departments which are mediocre at best and full of time-servers, doctors or other bureaucrats who were trained 30 years ago, have no appreciation of what is happening in our society today, and are not capable of coping with it. If you provide grants through conventional local or State govern- ment departments, you prevent the kind of change and the kind of service that is really needed. Private grants with no strings attached would be extremely helpful. The last comment I want to make is that we need to communicate hope, challenge, and possibilities to young people. We need to facili- tate their growth and development. Most young people growing up today have an environment that is markedly deficient, particularly when you talk about quality as opposed to quantity. Our highest priority must go not to the quality of the air or water but the quality of the emotional and human experience that is involved in growing up in America. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Caamryman. Thank you very much, Doctor. You have given us a great deal of valuable material in a short period of time. 1 just wanted to ask a couple of quick questions. Most of today’s witnesses have stressed the importance or citizen participation in programs that affect their lives. Dr. Fort. Yes. The Cmarman. Is that principal equally important in terms of the programs in which young people are interested? Should there be direct Federal funding of youth programs in which the young people share in those decisions in devising the structures of the pro- gram and their operations? Dr. Forr. I think so very strongly. I think it is entirely in keeping with American ideals and traditions that we introduce participatory democracy in our schools and in many other programs which deter- mine the future life possibilities of young people. To introduce that does not mean that they would have sole control, it would be a part- nership. The one thing that would most change going to school from a monotonous, boring, sometimes enslaving experience as perceived by young people would be the introduction of constructive youth power, the opportunity to criticize, to talk about what their needs are inclugd- ing what kinds of courses and what manner of teaching these courses, would be desirable. In health programs or anything else you might mention I think their involvement is extremely important. The ideal health program does not concentrate solely on M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s as the magic source of cure but rather blends the skills of the profes- sional and nonprofessional, including those of young people who often have a greater commitment, and most of all a greater sense | 1760 of urgency than the older, very academic, professional type. So it is not one or the other, but a blending of them, and we would benefit greatly by official and unofficial involvement of the young in all programs. The Cuamrman. I was impressed with what you said about the excessive dependence of children, young people, on television from birth on through until they leave home. Is it possible that the design of our cities actually fosters that kind of dependence? That is, the high rise apartments where it is difficult for the child to get outside or maybe he lives in a neighborhood where it is not safe to be outside or one that is so filthy that it is not pleasant to be there. Don’t all those factors contribute to an excessive dependence on television ? Dr. Forr. Yes, I think definitely, Senator, just as I think the absence of alternative sources of pleasure or meaning contributes heavily to preoccupation with alcohol or marihuana or other drugs, and contributes significantly to other things that we may think of as evil or deviant behavior. The most important thing we have to do is increase the avail- ability of alternatives, not just talk about them. We must make them available to young people throughout the country so that they can make more choices, have a greater diversity of stimulation and resources. TV would have much less significance if they could par- ticipate in their own block or neighborhood activities, if they could dance or play in their own neighborhood, and if they could do a great diversity of other things which we have foreclosed or pro- hibited. ~ We over-react very often to superficial things like long hair or whether somebody wears a necktie or sandals and in overreacting, condemning, isolating, and stigmatizing we force people into ever more narrow choices of what they can do to be an individual. The Crarman. Thank you very much. I certainly want to commend your suggestion about opening up the facilities of schools after class hours. That seems to me to be such an obviously commonsense proposal. Dr. Fort. That is probably why it has never been done. The CrammaN. I told Senator Percy when you suggested that that makes so much commonsense we probably won’t do it, it is not complicated enough. Senator Percy. Senator Percy. First, I would like to join the chairman in com- mending you as well as the other witnesses for providing us with the insight into the problems that we are dealing with today. Dr. Fort. Thank you. Senator Percy. Second, to comment on the use of school facilities, not only should we open them during the weekends and summers, but we ought to take a look at our churches. Our churches are even more unused. Yet when we are looking for day care centers the churches are located exactly where we went them, right in the neigh- borhood, right in the communities where it is very easy for parents to get their children there. So unused physical facilities and the utilization of them to a greater extent in the future would help. 1761 Dr. Fort. That would also help to mitigate what I call the edifice complex in American religion, spending $1 billion a year for new churches and synagogues while people are going hungry, dying unnecessarily, and living in poverty in the same neighborhoods where these monuments to the congregation and the minister, not to God, are being built. The Cmamman. Could you comment on the differences in the environmental needs of young men and young women? Are we neglecting the young women in our suburban cities ? Dr. Fort. Yes. I think a young woman is a member of at least two oppressed minorities and a young black woman of course, or a young chicano represents three oppressed minorities. Definitely in addition to what needs to be done about the environment of young people in general we should give specific concern to the subcategories of the young. We do instill from a very early age a kind of second-class citizenship for the young girl and do not concern ourselves as much with her welfare as we do with her brother’s welfare, or the masculine gender in general. It actually might not require anything more than giving equal priorities to both sexes. I don’t believe it requires a totally separate kind of evolution of resources but simply an awareness that both men and women should be equal from an early age and that the opportunities we create should reach both boys and girls rather than one or the other. Senator Percy. Can you tell us a little something about the environ- ment that the youth that you deal with are creating to satisfy themselves? Dr. Fort. Well, I have had the opportunity to deal with a diversity of youth groups ranging from high school and college students to black, chicano, and Chinese-American young people in San Francisco and also at an early stage, the group that later came to be called the “hippie.” The answer to your question is that they are doing many different things because, as I said at the outset, young people like older people are very heterogeneous and do not just represent one kind of life style. Most unfortunately the majority of young people, far from being militant reformers, are relatively passive and apathe- tic. That group does not get the attention from the mass media that the more active one does, but I think they emulate the older genera- tion in their acceptance or resignation to the status quo. However, most young people share the concerns of the militant young, as repeated surveys have shown, although they are not involv- ing themselves in doing much about it. Beyond that there are a significant minority of young people who are trying to do something positive. Mostly they organize themselves into community groups. This leadership came from black youth in various neighborhoods of our big cities and from the white middle- class youth in the peace movement. More recently chicano young people are organizing in various ways. It can be from a neighbor- hood clubhouse to a more political kind of organization. Other young people, particularly those we identify as hippies, are seeking a new identification, a kind of separatism; a feeling that it is relatively, if not completely hopeless to change things as they are. They are trying to form new life styles. That has been mainly 42-778—T71—pt. 6——4 1762 unsuccessful, not because that is what would have happened naturally, but because very aggressive wars were waged on those young people, particularly in San Francisco where the health and police depart- ments actually conducted a war on the hippie that resulted in the Haight-Asbury now being full of violence, criminality, heroin, and amphetamines instead of pot-smoking flower children, the original “evil” against which the war was waged. Therefore, most of the creative elements of that hippie community, the East Village in New York, and other places in America have moved elsewhere—sometimes to rural communes of various kinds. Some maintain that kind of identification but are generally, at least in terms of their appearance, assimilated into the broader life style of the society. So there are many different routes that young people are taking and unless we soon increase the options more and more will become and remain alienated, dropping out from meaningful participation in the society. Senator Percy. Lastly, I would like to ask you, because you are one of the drug experts in the country, the toughest question put to Congress today and put to teachers and other adults over 30. Why should I not smoke pot? Kveryone is on grass. They ask me, “Have you tried it?” And I say, “No.” They say, “Well, how can you advise me not to when you don’t know what it does to you ?” Dr. Fort. Surely. Senator Percy. How do you answer that question? What reasons do vou give young people? Because you have dealt with this problem professionally for a long time. Dr. Fort. Yes. Well, first of all it would be absolutely impossible to convert them or move them in another direction by talking in that narrow context. If you just spoke of marihuana, which you correctly expressed is the way it is commonly done, you would not be able to communicate any meaningful reasons. You would have to begin by being honest about the whole context of drugs and expressing concern not only about marihuana and the possible risk that somebody might have from it, but also expressing concern about the already demonstrated massive risks involved with alcohol, tobacco, amphetamines, barbiturates, and SO On. If you begin by talking honestly in the proper context of drugs, and, second, if you communicate how drugs really work, meaning that the main ingredient in the mind-altering drug experience, whether with alcohol or pot, is the personality and character of the user which interacts with the drug and with the social setting in which the drug is taken. If you get that across, which you can honestly do, you can then communicate that just as some dangers about some drugs have been greatly distorted and lied about, so have some benefits. And since this mainly rests with you, the human being that takes that mind-altering substance, there is unfortunately no drug that will make an ignora- mus into a creative genius, no drug that will solve your school or family problems and no drug that will rebuild your neighborhood while you are on a trip with that substance, whether booze, grass, speed, dope, or acid. 1763 The final point in trying to condense 15 years experience in treat- ment, education, and prevention is that you have to strive for, and represent, a source of reform that does not polarize the issue between criminalization and legalization; that you communicate a sophisti- cated and rational approach for dealing with all drug problems which would include doing many things that go beyond simply passing laws against it, or having the wife of the attorney general go and smell what marihuana is like, or a variety of other absurb, unsuc- cessful, and destructive things that are being done in our society. You have to communicate that law as a small part of an answer to a problem that has many social and psychological causes beginning with the institutionalization of drug use that I spoke about earlier through television advertising and through the role of parents and other adults. With the law you need to make major reforms that separate the private user or possessor of the drug— (best dealt with through education and prevention) from a major trafficker in a drug that you consider unpalatable or someone involved in a directly antisocial act, which are the proper priorities for criminal law. Along with that if you are dealing with drugs in context you would want to ban all advertising of alcohol and tobacco; stop subsidizing the tobacco farmers to grow more tobacco to kill more people, send- ing some abroad presumably to reduce overpopulation among friends abroad; and you would want to develop an extensive educational program which, contrary to present congressional thinking, cannot be based on educating about the evils of drugs. It has to be based on a more honest perspective which sees drug use as a symptom of social pathology. The main emphasis of treatment and rehabilitation must be long- term outpatient help for drug abusers as opposed to drug users for whom education and prevention is the answer. That is an important distinction that we often fail to make. Most of all you have to communicate to young people your concern about the roots of discontent and alienation, and be providing positive alternatives that would seem to move them and older Americans beyond drugs. The point I always stress is that there is an inverse relationship between dependency on drugs and social change; that the more an older businessman, let us say, or a young student turn to alcohol or pot or some other drug when they are bored, frustrated, tense, angry or whatever, the less likely they are to attack and correct the roots of that discontent. Now you cannot say that about every individual. I am talking about the society as a whole and I believe this relationship exists. Particularly if you live what you say you believe in, as opposed to telling young people what they should do, you yourself must not smoke tobacco while telling them about the risks of smoking or be drunk while declaiming against marihuana. If you are consistent in your own life style you can effectively communicate these concepts and help young people move away from drugs. But the more we continue to voice the fanatical approach that equates marihuana use with the hydrogen bomb, the more likelv 1764 it is that the young will polarize the other way, asserting that the drug is harmless and desirable. No drug, including marihuana, is necessary for mankind or is invariably beneficial to all who use it. That will never be communicated if you talk in the narrow context where you say marihuana is the problem and ignore the rest of it. The Cuamman. I take it, then, if you are going to give that advice to young people you don’t want to do it just having taken a tran- quilizer. Dr. Fort. That is right. The Cuamrman. And with a cocktail in one hand and the cigarette in the other. Dr. Fort. Yes. That is the evidence of hypocrisy which they are objecting to and which we should be objecting to. The Cuamman. Thank you. We appreciate your being here. We appreciate our other witnesses’ testimony and we will look forward to opening these hearings again. We will recess until 10 o’clock tomorrow morning. (Whereupon, at 12:54 p.m. the committee was recessed, to recon- vene at 10 a.m., Thursday, October 1, 1970.) HEALTH AND HOUSING THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1970 U.S. SENATE, Serect COMMITTEE ON Nurrrrion Axp Human NEEDS, Washington, D.C. The select committee met at 10:15 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 3302, New Senate Office Building, Hon. Charles H. Percy presiding. Present: Senators McGovern and Percy. Staff members present: Kenneth Schlossberg, staff director; Clarence V. McKee, minority professional staff member, and David Cohen, minority professional member. STATEMENT OF HON. CHARLES H. PERCY, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS Senator Percy. The Chairman, I understand, is on his way, but suppose I read an opening statement to get us underway, and we will just presume he will be along in a few moments. The Select Committee on Health and Housing will continue this morning. Our focus today will be on planning and action for better health through better housing. I have asked Dr. Mayer Spivack of the Laboratory of Community Psychiatry at Harvard to discuss with us his recent studies on human behavior and the environment. His work provides new tools for planning man’s residential environment. We need new tools to make that environment work to expand man’s horizons and opportunities instead of limiting his growth. In order to gain first-hand information about what it means to operate housing programs in a major U.S. city, we have asked Mr. Bailus Walker of Cleveland to be our second witness this morning. We look forward to hearing recommendations for solving these problems and also some of the achievements Cleveland has made. Dr. Spencer Parratt of the Maxwell School has been asked to give his testimony as the next witness. Dr. Robert Knittel of the Department of Community Develop- ment, Southern Illinois University, will advise us on how we can improve better community organization. As our last witness, we have invited Mr. Eric Mood of Yale University to formulate a comprehensive program of action to improve housing and health, a program that will deal with both the physical things and the social activities that constitute our residential environment. ; For our first witness, we are pleased to call Dr. Mayer Spivack. (1765) 1766 STATEMENT OF DR. MAYER SPIVACK, DIRECTOR, LABORATORY OF COMMUNITY PSYCHIATRY, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL Senator Percy. Dr. Spivack, we have copies of your testimony. If you would like, you may read the entire content of it. If you would prefer to summarize it, we will, of course, put the entire testimony in the record. I will leave it entirely to you. We have 2 hours now and five witnesses. We can proportion our time accordingly. Dr. Seivack. I think, with your permission, I would prefer to present the testimony in full, and T hope to move as quickly as possible without obscuring it. I thank you for allowing me to come and participate in this process, and I hope that my discussion can be of some relevance to the topic. Any discussion on the environment, even the narrowed field of the residential environment, is fairly complex, and in order to deal with the subject, I felt that I should attack it as broadly as possible with- Cut geting diffuse. I shall provide rather specific problem definitions, i can. This means I am going to have to cover a good deal of ground, and I think in order to make my testimony easier to follow, I would like to give you an index ahead of time of what I will talk about. First, I expect to deal with the education of architects, how to educate architects in evaluation procedures so that the buildings they produce will work, instead of just look good. Then, what happens when a few people have a great deal of design responsibility, and many other people must live in the results of their work? Following that, how to avoid multiplying our mistakes all over the country when we have public building projects on what I would call genotype buildings, such as schools, or mental hospitals, or offices. The term genotypic buildings describes a kind of building that tends to be completed without imagination and only minor variations wherever you find it. I will also talk about crises in local communities. This is a crisis that IT hope to be able to define in terms of setting deprivation and blandness, the “no place to go” kind of syndrome that we feel in our suburbs and gray areas. What are the necessary components of a whole human community ? This is a difficult subject, and it isn’t often addressed, and TI think it should be considered at this level. I would like to talk about walking communities, face-to-face communities, and what happens when you don’t have them, why people feel isolated, and what we can do about making a remedy. I would like to talk about recreation, especially for children, and discuss the possibility that playgrounds have proved inadequate, no matter what you call them, and that what we need is the different concept of play and play space allocation, and I suggest play routes instead, which is a continuous web of play space throughout com- munities. I would like to discuss mass-produced or industrialized housing, or shelter of any kind. I shall describe ways to prevent a dangerous 1767 condition which results in this kind of building when we tend to reproduce our mistakes again and again, because we don’t analyze ahead of time what we are going to do, and don’t evaluate it afterwards. Our existence as city building and city dwelling men is marked by a tragic paradox. While we aspire to build a world which is the realization of our dreams, we struggle to contend with an urban environment which is both our reality and our nightmare. The architects and planners of our physical environment have seen their task, as if schooled in noblesse oblige, as that of designing environments within which other men should be content to live. Their buildings and cities have evolved most often from idiosyn- cratic, intuitive fantasies in which spaces and forms are moulded by aesthetic principles. Architects are encouraged to conceive indi- vidual buildings in terms of their visual qualities—almost as sculptures. Buildings which meet sculptural criteria are good—and necessary —if the environment is not to become even uglier than it is. But they are not good enough. Architects must learn to attend to human behavior, and to design to human needs. It is now clear that while our behavior can obviously modify the environment, the environment can also modify our behavior, at all temporal and physical scales, for individuals and for societies. This is a kind of feedback loop which in good circumstances is responsible for the evolution of the behavior of the species and its physical environment, as well. The loop can be interrupted at several points. If individuals are under stress or in a condition of poverty or illness, it will be much harder for them to change their environment because they will lack access to suitable political power and authority, to actual tools, money and time. Under just such conditions, lives are most vulnerable to being distorted by outside forces—the inconvenient arrangement of the city or house, the impoverished sensory and social sterility of public housing or hospital, the imposition of limited housing opportunities by political or economic forces. J If we are to live in full health in whole, life-supporting environ- ments, we must radically reorient our goals. We must concern our- selves with the quality of life and the quality of life’s settings. Our architecture and city planning schools are as backward as is our building industry. Architectural education is directed towards producing famous idiosyncratic architects, and formal, monumental buildings. We must instead train architects to ask questions, solve problems, and study the results of their work. Architects are responsible for guiding the evolution of our society by their control over the evolution and design of buildings which are the containers and shapers of our culture. There is no tradition in the practice of architecture in which architects are expected to evaluate publicly their own or other architects’ work. Only careful scrutiny of working buildings in use can hope to produce an evolution in quality of building types. There has never been a necessary steady progression of design quality or appro- 1768 priateness in our public projects—housing, hospitals, schools, or our private offices, factories, et cetera. We must institute and sponsor, from the Federal level, innovations in architectural education which focus upon research and evaluation. We must require that all federally and State-sponsored construction be preceded by detailed analysis of program requirements for each building. Therein, design solutions should be related as hypothesis to the eventual behavior of the population to be housed. Every building must also have a follow-up evaluation study per- formed by the architect or other capable analyst, which is directed toward identifying and solving malfunctions in the design as well as noting where the structure successfully supports the use and behavior of its inhabitants. Our environments are for the most part designed and built by a few for use by the many. Rarely do people ever have the opportunity to significantly influence, or even modify the form of their shelter. This | practice guarantees that in the absence of evaluation procedures, whatever omissions or mistakes are made by the designer will be repeated, and will become the burden of all to live in. This magnification of error has for many years continued un- questioned and unchecked. Our contemporary urban crises, social and physical, are in part the legacy of this practice. Federally sponsored building or rebuilding projects should require a maximum of user participation and control in the design and later administration of all building efforts. Such projects should also be required to distribute architectural contracts over as large a group of individual design firms as possible. These designers must be bound by contract to work with local potential or present users. The more designers, the less monotony and the less multiplication of errors. Having more designers per large project also facilitates working in small groups with neighborhood groups or user com- mittees. Youth, especially, should be involved in design and planning decisionmaking. Where other age groups have been consulted in past experience, youth has been traditionally ignored. Young people are experimenting with the shape of their own new environment, with life styles and social structure. Give them the tools to imple- ‘ment their experiments and discoveries, and they will put down weaponry. The problems of our central cities receive national attention (but not much support). We must remember that a city is not an isolated patch of civilization, but is enmeshed in a larger web of population centers. Many of the greatest contemporary social problems are rooted in the inadequacy, barrenness and environmentally deprived and narrow local communities and neighborhoods, both inside and outside of major cities. We must reevaluate the viability of our neighborhoods. While we focus on the problems of the decaying central city, we must not lose sight of the function of neighborhoods and houses, wherever they exist in the metropolitan area. The details of day-to-day experience in houses and neighborhoods determine the quality of life for all people in all the extensions of 1769 urban life, from downtown to suburb. While the obvious and violent crises of our cities are being attended—or ignored—we must be aware of a growing mute crisis in our towns and neighborhoods. Wherever people in America live today, they are plagued by the symptoms of social dysfunction. Social problems arise in neighbor- hoods and remain there to poison the overall quality of life. We worry about drug addiction, rising divorce rates and incidence of mental illness, increases in school dropouts, rising juvenile delin- quency, rising crime rates, and we experience anomie, the lack of community life which marked the early years of American life. Some, if not many, of these ills can be traced to the inadequacy of the physical—and, therefore, the social —environments of our local communities. Our communities, towns and neighborhoods have grown cold, barren and inhospitable. In simple language, “there is no place to go” in most suburbs and in many cities. This constitutes what I call setting deprivation. Setting deprivation can be said to exist when some or all of the range of social settings, and their physical facilities, necessary to the support of healthy community and individual life, are missing. Communities in a state of setting deprivation are bound to produce people who are in some sense rootless. Where the environment de- prives us of opportunities to meet together under a variety of condi- tions, either indoors or out, in both planned and spontaneous gather- ings, the cohesive bonds of society dissolve. ; Living overlong in an environment composed of too few or im- properly organized environmental possibilities drains the meaning, the social context, and the stimulation from our lives. Established traditions, the desirable behavior patterns of communication, mutual government, peace-keeping and child care, recreation, courtship and other elements disintegrate or disappear without the support of appropriate environmental settings. Mutation of social behavior, not always in negative evolution, will result as old behavior patterns disappear. Populations adapt to even the most barren of surroundings. They may also maladapt. As the physical environment becomes less functional, it fails to support, as it did in the past, the context for the social behavior that the society is built upon, and when the physical context dis- appears, in the words of Dr. Roger Barker, the “behavior settings” disappear. Then, lacking the support of the context, some of the social be- havior begins to disintegrate, and I think we can analyze many of the problems we see around us now in that context. If we neglect to provide the complete range of settings in our communities, to compensate for those we no longer can contain within our homes, and to maintain adequate access to those which never were within the home, we may expect new behavior patterns to arise suddenly. These will, lacking stable environments and the support of a strong physical and social setting, change rapidly according to fad or to demogoguery. : In other words, I suggest that lacking the proper supports and proper kinds of settings in the physical environment, behavior fluctuates, becomes labile, and will attach itself to the strongest kind 1770 of stimulus that is available, and that might not be a physical environment. It could be demogoguery. Every neighborhood in this country either urgently needs or could significantly benefit from, an increased variety and density of set- tings. Viable neighborhoods cannot be achieved without a greater range of behavior settings than we presently find in most communi- ties, and all must be within easy, rapid transportation—or, pref- erably, walking distance—of every resident. This is a crisis-oriented country. We have heard this said many times. I think that when I said our neighborhoods are in mute crisis, it pointed to a danger, because this is a crisis that isn’t going to scream al us, maybe not for a long time, and I think that now is the time to address it, when there is still a possibility of making major changes, major solutions, major provisions, so that we don’t end up with a crisis later. We are in the middle of a good deal of rebuilding, and I think that if we successfully emerge from the international crisis that we are in now, we will be able to put more funds into our cities, and, we should do it with that kind of mute crisis in mind, and attempt to enrich the environment. What follows is an attempt to describe a whole community. If you go over your own neighborhood, or the neighborhoods where you used to live, you may find on a Sunday when you were looking for outside stimulus, there was nothing to do there, no place to go. Many community settings which are so commonplace as to be out of awareness when they are present, can be keenly missed in their absence in an environmentally deprived area. At the minimum, every neighborhood requires extra beds for transients and visitors, in the form of rentable rooms or hotels; there must be eating and drinking places where people can meet and talk; we must provide facilities for youth to carry on courtship rituals under conditions appropriate to the rapidly changing youth culture. There must be jobs available, now almost non-existence, close to most suburbs. The zoning of our suburbs tends to be so tight that. men, women and children are artificially separated for a good quan- tity of their lifetimes by zoning. They are zoned out of each other’s areas of responsibility and out of each other’s life experiences. People need to meet in formal, ritualized competition, as in sports; everyone, especially children, needs several kinds of nearby recrea- tion resources. Shopping must be close by and within the time/ distance range of the aged and of those women who are heads of households, who must take children along. Healthy community and political life can only continue so long as men can meet privately or publicly, and discuss anything, in any size group, without the possibility of permission denied; we need meeting places. Obviously, all need shelter, bathing and toilet facili- ties. Not all have them. We all need to get above it all and contemplate the activity around us from the vantage of a safe meditative lookout—we need a window on the world. Our individual territories connected by daily routes and paths tie it all together to form the network of each human community. A whole community contains no less—and perhaps much more. 1771 Access to the whole community is especially important as we grow old, and participation in community life shifts to less active involvement. The aged need the opportunity to meet with their peers, to com- municate their world view and experience to the young, and to enjoy the youngest. They have to be able to shop, vote, and walk safely in the streets. While housing for the aged requires special attention to detail, it must not be isolated in ghettos for the aged or “projects.” Such housing should be mixed into the community in order to remove stigma and provide a variety of housing and life styles for people to choose from as they age. Our routes and paths, our roads, are choked and lethal and must be relieved by massive public investment in individualized public transportation systems which are not tied to fixed routes. Roads and automobiles are killing us at a rate which competes with war. If it seems that occasionally I strayed from the residential environ- ment to talk about things like roads, I would like to mention that when the environment 1s considered, no part of it can be left un- analyzed, because it is an interconnected interdependent system. In any human community, even the smallest town, the quality of its residential life, even the indoor experience, is dependent upon the design of roads, the placement of the roads, the density of traffic, and whether or not a road which was originally a human walking footpath can still be used for that purpose. Walking has many ramifications in our social life, which I hope to get into, and if the path has become a super highway, then the small-scale face-to-face human activities are eclipsed by the speed, the noise and the danger of the automobile. As major functional places in our man-made habitat—the public or community-centered ones—were removed to more and more distant shopping and other specialized “centers,” the notion of what distance is a reasonable walking distance proceeded to shrink. Now, with no place to go, we simply don’t walk if we can drive. Thus, we often don’t know all the streets in our immediate neighborhood, nor do we recognize more than a small number of our neighbors by sight. We certainly don’t find long walks through the monotonously repetitive housing developments rewarding enough for any but desperate measures on a dreary, housebound weekend. An experience—walking, and its legitimate setting—the path— have fallen away. Probably our physical health has suffered by its absence. Certainly, because our neighbors are unrecognized, our neighborhoods have become anonymous and, perhaps partly because of this, dangerous. Circularly, we retreat to our cars and ignore the environment, convert our neighborhoods to freeways, our meeting houses and parks to parking lots. We learn that we must drive with our windows closed and our doors locked. Women with children to care for are often terribly, dangerously isolated and lonely. They need places to walk to in cities and suburbs, eating places. meeting and working places. Contemporary zoning practices militate against an interesting walking community by excluding interesting destinations. When people don’t walk, they don’t meet, and remain isolated. 1772 PLAY SPACE It is the growing concern of playground designers and observers that conventional playgrounds, vestpocket parks and tot lots are only marginally effective as play resources. I think they don’t work at all. Play space must reflect the nature of the play experience. It must be fluid, changing, full of variety, challenge, mystery, oppor- tunity, fantasy and exploration. It must permeate the environment. New towns and urban renewal projects must require all future designs to incorporate a continuous web of play routes on publicly owned and maintained land to be ubiquitous in the plan. Playgrounds I have observed favor athletic boys, ignore girls, and do not provide for the much more frequent nonathletic play activities. YOUTH A rich, varied community environment will have activity foci which are especially attractive to, and preferably operated by young people. As long as suburban “bedroom communities” become more restrictive in their zoning, and police harassment of active young people in quiet suburban neighborhoods continues, kids will leave their homes and hometowns in search of action elsewhere. This deprives the local communities of the stimulus and growth of young energy and imagination. It also puts unreasonable pressure on the host communities in metropolitan areas, often leading to trouble for all. We should be building and supporting programs in every com- munity, using rented quarters, in which young people run and regu- late their own social, political, medical and recreational activities. This cannot be accomplished easily in many neighborhoods because land-use zoning has become too restrictive. Federally-aided projects should encourage relaxation of zoning regulations where social and recreational uses are involved. SCHOOLS Last, our public schools will be under the greatest pressure in the next few years to reorient their spaces and curricula in an effort to become more competent institutions. Some communities have already begun to replace obsolete school buildings with mass-produced industrialized buildings. Industrialized architecture is a welcome experimental alternative to both the high cost of construction and the shelter shortage. However, there is, again, the probable danger that we will be multiplying our mistakes. Such projects should always be preceded by the most careful predesign programing, analysis of activities, behavior patterns, traffic flow within the building, acoustic qualities, lighting, airflow and temperature requirements. Most important, we need to predict how well a good teacher will be able to relate to students, and how well the children can work. We must become more sophisticated about specifying the per- formance of the architecture in behavioral and psychological terms. Each building project where industrialized housing is tried should 1773 be preceded by a pilot building, and that pilot building must be evaluated and tested in actual use, where its mistakes and inappro- priate configurations may be inspected and corrected before similar structures are built elsewhere. We made a mistake on a large scale, in about 1830, when the Kirkbride mental hospitals were being built all over the country, and even now we are suffering from that error. Up until recently, there weren’t any normal analyses of how poorly the Kirkbride buildings were designed, and we were building them up to a few years ago. I think we are in danger of duplicating that process again with every kind of building program, that the Federal Government has influence over. The Federal Government should consider establishing a clearing- house for educational facilities, making design information publie. This agency should be responsible for the disbursement of any Federal funds for the construction of educational buildings in local . communities. Such construction should be required to adhere to a design protocol of preprograming, pilot testing, and postconstruction evaluation and report of findings. If we fail to institute such procedures, we run the danger of replacing outmoded schools all over the country with look-alike structures made from the same cookie-cutter molds, none of which work more effectively than the ones they replace. If we put legislative and budgetary emphasis anywhere in the hometown environment, we must reserve for the schools the highest priority. The Cuoamman. Thank you very much, Mr. Spivack. On the point you make on educational buildings, I have a number of building contractors and architects coming to see me, and I know they have other Senators, complaining about the lack of imagination and the use of some of the best information about how the buildings ought to be constructed, and expressing the same kind of dissatisfac- tion that you do here about the lack of use of the best designs and the most viable type of construction. Is that a general feeling on the part of better informed architects and building contractors? Dr. Seivack. Well, if I can answer your question, there seem to be three kinds of architects. There are lots of bad ones. There are some very good ones, and then there are some architects who seem to be intimately familiar with procedures for analyzing behavior, for designing appropriately for behavior, for making buildings that function well. It isn’t always true that architects who have a lot of imagination, who are well-known and have a good reputation, are in this latter category. There are so few architects in the latter category that I think it places us in jeopardy. There are really two groups pleading for better architecture, not to mention the consumers. There are the architects who want to see better monumental, more aesthetic con- structions, more lavish constructions, and then there are those archi- tects who feel that buildings of that sort, while not necessarily mal- 1774 functioning, often do, and that more attention ought to be spent on really analyzing what is needed there before the building is built. In fact, more attention should be spent on whether the building is really necessary at all. The Cumamrman. What I understand you are recommending in your closing paragraph here is that there ought to be somewhere in the Government a clearinghouse where these factors that you have been suggesting here, together with other considerations, could be eval- uated and various model designs suggested for the construction of buildings, at least those that involve Federal funds. Is that correct? Dr. Seivack. Partially. I don’t mean to indicate that a model design is an appropriate way to handle the problem, because I really feel that model designs tend to be copied. The implication is that they are there to be copied. Every community is going to have rather special needs, and special requirements. There will be different ethnic groups there, different customs, different educational and different other kinds of philosophies. What is needed instead is a storehouse of information about the way things work in buildings, what happens if you organize the layout of a building one way as opposed to another, how does the traffic flow work, what happens if you use one type of airflow system or another, perhaps the effects of facing the windows to the east or west, what happens to the perception of people when the walls are painted one color and not another? The Cuamman. That would involve, would it not, some of the system analysis that has been used in defense contracting and the space program, where you have to look at the total environment and not just the design of the building without reference to the surround- ing needs. Is that correct? Dr. Servack. Well, I think the systems approach may eventually be the appropriate one, but I am afraid we are going to wait some years before the information in the field is of sufficient density and precision to constitute a system. : I think that instead we are going to have to store information in terms of patterns, essentially. The CrammanN. Where, in either this country or elsewhere in the world, would you say that urban planning is best informed on the demands of behavior and space needs? Can you point to some areas that you are familiar with where you think the problem is being handled properly. : Dr. Seivack. That is a hard one. It really is a hard one. IT can’t think of an area. I tend to look at social indicators when I am asked a question like that, and I can’t think of an urban environment anywhere in the world where social indicators don’t tell me that there is something wrong. I think if one wanted to look for a model of a community that was successfully handled, one would have to look back in time, not, I think, look at the present. A I may be wrong. My experience isn’t that vast, and I suspect that 1 For an explanation of patterns read: A Pattern Language Which Generates Multi- service Centers, Christopher Alexander, Center for Environmental Struct 2 Rd., Berkeley, Calif. (1968), pages 15-16. Wetare. 2701 Shasta 1775 a successful model could be found by looking back to country towns, where the decisions were made not unilaterally, but by a great many people over a long period of time. The Crmamyan. People are moving out of the country towns. Dr. Servack. It no longer serves the function that we need to serve. In other words, economic forces and other forces tend to make environments like that obsolete, but for their time they were appro- priate. They were less hazardous, less noxious, than our environ- ments are now, because I think the decisionmaking was spread out over time, and it was spread out over people. The Cmamrman. We live in a highly mobile society, as you know. Who really ought to make the decisions about neighborhood func- tions? I mean, should every neighborhood serve the same function? If not, there are variations. Who ought to have the chief voice in restructuring those neighborhoods, the residents, the people who really live in the communities, not Government experts or design experts, but primarily the people who live in those communities? Dr. Seivack. The neighbors. The role of the Government expert, of the city planner, I think, is in for change. I think it is changing now. I think it is certainly changing among the students in the city planning schools. It 1s changing to the role of consultant, where I, personally, think it belongs. No one, no agency, no man, has enough information, or even can gain access to enough information, or can understand the complexity of the network of a human community, and I think to structure it right, your input has to be diversified enough to cover all the needs, styles and all interest groups in a community. Now, I know that is hard to get. We have to develop techniques and competance for consulting to neighborhoods. We have to find ways of getting around our professional training in which professionals talk mostly to other professionals. We have to get down to the issues of what is needed, what the people need, what do they want, and then be able to tell them how best to get what they need and want, how best to design the environment. The Cramman. If you were given the responsibility to rebuild or revitalize a rundown neighborhood near the Capitol here, or any place else, if you had the responsibility of making it a more pleasant and viable place for people to live, how would you go about it? Would you begin with the experts, or would you begin by talking to the people who live in the neighborhood? How would you erank up a program of rebuilding ? Dr. Seivack. I guess I would attempt to hire the people in the neighborhood to run the program. I probably would attempt to hire a range of people from the neighborhood, not only people who have a reputation for competence in that neighborhood, people who have been successful in business and in public programs, who have spent a life of competence, but I would also want to hire, and this may sound a little contradictory, I would want to hire people who don’t have a reputation for making it, because those people know where the problems are. Those people are always bumping their heads, and 1t may have nothing to do with incompetence. That is a poor word, anyway. 1776 What we need is people who have been suffering with the problems that we are trying to redress, to come and redress the problems themselves. I think there is competence in neighborhoods stored among people who have to battle every day with the same kind of details that make their lives miserable. There is a lot of competence that could be shared and brought out, shared across communities from one com- munity to another, and could be shared within the community, which would make the community more viable. The Cuamymax. Do you think it is feasible to develop neighbor- hood codes, like some of our building codes, setting minimum standards that would have to be met, or does that result too much in a community form of development? Dr. Servack. I think that is an interesting idea. It is not one that I previously had thought of, of breaking the zoning and coding down to the neighborhood level ; in other words, to make it that fine- grained. But it is an attractive idea. There is a possibility that you could develop quite specific, quite distinctly appropriate kinds of environ- ments, environments which were subculturally specific, that were socially specific with respect to kinds of economic possibilities that the residents have. Yes; I think that is interesting. The Cramrman. Thank you very much, Dr. Spivack. We appre- ciate your testimony. Our next witness is Mr. Bailus Walker who is the Deputy Com- missioner of Health, Environmental Health of the Department of Public Health and Welfare of Cleveland, Ohio. We are pleased to welcome you to the committee, Mr. Walker. STATEMENT OF BAILUS WALKER, JR., M.P.H.,, DEPUTY COMMIS- SIONER OF HEALTH FOR ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH, DEPART- MENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH AND WELFARE, CLEVELAND, OHIO Mr. Warker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I sincerely appre- ciate this opportunity to appear before this distinguished committee, and I bring to you greetings and sincere best wishes from Mayor Carl B. Stokes and the people of Cleveland. Mayor Stokes asked that I especially commend you for your con- tinuing interest in the fundamental health and ‘welfare needs of this Nation and for your keen awareness and sensitivity to the ever- growing problems of our cities. The Cramax. hope you will express our appreciation to the mayor and thank him for his good wishes. Mr. Wacker. These needs and problems, as you know, are some- what unique in that they cut across boundaries of race, politics and geography. If they differ from city to city or state to state, they differ not in fundamentals but only in scope and complexity. The human needs in the city of Cleveland are no different from Bios in other well-populated urban-industrial settings in the United tates. I cannot review here the total range of health and welfare prob- lems we face and I shall therefore touch briefly on a few items. 1777 In 1969, Cleveland’s rat problem was among the greatest in the Nation according to a U.S. Public Health Service survey. One out of every four families in the low-income areas lived in rat-infested houses and more than 35 rat bites were reported that year; all in- volved young children. In addition to rats, these dwellings showed substantial evidence of cockroach infestation, inadequate ventilation, poor wiring, defec- tive walls and ceilings and inadequate facilities for storage of garbage, trash and other household waste. Tt is unfortunate but a statement of fact, Mr. Chairman, that many dairy barns and milk houses owned by the 3,000 dairy farmers who produce milk for our city are more habitable for humans than some of the housing in which many of our urban families now live. There are 47,000 housing units in my city which are in such state of disrepair that a child living in them will be exposed to hazards of lead paint poisoning. Currently, about 25,000 children are living in these dwellings and approximately 19,000 have significant levels of lead in their blood. The 85 cases of childhood lead poisoning from lead-base paints which were diagnosed last year in our city indicate that this problem in Cleveland has a history similar to that in urban centers. It is a serious menace to children in rundown housing units where peeling paint and plaster contain lead. The victims are usually between the ages of one to five and about 40 percent of those who survive show a great amount of brain damage and cerebral palsy. Shigellosis, an infection of the large intestines, resulting in diarrhea, is a constant threat in the substandard housing neighbor- hoods, because the transmission of this disease is favored by crowding and poor sanitation. Some 120 cases were confirmed last year in our city, and the mortality was relatively high among infants and the aged. The prevalence of mental health problems in poverty-stricken areas of Cleveland can be attributed in part to the simple fact of over- crowding. When a three-room apartment has to serve as home for half a dozen people, when children have to sleep in the same bedroom and sometimes in the same bed as their parents, when hallways and stairs are almost constantly noisy, and when a person can escape his crowded home only by going into crowded streets, it is hard to believe that the mind and the emotions or the physical health go unscathed. The seriousness of these housing problems is brought into sharper focus when we realize that more than 7,000 families in Cleveland are on the waiting list for public housing. There are 80,000 families eligible for this class of housing and the waiting list continues to row. Vacant lots, vacant and vandalized structures, abandoned auto- mobiles and discarded appliances add a new dimension to health and safety hazards in inner city neighborhoods. Large cities have problems of keeping the streets clean, but in bad- housing areas the basic sanitary conditions are most critical. Prac- tically all can be characterized by junked and garbage-filled lots, broken bottles and scattered debris. Whether this is a fault of city 42-778 0—71—pt. 6—5 1778 government, of the landlord, of the tenants or of people from other neighborhoods, including the suburban communities who sometimes use these neighborhoods as their dump, is a futile argument. All are involved. No one group can really solve the problem without the cooperation of the others. Too often the people living in a block try to spruce it up but get discouraged because the city or the landlords do not do their part. City sanitation, and health and welfare personnel similarly become indifferent if their genuine effort produces little visible results. To the family living in a rat-infested, firetrap structure, bad housing is the embodiment of the failure of the economic and social system. A bad living environment leads not only to individual and family despair but undermines confidence in our ability to fashion ° more wholesome communities. It corrodes the image of self and of community. Nonetheless, after two generations of agitation and amid a rising gross national product and the greatest physical abundance in the history of the world, we still tolerate substandard dwellings not only in the city of Cleveland but across the Nation. After reviewing this brief laundry list of manmade environmental health problems, one may logically ask: Why ? And what is being done to remove these unhealthy conditions? Certainly the city of Cleveland is making a serious and dedicated effort to improve the conditions under which our people live and work in our community. - In the years 1968 and 1969, we built, under various U.S. Housing and Urban Development programs, 5,128 housing units, but when we started we had 50,000 substandard units and even though we built 5,000 new units we still have 47,000 substandard units. This means that some 2,000 units fell into the blighted category in 2 years. The Cleveland City Council has recently passed appropriate leg- islation which will give the Cleveland Department of Public Health and Welfare the legal tools to help cope with the problem of lead-base paint poisoning. Closely related are the efforts of the Cleveland Department of Public Health and Welfare in home injury prevention and control. This includes a citywide public education campaign. With the help of the Department of Health, Education, and Wel- fare, we have launched a campaign to reduce the rat population through the elimination of those conditions which tend to perpetuate these vectors of disease. This program, after 1 year of operation, Mr. Chairman, has made significant progress in eliminating rat food and harborage through education and motivation of citizens in the principles of environ- mental sanitation. In addition, it has provided an opportunity for maximum involve- ment, employment, training and career opportunity for residents in the impoverished neighborhoods of the city. : The use of health educator aides, which started last year, has, to date, been a successful effort in my city. These individuals who are residents of low-income areas, are employed and trained to carry the teaching of health protection, environmental sanitation practices and housing maintenance into each and every home. 1779 These aides also serve as a link between residents of deteriorated, disadvantaged neighborhoods and the official and voluntary agencies of the Cleveland community by making referrals and providing the agencies with current information on the urban dwellers’ needs. In an effort to more clearly define, document and measure the residential environmental quality in our city, we have employed The Neighborhood Environmental Evaluation and Decision System (NEEDS) which was developed by, and will be conducted with the help of the Bureau of Community Environmental Management in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This system, Mr. Chairman, fulfills a longstanding local need for a reliable technique for measuring environmental quality in the com- munity and for identifying relationships between environmental quality and the level of health and well-being of the residents. It is also valuable in determining priority ranking for corrective action and minimizes much of the “guesswork” which has plagued local communities in analyzing their problems. : In addition to these activities, I could cite our expanded food protection program, institutional hygiene and safety services, mental hygiene services, consumer education program and hazardous sub- stances control. All of these acts and programs are designed to improve the health and welfare of our city. Unfortunately, this greatly increased local commitment has come at a time when our limited local revenue sources have been severely taxed to meet the rapidly growing demands imposed by the many Fashonsihilities which we must fulfill in serving the citizens of Cleve- and. : We, therefore, are grateful for the support which has been pro- vided through the various Federal programs, as those have been of valuable assistance in our efforts to withstand the multiple waves of “crises” which seem to roll over us. But the realities of appropriations have been somewhat less than the commitment needed at the national level, and the resulting un- certainties of future funding, combined with pressures to solve these problems have caused an even more severe crisis in many local com- munities. The $16 million spread among 26 cities for rat control can hardly begin to approach a solution to this serious community health problem. So, there are still great needs which must be met before those elements of the man-made environment, which greatly impinge on human health, can be adequately controlled. To make more effective those programs aimed at providing for the very basic human needs more than a simple extension of higher fund- ing level is needed. T We need at the outset, a more holistic approach instead of the narrow categorical approaches to environmental health problems. We talk constantly about national policies and coordinated programs for cities but we are still bogged down in fragmented patchwork programs, a little rat control assistance from one agency, a little housing aid from another, and a little community facilities support from still another agency. The very nature of this approach at Federal level has encouraged fragmented programs in local communities with the unfortunate 1780. consequence of not being able to deal effectively with the people aspect of the problems. The Federal Government can reverse this trend by preventing further fragmentation and consolidating some of the existing pro- grams, especially those with common concerns and goals. For example, Federal housing code assistance could well be admin- istered by the Federal health agency which has current responsibility for rat control and has also developed a program for lead-base-paint poisoning prevention and control. It provides extensive technical guidance and assistance to local health programs. Present administration of code assistance by DHUD is limited to only localities meeting other DHUD requirements. In contrast, Fed- eral, State, and local environmental health protection through hous- ing codes extend to all people in all portions of each State regardless of whether the community requests aid or not. Emphasis should be given to demonstration projects which involve the private sector through development of business opportunities involving new products for environmental protection and new pre- ventive environmental health services. In these demonstrations, the strategy should emphasize the mutual responsibility of governmental agencies and private citizens to improve and maintain environmental quality in the residential environment. The progress of environmental health programs at State and local levels has been hampered by the fact that the funds available under the Public Health Service Act have been used to support existing programs of medical care. Allocation of 314(d) Public Law 749 moneys for the exclusive use of prevention and environmental quality control programs would be a significant improvement. New legislation authorizing specific but comprehensive environ- mental health program planning and implementation would be a still better means-to achieve improved local services. "Lack of coordination and inconsistency in the objectives of various Federal programs operating in'the same city or geographic area reduce the effectiveness of many housing and sanitation programs. Frequently, programs work against one another or are used by local areas in a sequence which nullifies their benefits. Even more fre- quently, programs which are potentially supportive of one another are not recognized as such. Conflicting program requirements, dissimilar project boundaries and the multitude of different Federal agencies working in any one area produce a bewildering bureaucratic maze to local officials. The absence of a national urbanization policy provides a typical example of how conflicting national program objectives can increase the housing and sanitation problem. In the South and in Appalachia, some Federal programs seek to keep people in rural areas; other programs in both the rural and urban areas encourage people to migrate to the cities. Continued rural to urban migration will only increase the already serious urban health and well-being problem. Consequently, the future magnitude of the urban housing and sanitation problems are largely dependent upon what Federal and State policies are in the rural areas. 1781 I would urge you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, to use your influence and your efforts to develop a national urban policy and fully support that policy; a national urban trust fund with no strings attached; a kind of Marshall plan for communities which will provide to the cities of this country the money and pro- grams to be used in ways which local government knows is necessary to respond to our local crisis. Without a heavy commitment to our American cities and their fundamental human needs, they will not be here as we know them for the next generation because they are dying a slow death. If a human being is dying a slow death and there 1s a known cure, all sources rush to see that that cure is applied. Are American cities and the millions who live in them not entitled to that same public and governmental concern? I hope so; particularly when the alternative 1s so absolute. . Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of this committee, for the opportunity to appear before you. The Cramrman. Thank you ever so much, Mr. Walker. Mr. Wacker. I would like, Mr. Chairman, to introduce into the record a copy of the “Issue Study on Housing, Urban-Rural Prob- lems and Sanitation. The Caamrman. That will be made part of the hearing record. (The booklet follows:) CPEaS-0PD Anaiyois Series ISSUE STUDY ON HOUSING, URBAN-RURAL PROBLEMS AND SANITATION AUGUST 1969 Department of Health, Bdueation, and Welfare Public Health Service Consumer Protection and Environmental Health Service Office of Program Development Division of Program Evaluation and Analysis (1783) 1784 STUDY GROUP Mr. Ronald Coene, Chairman Bureau of Community Environmental Management Environmental Control Administration Consumer Protection and Environmental Health Service Mr. William Wheatley Indian Health Service Health Services and Mental Health Administration Mrs. Olive W. Swinney Office of Housing and Community Improvement Social and Rehabilitation Service Mr. David Yentis Department of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Warren Smith Indian Health Service Health Services and Mental Health Administration Mr. Richard Gallagher Office of the Assistant Commissioner for Program Development Environmental Control Administration Mr. Andrew D. Mank Architecture Planner Senior Assistant Environmental Control Administration Consultant: Mr. Bailus Walker, Jr. Deputy Health Commissioner for Environmental Health Services Cleveland, Ohio Part II: A. 1785 PART II - TOTAL REPORT TOTAL REPORT Introduction This report concerns the role of housing and sanitation in the daily environment of people. It describes: (1) The impact of housing and sanitation upon the prevalence, prevention and control of major health and well-being problems in urban and rural communities. (2) The present role of THEW and.its relationships with other publicly and privately sponsored residential environmental improvement programs. The impact of these programs upén the problems of urban and rural. housing and sanitation are evaluated. (3) The most effective actions which DHEV could undertake in combating housing and sanitation problems. Alternative actions, when reasonable, are suggested together with pro- jected evaluations of the impact of these strategies upon the problems and their associated costs. Relative emphasis for the suggested strategies are proposed. The report overlaps with several other issue studies. Problems of air pollution, noise, injury control and product safety, human ecology, solid wastes, and State and local capabilities are primarily con=- sidered by other task forces. Only those aspects of these problem areas which are especially relevant to the hame and the residential environment are discussed in this report. Statement of Issue The effects of an unsatisfactory residential environment upon man's physiological health and psychological well-being, together with his inability to escape from these conditions because of economic and/or educational reasons demands immediate, extencive involvement by the DHEW. The home and its environs commonly involve more of man's time and that of his family than any other single place in an urban area (Chapin and Hightower, 1965). Each individual, during this extended time in the residential environment, is exposed to a varying number of environmental insults which affect his health and well~being. The most severe threats to health and well-being in the urban residential environment affect the lower socio-economic strata of our society. In 1970, it 1s estimated that a minimum of 10 percent of the housing stock will be substandard and almost 6 percent will be overcrowded Jogias Commission). In addition, at least 12 million households approximately Ll million people) are forced to pay in excess of one- fourth of their income for shelter, thus significantly reducing the amount of money available for food, medical care, and various construc- tive forms of release for emotional tensions. Too little recognition has been given to the social and psychological aspects of housing in relation to human health and welfare. Basic 1786 human needs must be met to insure the health and well-being of in- dividuals and families. These needs are fullfilled, in part, through tangible goods and services including sound dwellings and means of maintaining the home and its furnishings and equipment. Maslowe's classification of basic human needs gre: 1. physiological needs such as hunger, thirst, rest, activity; 2. personal security and safety and release from anxiety aroused by threats of various kinds; 3. love needs including acceptance and a feeling of belonging in one's relationships with parents, friends, and other social groups; 4, esteem needs including a sense of self-mastery and self-worth; 5. need for self-actualization through creative self-expression in personal and social achievements. In family life, goods and services connected with housing and its environs provide satisfaction of a basic need. A dwelling can furnish shelter and protection, thus contributing to physiological and safety needs. The value of household inventories and of the house itself, if it is owned, may contribute to family financial security and personal esteem. The house and its furnishings can serve to provide an important element of family social and spatial environment. Spatial patterns provide the setting for social interactions in which love, esteem and self-actualization needs may be met. Where the dwelling fails to provide protection from the elements and hazards, basic sani- tation and facilities, adequate space for living and privacy in sleep- ing, the social and psychological as well as the physical health of its occupants are endangered. While a dwelling furnishes the shelter and protection necessary to ful- fill human physiological, psychological and safety needs, the site of the house and its environs contribute to the self-esteem and self- actualizing needs of various family members. Also in the space furnished by the neighborhood community, of which the house is a part, human beings participate in interpersonal relationships and activities which function to fulfill social and psychological needs. The dimensions of the physical environment include characteristics of density, light, air, green space, and general condition of dwellings. Related environmental factors are the degree to which a location is provided with community facilities such as schools, libraries, playgrounds, stores, means of recreation, services and utilities, police and fire protection, garbage and trash disposal, sanitation and transportation. Distances which must be travelled to reach activities away from home may be a strong element in housing satisfaction or dissatisfaction and Lrhese needs are ranked in ascending order. Each must be satisfied before an individual can function at the next higher level. 1787 may also have a direct bearing on the occupant's health and well- being, particularly if he is isolated and immobilized by age or physical disabilities. Major Environmental Stresses Imposed on Man by the Urban-Rural Residential Environment Although this report describes the magnitude of the problems caused by separate environmental insults, two insults in combination can act to produce an effect greater than would be predicted from combining their separate effects algebraically. In addition to magnifying the problem, environmental insults in combination may produce irreversible effects which would not result if they occurred singly. It is the combined effects of a multitude of environmental insults concentrated in the urban residential environments which have created our current crisis in environmental quality. (It should be noted that this report does not describe the environmental problems of air, solid waste and noise pollution, as they are being discussed in other issue studies of the Planning Team Report. These insults must be considered in a total program of managing man's residential environment.) 1. Health and Inadequate Maintenance of Basic Sanitation A number of health problems are related to inadequate facilities and provisions for maintaining basic dwelling sanitation. Acute respiratory infections (colds, bronchitis, grippe) and certain infectious diseases of childhood (measles, chickenpox , and whooping cough) are causally related to multiple use of toilet and water facilities, inadequate heating and ventilation, and inadequate and crowded sleeping arrangements. Minor digestive diseases and enteritis (typhoid, dysentery, diarrhea) are related to poor facilities for the cold storage of food and to inadequate washing and toilet facilities. Studies by the PHS show that the incidence of certain parasitic diseases can be reduced fourfold simply by the installation of water closets inside the dwelling unit. In addition, interior water closets reduce accidents and respiratory infections from exposure to the cold of winter. In- fectious and noninfectious diseases of the skin are related to crowding and facilities for washing. Wilner found that families relocated from slums to less crowded and more adequate housing experienced a one-third lower accident rate (Wilner, 1962). There are an estimated 6.7 million (9.9 percent of the total) occupied substandard dwellings. Four million of these lack one or more essential indoor plumbing facilities (water supply, toilet facilities or bathing facility), and 2.7 million are in such a dilapidated condition that they cannot be rehabilitated without ma jor repairs (Kaiser Commission, 1968). Both the Kaiser and the Douglas Commission warn that these figures understate the problem. In addition there are another 4 million standard but overcrowded units (Douglas Commission) that must be considered, giving an 1788 estimated total of 11 million substandard dwellings or about 3 dwelling units out of every 20 in the nation. Kristof in his work estimates that 6.3 million of these sub- standard dwelling units are found in rural America. They are on farms or in rural non-farm areas. This figure does not consider the magnitude of the housing deficiencies of the migrant laborer. Thirty-six States and Puerto Rico utilize migrant labor to a significant depres, 34 have standards re- lating to housing and sanitation. The plight of the American Indian and the Alaska native are equally severe as it is estimated that 50,000 or 75% of all dwelling units are substandard. Forty-six percent of the total occupied units are without running water or an adequate means of liquid waste disposal. Income affects the ability of a family to obtain and maintain decent housing with basic sanitation. In 1960, 77 percent of the renters with incomes under $2,000 paid 35 percent or more of their)income for rent; 32 percent of the renters with incomes between $2,000 and $3,000 paid 35 percent or more of their income for rent (Douglas Commission). Careful budgetary studies have shown that this proportion should be no higher than 25 percent. When the proportion of monthly income paid for housing exceeds 25 percent, the family must reduce expendi- tures for other essentials such as food, clothing, transporta- tion, repairs, and maintenance, etc. Viewed from the landlord's perspective, even these high per- centages of renter's incomes provide very low rents which deter landlords from maintaining units. Without proper maintenance and reasonable occupancy levels, sound units soon become dilapidated, so that the improvement in housing resulting from the filtering-down process is only temporary. As a result, in 1960, most substandard units were occupied by low-income house- holds - 55 percent by those with annual incomes under $3,000 and 24 percent by those with annual incomes from $3,000 to $4,999 (Downs, 1969). The problem of income becomes even more critical for the elderly. Thirty percent of the persons 65 and over live in rural America, about 4 million live in small towns and rural non-farm .areas, and another 1.5 million on farms. The inability of aged in many cases to care for their own personal needs accentuates the problems of obtaining an adequate residential environment. 2pnother Task Force is considering the problems relating to migrant workers and American Indians. Sanitation aspects of those Task Force Reports are included as appendix A and B. 1789 In 1960, 77 percent of all persons over 65 who lived alone had incomes of less than $2,000 - making them one of the largest of all the subgroups of the poor (Kaiser Commission). The non- white elderly in central cities are projected to double in number by 1985 (Douglas Commission). TEMPO projects that nearly half of the 3.4 million white urban households needing housing assistance in 1978 will be headed by a person aged 65 or older (Kaiser Commission). Overcrowding Overcrowding in the dwelling unit contributes to the spread of infectious diseases and it affects the response of individuals, as well as society, to many of life's stresses (Dubos, 1965). Secondary attack rates of tuberculosis have been found to be over 200 percent higher for people on relief living in overcrowded dwellings than for all economic status groups living in less crowded structures - one person or less per room (Britten, 1940). Studies have shown that overcrowding is associated with the frequency of disabling illness lasting a week or longer (Britten, 1940), the number of respiratory infections in infants, infectious childhood diseases (Wilner, 1962), skin diseases, and the number of home accidents (Spence, 1954). Overcrowding interacts with home heating and ventilation to produce increases in morbidity and mortality in the young and the aged (Gilbertson, 1964, and Wilner, et al., 1962). Overcrowding also conditions personal and group behavior and mental health. Doubled-up families in multi-story buildings tend to develop higher levels of emotional illness and hostility (Mitchell, 1968). In the 167 metropolitan areas in which rioting occurred during 1967, 24 percent of all dwellings occupied by non-whites were overcrowded, against only 8.8 percent of the white occupied units (Kerner Commission, 1968). Obviously, over- crowding is not the single element that produces a "culture of poverty;" more likely, crowding heightens the effects of other deprivations, each reinforcing the other, tu shape the person- ality of the slum dwellers. Overcrowding affects privacy and often results in family members spending more time outside the home (Mitchell, 1968). When recreation is not available, families have been observed to show aggravation of any predisposition to neurotic behavior (Strotzka, 1961). When overcrowding forces children to find activity space outside the home, children's study habits suffer and parental supervision and control is reduced (Jackson, 1955; Lewis, 1961; Mitchell, 1968). Weakened supervision and exposure of children to the life of the street may in turn contribute to the develop- ment of many of the social problems of youth assumed to be characteristic of high density slum communities around the world "(Mitchell, 1968). 1790 In 1968, it was estimated that 6.1 million dwelling units (both standard and substandard) were overcrowded with more than one person per room (Kaiser Commission, 1968). Of the 6.1 million, 3.9 million dwelling units are standard but overcrowded (Downs, 1969 and Douglas Commission, 1969). In 1960, about 1 out af every 50 American families were doubled-up - that is, they shared their home with another unrelated family (Kaiser Commission). Poverty areas in central cities contain over half of the over- crowded units and five out of six of the overcrowded units are occupied by non-whites in central cities (Douglas Commission). The National production target of 26 million new and rehabilitated housing units in the next decade is calculated to permit elimin- ation of all substandard housing; it will not necessarily eliminate all crowding and doubling-up (Kaiser Commission). Vectors of Disease Rats proliferate in many areas where environmental sanitation is grossly inadequate - commonly in the poorer parts of our urban centers. In 1957, the rodent population was estimated at 90 million. In 1965, rats and mice caused an estimated $900 million in damaged food and property. In the same year, no fewer than 6,000 cases of rat transmitted diseases and 14,000 cases of rat bite were reported nationally (Scott, 1965). Sampling surveys in New York City revealed that reported rat bite cases are about one-third of the actual number each year. Rat-borne diseases include murine typhus fever, plague, salmonellosis, trichinosis, Weil's disease and rat bite fever. Contact with a rat is not essential to transmission of some of these diseases; victims have become infected while living or working in rat- infested buildings (Clinton, 1969). In addition to disease transmission, the presence of rats in the home and/or evidence of an encounter, such as an infant's rat-mutilated lip or ear, may have deep adverse psychological effects on an individual's personality. Helpless persons (infants, aged, paraplegics, and persons in- capacitated by alcohol and drugs) are attacked more often than able persons (Clinton, 1969). In cities, rat-inflicted injuries are most common under crowded conditions, in substandard housing, and in areas with poor environ- mental sanitation, or in neighborhoods where rat-infested property is being destroyed. However, rats do not respect socio-economic status and have been found alive in covered toilet bowls of upper- socio-economic homes, having entered the home via sewer lines (Clinton, 1969). Personal and Family Stresses Conditioned by the Residential Environment Injury, illness, incapacity and death are not the only dangers of problems in housing and its environs. The mere threat of such 1791 physical harm from human violence and non-human dangers inhibits a state of emotional well-being; many urban poverty groups are particularly sensitive about the security that housing should provide against the most blatant of threats (Rainwater, 1966). The National Advisory Council on Civil Disorders (1968) points out that 47 percent of the housing units occupied by non-whites were substandard and 24 percent were overcrowded in the 1967 civil disorder areas. One's home is a symbolic extension of one's self (Schorr, 1963 and Rainwater, 1966). Rats, overcrowding, the stench of inadequate plumbing and the inability to keep one's family from freezing in winter conveys to the slum dweller in devastatingly graphic terms their inability to control their own destiny and provide a stable family environment. The physical and social disorder of their world presents a constant temptation to give up or re- taliate the kind (Kerner Commission, 1968 and Rainwater, 1966). The continuing disparity between the slum dweller's housing expectations and their lack of fulfillment has been stressed as a common source of recent ghetto rioting. The long term con- sequences for health and well-being of adaptation to these and previously mentioned psychologic and physiologic problems associ- ated with the residential environment are unknown. Wilner (1962) in a longitudinal study of 5,000 persons found that rehoused slum families, in contrast to control families remaining in the slum, responded to greater space and improved dwelling with: (1) better personal relations and lessened friction between family members (particularly in the mother's reaction to and discipline of children); (2) markedly increased assistance to neighbors with household chores, children and in time of illness; (3) more pride and care in maintaining their immediate neighbor- hoods; and (4) an increased sense of improvement in their position in life, even without increases in incomes, Psvchiatrists believe that these factors indicate a more stable emotional state and better mental health. Rainwater (1966) found that rehoused slum families evidenced a ''dramatic drop in anxiety about non-human threats within the dwelling" and viewed the improved house as a haven from human threats, but not a complete solution to human threats. Accidents Many injuries which occur in the home and its environs are prevent- able by adequate housing code enforcement, proper education, and informed urban planning. Of all the local authorities, the hous- ing inspectors visit more homes than any other official and can have the greatest impact in eliminating conditions which could cause accidents. 1792 Accidents in the home environment affect an estimated twenty- five million persons each year. One-third of all nonfatal accidental injuries and more than one-fourth of all fatal injuries (24,000) occur in and around the home. Each year these accidents injure more than twice as many persons as work accidents and four times the number injured in motor vehicle accidents. Children and the aged have the highest home injury rates. In addition, these home accidents have a significant effect on the costs of hospitalization and medical care. Heating devices in the home cause 125,000 injuries yearly. Carbon Monoxide poisoning causes the yearly death of 1,500 people. Space heaters and pipeless or floor furnaces account for 60,000 of the 125,000 "hot object' burns reported yearly. In addition, most poor housing areas account for more than the average number of fires caused by improper and defective home heating and electrical systems. 1,800,000 injuries occur on stairs yearly. Glass doors result in 100,000 injuries a year. Children are the most frequent victims in these and many other home accidents. Other significant features of the home associated with accidents include lead- based paints, windows, tubs and showers, doors other than glass, hot water in bathrooms, cooking devices, electrical facilities, hot water heaters, and incinerators. The magnitude of the pedestrian and motor vehicle accident problem in residential areas is suggested by the fact that in Watts, the year before the riot, 37 people were killed and 2,752 people were injured. by motor vehicles (Sielski, 1969). Unavailable Inaccessible mie Services and Facilities (An indepth discussion of accidents appears in the Task Force Report on Injury Control.) Every major episode of violence in the 1967 riot cities was associ- ated with the inability of local communities to respond to un- resolved grievances and widespread dissatisfaction with community services and facilities among ghetto residents (Kerner Commission, 1968). A "standard" dwelling unit lacks the necessities to sustain urban life if it is in a neighborhood lacking minimum health and sanitation services, and a food store, drugstore and laundry accessible to the residents, especially the aged and disabled. Lack of or inadequate transportation services increases the impact of inadequate sanitation services by making the use of these basic facilities and services very difficult and greatly hinders employment (Kerner Commission, 1968). In the poverty areas of central cities, the housing density is 100 times as great as in the poverty areas of the suburbs and rural areas. In these central cities congestion is the great evil. It makes for acute shortages of open and recreational space, continual 1793 crowding in the use of transit and other public facilities and high land costs in providing facilities, and great difficulty in providing the frequency and type of sanitation services required thus becoming a major factor in creating urban stress. In contrast, the low density of poverty district structures in the suburban areas coupled with the low incomes of the residents, works strongly against community facilities and services of all kinds - schools, hospitals, stores, public transit, waste disposal, etc. (Douglas Commission, 1968). These problems are illustrated in the case of medical services. Residents of the racial ghetto suffer from higher mortality rates, higher incidence of major diseases, and lower availability and utilization of medical services. About 30 percent of all families with incomes less than $2,000 per year suffer from chronic health conditions that adversely affect their employment - as compared with less than 8 percent of the families with incomes of $7,000 or more. Non-white families in the lower income group spent less than half as much per person on medical services as white families with similar incomes. Fewer doctors, dentists, and medical facilities are conveniently available to Negroes - especially to poor families - than to most whites. The result is fewer visits to physicians and dentists (Kerner Commission, 1968). 7. Microclimate Insults A severe six-day heat wave in St. Louis in July, 1966 more than tripled the city's usual daily death rate. Of the some 500 excess deaths, 246 were attributed directly to heat stroke and heat was listed as a contributing factor in 40 additional deaths. Deaths from heart disease, strokes, and pulmonary disorder, which more than doubled during the heat wave, accounted for the remainder. The heat deaths were clustered within the city core area, where overcrowding, poor housing and poverty are concentrated (Henschel, et al., 1968). The aged and chronically ill are par- ticularly susceptible (McPherson and Offner, 1965). Microclimatic conditions in the home and the residential environs which cause discomfort and disturb the body's heat-regulating mechanism and equilibrium may lead to a number of pathological conditions such as colds, pharyngitis, and pneumonia through cooling or overheating the body (Goromosov, 1968). Ability to survive shock from any cause is cecreased with increases in heat stress sufficient to cause a rise in body temperature (Wakim, 1964). In addition, maintenance of the health of the newborn infants in homes is influenced by temperature control. 42-778 0—T71—pt. 6——6 1794 The microclimate of a dwelling is determined by the temperature of its walls and furnishings and by the temperature, moisture, movement, and exchange of the air within it. Man's adaptability to the microclimate of his home is relatively small. The so- called "zone of indifferent metabolism," defined as a temperature range over which human energy expenditure is minimal, extends from about 60°F to 77°F. Noise Noise, unwanted sound, is an every day occurrence for many urban dwellers disrupting relaxation and sleep, interfering with speech communication, and invading the privacy in their home. The over- all loudness of environmental noise is doubling every ten years. Sound stimulates the central nervous system (von Gierke, 1965). Many authors consider that the irritation caused by low-intensity noise is attributable to fatigue resulting from a large number of warning signals that evoke a reaction related to fear or uneasiness. In this state, a person may be more susceptible to accidental injury. Some authors contend that exposures to noise from mass transportation, arrays of household appliances and home power tools may cause some degree of hearing loss (Ward, 1968 and Bell, 1966). In some instances, characteristics of noise in the home may be such that its effects are not confined to the symptoms defined above. Such noises may play an important part in the develop- ment of cardiovascular, nervous, psychic, and other disorders (Goromosov, 1968 and Cohen, 1969). (An indepth discussion of community noise problems appears in the Task Force Report on Noise Comtrol.) D. Constraints to Compating These Problems Within Government and Society 1. A Federal Definition of Residential Environmental Quality is needed. Neither a decent nor a minimum living environment can be obtained until they are defined in terms of health, safety and general welfare. The 1949 Housing Act and subsequent acts set a national environmental goal - a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family. Minimum standards for the dwelling wnit are now only imperfectly developed, adopted and enforced and therefore do not fulfill their potential. Even if minimum quality dwelling is achieved, we will still be far short of the 1949 goal of a "decent home for every American." Past efforts have not been directed towards defining standards of a "decent home' but rather towards defining a "minimum home." There are virtwally no codes which establish standards for either a "minimum" of a "suitable" living environment. Housing quality cannot be achieved without also insuring the quality of the residential environs. National urban and rural progress towards meeting these goals camnot be determined until yardsticks are defined against which progress can be measured. 1795 The Relationship Between Man and His Residential Environment Funds have not been available to determine how deficiencies in the residential environment affect physiological health, emotional stability, and well-being. As a result, decisions about environ- mental programs are sometimes ill-advised and result in effects that are opposite to those which were intended. The effects of environmental deficiencies on special populations such as the aged and the rural and urban poverty groups, are as little under- stood as is their effect on the typical middle-class family. Not only are the health effects of a single environmental stress in- adequately understood, but the health significance of multiple stresses on one individual, a family, or a neighborhood are largely unknown. Yet it is the accumulated stresses of rats, noise, overcrowding, lack of basic sanitation, etc. which have created the current crises for many families in America, especially in the urban areas. Effective solutions to these problems are dependent upon knowledge of how individual and multiple environ- mental stresses affect man's health and his behavior. These problems are more extensively discussed in the report on human ecology. The Effects of Inadequately Financed Urban Services Upon Sanitation and Housing Local government's inability to adequately provide the basic sani- tation services often increases urban decay, impairs health, and results in'alienation in low income neighborhoods. For example, many cities provide the same frequency ofy solid waste collection to all neighborhoods without recognizing the peculiarly intense needs in slums caused by higher population densities, lack of well-managed buildings, and high volumes of bulk refuse left on streets and in buildings as a result of high relocation rates. Such cities cannot increase services in slums because funds are in short supply that it would require cutting services in a more articulate, well-financed, politically alert neighborhood. Similar problems affecting health and welfare exist for such other services as sewage, street cleaning, water supply, housing, parks and recreation, and police protection. Of all tax revenue of urban government, about 5/6 comes from property taxation. Property taxation imposes a disproportionately heavy burden upon housing, tends to deter the adequate provision and maintenance of urban housing, and operates regressively (Douglas Commission, 1968). The Effects of Racism on Equal Opportunity for Residential Satisfaction Those most likely to live in sub-standard housing are the poor, non-whites who have big families and are renters. As the Douglas 5. 1796 Commission points out, if you are poor and non-white and rent, the chances are three out of four that you will live in sub- standard housing. Not only does poverty and race determine to a large extent whether a family lives in standard or sub-standard housing, it also determines location of the home; and therefore, the employment opportunities and community amenities available to the family. Even if the National goal of 26 million new units is achieved, unless racist attitudes are changed, a large portion of these units will not be available to certain minority groups. Since the new units cannot all be built in existing integrated areas, it will be necessary to open up the suburbs to the urban core resident. The Cost of Housing Improvement in sub-standard housing is largely dependent upon the availability of new and existing standard housing at a cost with- in the reach of the families concerned. Housing codes cannot be effectively enforced against substandard housing if alternative standard housing at costs people can afford is not available. When alternative housing is not availablbe, housing code enforcement can produce homeless families. Therefore new construction and rehabil- itation techniques which are cheaper in price but not quality must be found in oyder to keep decent housing within the price range of the urban poor. Even with urban renewal land writedown and generous subsidy, the typical new unit in urban multi-family housing is built for $20,000 and requires rent payment of roughly $150 a month. Yet half of the low income families in the slums can afford to pay only $65 to $110 a month for rent and the other half cannot afford more than $35 to $60 a month. Rental and shelter allowances for welfare recipients are inadequate and uneven from state to state and only a few states include money in the assistance allowance for such housing upkeep items as garbage cans, purchase of replacement of essential furnishings and equipment. The national average shelter allowance is less than $35 a month, an amount grossly inadequate to obtain or maintain standard housing. Furthermore, it affords little leverage for pressing landlords to improve rental properties or for recipients to maintain the homes they own. Consequently, welfare recipients spend $1.1 billion per year for shelter most of which subsidizes known slums. Many recipients pay more for shelter than the amounts allowed. This means money which should be spent on food, clothing and other necessities goes for shelter and still does not purchase adequate housing. It has been estimated that between $750 to $850 million in Federal welfare funds are used annually to pay for families to live in sub-standard housing (Douglas Commission, 1968). 1797 Housing Decay and the Law of Landlord and Tenant Effective housing maintenance is stymied by the lack of tenant cooperation as well as the lack of landlord compliance with housing code standards. Housekeeping habits and ignorance of city ways (and neither can be solved by legal sanction against tenants) are at the bottom of tenant-caused housing violations. Tenant education and motivation programs are sorely needed. Tenants cannot seek direct redress for the hazards to life and health that noxious, unlawful and sub-standard housing conditions now impose on them. Leases of dwelling space do not have the characteristics of ordinary contracts; a tenant's covenant to pay rent is independent of the landlord's obligation to maintain decent housing conditions. Tenants are not protected against eviction or rent increases in retaliation for complaining to a code enforcement agency -- the only remedy open to them. Pro- tection would be made available to tenants if the doctrine of independent lease covenance were abolished, particularly if the requirements of the housing code were to become implicit terms of the lease agreement (Douglas Commission, 1968). Conflicting Standards for Housing in the Neighborhood Environs Conflicts among standards in housing codes, building codes, zoning ordinances and subdivision regulations seriously weaken their effectiveness in molding the residential environment for the betterment of man's health and well-being. For example, building codes are written to insure minimum loss to property and life due to fire and structural instability in new buildings. Housing codes are written to safeguard the health, safety and well-being of occupants as they are affected by the occupancy and the environ- mental stresses found in the existing home. As a consequence of these different objectives, many buildings are in violation of the housing code as soon as they are built. Existing conflicts among the provision's various codes, and even within the same code, increase building costs, create problems in legal enforcement, result in discriminatory practices, deter manufacture of standard- ized homes and building components and consign sound environmental management to an often fruitless exercise. Inadequate Federal Program Coordination Lack of coordination and inconsistency in the objectives of various Federal programs operating in the same geographic area, reduce the effectiveness of many housing and sanitation programs. Frequently programs work against one another or are used by local areas in a sequence which nullifies their benefits. Even more frequently, programs which are potentially supportive of one another are not recognized as such. Conflicting program requirements, dissimilar project boundaries and the multitude of different Federal agencies working in any one area produce a bewildering bureaucratic maze to local officials. 1798 The absence of a national urbanization policy provides a typical example of how conflicting national program objectives can increase the housing and sanitation problem. In the South and in Appalachia, some Federal programs seek to keep people in rural areas, other programs in both the rural and urban areas encourage people to migrate to the cities. Continued rural to urban migration will only increase the already serious urban health and well-being problem. Consequently, the future magnitude of the urban housing and sanitation problems are largely dependent upon what Federal and State policy is in the rural areas. E. Projections to 1975 of Problems of the Residential Environment 1. Urban-Rural Population Change by 1975 The population of the United States is becoming increasingly urban. Insults to the urban environment have been obvious accompaniment to this urbanization process. Although the rate of urbanization is expected to reduce over the next thirty years, environmental problems resulting from the magnitude of the urban population growth will require major emphasis on our environmental policies and priorities. Table 1 shows the urban-rural population change from 1960 to 2000. TABLE 1 (1968 Statistical Abstract; Douglas Report) Year 1960 1967 1975 2000 Urban pop. 125,269,000 144,000,000 166,316,000 266,000,000 Rural pop. 54,054,000 53,900,000 51,847,000 48,000,000 % Urban 69.9 73.0 76.2 85.0 It can be seen that the urban population increase from 1967 to 1975 is projected at 22,316,000 persons. Rural population will decline by 2,053,000 persons. The implications of an addition of over 22 million persons to the urban areas of the nation in eight years are of great concern. The population cannot be absorbed in the central cities as these areas are overcrowded and/or declining in net population because of reduced land area for residential purposes. The slow progress in developing "New Towns" in the United States as witnessed by an ACIR report, shows that as late as March 1968 less than 50,000 housing units had been rented or sold in all United States New Towns (Urban and Rural America, Table 41). Even a rapid upsurge in New Town development between now and 1975 could not begin to house 22 million new urban residents. Thus, the vast majority of this growth should occur in the sprawling suburbs - areas where aircraft noise, auto- mobile exhausts, inadequate water supply and waste disposal systems, and other environmental hazards are already widespread. 2. 3. 1799 White-Black Population Change by 1975 The non-white population of the United States will increase at nearly double the rate of the white population between 1965 and 1975, 11.5% to 20.9%. Washington, D.C., Gary, and Newark, have Negro majorities at the present time and current trends indicate Negro majorities in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New Orleans, St. Louis, Richmond, and Oakland by 1985 (Douglas Report, p. 43). If current locational trends continue, most of the non-white pop- ulation increase will be absorbed in the crowded central cities. The non-white population proportion in the suburbs has been consistently 5% nationwide, and projections for 1985 under current policies and public acceptance show an increase to only 6.1% (Douglas Report, p. 44). The problems of the urban resi- dential environment discussed earlier in this report are magni- fied by the influx of non-white poverty migrants and high birth rates among central city poor. This projected 1975 growth of the non-white population will emphasize the urban problem. It has been estimated that just to maintain the ghetto population at its present undesirable level, one-half million Negroes a year would have to move into the suburbs compared to the present outward movement of 50,000 per year (Ylvisaker, 1967). Housing Stock Change by 1975 Numerous governmental and private reports in recent years have arrived at similar conclusions - a major increase in the size and choice of the housing stock is necessary for all segments of the nation's population. It is estimated that during the 1968 to 1978 period a total of 25,700,000 new dwelling units will be required (Kaiser Report, p. 40). With the need for 13,400,000 dwelling units accounted for by the formation of new households, the other half of the new dwelling units will be needed for replacing substandard dwelling units for providing urban units for the continued exodus from rural areas and for providing enough vacant units for mobility. In 1966, 6,727,000 occupied substandard dwelling units existed in the United States (Kaiser, p. 44). It is projected that by 1978, the number of substandard housing units should be reduced to 4,300,000. Overcrowding existed in 3,957,000 of the standard dwelling units in 1960; another 2,190,000 substandard dwelling units were overcrowed in 1960 (Douglas, p. 70). Projected decreases in overcrowding are 1,069,000 dwelling units by 1970 and another 799,000 by 1980. It is interesting to note, however, that during the 1950's the number of overcrowded standard units increased by 47.5% while the overcrowded substandard units had a 46.87 decrease. This may be explained by the fact that easy financing terms 1800 during this period caused young families to purchase houses beyond their means and they later had to remain in these houses even though they had outgrown them. Since overcrowding usually precedes deterioration, it will be necessary to observe this segment closely. Of all dwelling units occupied by lower income (under $3,000) families, 36% are in the substandard classification. The 1960 Census shows 10% of urban housing is substandard. However, the 196Q definition of standard housing is rural-oriented and gives a minimal picture of the ghetto housing problems. To meet the urban housing needs of 1975, HUD estimates that public assisted starts and rehabilitation will have to reach a level of 700,000 units per year compared to only 128,000 units in 1968. Inequalities of Income Distribution Within Urban Areas Lack of sufficient income will prevent many families from achiev- ing a dwelling unit with a desired quality of environment. It is estimated that between six and eight million families will be unable to afford proper housing in 1978. About 30% of these families needing public assistance will be non-white - proportion- ately nearly three times more acute than among the urban white majority (Kaiser, p. 42). Because of racial discrimination, similar sized households must earn about one-third more annual income if they are non-white than if they are white. Table 2 shows the distribution of white and non-white households requiring some form of housing subsidy. TABLE 2 (Kaiser Commission, p. 42) Number % Total Number % Total Year White Non-White 1960 3,612,000 11.8 1,017,000 29.2 1968 3,374,000 9.6 989,000 23.4 1978 3,380,000 1-7 1,132,000 18.3 5. Age Projections to 1975 for 0ld Age and Young Children Segments An important factor in determining a desirable residential environ- ment for 1975 is the age structure of the population. Population will increase significantly in the next ten years. These increases are especially significant in two segments of the age structure. 1801 The baby boom of the 1950's will create an important need for housing during the 1970's. It appears that the major type of new housing for these young couples will be apartments. Apart- ments now make up one-third of the total new dwelling construc- tion. By 1975, they are projected to reach the fifty percent level. Projections on the increase in the number of young children during the 1965-1975 period show a relatively small gain - 977,000 persons (Census Bureau, Series C). This projection is based upon low birth rates and decisions among many young couples to delay the start of their families. These estimates tend to substantiate the predicted boom in apartment units and should provide an important indication of the type of urban residential environment that must be planned. A more significant and often overlooked segment of the age struc- ture is the old age population. It is projected that between 1965 and 1975 there will be 2,977,000 more persons over 64 years of age. The older decaying portions of urban areas contain a high percentage of older persons. Present Programs to Correct the Deficiencies of Urban-Rural Residential Environment 1. Federal Activities Department of Housing and Urban Development The following programs of DHUD represent only the principle activities direct toward correcting deficiencies in the resi- dential environment and do not represent all of HUD's programs. Urban Renewal - Urban renewal, first created by the Housing Act of 1949, is the major tool of HUD in altering the urban environment. It provides cities with the funds to make physical changes in those areas which city officials have shown are too deteriorated to warrant rehabilitation. Since 1950 this program has grown from $200 million per year and 124 projects to $7,335 million and 2,525 projects in 1968. Concentrated Housing Code Enforcement - In urban areas in which at least 20% of the structures have housing code violations, cities can utilize the "Concentrated Housing Code Enforcement Program" to improve not only the dwelling unit but also the residential environ- ment. Eligible costs include: code enforcement costs, any necessary relocation of residents, street paving, curb and gutters, street lighting, beautification costs, police and fire call boxes, sidewalks and some other surface improvements. In addition, qualified home- owners can receive a direct grant of $3,500 for rehabilitation of their homes and refinancing of the home and additional rehabilitation costs at an interest rate of 3%. Since its inception in 1966, 209 grants to cities, totaling over $271 million have been awarded. 1802 Demolition Grant Program - This program is designed to provide cities with funds to demolish dilapidated structures which are blighting influences upon the neighborhood and a threat to the health and welfare of the residents. Since its inception in 1964, this program has awarded 168 grants totaling $31.8 million. Water and Sewer Facilities Grant Program - This grant program pro- vides communities over 5,500 population with partial funding of projects to provide water distribution and sewage collection facil- ities. Since the first approval in May 1966, 1,522 grants totaling over $724 million have been awarded. Model City Program - The intent of the 'Model City Program" is to provide selected cities with the opportunity to focus considerable activity in a given problem neighborhood and demonstrate how the area can be improved to provide a desirable living environment. The city applies for funding (from the appropriate Federal agency) for the various improvements which they seek to make. HUD, in turn, pays 80% of the cities share of each of these matching grants. In this manner a city can increase its effective financial involvement five-fold at the same cost to the city. Although iat this time only a few cities have received implementation funds, 150 communities have received Model City planning grants (22,035,000) to prepare for the implementation stage. Federal Housing Administration - FHA's activity in insuring loans made by private lending institutions for housing construction, re- habilitation, and purchase has significantly improved the adequacy and quantity of urban and rural housing. From 1960 to 1966 there were 149,000 homes built in rural areas insured by FHA. The number of such loans have been declining from 30,190 in 1960 to 17,130 in 1966. The South Atlantic and East South Central regions had the largest numbers of new homes insured and New England had the least. Home improvement loans made by FHA in rural areas are made under Title I of the Housing Act. Loans are made to "credit worthy" individuals for alterations, repairs and improvements of existing structures. The maximum repayment period is 5 years. In 1966 the average size of a loan was $1150. From 1960 to 1966 about 937,000 home improvement loans were made in rural areas, over 6 times the number of new construction loans. From 1960 to 1969, there were 3,787,000 homes built in urban areas insured by FHA. The annual number of such loans has remained approxi- mately the same during this period. From 1960-1968 about 4,896,000 home improvement loans were made in urban areas and insured by FHA. a) 1803 Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Social and Rehabilitation Services In November 1968, a focal point for housing and community improve- ment was established in the Social and Rehabilitation Service of DHEW to augment and coordinate housing improvement activities through- out the agency and to advise the Administration on implementation of the recommendations contained in the DHEW study and report to Congress "The Role of the Public Welfare in Housing." Since the housing unit has been in existence only six months, detailed information is not yet available in SRS on housing improve- ment programs being conducted by State and local welfare depart- ments. Ten states have adopted minimum housing standards in the State assistance plan, but information on how effectively they are being implemented is not available. Three such demonstration projects, new methods and approaches are being tried out. A Section 1115 Dem. Project in Home Repair is being jointly operated by HEW, OEO, FmHA to test methods and costs of implementing Sec. 1119 of the Social Security Act. If successful, 800 homes occupied and owned by elderly and disabled recipients will have been repaired to a minimum level of safety and security. The Home Sanitation experimental project will be carried out and research in connection with this Home Repair and Improvement Demonstration. Hartford, Connecticut, Department of Social Welfare is conducting a Sec. 1115 project to try out a Home Improvement program for AFDC families. Home management skills are being taught. Landlord-tenant disputes are negotiated and families assisted in moving to standard housing outside the ghetto when landlords refuse to make the necessary repairs. A joint HEW-HUD national demonstration project in Housing Aid for the Aged will be carried out in the Model City neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia, to test use of HUD's Section 23 leased housing program for elderly renters. Another HEW-HUD joint project is being developed to measure the methods and costs of helping AFDC families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, become homeowners through use of HUD's low interest rate subsidy programs. b) 1804 Public Health Service Comprehensive Health Planning Best available information indicates that financial support for environmental health services and projects from Section 314, PL 89-749 and PL 90-174 is very meager. Specific information on the subject in terms of dollar allocations is so sparse and difficult to obtain as to make it non-existent. This void of environmental programs is related to many underlying factors. These include a low level of organization for environ- mental health planning, a disproportionate representation between representatives of environmental health interests and those of personal health services on State Health Planning Councils, and limited capability of PHS Regional staffs to provide the necessary leaderships, consultation, technical assistance and guidelines. The latter dees not reflect on the technical and professional abilities of these staffs but rather highlights the manpower con- straints which hamper the effectiveness of their efforts. The only notable success in the use of the 31l4(e) grant program has been in urban rat control. In FY 69, 16 1/4 million dollars were allocated for projects in 19 cities. This success is due only to the fact that the Secretary, DHEW by administrative direction, required these funds be used specifically for urban rat control. CPEHS, Environmental Control Administration ECA is involved in all five of the major functional areas in hous- ing and urban environmental health problems. 1. Research and Development During the past ten years research studies have been directed in an organized manner on two fronts. First, to provide basic data regarding the health response to adverse conditions with- in the residential environment; secondly, to investigate the legal and administrative constraints to effecting change of these adverse environmental conditions. Although most of the research work has proven quite successful, the funding of research studies has been so small that little benefit has reached the general public. Studies have shown definite relationships between various environmental factors and the health status of the affected population. However, considerable additional studies are needed investigating the interrelated effects when several adverse environmental con- ditions exist simultaneously. Funding by HEW of research in the area of housing and urban problems has averaged $700,000 per year for the last ten years. 1805 Empirical studies will be conducted during the next few years utilizing the NEEDS technique (Neighborhood Environmental Evaluation and Decision System.) With NEEDS, cities can quickly identify and quantify the pro- blems of blight and then take such corrective actions as con- centrated code enforcement, increased municipal services, and capital improvements programming. In addition, the social profiles which will be developed as an integral part of NEEDS will help to define people's expectations and life styles, and thus provide basic information about the impacted popu- lation which will be reflected in the standards. Data collected with NEEDS will be analyzed to see if significant correlations between various environmental factors and indicators of community and individual ill health can be identified. Funding of the NEEDS demonstrations during FY 1970 is adequate; however, unless considerable personnel and budget increases are provided in FY 1971, HEW and the urban cities will not receive full benefit of this technique. Technical Information Although several excellent technical publications have been published during recent years (APHA-PHS Model Hosing Code, Environmental Health Planning Guide, Housing Inspectors Train- ing Manual), lack of HEW personnel to provide technical assistance on the use of the documents has limited their usefulness to the cities. These documents could have considerable effect on improving the residential environment if they were adequately understood and utilized by the cities. HEW is in the difficult position of having available the tools to provide answers to many urban problems but not having available the system to deliver these techniques to the cities. Training During the last two years, 8 basic training courses for housing inspectors have been conducted, providing training for 335 persons. This figure is for too few considering the fact that HEW is the only agency providing basic training in housing inspection on a national basis. The Health Educator Aide technique, a motivational and communi- cation technique, proven effective in improving the attitudes and life styles of ghetto residents, has only been taught by CPE in two cities in the last two years. While the philosophy of training '"trainers" in this technique is commendable, the present rate of training will not provide action in the field fast enough. HEW must increase its activity in this area if the cities are to produce lasting improvements in the residential environment. 4. 1806 Program Assistance With a central office staff of only three and with only two regional offices staffed, limited assistance is being rendered to States and local agencies to develop adequate pro- grams in housing and environmental quality appraisal code enforcement, and code administration. Three basic operational objectives are used as the framework on which the program assistance delivery system is built: a. Increase number of states and municipalities with housing legislation. At the present time only sixteen states have some form of housing codes in effect. State legislation or state recommended model ordinances will provide guidance for development of municipal codes and will insure uniformity of housing quality standards throughout the state. Popu- lations living in municipalities without housing codes will automatically be protected by enforcement of the minimum state code, b. Increase the number of States with effective housing improve- ment programs which will provide adequate technical assist- ance to municipal agencies in evaluating housing quality, development and adoption of housing codes, and development and implementation of effective code administration and enforcement programs. Of the fourteen State health depart- ments reporting activities in housing, the average number of professions in this area was 0.8 full-time and 2.0 part- time employees - hardly adequate to provide the technical assistance needed for an effective program. c. Increase the number of State and local health departments with housing improvement activities which will provide technical assistance and training of a health-related nature to other State and municipal agencies to insure that health standards are incorporated in the development, administration, and enforcement of housing ordinances. At the present time only two State health departments have budget items for housing hygiene programs. Criteria and Standards The "APHA-PHS Recommended Housing Maintenance and Occupancy Ordinance" has been designed to meet the immediate needs of cities and States for a model housing code based upon health and safety criteria. While this code is not a strict specifi- cation type code, there is a dire need for a performance code covering the residential environment. Housing codes should not consider only the quality of the dwelling unit but should also view the influence of the residential environment upon the livability of that unit. At the present time no performance type housing code and no residential environment code exits. HEW as the national health agency has the responsibility of developing those codes. 1807 Comprehensive program planning guidelines are being developed for use under PL 89-749, Comprehensive Health Planning Act. These guidelines could also serve cities and States in evaluat- ing the comprehensiveness of their programs directed at solving various urban and/or rural environmental problems. Indian Health Services The Public Law 86-121 sanitation facilities construction program through fiscal year 1969 has included 745 projects at a cost of $63,756,000. Comprehensive solid waste control projects can be funded under this program; however, to date, no such comprehensive programs have been funded. Two tribal maintenance programs have been funded at an approximate cost of $40,000. In addition to the sanitation facilities construction program, the Indian Health Service carries on a comprehensive interdisciplinary environmental health program utilizing professional sanitarians, engineers, sanitarian aides, health educators, and public health nurses. The program consists of education, motivation and training of Indians and Alaskan natives in the utilization and maintenance of the installed sanitary facilities; advice and consultation and basic sanitary practices in home and community; promotion of and consultation in solid waste and vector control programs and accident prevention programs; promotion and direction of rabies control programs; disease outbreak investigations and follow-up; nuisance investigations and food sanitation surveys and consultations at tribal celebrations and in the home; and an institutional sanitation survey and follow-up program for those institutions serving the Indian people. The data obtained will be utilized to (1) determine the extent of environmental health problems; (2) determine the effectiveness of pest programs; and (3) plan future programs to meet the problems identified. To date, major success in promoting health codes has been on the Navajo Reservation. Migrant Health The basic Migrant Health Act (PL 87-692 as amended) authorizes the Public Health Service to make grants to public or private non-profit organizations to help support health services for migrants. Grantees may be local, State, or interstate organizations. The program encourages assumption of State and local responsibility, and in 3/4 of the projects, planning and operations are done by State and local government. In the others it is assumed by voluntary agencies. All applications go through the State health department for an evaluation, and about 40% of the total project costs are borne by non-Federal sources. 1808 In FY 69 of the $8 million appropriated, 7.2 million was spent in grants and the remainder for direct operations. In general, the ratio of distribution of grant dollars in recent years has been 90% to personal health care and 10% to sanitation services. About 150 counties have used grants solely to assist in sanitation inspections (100,000 in 1968) including water supply, waste disposal, housing, and safety. Department of Agriculture - FHA Water and Waste Disposal System for Rural Communities This is a program that provides up to 50 percent of the developing cost of water or waste disposal system for any public and non- profit organization serving rural residents. During the decade 1959-1969, 3,214 rural water systems were installed. 576 waste disposal systems were funded under this legislation from its inception in 1965 through December 1968. The economic research service of the United States Department of Agriculture estimates that there are remaining 34,700 named communities that need help in establishing a water system and 44,500 that need sanitary waste disposal systems. Some need both. Rural Self-Help Housing Loans This program is primarily to enable low-income rural families to obtain adequate housing. The families who will occupy the dwelling per: form most of the construction work under the supervision of an expert. Small groups of from six to ten families may make application for self-housing loans. Rural Housing Loans - FmHA This program provides loans to low and moderate income farmers and residents in rural areas and communities with populations under 5,500. These loans have a wide scope as to what may be done includ- ing improving or repairing rural homes, obtaining farm service buildings, and related facilities, to buy buildings, and building sites, to repairing homes damaged by natural disaster, as well as financing homes for senior citizens. These loans may be set up on repayment terms up to 33 years, with interest rate varying according to situation. FmHA made direct or insured loans for the construction of about 76,000 rural homes from 1960-1966, more than 2/3 in Southern States. During the same period about 50,000 rural homes were repaired as a result of this program. 1809 It will not be possible to determine how much improvement has occurred since 1960 until the next Census on Housing. The addition of 3.7 million rural homes (3.3 million through conventional or private lending institutions) and the improve- ment of 15.6 million rural residences from 1960 to 1966 has vastly improved the status of rural housing. These improvements, however, may not have appreciably altered the number of sub- standard homes. Most of the 4.8 million substandard and dilapidated homes in rural areas were occupied by families having incomes of less than $3,000 in 1960, and almost all of the new homes built during 1960-1966 were occupied by families having incomes greater than $6,000. Finally, it appears that the type of remodelling done to most rural housing was not great enovgh to change the condition of many of the substandard homes especially those lacking complete plumbing. Rural self-help housing programs have been promoted by FmHA as a means by which a group of 6 to 10 families can build their own homes under supervision, contributing ''sweat equity" to lower the cost. In fiscal '69, FmHA grant loans to 602 families to finance homes in the amount of $4,962,560, at an average cost of $8,243 per house and yard. California and Florida have the largest number made to farm workers. This is an increase over 1968 in which there were 514 loans made and these homes completed. Office of Economic Opportunity Housing activities of OEO have been largely concentrated on insti- tutional problems within the housing system that prevent the poor and near poor from obtaining decent housing; and to make maxi- mum use of the new types of housing development possible under various HUD-financed programs, such as 221 (d) (3), (moderate rental through new construction and rehabilitation), rent supplement projects, and 221 (h), (federally-assisted home ownership for the poor). OEO has helped to organize non-profit sponsors for these projects and to offer them technical and financial assistance in filling the gaps in housing resources for the poor. Wherever possible, specific housing programs have been coordinated with the activities of the Community Action Agency in the community and/or with other programs attacking the problem of the poor. 42-778 0—71—pt. 6——7 1810 OEO has, in this process, funded 10 urban and 2 rural Housing Development Corporations (HDC's). The 10 urban corporations are in Philadelphia, North Carolina (12 urban locations with headquarters in Durham), Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Milwaukee, New York, Washington, St. Louis and Los Angeles. These HDC's have generated about 4,500 new and rehabilitated dwelling units. The 2 rural HDC's are in California and Kentucky. The California group has created 325 new dwelling units. The Kentucky HDC has sponsored a 50 unit rent supplement project and is supplying and training repair and rehabilitation crews to do the repair work on 800 dilapidated homes in a four-county rural poverty area, which are owned by aged and disabled recipients. By January 1969, the 12 OEO funded HDC's had generated some $60 miJlion dollars worth of mortgages, more than 20 times the amount of the money QEO had made available to the corporations for admin- istration and services. The significant contribution made by OEO in stimulating the pro- duction and rehabilitation of housing for the poor has been widely recognized. Most important, Sec. 106 of the 1968 Housing Act for the first time included Congressional recognition of the need to provide non-profit sponsors with financial and technical assistance to fill a gap between public housing and private real estate operations. OEO has pioneered in another significant area of housing improve- ment, in making demonstration grants to metropolitan Fair Housing Agencies in Denver and Los Angeles. Both provide for a neighborhood based housing service program in poor neighborhoods to help minority poor overcome the problems of a segregated housing market. A small but significant beginning has been made in developing a new approach to housing management and maintenance as a new career line in public service. One potentially fruitful approach is the creation of non-profit corporations of tenants which can be trained to undertake many of the responsibilities of management and maintenance of property. Whatever the specific approach, the goal remains involving the poor in new roles and new training programs for the purpose of creating an improved living environment for poor people. Appalachian Regional Commission At present, approximately one million Appalachian families live in substandard housing. In West Virginia and Kentucky alone, 567% live in inadequate housing. Because of the lack of local public resources, communities in Appalachia have not taken advantage of Federal housing programs and Federal mortgage programs. In response to these con- ditions, upon recommendation of the Commission, the Congress in 1967 1811 added Section 20 of the Appalachian Act to authorize the Secre- tary of HUD, upon approval of the Commission, to make grants and loans to cover costs of initiating low and moderate income housing projects under Section 221 of the Housing Act. Grants will be made primarily to cover the costs of obtaining com- plete technical assistance for initiating and managing the con- struction of low and moderate income housing and rent supplement programs. Items eligible for funding under these grants include land options, market analyses, FHA and FMA fees, and construction and loan financing fees. In response to this legislation the States of West Virginia and Kentucky drafted legislation to create State Housing Development Corporations. To benefit by the opportunities created by this program, the Commission contracted with Urban America, Inc. for assistance in the design and organization of State Housing Corpor- ations. The Commission, established by the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965, works through the States and localities to ''develop, on a continuing basis, comprehensive and coordinated plans and programs, and establish priorities there under, giving due consid- eration to other Federal, State, and local planning in the Region ...." Sixty State planning districts are now functioning in the 13 States as a focal point and coordinating unit for Appalachia programs. 2, State Activities There is a recent trend toward a much more urban oriented outlook on the part of many State governments. This trend is noticeably apparent in the field of housing and community development. Although, in the past, a few States have been active in assisting cities with housing and urban development programs, the focus has been narrow and the funding limited. Governmental Reorganization Since about 1966, at least 16 States are reported to have established some form of administrative machinery to deal with problems of housing and community development in a coordinated and continuing way. No less than seven States - Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsyl- vania, Ohio, Missouri, Vermont, and Wisconsin - have established cabinet-level departments to bring urban needs to the highest level of State government. These are States which have large pressing problems and also the resources and drive to deal with them. The remaining 34 States need to be spurred into action to identify their housing and environmental health problems, plan and carry out improvement programs. Even those States which are moving need help 1812 with their programs in terms of both resources and technical assistance to train their personnel and continue development of their programs. Only 14 States have any health department input into housing improvement efforts. In the remaining States, there remains a vacuum which cannot be filled by any other agency. They do not have the professional capability nor the health orientation. The result is that the health aspects of their program are minimal if consideration is given at all. Encouragement and help from HEW could reverse this trend. Only 14 States have established minimum housing standards in their State welfare assistance plans. Constitutional Changes Modernization of their constitutions is recognized, by the States, as a necessary step toward improving their governmental operations and to freeing local governments to function more autonomously. The need to meet the changing demands of government has already resulted in the passage of several hundred amendments to constitu- tions throughout the 50 States. According to the Council of State Governments, this trend has reached a "boom" in 1968. A survey of the States made by this organization shows that more than half the States updated their constitutions in some way in 1968, while only ten States had done so in 1967. A State Government Administration study shows that nineteen States had constitutional amendments pending voter approval in the 1968 elections. These changes are presumably of a wide range and many of a minor nature. They will probably not result in any major housing and environmental improvements in the immediate future. In addition, only fourteen States have adopted any kind of housing standards. This is important to provide uniformity throughout the State. Since the major emphasis of housing legislation is on the health and safety aspects of the home, HEW should promote the adoption of such State standards. This could improve the health status of the nation generally and in particular reduce the infant mortality rate. Effects of Federal Programs Another encouragement to greater State involvement in recent years had occurred at the Federal level. New programs have been enacted specifically to make room for State government in Federally assisted urban projects. Among these are the Federal-State train- ing programs authorized under Title VIII of the 1964 Housing Act, the urban information and technical assistance program authorized under Title IX of the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Develo- ment Act of 1966 and the Comprehensive Health Planning and Public Health Service Amendments of 1966 amending Section 314 of the Public Health Service Act. In addition, direct Federal-State programs to improve housing for welfare recipients are being conducted through the SRS. 1813 3. Local Activities Workable Program An increasing number of communities are receiving certification for the Workable Programs for Community Improvement. This is a good indicator of local activity and interest because certification is prerequisite for receiving DHUD funds for community improvement projects and its formula relates to all the elements with which this report is concerned. Since the inception of this program, there has been a steady increase in the number of communities with certified programs, from two in 1954 to 3,500 in 1968. This growth indicates a realization of need for improvement and some will to achieve it. However, of this total, only 1,851 programs are currently active; leaving 1,699 programs in the inactive column. Generally, 1/3 to 1/2 of the certified programs of the State become inactive after initial certification. Although many speculations can be made for the failure of so many communities to be recertified, four reasons are most frequently given; lack of funds to continue projects; shortage of trained personnel; public and political apathy; and lack of knowledge by local officials to plan and conduct improvement programs. The needs for success relate directly to reasons for failure. Success- ful programs will be found in urban areas or areas that can meet the needs. Housing Standards A greater number of communities are adopting housing quality standards. As late as 1956, 100 or fewer large cities had housing codes. The number had increased rapidly since then to 4,904 in 1968. This indicates that (using a base of 17,993) about one out of four communities have adopted housing standards. The adequacy of these standards is in many instances questionable and recommendations have been made for more stringent.national and/or State standards. The adequacy of code administration is likewise questionable if not definitely inadequate. However, code administration as a national development is barely twelve years old. Patterns of organization and techniques of performance have not in most instances had an opportunity to stabilize. Much of the administrative organization of the code compliance effort is on an experimental trial and error basis. Poverty There is a widespread movement to combat root causes of poverty through job training, creation of job opportunities, and generally improving the level of education in poverty areas - especially in urban communities. 1814 These problems relate directly to poor environmental health prac- tices and are therefore mentioned here. These efforts are experimental in nature and their effectiveness not yet proven. 4. Private Agency Activities The potential for involvement in solving the problems of cities reaches far beyond the financing, construction and management of housing. There are needs for the location of more job producing institutions in ghetto areas, more job training activities, more local civic leadership. The current observation is that low- income housing and environmental health problems, in both town and country, are so massive, urgent, and interrelated with jobs, training and racial unrest, that they must be confronted first and in a way that will start to produce immediate results. Unfortunately there is no central clearinghouse for reporting on the housing and environmental improvement projects of non-government organizations ,and private enterprise institutions. Therefore, specific, detailed information on who is doing what and how many dollars are involved is not available. The general picture, however, is as follows: Non-Gqvernmental Organizations About 30 national organizations are known to be heavily involved in urban problems. The activities of individual organizations depends upon its previous experience and organizational goals. Generally, such groups are concerned with a wide range of urban problems; employment, economic development in ghetto areas, housing and health, education and community relations. Throughout the country, universities are involved not only in research but also in action programs. There are many uncounted action projects operating in depressed urban and rural areas which were fostered by universities. Private Enterprise Institutions Many large business firms in recent years have become involved in projects designed to provide better housing and a generally im- proved environment for low and moderate income groups in the nation's core. As of July 1968, there were more than 50 large corporations involved in some of the more publicized efforts to provide better housing or new communities for low and moderate income families and racial minorities living in blighted urban neighborhoods. In addition, there are many more uncounted firms providing job training and job opportunities for the hard-core unemployed in these same neighborhoods. 1815 Small businessmen, however, are concerned about the kind of private involvement and its potential effects on them. This is especially true of realtors who are well aware of the problems of the cities and are highly sympathetic to the notion that something must be done. The realter is a small business man and he wants his role in the work of the cities to continue as it is now. Swings to big business or to big government will not have his support. Relationship of HEW and Business. in Urban Affairs Some national leaders feel that an effective alliance has been formed between business, labor, churches, and civic leaders. While their convictions are strong and spirit optimistic, they have not yet begun to get hold of the really tough questions of how they can accomplish what they have set out to do. The greatest competency in the fields of housing improvement, environmental health, and sanitation are in governmental levels. Whether welcome or not, Federal involvement is necessary to inject the needed expertise to make many of the private programs work. This is particularly true of HEW where such projects relate to environmental health. Ultimately this means that to reach more States and communities, expanded regional staffs working toward specific program objectives in all aspects of environmental health and housing are needed. G. DHEW - Goals, Objectives, and Recommendations 1. Goals a. To determine the effects of designated environmetnal insults acting both singly and in combination upon an individual, his family, and his community. b. To strengthen the capability of States, cities and regions to improve health and well-being by providing them with the information and programs needed to modify human behavior and manage changes in their homes, neighborhoods, communities and regional environments. 2. Objectives a. In pursuing these goals, the top priority must be given to the development of more complete and adequate knowledge and federal technical assistance capability. As the health resources focal point for more than a hundred Federal, State and local programs, HEW must be adequate to serve the needs of the States and cities for data and technology, for monitoring, and for technical assistance. 1816 The CmamMmaN. I notice you spoke with force when you spoke about the confusion in various Federal programs, the absence of coordination, and the maze of conflicting programs. I take it you attach a high priority to that problem being straightened out so that communities can deal, if not with one office, at least with offices that are more carefully coordinated. Mr. WaLker. Yes; Mr. Chairman. I feel this is an important aspect of the local problem. When we have to deal with several agencies that at some points have conflicting views, it makes it difficult to carry out those programs at the local level, especially the federally funded programs. So, I would certainly agree with that observation. The CrammAaN. Do you believe that neighborhood decentralized control of Federal programs would be more effective than city-wide administration of health and housing programs? Mr. WaLker. Yes. I feel very strongly that if we decentralize these programs and get the people more involved that we can better achieve the long-range objectives or goals of some of these programs. I think our rat-control program is an outstanding example of involving people right from the outset in these programs designed to meet human needs. The Cramman. Do you find, Mr. Walker, that there are sharp differences between the kinds of programs and needs of a city such as Cleveland as over against a smaller city, let us say Dayton, or cities of that size? Are we talking about one range of problems that are different not only in quantity but in substance and quality of the large city as over against the smaller cities? Mr. WaLker. I think fundamentally, Mr. Chairman, the problems are basically the same. The housing problem we face in Cleveland is basically the same as those we faced when we administered the program in Dayton. : But I think the problem in Cleveland is more complex, and it is on a much broader scope than the problem we faced in Dayton. The Cuamrman. I was very interested in the program that you outlined in your statement where you are attempting to currently use people from the neighborhoods that you train as environmental health aides to help improve the understanding of other people in the neighborhood. Is that program working out well? Mr. WaLkEer. Mr. Chairman, that program is very effective in our community. We have been able to see a substantial amount of progress through the use of these community health aides. They are people who live in the neighborhood, and therefore they are not too readily identified with the so-called Establishment or the people downtown, and they have been very effective in our city in getting things accomplished. I only wish we had more of these aides. The Cuamrman. Thank you very much, Mr. Walker. Senator Percy, did you have questions? Senator Percy. Mr. Walker, the Commission on Violence listed housing as one of the primary needs to eliminate the feeling of frustration and bitterness on the part of people living in urban areas. Your testimony is certainly a specific example of this. I glanced through it quickly. You have listed many of the problems that the people living in urban areas have. 1817 Would you say that eliminating these in the way of providing better housing would provide better stability to our cities, to give a sense of being and belonging to our people that would be important? Would you comment on the rate at which we are attacking that problem, how high is it in priority now in Cleveland and at the Federal level Mr. WALKER. Yes. I think, Senator Percy that housing is one of the most important issues, and in Cleveland it is the basic issue that we are facing. In trying to remove some of these problems, I think standard dwell- ings would eliminate or at least minimize much of the frustration that the people feel. In Cleveland, this is the Number 1 priority. At the national level, I question whether or not it is Number 1 at this time in the minds of some of our leaders. Senator Percy. Do you think it should be? Mr. WaLker. Yes; I think it should be, Senator Percy. Senator Percy. Could you comment on high-rise housing, as to what that has done to the human being, in public housing, and maybe your testimony did cover that, but could you give us in your own words the impact of high-rise housing, the impact it has had, and compare it with whatever experience you may have had to offering homeownership to low-income people under the 235 programs now? Is there any difference? It costs money either way. Which way is the better way, to offer public housing at lower subsidized rents, or to take the same money and offer homeownership opportunities by subsidizing interest costs? Mr. Wacker. I think the best approach would be to offer home- ownership. It gives a person a sense of pride, a sense of owning; that here is something that actually, in due time, will belong to him, and that this is something tangible that he can put his hands on. He may never have owned a home before and will take pride in its upkeep and maintenance. I think this is the real key to this problem. I am not so sure that high rises have really served the purpose for which they were con- structed. I find that some of the people are frustrated by living in high-rise structures, which have been aptly called “vertical slums.” So, I have serious doubts as to whether high-rise structures are moving to meet the basic human need that we are faced with. Senator Percy. You indicate here that too many people living in a block try to spruce it up, but they get discouraged because the city or landlords do not do their part. This is a cooperative effort, then. The city cannot do it all. Mr. WaLker. No. The city cannot do it all. Senator Percy. Or the landlord can’t do it all. You point out that people don’t do their part because they are dis- Sriaged that others aren’t doing their parts. I don’t know who starts rst. Are there educational programs you have found effective in Cleve- land to get people to do more of their own picking up ? I noticed when I went to New York in sections of Bedford- Stuyvesant with Mayor Lindsay, we were in an area where it was a 1818 pigpen ; we turned around a block away and the houses were carefully taken care of and the lawns were taken care of. I said, “What is the difference?” He said, “The people all own their homes over here, and in the other area they are renting.” How can we get people to police their own areas better from the standpoint of sanitation and picking things up? Mr. Wacker. I think the health educator aide program now in effect in our city, and is in effect in your city of Chicago, is a sound educational approach, because here the health worker is able to go in, talk with the tenant, spell out the responsibilities of the tenant, spell out the responsibilities of the landlord, and help both the tenant and the landlord to meet these responsibilities for improved health and welfare. We have found in some of the areas in our city that the tenants are not really aware of what is expected of them in terms of main- tenance and property upkeep. In other cases, we have found that they may be aware, but there are so many other pressing human problems that they really haven’t given much thought to the general maintenance. I don’t think a mother, for example, can give much consideration to picking up litter in the front yard when the children didn’t even have breakfast that morning, or need shoes to wear. So, I think these problems are somewhat interlocked. Senator Percy. Lastly, I would like to ask you about a problem that the committee will be looking into in a visit to New York on Saturday, the problem of abandoned buildings. Is that a major problem in Cleveland at this stage? Mr. Warker. It is. It is a very big problem to us now, and I think the basis of the problem is the legal entanglement that we must go through in order to remove a structure. We have owners who sometimes impede progress in our efforts to remove abandoned structures and improve a given area. Senator Percy. Is there anything the Federal Government can do here, other than to provide money to rehabilitate and refurbish them ? Somewhere along the line, is it possible for us to remove deprecia- tion allowances for landlords who do not meet certain standards as they go along so they don’t have these buildings depreciate? Would something like that help? Mr. WaLker. Yes, Senator Percy; I think this would be a very effective approach, and I certainly would recommend it. Senator Percy. I want to thank you very much, indeed. I think your testimony is very moving, and I hope you will give our very best wishes to Mayor Stokes. Mr. WaLker. Thank you. The CaarmaN. Thank you, Mr. Walker, very much. The CramrRMAN. Our next witness is Dr. Spencer Parratt, Depart- ment of Political Science, Maxwell School, University of Syracuse. Dr. Parratt has recently completed a study of code enforcement Srsingies and we are pleased to welcome you to our committee, Dr. arratt. 1819 STATEMENT OF DR. SPENCER PARRATT, DEPARTMENT OF POLITI- CAL SCIENCE, MAXWELL SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF SYRACUSE Dr. Parrarr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Senator Percy. I would like to read a few minutes and then discuss on an open basis some of the problems we have. When Government expands through intervention into conditions balanced through market and traditional forces, the normal result elicits unintended disruption. This is the case relative to govern- mental policies involving housing. The unintended elements result in rising pressure which lead to further interventions. The approach in the following statement is permeated with this perspective. Two interrelated analytical views of housing problems affected by governmental policies are considered. The first relates to the overall role of Congress with particular reference to its delegation of power; the second is concerned with observed difficulties in housing code administration with reference to the extent to which Congress has responsible authority. The first series are made from the vantage point of a political scientist ; the second as a specialist in administrative regulation. The overriding difficulty in considering housing problems is that Congress has distributed discretion, appropriated million upon mil- lions of dollars, but has established no functional criteria or con- trolling policy. This condition has been emphasized through the establishment of the Department of Housing and Urban Develop- ment, with the expertness, which is at issue before this committee, being located primarily in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Why has Congress intervened in housing subsidies and regulation ? The obvious answer is that a political demand supported action and the States and local governments, for one reason or another, did not respond to pressures that were evident in the central government. The first thrust was public housing. It was designed to keep fam- ilies off welfare. None could have reasonably foreseen that the time would come when public housing would be increasingly the final refuge of welfare recipients. ‘When public housing was new, it was assumed that families could look out for themselves; today, burdens of special services and un- controlled destruction are making public housing the institutional haven for the maladjusted. It 1s not surprising that a high proportion of public housing authorities are operating in the red even though a high proportion of families enjoy double subsidies, one from the housing, itself, and the other from welfare. Moreover, in the face of this deteriorating condition, the expertness essential to meet the maladjusted popula- tions is outside of HUD and uncoordinated in congressional distri- bution of responsibilities. Institutional type high-rise public housing should be limited to people who are handicapped or people who have some special problems that make improbable their being taken care of in what we might call ordinary housing. 1820 There has been considerable discussion that the problem of educa- tion—the problem of the transition that people must make as they come from the rural areas with, usually, rural backgrounds, into high-rise apartments makes excessive demands and is not being ade- quately met. You can’t condemn tenants for complaining about housing condi- tions, but the arguments should be considered that low-rent housing has a price fixed by welfare allotments primarily, and those allot- ments at the present time are resulting in many, if not most, of the public housing authorities operating in the red. That is, if the payments are not sufficient to maintain partially subsidized public housing, there is no reasonable expectation that privately owned comparable code-complying housing, which must meet rising taxes, rising operational costs, higher mortgage costs, and higher administrative costs, that this housing can be supplied on a basis in which the rental base is substantially the same as that in public housing. This dilemma permeates the whole subject, and the underlying economics of housing regulations has been overlooked. Even more devastating conditions result from placing the jurisdiction in HUD, which has approached it from the point of physical construction, whereas HUD does not have in its jurisdiction the control over the very programs that are necessary to facilitate the adaptation of the people to the needs that urban conditions demand. This function concerned with adaptation is an essential ingredient that flows from the composite of voluntary and forced mobility of the poor. Whatever may be said, it is certain that the capacity to deal with this matter is not in HUD. Nor can it be developed in HUD without duplication or massive unsettling of existing centers of ex- pertness. But it is this expertness that must be infused into the complex. Jive is a problem that, as far as I can see, only Congress can deal with. If we are to have an overall policy in housing, we are not going to get it by the route of the present housing codes. The present hous- ing codes presume that all provisions in the codes are equally impor- tant, there is no gradation allowed for changed conditions, there is no reasonable assumption that housing codes have in most instances developed from any spontaneous interest of the local people. There are not more than a few housing codes, and probably not more than 100 in the United States, which are not a direct result of the requirements that HUD makes in order that municipalities can get money. Codes are brought about by bribery, and not through responses to needs of people. When I was a branch chief in HHF A, T was pestered all the time by this problem. A mayor would call up, for instance, and say, “We want to get urban renewal, or urban redevelopment money.” He would say, “We need a housing code; we have one, but we call it a building code. What is a housing code #” I would try to explain the difference between a use and maintenance code and one that was structural, and he would say, “If we need one, can you send us one?” 1821 I would tell him we could send examples to him. He would call me a month later and say, “We adopted the code; what do we do now ?” What do you think about trying to operate a local government with this kind of an approach? Can you see that we are in trouble, that no city solicitor is going to go out enthusiastically in order to enforce the housing code, that there is no demonstration in the com- munity of subsupport. He will take the position that the political leader must always take. He must consider where the votes are. He must accept this criterion. When Congress responds to political pressures, the movement is usually toward uniformity. And so it should be as long as the equalitarian doctrines permeate our culture. But undue burdens can- not be placed upon local governments when equalitarian thrust runs afoul of local economic and social capacities and values. If Congress finds it politic to provide better housing it must recog- nize that this must be done in conformity with our basic faith in justice and that justice, in the ultimate analysis, is intensely personal. Congress oversteps its proper bounds when it imposes standards that cannot be met except through undue burdens on owner-occupants and landlords so great as to force abandonments. One minority inter- est cannot be advanced at the expense of another. If Senator Percy would look into this problem that he raised this morning, he will find that abandonments are interlocked between the housing code and, in some places with, rent control systems, and that every large city in the country, and I can speak from personal knowledge, is facing this problem of abandonment because the land- lord needs operational money. Any way of increasing the economic burden on the landlord, who must face costs that are so high that public housing cannot operate with built-in subsidies is futile. I am sure Congress has no such conscious purpose. I was on the committee that created the original housing code of the American Public Health Association. I think I am the only person left who is actively functioning, after a fashion. The APHA committee’s intention was not a national housing code. The committee’s intention was a set of standards which would induce local health officers to accommodate the fact that housing is related to health, and at that time when I tried to get the State of New York Health Department interested in becoming a partner in establishing a code in New York State, the health department told me in no uncertain terms that this was not a problem for the health depart- ment. At the time that code was drafted, I can make a safe statement that the majority of health officers in the United States did not consider it appropriate to their jurisdiction or functions. Congress, under the Act of 1954, and under the 1949 Act, provided the foundation for contemporary housing codes. HUD adopted this APHA-PHS code as if it were gospel, and the private building code organizations, of which are three or four, have all paraphrased, or modified, slightly, and have added parallel codes of their own. This pattern has become widespread in the country, and is the 1822 backbone. HUD says, “If you adopt any of these, you are in the clear for urban renewal.” If there has ever been a forced system of seeing that we got a relatively uniform approach to a problem, this is it. I don’t think this approach is the role of the Federal Government. I think the role of the Federal Government is to create information to make available resources, to encourage education, and to try to create, or to create, the opportunities through which local officials can create support patterns, and when these support patterns ma- terialize, they can or should be aided. But if they are aided before they materialize, values are coerced. I would like to note that the conditions in American cities are such that an honest, straight-forward, simultaneous enforcement of hous- ing and building codes will put the people in the streets. Eo smaller area surveys that have been made make it clear that there are very few houses in the city, even those built up to 5 years ago, that fully comply with code requirements. There is no way in the present administrative process to separate the serious from the nonserious, the serious from what might be called those that are concerned with convenience or amenities. I favor supplying those conveniences and amenities that can be supplied, but not at the expense of any class, nor at the expense of local government which has to balance that cost against schools and other services. A coerced requirement, may be doing a more basic harm, and even undermining democratic government. Another important item is that housing codes are based on criminal penalties. Criminal penalties, speaking now as a lawyer, criminal penalties should be used and imposed only when the element of mens rea or culpability or criminal intent can be demonstrated. You cannot demonstrate criminal intent against the landlord who cannot make the changes in the building on income that he can derive from welfare allotments. Something has to be done that the penalizing of the landlord is not the answer. If there is an answer that could be thought about, we must consider that public housing is in the nature of a service and that the landlord who can supply housing for the poor, or housing for the nearly poor, that there should be some way of recognizing that prudent and honest management is entitled to a rate of return in the same way we deal with public utilities. I don’t know of any place that tries this, except New York, which tries to operate in rent control by a formula that is based upon assessments, a formula that reasonably attempts to insure a rent modification which will give 6 percent profit. Well, 6 percent profit for the landlord is less than he can get by buying tax-exempt bonds if he could sell his house. And he can’t sell it. The thing that happens is that the landlord on the edge—you want me to quit. I accept the decision. Senator Percy (presiding). Why don’t you round out the thought, and all of your testimony will be incorporated in the record. (The document follows :) 1823 Housing CopEsS—THEIR ADMINISTRATION AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST PERSPECTIVE When government expands through intervention into conditions balanced through market and traditional forces, the normal result elicits unintended dis- ruption. This is the case relative to governmental policies involving housing. The unintended elements result in rising pressures which lead to further inter- ventions. The approach in the following statement is permeated with this perspective. Two interrelated analytical views of housing problems affected by govern- mental policies are considered. The first relates to the overall role of Congress with particular reference to its delegation of power; the second is concerned with observed difficulties in housing code administration with reference to the extent to which Congress has responsible authority. The first series are made from the vantage point of a political scientist; the second as a specialist in administrative regulation. I. CONGRESS AND HOUSING POLICY The overriding difficulty in considering housing problems is that Congress has distributed discretion, appropriated million upon million of dollars, but has established no functional criteria or controlling policy. This condition has been emphasized through the establishment of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, with the expertness able to provide criteria in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Why has Congress intervened in housing subsidies and regulation? The obvi- ous answer is that a political demand supported action and the states and local governments, for one reason or another, did not respond to pressures that were evident in the central government. The first thrust was public housing. It was designed to keep families off welfare. None could have reasonably foreseen that the time would come when public housing would be increasingly the final refuge of welfare recipients. When public housing was new it was assumed that fami- lies could look out for themselves; today burdens of special services and uncon- trolled destruction are making public housing the institutional haven for the maladjusted. It is not surprising that a high proportion of public housing author- ities are operating in the red even though a high proportion of families enjoy double subsidies, one from the housing itself and the other from welfare. More- over in the face of this deteriorating condition, the expertness essential to meet the maladjusted populations is outside of HUD and uncoordinated in Congres- sional distribution of responsibilities. Faced with inability of subsidized public housing to make ends meet, the lot of the private landlord moves increasingly toward disaster. Confronted with governmental expectations that landlords can supply code-complying housing at rental figures dominated by welfare allotments, it is quite valid to say that it is governmental policy to encourage deterioration in privately owned rental properties available to the poor. This planning, or absence of planning, results in expansion of slums. Franti- cally concerned with this phenomena, government considers that the problem is the slumlord. He is the villain. He must be brought to heel. Who should deter- mine whether the tenant gets what he pays for and what he ought to have? The answer to this is to organize the tenants for “more” of everything and to encour- age tenants to protest politically. In the extremities of the rapid influx of cul- turally inexperienced tenants from the rural south, the tenants are almost wholly devoid of understanding housing economics. Nor is there a very good reason why they should when government responds to clamor and organized threats. It is not intended to condemn tenants for complaining about housing condi- tions. Neither is there any intent to argue against good housing. But the argu- ment is advanced that when welfare allotments for housing will not support the costliness inherent in good housing, something is amiss, Why are basically sound housing structures being abandoned in larger American cities when hous- ing shortages exist for the poor? The answer is not simple, but no one can deny that the enforcement of housing codes that deny capacity to make a reasonable profit for prudent ownership and management is a growing factor. 1824 Confronted with operations that are profitless, under circumstances that the market value drops as neighborhoods decline, the landlord faces a bitter choice. Evidences of this choice exist in most cities. Codes cannot be enforced against poor landlords in favor of poor tenants, and call the result justice. We have reached the point where boarding-up and abandonment set limits on code enforcement. It is not only nonsense to talk about “intensive code enforcement” under such conditions, it smacks more of planned witch-hunting and official ignorance. : Not only has the underlying economics of housing regulation been over- looked. An even more devastating condition has resulted from placing the physical-structural jurisdiction of HUD in juxta-position with financing and subsidy programs without policy guidance as to impact upon the lives of people affected. HUD is a collection of operational programs that the present adminis- tration is attempting to bring into central focus. These programs view people as equals except for the degree of spendable money. The facts are that ability to function in urban conditions is divergent and divergent to a degree previously unknown with the immigration of Europeans. Moreover provision of physical housing for families unlearned in urban living is more likely to cause the hous- ing to adapt to prior life-styles of the inhabitants than the inhabitants to adapt to the opportunities inherent in good housing. This function concerned with adaptation is an essential ingredient that flows from the composite of voluntary and forced mobility of the poor. Whatever may be said it is certain that the capacity to deal with this matter is not in HUD. Nor can it be developed in HUD without duplication or massive unsettling of existing centers of expertness. But it is this expertness that must be infused into the complex. In seeking definition of the criteria through which dwelling units, environ- mental surrounds, neighborhoods and urban complexes can be approached, the comprehensive definition of the World Health Organization surfaces. Moreover, most nations struggling with parallel problems give allegiance to this concep- tual formulation and make it the center focus around which housing controls function. Although Health, Education, and Welfare has not achieved organiza- tional arrangements to maximize effectiveness, it must be recognized that one of the primary hindrances to such organizational perspective is the disjointed ~ relationship inherent in the HEW-HUD power distribution. Whatever may be said the basic burden is on Congress. It must be recognized that functional service to people is the key and that structural arrangements and redistribution of family units into planned housing, neighborhoods or metropolitan areas is a means and not an end in itself. At present the combination is proving unworkable and showing little promise of improvement. We live in a federal system in which both the responsiveness of elected offi- cials and the power of the purse are gradually concentrating policy control in central government. This thrust is reinforced by continued emphasis upon equali- tarianism. A constant effort to reassess distribution of authority is a sometimes overlooked part of our system. When Congress responds to political pressures the movement is usually toward uniformity. And so it should be as long as the equalitarian doctrines permeate our culture. But undue burdens cannot be placed upon local governments when equalitarian thrust runs afoul of economic and social capacities and values. If Congress finds it politic to provide better housing it must recognize that this must be done in conformity with our even more basic faith in justice and that justice, in the ultimate analysis, is intensely personal. Congress oversteps its proper bounds when it imposes standards that cannot be met except through undue burdens on owner-occupants and landlords so great as to force abandon- ments. The traditional limits are minimum health standards that are a combi- nation of nuisance concepts and demonstrated conditions that produce unhealthy effects. Beyond this minimum the criteria are essentially political insofar as they can be imposed. These elements are compatible with the comprehensive definition of health, but they cost money. The local burden should be tailored to a maximum of popular support. The administrative burden is to raise the hori- zon of understanding and stimulate support patterns. When the federal govern- ment imposes demands upon landlords or owner-occupants through making urban renewal funds dependent upon local acceptance of code provisions, the basic fabric of local autonomy is threatened. More than this, the approach is 1825 essentially one founded in bribery. It constitutes a subtle attack upon the very rationality of the voters upon which democratic government depends. Finally it must be noted that the bribery is to a local government, to deal with its land- lords and homeowner-occupants as minorities which can be penalized for being poor. Certainly this is not a conscious purpose of Congress. Critique of Housing Codes and Administration The APHA-PHS housing code was devised as guide to local health officials. It was designed to appeal to a wider concept of public health regulation than was then institutionalized among public health administrators. As such it was ahead of its time and more nearly forms a segment dealing with the dwelling unit under the World Health Organization definition than a statement of agreed-upon values at the time it was formulated. Being applied under pressure and often- times against the better professional judgment of local health officials, it has generated confusion and dissatisfaction. Withal, it is probably the best contem- porary statement of an ideal dwelling unit code available, even though it is euphonistically called a minimum standards code. Because it has been adopted by some four thousand local units as entrance ticket to the urban renewal circus, it must be evaluated as not being an indige- nous thrust toward local betterment. Since the codes derived from this ancestral one, have met HUD approval and are more or less in force, it must be pre- sumed that what is, meets the contemporary values of Congress. An attempt will be made to point out weaknesses, but conditioned by the consideration that correction can and must be within the value system expressed in these instruments. II. THE HOUSING CODE PROBLEM (1) In a study of more than two hundred local housing code administrations, nearly all in cities, no instance of regularized, jurisdiction-wide enforcement was found. Even houses in the better class residence areas, and those built within the last few years, are not free from violations. The same generalizations can be made about building codes. These codes are enforced under special cir- cumstances ; building codes in new construction and on complaint and housing codes in selected areas and under political pressures. Straightforward, annual inspection with effective imposition of penalties would put a good share of the people in the streets and probably result in ousting the political leadership of the local government undertaking the program. (2) At present a gap of growing importance is developing between land use planning and housing code jurisdiction. This relates to the neighborhood sur- rounding the dwellings. Probably more usable housing is lost each year through neighborhood deterioration than through anything that happens within the dwelling structure itself. There is a serious need for development of criteria which implement housing eode evaluations. A “good” house in a bad neighbor- hood environment is not worth the same support and reconditioning that it would warrant in a better environment. Relatively too much emphasis has been, and is, placed upon the dwelling unit, and too little upon the surrounding condi- tions which contribute to livability. It must be emphasized that criteria appli- cable to this expanded concept are primarily related to the comprehensive defini- tion of health. (3) Housing code administration, typically, makes no effective adaptation to urban renewal programs. This is true even when both administrative proc- esses are interlocked as creatures in which HUD has an interest. Codes are enforced putting owners to great expense in areas where urban renewal plans are to undertake demolition within months or a year or two. Given the type of administration that is encouraged, the only way such situations can be dealt with is through the closing of official eyes, or some other technically illegal practice. Reliance upon illegality is hardly appropriate when such a slight rela- tion exists between health and compliance. This situation, as well as recogni- tion that areas classified as “rehabilitation” but having a probable life expec- tancy of a relatively short time before the bulldozers move in, should support a gradation of enforceable code provisions equating costs with serious impact upon health. , (4) Housing codes are essentially an urban phenomenon. They are relatively uncommon in suburban and almost lacking in rural areas. This is in the face of the facts that sub-standard housing is proportionately greater in the rural 42-778 0—71—pt. 6—8 1826 areas, and that lack of suburban standards increases likelihood of future slums. The principles underlying the APHA-PHS code should be extended to cover all housing. The rigor of provisions should be tailored to (a) the level of affirmative understanding and support of local voters in relation to (b) the economic resources that can be found to support compliance modifications. This is not an argument that nuisance conditions should be tolerated. A special and rapidly increasing problem, especially in suburban and exurban areas is the mobile home. The dwelling unit is best regulated at place of manu- facture, but the environmental conditions in which such units are validated are being tragically ignored. This is a problem related to housing codes, but best approached as an expansion of land use controls. (5) An obvious limitation in housing regulation programs, yet essential to coordinated action, is the development of records which provide a running de- scription of housing supply and needs, with subclassifications relating to rents, location, neighborhood resources and special accommodations for different cate- gories of people such as physically handicapped, blind, deaf or crippled. Such records are essential to program planning and coordination. They are slowly coming into existence. (6) It is the exceptional city or county in which coordination of development of low-rental housing is undertaken in a planned program to enforce codes, as such housing becomes available. The relocation efforts in many, if not most, cities are too far removed from those influential in the development of public housing or other subsidized units to give an impression that both enterprises are directed at a common purpose. This observation extends both to relocation resulting from urban renewal projects and to other programs that result in demolition of occupied low-rental housing and owner-occupied housing. Deci- sions as to availability and adequacy of available dwelling units should be made with greater operational expert discretion than is possible by reliance upon housing code standards. (7) A serious problem exists in many local jurisdictions in coordinating housing code administration with other more or less related administrative processes. Housing codes center attention upon occupancy and maintenance. When issues of this type can be considered without structural change the entire compliance mechanism, short of judicial review, can be contained in the housing code administrative system. But if the code administrator discovers a dwelling unit without a bathroom, he is in no position to competently determine the instal- lation of this facility. There are or should be plumbing code or building code experts available for this purpose. If a structural change to prevent fire is needed, the matter should properly be referred to the fire prevention code people. The intercommunication system with its checks and balances and necessity of keeping executive and legislative officials cognizant of operational results fre- quently leads to confusion. Few cities have diagnosed and developed solutions that work smoothly. When responsibility becomes confused, the enforcement processes suffer and blame is difficult to place. Few codes recognize the existence of these matters and central governments have seldom provided enabling legis- lative guidance. It must be clearly understood that a housing code program can place burdens upon a variety of agencies. (8) Housing codes are designed to rely upon criminal penalties to obtain compliance. In our tradition, criminal penalties are enforceable only when criminal intent can be proved. Housing code administrators are prepared to prove violation, but stumble relative to proof of intent. The defense of “hard- ship” is widespread and the longer codes are enforced in a city, the resistance based upon this claim tends to harden. When a housing code is first adminis- tered something of a honeymoon period can be expected. Numbers of owner- occupants and landlords can be found in which compliance can be obtained through bargaining and threats. In these situations the cost of compliance can ‘be absorbed within the economic framework. The widespread belief that there are slumlords is not entirely a myth, but low rental housing cannot be expected to be supplied at rates made inevitable by welfare allotments. (9) When evidence of violation, without supporting evidence of economic ability to absorb the compliance costs entailed, is cumulated in public prosecu- tors’ offices an undue burden is imposed. This is reinforced by the widespread ignorance of the importance of housing code regulations, and by the apathy of voters generally. Political leaders cannot be expected to bring pressure to 1827 enforce little understood laws, not widely supported, and without consideration of the burdens imposed on owner-occupants and landlords. (10) Codes do not sufficiently distinguish relative importance of different violations. The serious and the trivial are treated as equal, and an administrative bur- den is imposed that can only be effectively accommodated through illegal relaxation. The appearance of equality in violations is largely an illusion. It is of utmost importance that administrative discretion be delegated to accom- modate different violations in different circumstances. Buildings scheduled for demolition within months or up to two or three years should not be dealt with as are similar building$ in relatively stable environments evidencing permanence. As long as present conditions are imposed upon administrators and prosecutors the code administering system will continue in undue confusion. The difficulties lie in the legislative authorization and empowering, not in the inspection processes. (11) Codes require a wide variety of expertness that is usually not present in administrative agencies. Most codes presume that administrators can evalu- ate existing housing, estimate costs to bring it into compliance, and then deter- mine whether these costs will constitute a percentage of the value of the property when the modifications have been made. Only an agency large enough to provide these subsidiary experts can effectively function. Most code adminis- tering agencies not only lack these basic experts, but have no functioning relationship to involve them in critical determinations. No encouragement, or not enough, has been given to developing jurisdictions providing enough code administration business to warrant employment of the variety of experts essential to effective enforcement. The expansion of adminis- trative areas, by contract or other devices, could readily be encouraged with inducements sufficient to meet experimental costs while such programs get underway. HUD has been much more concerned with adoption of codes and enforcement of penalties than with the development of competent administra- tive units. (12) Well-trained, experienced health administrators command salaries be- yond those possible in the typical small city administrative unit. Combined with the need for supplementary expertness, a conclusion is obvious that housing code administration should not be undertaken by units unable to provide essential competence. There are not more than a handful of housing code administering agencies in the country able to meet these conditions. In encour- aging smaller and smaller units to undertake housing code administration as the urban renewal programs are encouraged in these smaller local units the situation can be expected to show little improvement. Another possible direc- tion of development would involve greater reliance on state concentrations of needed expertise. (13) Too little attention has been given to the preparation of citizens to understand and support codes. Much more attention and resource should be devoted to obtaining citizen support, especially among those most directly affected. This is difficult because the poor read few newspapers. Use of tele- vision is more likely to produce results. This means that effective code work involves skillful and expensive public relations. Few local governments have experience in this type of operation, especially when the local political leaders are not dealing with indigenous local issues. It can be stated that the develop- ment of public sympathy and assent has been inadequate in nearly all local governments. It is equally true that public health officials have had longer and more extensive experience in this enterprise than other governmental agencies. This experience and competence should be utilized insofar as possible. As the trend is developing, the effective participation of public health officials in housing regulation is declining. Failure of states to integrate these matters into coordinated state-local systems is noteworthy. (14) A fundamental difficulty in housing code enforcement is the lack of consideration that housing, to be effective, is part of a milieu which includes neighborhood and surrounding environment. A dwelling unit cannot be effec- tively evaluated, as to costs that can be sustained, without concern for its desirability and life expectancy as part of a functioning neighborhood. Its desirability as an element in a neighborhood cannot be evaluated effectively without assessment of services and community resources. From this vantage 1828 point the housing code in its present segregated function, should be considered a first step. Even if enforcement is ‘‘stepped up” without a perspective that encompasses the quality of surrounding environmental factors, and the pres- ence or absence of elements that make for neighborhood living, the: is . serious question that the public interest is markedly advanced. Housing codes are indubitably soundly based in public health expertness: they are thrust in an unquestionable direction toward public welfare. They are not administered with full utilization of health expertness, nor with regard for economic realities. It is high time that the foundation laid become a basis for more effective steps ahead. Dr. Pagratr. The codes are too explicit. They have the characteris- tics of building codes. They try to exhaust the expert functions in the definition. You cannot exhaust expert functions in terms of widths and heights and depths and light without leaving some ele- ment over that requires discretion. To me, it is essential that that basic discretion be exercised by a person trained in public health. A person trained in public health requires a salary which is not commensurate with the mass of small villages and cities that are coming under the urban renewal program. As they come under the urban renewal program, they adopt codes. As they adopt codes, they do not have the expertness to run the codes, and the codes are drifting into the hands of people bit by bit who are not trained in the basic expertness that is concerned with health, and I am using “health” here in the World Health Organization base. I thank you. Senator Percy. We thank you for your testimony. I note this very extensive study entitled “Housing Code Adminis- tration and Enforcement” that you made, at the direction HEW and cooperation of several organizations. I presume you gave very careful consideration to the Paul Douglas Commission and what they did in the way of studying housing codes. Their conclusions were, of course, that we need much more uni- formity of codes, among other things. Do you largely agree with the studies that the Douglas Commission conducted and the findings that it made, and do you see any evidence that since that Commission has filed its report that anything has been really done about it? Dr. Parratr. I should state first that the Douglas Commission report data came out when I had assembled my information, so that it was simply a question of comparability. I believe uniformity of codes is relatively unimportant. I think the uniformity principle upon which the code is reached, or pointed, and I think the capacity to which it can be reached in a given situa- tion should be on one basic conceptual pattern. I do not believe that you can or should try to enforce the same code everywhere. For instance, at the present time housing codes in the municipalities are not applicable in many parts of the United States in many of the suburban areas, and in practically none of the rural areas. Now, I won’t argue the uniformity of these codes in the rural areas would answer the question. If we are talking about cities that have comparable conditions, if we were talking about Cleveland, Phila- Sots, Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, I would say that the codes will approximate uniformity. 1829 But the difference between the code for that and a code for Evans- ville, Ind., and Joliet, Ill., are different. There are more dilapidated substandard housing units proportion- ately to total housing units than there are in the cities. I don’t know if that answers your question. Senator Percy. Do you think, though, under a rule of law that you can selectively administer housing codes without violating enforce- ment of the laws? Dr. Parratt. Of course, you can. We have zoning categories, and I have served on the planning board for some 14 years. The principle of classification in the public interest to achieve differentials in en- vironmental conditions has been underplayed, not overplayed. The classification of cities under the old CRPs, for instance, which could be made, demolition, rehabilitation and conservation categories or, areas are probably just as realistic as the zoning structure which relates to one-family or two-family houses, industrial, commercial. We are just habituated to the assumption that that pattern is a valid pattern, and the other pattern gets caught in the egalitarian prin- ciple. note Percy. I am not sure I fully understand how you could selectively and equitably administer codes. Wouldn’t that place a tremendous amount of power in the hands of the people who would have the responsibility for administering them ? We have great problems in urban areas. I know that in some cities I am quite familiar with there are pay-offs to local building inspec- tors, who can ignore code violations. At least, when we find them violated, we can go back and find out why, and who benefited as a result of it, and whose discretion was needed, and bring that to bear. It seems to me that we have selective administration now. Dr. Parrarr. We do. Senator Percy. It is easier to pay off an inspector $10 or $15 or $20 and not administer the code than to spend $300 or $400 to make the necessary repairs. That is where our great problems come in. Dr. Parrarr. The problem is complex. But I have seen situations in which codes have been enforced by intensive code enforcement programs a year or two before the area was marked for urban renewal. You can expect an owner in a situation like that to cooperate, if he is sure he can sell the cost of the bathroom back to the city. But where he can’t sell it back to the city, and where there has to be discretion exercised, where that happens it is an encouragement to illegal use of discretion by enacting codes that don’t recognize the hard realities of hardship that have to be faced. You know as well as I do that discretion can be delegated to make these kinds of relaxations in terms of principle, but the principle has to be in the hands of somebody who is capable of exercising a trained judgment and that trained judgment has to be health, or at least until somebody else might come up with an other better criterion. I haven’t found another. Senator Percy. What evidence have you found that building codes are largely dictated by vested interests, trade unions, building con- 1830 tractors, who want to keep out, for example, plastic pipe, which is perfectly usable, but it doesn’t fit into their particular business to do so? If they originally build into the local system which they can more effectively control than can some higher authority, is this a contributing factor to the hodge-podge that we now have of build- ing codes? Dr. ParraTT. As we move toward national uniformity in building, materials, codes move toward uniformity. It also moves toward block- ing the development of what might be called the “breakthrough” © approach. There is no question about that. I have been to the conferences and meetings of the major code organizations. These are the building code people, and there is no question but that they in effect demand a fee for approval. They don’t say so. Senator Percy. Mr. Parratt, I want to thank you very much for being with us, and I am going to read over with great interest the study you have made. Dr. Parratr. May I have leave to make a few modifications that I did not read at all? Senator Percy. Yes. Thank you very kindly. Our next witness is Dr. Robert E. Knittel, Department of Com- munity Development, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Ill. He has worked with assisting isolated inner city residents to help themselves. We are delighted to have you with us, Doctor. STATEMENT OF DR. ROBERT E. KNITTEL, DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT, SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, CARBONDALE, ILL. Dr. KxrrrEL. Thank you, Senator Percy. I have been asked to summarize, which I had intended to do, and I will summarize on the health education aid program, and add some comments on citizen participation. I have been involved in community development for the past 17 years and a good part of that time I have been involved with govern- ment programs designed to improve housing, neighborhoods and towns, such as housing rehabilitation, urban renewal, public housing, community planning, comprehensive health planning and various programs of this type. I have been involved not as a government official nor as a direct recipient of the programs but, rather, in an attempt to get people to try the programs and to make them work in communities. One of the programs with which I was fortunate enough to be associated is the health education aide program which Mr. Walker referred to a little while before. The problem here was that in connection with the rat control program, the rats could be killed, but more rats would take their place unless the people could clean up their environment and make sure that conditions were such that it wouldn’t encourage more rat infesta- tion. 1831 So, the idea that the people in Chicago came upon was to use health education aides to work with the people in the neighborhood on an almost door-to-door basis to talk about improving sanitation. I was called in to train the aides and set up a program for doing so in Chicago. Today, it appears that this is one of the most successful govern- ment programs with which I have been associated. Subsequently, the Bureau of Community and Environmental Man- agement asked me to work with them in training trainers’ for these aides, and we did that last year. Some of these trainees have gone back to various cities and have had a great deal of success. Some of the cities in which I gathered information from the super- visors and their administrative superiors included Cleveland, Chi- cago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Nashville. The point that impressed me about the program was that for once it had greater success than we could have imagined in terms of meet- ing the particular goals set for it. Another advantage is the enthusiasm that developed in the city administration for the program once it was thoroughly understood. One of the problems that this program gets at is that the housing codes stress legal responsibilities for landlords, but the responsibili- ties of tenants are not nearly as explicit. Even in cases where tenant legal responsibilities are spelled out, it wouldn’t make much sense to try to enforce the law against the mother of eight children by putting her in jail or fining her. So, the process seems to work something like this: The aide works with the residents, the family, usually the woman in the house, some- times with the children, to bring about changes in attitude and be- havior in regard to the residential environment. We start by concentrating on a very small area, the immediate living space. This may be 150 square feet of the kitchen. The aide helps the resident to obtain mastery over that area. This concern can then be extended to other rooms in the dwelling and then outside the dwelling. Once you get outside the dwelling, there is a different set of rela- tionships, that is, social relationships. Many of these residents are what is referred to as socially isolated. That is, they have very few contacts outside of that dwelling. When they start making contact outside the apartment, there are other apartment dwellers to share responsibilities for the cleanliness of the halls, stairs and yards. The residents see the need for meeting with neighbors, and then they may gather with a group in the apartment or on the block to work with others toward goals with reference to the rat and roach control program. I think this ties into the remarks that Dr. Hinkle made yesterday about the physical and social environments acting together to determine variables of health. The role of the health educator aide in placing the initiative on the recipient of services is an important one. The aide does not promise to deliver anything but says that “We will try.” That is, “We will try together,” the resident and the aide, and if they fail the first time, they will try again, and usually the aide is able to effect some 1832 kind of change, with the many resources that are available in these neighborhoods on a citywide basis. Now, what is the significance of the program ? As seen by the administrators, there are at least five areas that are important, and some that may be less important, but one is positive results, which means that real significant problems of an immediate nature will be solved in the ghetto. Housing improves, sanitation improves, and the people know their government cares about them. Another factor is that many existing resources from the ghetto and the city have been put together through the efforts of the health educator aide to solve the immediate and real problems. The aide program has been extended to middle-class programs. The health educator aide enables the city administrators to gain citizen participation in meaningful community organization for neighborhood environmental improvement as well as for other objec- tives of municipal concern. A very important factor in the whole program is the placing of the aide in a professional field, the field of health, with professional people pursuing professional goals. This gives perspective to the motivation that the aide has, and which the aide develops in the people of the neighborhood. I want to stress that the program is comprehensive. We are basic- ally dealing with environmental problems, but the aide is concerned about whatever problem is facing that person at that time. As some- one mentioned before, you can’t talk about sanitation if the children don’t have food. So, this is the problem that the aides have to address themselves to first. So, what we have come across, perhaps rather fortuitously, is that in a situation where rats are competing with human beings for living space, you can work with individuals and groups in an effort to defeat this invasion into the environment. This serves as a focus for the immediate environment, of which many people are not really aware, and from that focus you can move out into the apartment, into the block, into the neighborhood. With this as a beginning, the mastery of a real live enemy such as a rat, the neighborhood residents can go on to mastery of a number of problems that plague them. I believe this relates to the earlier statement by Dr. Cassell, that health is related to the degree to which people feel they have control over their destinies. Yesterday and again today in the testimony, the next subject has come up, and I would like to point out that in the past we have had Government programs that required citizen participation. We had Urban Renewal, and this resulted, more or less, in a mayors’ com- mittee which was kind of a rubber stamp for urban renewal pro- grams. We had citizen participation outlined as a part of the OEO pro- gram. I was amazed the day I read the OEO legislation, to find that it said “there shall be a representative community organization.” This, in effect, is kind of like creating the wheel for the first time. The fact that you could have a really representative community or- 1833 ganization in itself would be a tremendous asset to a community, but not a fact that could be readily ascertained as a prerequisite for a Government program. We have in comprehensive health planning a guideline that says there shall be 51 percent consumers and 49 percent professionals. These kinds of pronouncements and guidelines do very little in terms of helping the people actually implement this kind of pro- cedure. Citizen participation and people involvement in planning is a very complicated and specialized kind of activity. There is a great deal known about it, and there is a great deal going on. There is a lot more in people’s heads than there 1s in books, but one of the things 1 think that has to happen to fulfill the Government programs is that the expertise, the knowledge for this type of activity is going to have to become part of the Federal arsenal of aid. That is, we are going to have people who can really assist groups, cities, communities, in performing these types of community involvements. We will have to create an expertise within the existing programs in order to bring this about. The involvement of people in the planning process, as shown in number of programs that have attempted to do this in neighborhood development, has many difficulties, one of which is the fact that the people, themselves, do know their needs. They may not, however, be aware of some of the pitfalls. Just as we should not take a blueprint from an expert and try to implement it on a widespread basis, neither can we take a blueprint from people who are not experts and try to implement it, even on a local basis. Fala I think the trick here is to develop a kind of a meeting between the people who are knowledgable in these areas, the experts, and the people of the neighborhoods, to bring about the kinds of changes in which they are interested. Now, along that line there are some trends that are of interest. I think Senator McGovern mentioned the possibility of individual neighborhood standards and codes. Some work has been done in the area of housing societies. They have been tried in new subdivisions,’ and the possibility has been explored of trying to apply this concept to existing neighborhoods, in which the people—and I think legally it would have to be 50 percent of the people—would sign covenant among themselves as to standards and amenities, which they would want for the neighborhood. Professor Jan Krasnowiecki, of the University of Pennsylvania, has worked out the legal groundwork for such a plan. He has written a model State Housing Societies law. Working together with the city, they would attain those standards and assess people in the neighborhood to see that they were either enforced or that they were provided at the individual level. This, I think, has possibilities for tying into decentralization of our cities. It is not, certainly, to be adopted as a universal plan nor to say that tomorrow we should try to put this type of thing in opera- tion in all our cities. We need to utilize these proposed programs as pilot programs and we need to try to draw some results from what happens and make the results available to others. 1834 But, generally, in terms of Federal programs, I would like very much to see a direction away from specific programs where, within one area, say the XYZ program, you work with an agency that is going to do the job, and work with another agency to do the training that is to help them do the job, and work with another organization to get the funds which are going to do the special projects which the special organization is going to do. This type of fragmentation makes it almost impossible to do any kind of a coordinated program that is going to mean anything. Senator Percy. Thank you, Doctor, very much. Let me ask you about the number of professional people who are available to help solve some of these problems. When this country decided to go into a space program after Sput- nick, we massively trained people all over the country, Ph. D.s were given by the thousands every year, and fellowships were created by NASA, and we developed a highly sophisticated group of specialists to handle these problems in a short period of time. I think President Eisenhower began a program of putting more emphasis on training of school teachers. We have a surplus this year. We have more teachers potentially applying for jobs than we have jobs. What is the level of competence, the number of people who are urban specialists now, available to work on the problems of the cities? Dr. Kn1rrEL. This would depend on the type of urban specialist. There are all kinds of urban specialists. Senator Percy. Let’s concentrate on housing and health. Dr. KnrrrEL. It would be really difficult to give an estimate on that, because there are specialists in so many areas, even in housing. But I would say, in terms of the area of community organization, which is the one that I am closest to, community organization and citizen participation, I would say there are perhaps 500 people who have real competence in this area. Senator Percy. Is there homogeniety among the 500 as to the nature of the problem we face, the errors that we have made in the past and some of the things we ought to do to correct them, or are they as divergent in viewpoint as we sometimes are down here ? Dr. Kn1rTEL. There are divergent viewpoints, but they tend to fall into several schools, and I think it is possible to bring these people together to talk about the relative advantages and the merits, the appropriateness of various approaches to various situations. What we tend to get is, at one point, involvement of everybody, which is popular, and then a kind of confrontation becomes popular, and, other various types of styles become popular. What we need to do, and this is where I would see a Government- type of expertise, and I don’t see why we can’t get it, just as we have expertise in the FBI, in space and other things, in the whole area of community organization and citizen participation. This would be a reservoir to which the people at the local level could refer and could get consultation, and training, to assist them in problem solving. Senator Percy. I wanted to ask you, and then we may call Dr. Spivack back to ask him how he feels; how we can go about organiz- 1835 ing our big cities on a decentralized basis, and whether little city halls are an answer. I live in the District, but I live in Georgetown. Our problems are different from the problems of other communities in other areas. The nature of the problems we are dealing with are so different that I can’t believe that to solve ‘a problem we must go downtown to city hall. Someone else has to work on it, you know, that fully understands the nature of our problems. Now, I can’t imagine the associations and organizations looking at our problems would be of much help in solving the problems in a section of the city very far removed from us with totally different problems. Does a small city hall, breaking down our municipal units, offer any possibility for an organizational approach that would more per- sonalize city administration so far as smaller and more manageable numbers of people are concerned ? Mr. KxrrrEL. 1 think certainly decentralization is a direction in which we have to go, because when it comes to people in their imme- diate vicinities, as I said before, we can’t impose blueprints, and that is what we are trying to do when we administer a large area with the same rules. They are not going to be uniformly applicable. The housing codes are not, for example. In a very small environment, we should try to localize the problem and make 1t relevant for that particular situation, and this is a very important function. This is another type of arrangement that might be approached through the housing association concept, which would give a legal basis for community organization. One of the problems we have with community organization is that it tends to be spotty and discontinuous, and if we could somehow tie it into a legal basis, I think this would have great possibility for making more permanent the difficult work of community organization. Senator Percy. I would like to try to visualize a family, say, up in the Robert Taylor housing, on the 15th floor, which has a dropout problem, which has a literacy problem among the adults of the family, including drug addiction. The impersonal nature of family life in a large apartment dwelling in the city of Chicago is well known to us. How do you reach that poor family? How do “you get them involved ? How can you offer the kind of helping hand which might have been offered in their community from which they came, because people knew them, saw them on the streets, saw them out in their yards, but now they don’t even know they exist up there? Mr. Knrrren. The way they are doing it now through the health education aide program in Chicago and other cities is to knock on the door and say, “I am from the Health Department, and I am inter- ested to see if you have any problems we can help you with.” This approach takes people by surprise, because very often a caller is only welfare checking up on somebody. So this kind of approach has been successful in gaining entry. The whole matter of gaining the confidence of the individual and family is one which the aide takes on. 1836 They are trained for that. They are acquainted with various styles of help, why help may be rejected, and they know how to try alterna- tive styles, and they do it very skillfully. One of the things that has amazed me in the program is the lack of great turnover in these aides themselves. They seem to be very highly motivated and enjoy the work a great deal. Now to many of us I think, the fact of facing these bleak prospects every day would be rather dismal. However, what sustains them is the fact that when they are able to help someone they see some change. It is a tremendous force— a motivating force for the aide—so that this motivation kind of works together. One of the things that has seemed to work is the idea of reciprocal help, rather than the idea of, “I am just here to help you.” That is, the resident is helping the aide in some terms or other, in terms of getting the job done or in helping make a better neighborhood. Senator Percy. Would it help to recognize community organizer as an occupation and to train our young people for this type of position right in the schools? Mr. K~1rTEL. Yes, I think so. We don’t have any formal training, generally speaking, in our lives for this. There is some starting. But now there is little in our secondary education relating to people. We just have taken this for granted, but like a lot of things in our society, Institutions and rituals and so forth, we are having to recreate them just as primitive people had to do when they were faced with the new industrialization some time ago. So it is coming around to us now. We have to analyze what we are doing and how we do it. We need to start in the secondary schools. We have graduate training in this now, of course. Senator Percy. We see evidence of polarization in American society, and we have seen a good deal of polarization in recent years between tenants and landlords. Can you give us the benefit of your own experience in getting them together for common improvement of the property, and are you encouraged by the possibility of attaining these objectives and goals and with each party thinking of their,own responsibilities and seeing this improvement unfold ? Mr. KN1rTEL. Yes, I am encouraged, Senator Percy. I will have to give the experience second hand, because it is aides that do this, and they do it pretty much in their own context, with people who are familiar to them. pL But they will very often attempt to arrange a meeting between the landlord and the tenant, and they say this is much more effective than talking to the landlord or to the tenant alone. In some cities, you have a large number of properties owned by widows who were given the property through their husbands estate, thinking that it would give them an income in later years. Many of these people do not know how to manage property. They do not know how to collect rent, they do not know how to get tenants to take care of the property. : The aides have been able to work with these landlords and with the tenants to assure better cooperation on the part of both. 1837 They have been able to talk to landlords and have them make avail- able large apartments and even large houses for large families, by saying that they will continue to work with the people who are going to move in, and if the landlord will keep the place up, they will also try to take care of it. , This has been very gratifying. Now, I am not so sure how this would work in terms of large parcels of property owned by corpora- tions, or even individuals. However, I have heard of a case where a landlord hired a health education aide type worker for a block of row houses to work with the tenants. So I would assume that he would think it economically feasible to do this. Senator Percy. I want to thank you very much indeed for your appearance today, Dr. Knittel. We appreciate it a great deal. You have made a valuable contribution. Mr. KnrrreL. Thank you. Senator Percy. Our last witness is Dr. Eric Mood, professor of health, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale Uni- versity, New Haven, Conn. Dr. Mood, I am going to hopefully suggest to you to pull all this together. You can integrate what we have heard and boil it all down for us. You have had extensive experience in health and environ- mental problems, and we are very pleased to have you as our anchor witness today. STATEMENT OF MR. ERIC MOOD, DEPARTMENT OF EPIDEMIOLOGY AND PUBLIC HEALTH, YALE UNIVERSITY, NEW HAVEN, CONN. Mr. Moop. I am delighted to be here, and to have this opportunity to talk with you and to discuss some possible solutions to these prob- lems that have been with us for a long time. This has been an area of great concern to me since my days of graduate study under the late Professor C.-E. A. Winslow, who I believe did more than any other man to identify some of the primary issues of housing and health. There has been some very excellent testimony presented which has discussed various ways in which housing and health are very inter- twined. We have heard a great deal about some of the things that ought to be done in specific areas. In retrospect, it is unusual that there has not been more public health involvement ;—that we have not recognized and acknowledged publicly the intimate relationship of housing to health. In the testimony that I have prepared and am submitting herewith, I have indicated several reasons why I think this has happened, and have laid some of the blame largely on the shoulders of the Federal Government for failure to look more closely at the problem and to implement programs that will accomplish the stated objectives of the national housing policy. The policy to which I refer is that which was stated in the Housing Act of 1949, namely, establishing a decent home in a suitable environ- ment for every American,—one that will provide for the health and social well-being of the occupants. 1838 I think that we might look in detail at some of the corrective action that might be initiated. These actions have been hinted at by some of the previous speakers. First of all, I think that we must establish a new or revised national housing policy. The present housing policy, which was established in 1949, and which has been reaffirmed in subsequent legislation, must be restated either in a new form or in a revised form. This revision should permit the fulfillment of basic human needs and health requirements, and yet at the same time provide for the establishment of a decent home in a suitable living environment. In order to provide decent housing in suitable environments, the policy must include and emphasize those humanistic factors which are pertinent not only as necessities of life, but also as amenities of life. The policy should stress the cultural and the social aspects of hous- ing. We heard excellent testimony yesterday on these issues. It is apparent to me, as I hope it is to you, that the new or revised housing policy should include a general indication of the types and scope of action programs that will be undertaken by the Federal Gov- ernment to meet the social and cultural needs of people for an adequate residential environment. I would like to stress the human need for a decent home in terms that have not been emphasized sufficiently. I refer to the economic need. I consider it a national disgrace that welfare payments today to economically indigent people are at such a low level that they cannot reside in anything but a substandard dwelling in a substandard neighborhood. The Federal Government, through the establishment and the main- tenance of the current welfare program, is supporting numerous “slum lords.” The Federal Government seems to condone ownership of substandard dwellings which is a highly profitable business. In establishing a new national housing policy, we must require coordination of the many agencies of the Federal Government that have or should have a role to play in developing a decent home in suitable living environments. This coordination has been lacking in previous legislation, and it may be one of the reasons why current legislation has been unable to solve present problems associated with housing. There are many agencies of government that have a role to play in the provision of a decent home in a suitable environment. We cannot expect a single agency, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to solve this problem alone. I have singled out in my testimony the fact that I believe the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare should more deeply be involved in the implementation of a national housing policy. Unfortunately, to date this Department has not been permitted to become deeply involved, and I am very much concerned about it. I am also concerned about the reorganization of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare called for under Reorganization Plan 8 and the establishme=t of the Environmental Protection Agency. There is a need to establish a strong element in our Federal Govern- ment which will be concerned about the effects of environment on 1839 man, generally, and of the effects of the residential environment on the health of people, specifically. The new Environmental Protection Agency seems to have but one mission, which is to protect environment from man. What good is the environment if we don’t protect ourselves from environmental haz- ards so we may live to enjoy the environment ? I think Congress should take bold leadership now in establishing an effective program to meet human needs for adequate, safe, and health- ful housing. This has not done it in the past. I don’t know why Congress has been so timid. In establishing a new policy, Congress must concern themselves not only with the urban housing problems, but also with the rural hous- ing problems. We have heard testimony that the problems of rural housing are as severe, if not worse than those associated with housing in the inner city. Proposed solutions to current housing problems must be compre- hensive and must include the residential environment. We must begin to act immediately to develop solutions to these problems. Departing from summarizing my prepared testimony, I would like to make a few remarks about the subject of some of the questioning that took place earlier today and yesterday. I am prompted to suggest that this committee look rather critically at some of the housing programs of other countries, particularly in Western Europe and in the USSR. Several of these countries, notably the Netherlands and the Scandi- navian countries, have had considerable success in meeting the social and cultural needs of people for improved housing. As new housing has been built and older housing has been rehabili- tated, the quality of housing in these countries has been substantially improved and the residential environment has been enhanced to a high degree. While in the USSR 2 years ago as a consultant for a World Health Organization Traveling Seminar on Public Health Aspects of Hous- ing, Urban Planning and Metropolitan Development, I was im- pressed with the role that the public health profession has played and is playing in programs of providing new and improved housing, or redeveloping and renewing cities, and of planning and building new towns. They have made tremendous progress and I think that we have a lesson to learn from them. It is most unfortunate that there has not been more dialogue between the public health, the housing and the planning officials of the USSR and the United States. I acknowledge that there are hazards inherent to proposing that a Senate Committee take a trip to another country, but I feel I should do so, because I think that much can be learned from the successes and failures of these countries. I suggest visits to Scandinavia, the Netherlands and the USSR. I would like to also try to answer a question that Senator McGovern asked earlier. I refer to the question concerning a city or a town in which social concepts were basic to development or renewal. 1840 In answer to that question I would like to suggest that the city of Tapiola, Finland, be considered as an example of good social planning. This is a satellite town outside the city of Helsinki. It is a beautiful town, but more than that, it is functional. This city is a functional city, because the managing director, who played a very important role in its development applied social con- cepts to the planning. Dr. Heikki von Hertzen, who has lectured in the United States many times, involved sociological principles in the planning of this city. I think we could learn a great deal from him and others like him. Senator, I hope that you and your colleagues will acknowledge the urgency that exists in these problems of housing and that you will act quickly in order that we may maintain our status as a great nation. If we fail to provide immediately adequate housing for our people, i.e., decent homes and livable environments, we will not be a great nation very long. Thank you for this opportunity to be with you this morning. Senator Percy. Thank you very much, Mr. Mood. I think you have done exactly as we hoped you would. You did not mention the accident prone nature of our housing structures, and I have been rather shocked by the incidence of accidents in homes. You would include that as part of good health as well ? Mr. Moop. Very definitely. I think probably the public health pro- fession should be admonished for failing to give more attention to this problem. Public health professionals seem to be more concerned about a person who is in the hospital as a result of an infection from a micro-organism than an individual with a broken leg caused by a fall in his home. I think we ought to address ourselves immediately to the whole area of home-accident prevention as a public health responsibility. Senator Percy. In contrasting walking through European cities and American cities, I am not only struck by the sense of personal discipline that European individuals have as they take care of their parks—the center of a park Sunday afternoon almost any place in Europe is meticulous. Ours are just pigpens by Sunday afternoon. Also, I am struck by the differences in housing structures. Many times, or most of the time, the housing structures are older. They don’t have the window space, they don’t have the facilities in Europe, and yet they seem to be neater, cleaner, and more sanitary, almost, than our urban areas. What, from your experience, can we do to rehabilitate our older neighborhoods in our urban areas? Mr. Moop. We have to do several things. I think the problem in the United States stems from the philosophy that this 1s the land of plenty; that we don’t have to conserve our resources; that we can always move somewhere else; and that there is always plenty to replace that which we have used. ‘We must realize that there is a limitation to all available resources, and that any act of degradation of these resources is going to affect ourselves and others. 1841 Therefore, we need to recognize the need for the reuse of resources and facilities. If we are going to rebuild or rehabilitate our cities, I think we must look at then more than just as a rehabilitating or rebuilding of structures. We have to rehabilitate and rebuild neighborhoods. Some programs of rehabilitation of housing that I have seen have failed because community services and facilities that are necessary to support rehabilitated housing are not provided. In many cases we must provide additional governmental services, better transportation, better schools, less noise, parks, off-street park- ing, et cetera in addition to improved housing. Too frequently, urban renewal programs have focussed on build- ings. Some housing programs have been structurally oriented. The totality of human needs of people has not been considered. Often we have forgotten that houses are to be occupied by people, and that we need to do more than just put in a new bathroom, or repair windows or repaint. Usually we have done nothing to improve the social environment. Senator Percy. Dr. Spivak, I wonder if you would join us for a second here? We are going to finish promptly, but I would like to ask Mr. Mood, I noticed in the administration’s 1970 housing act, that this contained no national housing policy as such. I wonder when we get the new Congress in next year, the 92d, whether it might not be well for us to suggest a national housing policy statement to be incorporated into the Housing Act of 1971, and we will have 2 years in the Congress to work on a housing bill. We did not incorporate in this bill anything controversial. We said, in fact, that because of the time we would not have anything contro- versial in there, So what we have is a forward movement of existing programs, but I think we could have a hard look. Is it possible for you to put together a statement that you would like to see incorporated into a national housing policy for this decade and let us take a look at it and see whether we can’t suggest it to HUD? Mr. Moop. I would be honored to do that, sir. Senator Percy. I want to apologize to you for the necessity of leav- ing the room. We have two vacancies in Federal judgeships in Illi- nois. I have been working for a year to fill these vacancies. Two men were before the judiciary committee this morning, and I had to be there to represent them. Only for that reason did I leave. But I have read your testimony. On the top of page 9 you talk about certain physical facilities we could use. We retreat to our cars, convert our neighborhoods to free- ways, our housing and yards to parking lots. We learn we must drive with our windows closed and our doors locked. I think you have given us a graphic illustration of what should not be the quality of life in America. I have watched with interest some of the things that Mayor Lindsey has done in New York—the closing off of streets. I spent a delightful Sunday in Central Park where all the automobiles were cut off. It was very pleasant. There were literally thousands of bicy- 42-778 O—171—pt. 6——9 1842 clers. I understand the Smithsonian has plans for Washington to finish off bicycling routes. Do you think the bicycle will ever have a comeback? Can we make it patriotic to use a bicycle ? Dr. White tells us it is the finest form of exercise so far as main- taining health. We are spending tens of millions of dollars to under- stand heart disease. We are a sedentary group of people. I now find that I rather enjoy quorum calls, because I have decided I am going to trot, outside, every quorum call over there. I hate going through the tunnel and riding on the subway. But I think we have to discipline ourselves, living in the cities, to do more of this. But today, to ride a bicycle from my home down here would imperil your life, I think. You just can’t do it. And yet we do have wonderful bicycle rides in Washington down by the canal and in other areas. Is it possible that this could be another approach and avenue, and as an expert now in this field, would it be an exercise in futility to try to encourage the American public to try to ride to work on bicycles again and go back where we were, but make it a pleasant, healthful, and nonpolluting means of moving ourselves about ? Mr. Servack. Well, I think that you have aptly pointed out the hazards of riding a bicycle. I think that bicycle paths are really designed for the recreational rider, and I doubt very much that, given the spread nature of most American cities and the density of traffic and the very great distances that often occur between destination points in a given business day in the life of any individual who must transport himself in the city, that a bicycle will solve the problem. It is good, cheap, point-to-point transportation and it is often faster than the traffic, but it is not very good when it rains or when it snows or when it is very cold out, and it does not carry much in the way of baggage. Unless decentralization of facilities from the central city stops following the direction it has been following, that is, going to recentralization outside of the city in groups of like functions— industrial parks and this sort of thing—that this kind of thing won’t be possible, that in fact we will have to have a much finer grain of urban redevelopment. In other words, we will have to have our destinations close to our homes before bicycle riding becomes practical. I wonder if I could take the opportunity to somewhat answer the question that you posed earlier on the small city hall? Senator Percy. Yes, I would very much appreciate it. Before we leave the bicycle thing, I would like to comment that I got out of a taxicab in Chicago the other day and walked 6 blocks and then had to wait 10 minutes for the cab to catch up and pick me up again. There is a man up here on the staff of the housing and urban affairs committee, who I have seen put his shorts on and bicycle home. He would like to start a Hertz Rent-a-Bike for in-city use. I yield to you for the question, and we will adjourn in about 2 minutes, if we can. 1843 Mr. Moop. If I may, I would like to add a thought. An increasing number of the faculty at Yale University are bicycling to and from work, and a larger number would if we could solve one additional urban problem. I refer to the problem of safety on the streets. Many more faculty members would bicycle to and from work but bicycling in the city after dark is not safe. If we could stop crime on the streets, I think bicycling in urban areas would increase. Dr. Servack. Dr. Robert Somer, in Davis, Calif., has been working in his own city to make bicycling practical. The weather is accommodating there. There is a tremendous revival of bicycling there. It might be well to look into what they have done. Senator Percy. Go right ahead with your final comment. Dr. Seivack. My experience with small city halls is not first hand, and I have not followed the experience very closely. Just intuitively I think the scale of the little city hall’s relationship to the individual is still too distant. If an individual is to be able to communicate his deeply felt environmental needs, he must first be able to communicate with other people on an informal basis, with others who may have felt the same need, before he can express the need to an official in language that might result in an official action. Instead, I would support the establishment of a finer grained sys- tem which gives us neighborhood city halls in a sense, neighborhood centers, suggesting, perhaps, that when we become affluent enough we can rent space in a house in every block and open that space up for community use. It would be publicly owned, and it should be associated with a route in the play network, and it should be adjacent to informal food cen- ters, someplace where you can sit down and eat and drink. It could be a meeting place of a very stable and informal sort. This can relate to a small city hall on a regular basis. Since we are such a communicating society and media focussed, we could consider a program in some cities which would provide mobile radio stations which have limited broadcasting range, and maybe would only encompass a half a dozen blocks or so, and people who ordinarily listen to the radio during the day while they work, while they are at home, could tune to the station that is being broadcast by local people, listening to music, and also discussing very local neighborhood issues, and at some regular repeated time during the year, one of the largest stations could have every neighborhood represented in a series of dis- Sassions of the problems that have come up with a kind of continuous orum. I expect we would spread competence and bring issues to light. With phone contacts and a similar format to the talk shows on the radio, we might be able to elicit in this way the people, unknown people in the neighborhood who have the competence to deal with the problems, who have found unique solutions and are willing to spread them. I have a proposal written for such an experiment. Senator Percy. Thank you very much. Without objection, and there is no one here to object, we will insert in the record a pamphlet “Mental Health Facilities and Model for Fiscal Planning,” by Dr. Spivack, and supplementary material, “Mental Health Implications” also by Dr. Spivack and his colleagues. (The documents referred to follow :) 1844 Soc. Sci. & Med. 1970, Vol. 3, pp. 513-528. Pergamon Press. Printed in Great Britain MENTAL HEALTH FACILITIES A MODEL FOR PHYSICAL PLANNING* MAYER Spivackt and HAROLD W. DEMONE, JR.} Laboratory of Community Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School Abstract—Considerable emphasis has been placed recently on the importance of social planning in mental health. In this article, in order to complete the planning gestalt, we will discuss the major features of physical planning. CONSIDERABLE emphasis, all necessary and appropriate, has been placed recently on the importance of social planning in mental health [1]. In this article, in order to complete the planning gestalt, we will discuss the major features of physical planning. On a previous occasion [2] we have discussed the structure and function of a compre- hensive planning unit proposed for a state mental health authority. This model was explor- atory and we spoke sparingly of the necessary physical functions. More recently, further research and field experience have given us information to suggest more definitively the physical planning functions necessary for truly comprehensive planning. The recommen- dations set forth in this paper are derived from the findings of the authors’ research project— Research for Community Mental Health Center Planning—in which detailed studies were carried out on the planning processes in six emerging community mental health centers in Massachusetts between 1958 and 1966. SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS We urge strongly that a comprehensive planning unit should be established as a staff service to the director of every large state, county or city mental health authority. A section of that unit concerned with physical planning should be directed by a fulltime professional physical planner, trained and experienced in city, regional and institutional planning pro- cedures. Other specialized physical planners may be added as necessary or, alternatively, contract services may be used. A rational format for the operation of the physical planning services follows. *Supported in part by a grant from the Permanent Charities, Inc. to the Medical Foundation, Inc., and from a National Insitute of Mental Health Contract, to the Laboratory of Community Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. tDirector, Environmental Analysis and Design, Laboratory of Community Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Former Associate Director of Research for Mental Health Center Planning: The Medical Foun- dation, Inc. {Executive Director, United Community Services of Metropolitan Boston; Assistant Clinical Professor of Social Welfare, Laboratory of Community Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and formerly Director, The Massachusetts Mental Health and Retardation Planning Projects and Research for Mental Health Center Planning, The Medical Foundation, Inc. 513 1845 514 MAYER Spivack and HAROLD W. DEMONE, JR. A STATEMENT OF PURPOSE The physical planning unit should coordinate and supervise all physical and temporal planning activities in each new or renovated mental health facility. It should, in addition, provide consultation services to the Mental Health Authority and to its satellite facilities, such as mental hospitals, community mental health centers and child guidance clinics. The Planning Section should provide instruction in procedures of physical planning to people engaged in all levels of planning, from the Mental Health Authority central planning agents through the local facility director, as well as to representative local community groups. It is recommended that sufficient personnel should be employed on a fulltime consultative or contract basis to enable the Planning Section to solicit aggressively the active interest and participation of all individuals and agencies concerned in community mental health planning efforts. The Planning Section should have the duty of notifying relevant individuals and agencies at all levels of their respective roles in a given planning project in sufficient time to allow such projects to be expedited smoothly. The specific areas which the Planning Section must coordinate and supervise on a local and state level include the following, in the order listed: I. Comprehensive and long range planning. 1. Budgetary planning. 2. Legislative involvement. II. Project planning. Communications and community organization. Statewide site location studies. Site selection. Complete administration of architect selection procedures. Architectural contract administration, management. Consultation to and free dialogue with architects and their local clients (staff of future facility) during all phases of architectural work. Architectural programming research. Site planning studies. Schematic drawings. Preliminary design studies. Final design drawings. 11. Working drawings. 12. Review and release of construction contracts and schedules. 13. Construction and on-site design modifications. 14. Establishment of maintenance standards, schedules and procedures, and their supervision. Pris Loh Sooo III. Evaluative research review and feedback. 1. Continued research. 2. Review and feedback. It is essential that these steps be performed in the order described to provide adequate lead time for all personnel involved in the planning. Each step must provide information to 1846 Mental Health Facilities: a Model for Physical Planning 515 support the step which follows. For example, the architect must be selected in time for him to collaborate in the development of the treatment program with the architectural pro- grammer and before detailed site plans are prepared. These then are the operating procedures in skeleton form. In order to give form and sub- stance to the role of the physical planner, selected procedures will be discussed in more detail in the following pages. I. Comprehensive and long range planning 1. Budgetary planning. The facilities planning unit should be required to provide and coordinate development plans for every facility under the jurisdiction of the Department of Mental Health. This includes the existing facilities which preceded the establishment of the planning unit itself as well as planned new facilities. The usual concerns of institutional or facility planning should be foremost in this regard—facility expansion or contraction, diversification, duplication and possible development of supplementary facilities within a given local area. It should be the further obligation and charge of the Planning Unit, in collaboration with other departments, to draw up capital expenditure projections for a minimum period of five years. These projections should always be available for reference for the planning and coordination of facility development on a state wide basis. Although the budget projection is understood to be flexible and predictive rather than controlling it should be held to realistic proportions and adhered to as closely as possible in the planning of real time projects in order to provide information for major area-wide planning decisions. Such financial plans are especially needed where local areas within the state are in competition for the development of new facilities at some considerable expense [3]. Such planning demands a continuous, up-to-date evaluation of needs and resources available to popu- lations across the state. II. Project planning 1. Communications and community organization. It is to be expected that The Planning Section, in the course of planning and designing new facilities for new areas, will have been working closely with the community long before the architectural contract is awarded. The physical planners will have a special responsibility to work directly with neighborhood groups and residents near the site of the new facility. In community mental health center construction, it will be especially helpful to invite the community to participate in the planning of the center, to define its own needs with the help of the central Department planning staff, and to become early and thoroughly involved in the new acquisition. There is growing evidence that intensive community involvement in planning activities of any type, whether urban renewal or mental health center planning, aids greatly in the acceptance of the project and contributes in countless ways to its success. Site planning issues frequently arise in contiguous areas at the same time. It is not un- likely that mental health centers will be in planning stages at the same time as nearby structures. It is recommended that early and frequent communication between the site planners of communicating or congruent areas be established. It is essential that channels be opened for rapid and spontaneous communication, so that planning issues may be resolved by dialogue and analysis cooperatively and promptly. In the planning and construction of community mental health centers or other health- care facilities, the destruction of homes will inevitably affect community relations negatively 1847 516 MAYER SPIVACK and HAROLD W. DEMONE, JR. unless acceptable replacements have already been provided. Public agencies must take great care in the manipulation of the physical environment to insure that all their actions are seen as beneficial by the community, and that their political power and use of legal force is exceeded by their good will and discretion. Community mental health center program directors and the program director for any building should be hired as early in the planning work as possible. The best time for hiring the director of a community mental health center is at the very beginning of planning work, during site evaluation and selection studies. Deterrents to early hiring of a director should be remedied by a re-examination and recasting of the legislative requirements and obligations imposed upon the Commissioner of Mental Health with regard to the hiring of the staff. 2. State-wide site location studies. The rational choice of the best location for a new structure should first be based on an analysis of community and regional needs and their existing and proposed services. The choice of a general location within the broad geographic area should be made on the basis of criteria which relate to the community on a large scale. Such issues as population density, social ecology, etiology, public transportation patterns, community image and identity, and location of other care-giving facilities must be dealt with. Many planning and architectural firms are equipped to provide this service. 3. Site selection. When a community has been chosen to receive a new facility, planning efforts to select a specific site within that community must be initiated. Historically, site availability has constituted the major criterion which linked and merged the choice of site location and the issue of site planning. Many other criteria must be considered. The criteria which rationally bear upon optimum site location are best evaluated collaboratively by the architects, mental health specialists, site planners, physical planners and representatives of the local community. Such decisions are not simple, are not usually arrived at quickly, and may properly be the subject of a sophisticated analytical study and report. It is recom- mended that a location committee be formed from the previously named groups to study site location criteria and solutions, and to make a recommendation as to three alternative site locations, listing their respective advantages and disadvantages. Alternatively, as in the case of State-Wide Site Location Studies, this service may also be obtained from many architectural and planning firms. Land cost should not be a prime consideration in the location or site planning when considering the most advantageous location for a multi-million dollar structure. Obtaining cheaper land from public agencies in preference to better located land from private or other public sources, or purchasing small and comparatively inexpensive parcels of land instead of relatively costly and roomier sites in order to save a few thousand dollars, may un- necessarily and inappropriately limit the effectiveness of the larger investment in the physical plant, and treatment services. Such savings fall into the category of false economy. A well located facility has the potential to draw more patients and therefore render greater service than a less than optimal location. 4. Architect selection. The design methods and sequences recommended in this paper will require architects of more than average sophistication and ability. The education and training, and indeed even the professional practices of most architects does not always include the experience of designing to the type of exacting performance specifications required for therapeutic facilities. Also, few architectural firms are equipped to participate - in the necessary follow-up procedure of evaluation and criticism of the working, finished 1848 Mental Health Facilities: a Model for Physical Planning 517 product. Therefore, it will be found that not all architects who formerly were considered eligible to design state owned buildings will be willing to adhere to this structural design process. Mental health treatment structures and buildings are complex and extremely subtle in their effects upon the success of therapeutic efforts. In most parts of the country a quick tour of the buildings produced by conventional design preconceptions will convince the sensitive and observant administrators that conventional architectural practices have produced many very poor buildings—buildings which do not assist the staff in their work or allow the patient any dignity, identity or freedom. Such structures require the services of the best and most advanced architects. The effort needed to locate and select these better firms will be more than repaid in the quality of the product. A patronage list of architects who may receive government contracts is not good enough; nor is a list of architects approved by the state as competent and solvent. Competitions for the best design are not suitable for the selection of architects to work within this system because the building cannot be designed without exhaustive attention to the program document which will not exist that early in the planning sequence. It is recommended that architects be chosen by interview and by site visit evaluation. Interviews with the corpor- ation principals and also with the proposed project director and designers should be held at the offices of the architectural firm. A tour of buildings designed by that firm and dis- creet interviews with the administrators and occupants of those structures should be con- ducted. The interview panel should include several recognized architectural educators who also have or have had their own commercial practice, and/or highly competent practitioners in good standing in the American Institute of Architects [4]. The balance of the panel should include individuals from the local professional community who will use and/or administer the new facility. 5. Architectural contract supervision. The relationship between a contracted architect and the Mental Health Authority and other government department clients should be reviewed and reformulated more sympathetically and more liberally, with more attention to the objectives of producing a satisfying human environment. Greater stress must be placed on architectural and construction quality as defined by the most advanced state of each of the relevant arts. Architects should be encouraged to produce designs which improve the quality of life and aesthetic conditions surrounding users, especially at mental health facilities, where a good environment may be considered to weigh heavily in the balance between emotional health and emotional sickness. The traditional two criteria used by governmental construction authorities to evaluate architectural plans and construction programs financed by the state—initial cost and administrative efficiency—must now be greatly de-emphasized. For it is expected that by the introduction of a formal architectural programming procedure in the letting of contracts for community mental health, the best balance between architectural quality and dollars and cents and efficiency measures will be achieved. Procedures surrounding the financial administration of architectural and construction contracts should be simple and clear. Legislation and administrative pro- cedures for the handling of finances should be simplified and rationalized so that the decision sequence requirements of different planning and construction tasks are met. Close attention should be paid to the sequencing as suggested in earlier recommendations re- garding the relative times of hiring the architects, (including the architectural programmer), and the landscape architects, and the letting of construction project contracts. Architectural fees and construction costs must certainly remain a factor. However, they 1849 518 MAYER SPIVACK and HAROLD W. DEMONE, JR. must be weighed realistically against the more illusive but equally real social costs and social utilities which are inherent in environments of high or low quality. An environment which provides a high degree of human satisfaction in living and working over the long term may save many thousands of dollars in employee job continuity and in productiveness annually. In the case of mental health treatment facilities, there is strong reason to believe that a high quality environment, sensitively, appropriately, and hospitably conceived, can contribute to the early and successful rehabilitation of the mentally ill, with subsequent social and financial savings. 6. Architectural programming. The rational architectural design of complex structures housing diverse functions demands the services of an architect or other design specialist whose efforts are devoted exclusively to articulating the new building’s physical, spatial, functional, and ‘‘aesthetic” requirements. Before an architect can begin to design a new building, he is obligated to understand the needs of his clients in great depth. He must solicit and evaluate the desires, judgments and opinions of those who will use the new structure. The individuals who work in each area will have knowledge of the working patterns peculiar to their specialty, and therefore will be in a unique position to help the architect to fit the form of the structure to the circulation patterns, space requirements, and atmosphere of the functions it must house. Buildings designed without this minute analysis of functional requirements are often less than optimum in performance, and frequently require costly post-construction modifications. Without a program for design furnished by the clients, an architect must provide such a program for himself, or otherwise begin designing by trial, argument and error, hoping for the best and probably obtaining the worst. The latter course is unfortunately the too fre- quent choice where relatively small amounts of money are awarded to architectural firms for their designs; many very poor buildings have been designed this way. If the firm chooses to provide its own program for a complex structure it will be at the expense of six months to a year of their lead time before construction is due to begin. The writing of a program document should be funded separately as a first stage in a series of design stages by an architect and should not compete with actual design work on the same job. Further diffi- culties often face the architect who writes his own program and result from a tendency of both the architect and the client to move too early into design work at the expense of con- ceptual planning. It is, therefore, recommended that contract funds be made available to secure the services of the architect as a program planner (in the first phase of the design contract, or in a consultant capacity) at an early date. His function and obligations would be as follows: to furnish, at the request of, and in collaboration with, the client, a written program covering at the minimum, the following categories [5]: Statement of purpose—What is the purpose or objective to be achieved by those using the building, what is the purpose of their work ? Implications of purpose for location of structure, site planning, and architecture: What special demands, limitations and obligations are imposed upon the architect by the purposes and objectives of those to be housed in the new structure. Program Function Analysis: What are the individual program elements which make up the general program? That is, how many separate staff and personnel functions must be 1850 Mental Health Facilities: a Model for Physical Planning 519 considered? How are these separate functional areas linked or related to each other? What are their individual architectural requirements ? The programmer should perform at the minimum, the following sequence tasks for each separate area to ensure that the full range of functions have been considered in detail. A. Organization of all working personnel into groups or committees whose job it will be, in collaboration with the programmer, to consider in greatest detail the environmental characteristics, qualities and objectives needed and desired for their own particular area of the new structure. A typical schedule of topics for the attention of such groups should include at the minimum such items as: 1. Function and purpose of specific area being considered. 2. General statement of environmental objectives, characteristics or qualities to be met in the new design. a. probable furniture types to be used and their possible groupings in behavior settings. 3. Detailed description of environmental objectives, etc., in terms of: circulation patterns location requirements within the “system” of the building number of individuals using the area types of social or professional relationships to be encouraged sensory qualities of spaces (acoustics, illumination, etc.) air movement problems (such as originate in kitchens, laboratories, etc.) desired “feeling tone” of the space, i.e. whether openness, control, freedom, in- formality, or formality, etc., are desired time span or time use of area—will there be 24-hr continuous use of the space or will the building be closed for portions of the time ? Will there be significant subdivisions of time in the “on time period”? kinds of surfaces, textures, materials needed for the area auxiliary functions associated with area, i.e. janitorial needs, policing, parking, etc. . possible future needs for expansion and/or physical change specialized utility installations for equipment or processes which require such installations, such as acid proof plumbing, 220 volt wiring, etc. m. room volumes in cubic feet n. floor area requirements in square feet. F mmo pa0 op fig Ces B. Essentially the programmer is gathering program data about physical, spatial and qual- itative requirements in the new design. In the role of a mediator and catalyst to both the architect and his client, the programmer will aid in evolving explicit design goals for the architect, and will help re-articulate and even perhaps reformulate the objectives of the client with respect to a new structure. Program objectives and instructions should be easily translatable from and into researchable hypotheses concerning the predicted functioning of the buildings, their spaces, equipment, and the behavior of the user population in the settings to be designed. These hypotheses will form the basis for later evaluation and analysis of the finished structure in use. These hypotheses should also be stated as perfor- mance specifications which the designers and builders should be asked to meet and upon which the success of their work will later be evaluated. The programmer must, therefore, meet as many times as is necessary with each of the area or function committees and with 1851 520 MAYER SpivAck and HAROLD W. DEMONE, JR. the architect. In this capacity it becomes necessary that the programmer be allowed a free choice of communicants at all hierarchical levels. C. Following the evolution of design specifications, it is the obligation of the programmer to organize this material into narrative with illustrative flow diagrams, coupling and de- coupling linkage diagrams, organization diagrams, and other material which might prove helpful to the architect. D. To ensure the full communication of the program document and intentions and their realization in the final design, the programmer must be allowed or required to follow through collaboratively with the architects as a design consultant until the completion of the work. E. The programmer must be required to provide a written and illustrated post-construction analysis of the building within one year of its opening. The provision of evaluation feedback to the Department of Building and Construction, the Department of Administration and Finance, the relevant department heads or commissions, and the architects is a necessary step in the quest for better buildings. Analytical examination of a working building, in the light of the goals made explicit in the hypotheses and performance specifications of the written program, is the best way of evolving improved structures for the future. 7. Site planning. The Mental Health Authority, or its newly recommended Planning Unit, should hereafter establish as policy in the development of new mental health facilities or the planning of additions to old facilities to obtain the services of professional architectural site planners simultaneously with the hiring of the programmer. Site planners should be hired at the same time as the architects’ contract is let. The site planners and the architects should be able to confer collaboratively with the mental health center personnel in the dialogue with the architectural programmer. In the siting and planning of new structures adequate attention must be paid to the following considerations, which are traditionally the concern of the site planner. A. Site topography—The land form and the elevation or contour of the available land all influence the position of new structures on the land as well as the plan for the structure. The sub-soil structure—the geologic structures underlying the surface of the land, such as bogs, streams and ledge rock—can place exacting requirements on building location for a par- ticular site and can strongly influence and limit the type of building foundation allowable on a particular piece of land. The type of building foundation in its turn can influence the overall form of a structure as well as its expense. B. Future expansion program—Future building plans for the new facility may involve extending existing buildings or adding new structures elsewhere on the site. Adequate attention must be paid to the overall utility of the site, as well as its aesthetics both before and after the addition. C. The zoning requirements—Local zoning ordinances often specify maximum floor area ratios, building heights, set backs, building depths, and parking provisions. All of this and more must be dealt with on the site plan. D. Utilities—New buildings may be served by newly laid water, sewer, electricity and heat- ing ducts. Sub-soil structures, topography and other considerations must be dealt with for the proper placement of these vital supplies. E. Climate and micro-climate—Regional climatic conditions have a bearing on the position- ing of buildings with regard to prevailing winds, wind forces, variations in natural light 1852 Mental Health Facilities: a Model for Physical Planning 521 from season to season, depth of rainfall, height of snowfall and snow disposal problems. The immediate environment of a building may be influenced by other buildings nearby or by large topographic features. Low buildings may be cooled in the shadow of skyscrapers in the summer; a building in a valley just a few hundred yards from a similar building on the top of a hill may experience widely differing light, wind, air circulation, humidity, rain- fog accumulation, temperature and other climate variables. Such climate differences within the same regional areas are often extremely subtle and difficult to analyze and may signi- ficantly affect the positioning, form and location of buildings on the land. F. Acoustics—Traffic noise, such as may be experienced near a freeway, or the noise from a playground or other source may either be amplified or masked by intervening land forms, vegetation or other buildings. Noises generated within a structure may pleasantly or un- pleasantly advertise its functions to the neighborhood. High frequency sounds, being directional, may be buffered by high walls, sunken roadways, and by certain kinds of vegetation. Low frequency sounds are harder to suppress. Occasionally the distance between a noise source and a structure can significantly affect the quality of life within it. Such conditions must be analyzed for given sites, decisions made about the best placement of new structures on the land with regard to acoustical criteria. G. Landscaping—No construction project or architectural design is complete without the reestablishment on the land of some natural vegetation to soften the harshness of new, man-made environments. Trees, sensitive landscaping (involving the moving and moulding of the earth and changing of the land form), and planting of shrubs and ground cover can significantly affect an architectural project and change the image and public acceptance of a new structure in the community. Further, the skill of the landscape architect with con- struction materials, the design of terraces and patios, walkways, roadways, retaining walls, lighting fixtures, and canopies, can greatly enhance the beauty, usefulness and public acceptability of a new project by extending its hospitality usefulness outward to the com- munity beyond its formal and functional boundaries. H. Access—The ease with which vehicular traffic can be moved onto and off the site or stored on the site can be either a constant source of annoyance to those who use the building or a tremendous boost in efficiency. Pedestrians need to have clear, simple and pleasant access from the street into the building. The requirements of particular age groups and the disabled may influence the positioning of the building on the land or the design of the land form or its landscape architecture. I. Internal circulation—Within the building or buildings, circulation patterns resulting from their functions will influence their mutual placement in interrelationship on the site, which in turn will influence the necessary site size and shape. J. Relationship to existing facility—If mental health centers are placed on the sites of general hospitals, it is expected that intercommunication between buildings and shared use of existing facilities will be encouraged. Much staff communication may be anticipated be- tween the existing and new structures. Such considerations must necessarily influence positioning of a new building with regard to its surrounding structures. K. Relation to local and immediate neighborhoods—A new mental health facility may be either outgoing and hospitable or ominous and oppressive. The immediate neighborhood and local community will be greatly affected by such differences in the visual image. The place- ment of the buildings on the land and the form of the land and its landscape may mediate 1853 52 MAYER SPIVACK and HAROLD W. DEMONE, JR. and communicate the uses of the center to the community and may greatly facilitate good community relations. Furthermore, neighborhoods almost always have some predominant architectural style which may be either complemented or negatively influenced by the intro- duction of a large new building. Landscape design and site planning must integrate the new with the old. Site Planning Summary. Site planning is a decision making and planning problem which must be considered separately from other issues. Site planning decisions must not be left solely to the architect designing the building or to the psychiatrists with whom he works. Site planning issues require additional rationale which include the ecological considerations of landscape design and plantings and for which a specialist should be consulted. (Items 8 through 11 are not discussed in detail because they do not require extensive client involvement). 12. Review and release of construction schedules. Where possible, tightly drawn and realistic planning and construction schedules should be provided for every mental health facility planning project. Loosely conceived schedules are more difficult to plan for, and frequently cause the waste of public funds. Schedules should be planned by collaborative effort, specifically for each new project. Construction contractors should be required to use Critical Path Techniques [10] in the planning of their construction schedules and sequences for optimum performance within the limitations of time and budget. 13. Construction and on-site design modifications. In this phase of project planning and development the architect and the client frequently will jointly tour the facility under construction. This is the time for last-minute detail changes. 14. Maintenance standards and schedules. Buildings constructed of high quality new materials will require regular maintenance procedures as specified by the materials and equipment manufacturers. Formerly Mental Health Treatment facilities were constructed on the Medical Hospital model and subjected to periodic antiseptic scrubbings and hosings. With the introduction and widespread use of chemotherapy, patients are no longer as frequently incontinent or unpredictably destructive of their environments. Therefore, there is no longer any need for patient-proof structures designed primarily for ease of maintenance. Main- tenance standards for new buildings should be based more upon aesthetic criteria than antiseptic ones. The informal tradition in which maintenance standards dictated the build- ing design (i.e. the structural tile everywhere evident in most mental hospitals) must now be reversed. The building requires maintenance to keep the quality of the environment at its optimum level for the aesthetic benefit and pleasure of the staff, the patients and their visitors. There must be a high degree of collaboration between the Standards Setting and the Inspection Program of the Mental Health Authority. As the array of mental health services becomes an increasingly complex web of interrelated public and private programs (in contrast to the traditional isolated state hospitals, small community based child guidance clinics and privately operated psychiatric services in general hospitals) the standard setting responsibility of the public mental health authority will increase. Some of this responsibility will be a consequence of the increasing use of grant-in-aid and contractual arrangements (state-to-local) and the subsequent responsibility for adequate supervision of the expend- iture of state funds. Other increased standard setting responsibilities will be the consequence of the state’s general public mental health responsibility. This includes both physical and 1854 Mental Health Facilities: a Model for Physical Planning 523 program standards and customarily is operated in conjunction with state and local public health and public safety authorities having similar responsibilities. The interrelationship and necessary feedback between the mental health standard setters and inspectors and the social and physical planners is critical and vital for all three groups. For the purposes of this paper, the planners need the field information collected from the inspectors. III. Evaluative research review and feedback The planning unit should be required to reassess its basic physical design and planning objectives with respect to changing treatment patterns in community mental health, public health and psychiatric practice at regular 5-year intervals. Out of this repeated re-evaluation process the planning section is expected to publish planning, architectural, programming, construction, and design guidelines for future contractees. Soon after the completion of each construction or renovation project, the planning section should be required to publish an analysis and evaluation of the quality and success of the project with respect to articulated program goals as specified in the architectural program. This feedback of data gathered in the field under working conditions from each building constructed under the auspices of the Mental Health Authority can be used as a basis for recommendations of future design objectives, for the development of prototype designs, and as the basic data bearing upon the rational re-assessment of physical design objectives as spelled out earlier. The planning section should function as a central clearing house, screening and evaluating all renovation and construction plans for facilities to be built or operated with the assistance of state funds. Careful consideration should be given to the “intangible aspects” of design quality and environmental quality in all plans submitted for approval. A member of the section should be assigned to study each project. This same individual will also be able to collaborate with the project planners and designers by bringing the most recent research results to their attention for utilization in the new facility. The Director of Planning should have final power of acceptance or rejection in cases of dispute. The same services of planning and design review should be made available to all private and public mental health agencies on a voluntary basis where requested. The planning section should organize a continuously interdisciplinary study committee composed of directors of state-run facilities, planning section personnel, other state level administrators and consultants, and other individuals from an unspecified range of public and private agencies who wish to participate. The objective of this committee would be to draw up recommendations for planning and design policy on an annual basis as a result of evaluative data gathered in the field from projects recently finished or under construction, and on the basis of the best available information from research. This committee should organize and hold regular annual mental health facility planning and design seminars. The director of every state operated or sponsored mental health facility should be asked to attend this seminar or to send his representative. The seminar should also be open to all others who wish to participate on a voluntary basis. The charge of this seminar is to provide the necessary information and dialogue for the work of the committee in the following year, and to generate and discuss alternative approaches to planning and design and to evaluate alternative and experimental models of new mental health facilities. The planning authority should keep an active, updated file of all mental health facility 1855 524 MAYER Spivack and HAROLD W. DEMONE, JR. planning documents produced in the state. Multiple copies, as part of a library and biblio- graphic reference service, should be available to all community agencies, mental health personnel, architectural programmers, architects, and state contractors. The planning authority should publish as necessary pamphlets and instruction aids on aspects of mental health facility planning for the guidance of mental health and archi- tectural professionals, community agencies, and contractors. The planning unit should publish information which spells out clearly and simply the desirable and required steps and procedures for the optimum performance of tasks related to mental health facility planning. Within the planning authority there should be a research section, which investigates, among other things, theoretical and practical aspects of the effects of physical environment variables upon the effectiveness of mental health treatment programs and upon the ecological states and behavior of staff, patients and clients housed within buildings planned by the unit. At least one member of the planning unit staff on a rotating basis should be seated on any panel or committee involved in the selection or interview of prospective architects for mental health center facilities. CONCLUSION An environment which provides a high degree of human satisfaction in living and working over the long term may save many thousands of dollars in employee job continuity, and in productiveness. In the case of mental health treatment facilities, there is strong reason to believe that a high quality environment, sensitively and hospitably conceived, can contribute to the early and successful rehabilitation of the mentally ill, with subsequent social and financial savings. In order to facilitate this process, a comprehensive planning unit, including a physical planning section, is recommended for each state mental health authority. Sequential functional areas of concern, visualized as specific procedural steps, have been suggested: 1. Comprehensive planning—Large scale coordination and development of plans for state-wide mental health facility construction. 2. Budgetary planning—Planning for capital expenditures based upon priorities derived from analysis of needs and resources. 3. Legislative involvement—The surveillance of pertinent legislative action and com- munication with legislators about Mental Health Planning issues. 4. Community organization—Physical planning in cooperation with local representation. 5. State-wide site location.—The selection of a broad area within which the best site for the location of a given facility may be selected. 6. Site selection—The choice of a particular site, out of a range of alternative sites, which best suits the architectural and locational criteria for the particular project. 7. Architect selection—The participation in selection of an architectural firm or architect whose responsibility it will be to design the physical plant for a new facility or for its renovation. 8. Architectural contract supervision and management—A liberal and rational approach to architectural contract management may yield higher quality environments at the same or reduced cost. 9. Architectural programming—The writing of architectural program requirements and building performance specifications. 10. 11. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 1856 Mental Health Facilities: a Model for Physical Planning 525 Site-planning—The rational and aesthetic placement and design of a given structure on its own land. Schematic Drawings—Projected organization diagrams and function form studies prior to final design decisions. Preliminary design studies—Exploratory evaluation of alternative design solutions appropriate to the information, resulting from function diagramming in the previous Schematic work. Final design drawings—Design decisions are made during this phase; having evaluated alternative solutions in the previous phase architectural studies emerge into detailed drawings which will assemble the final building. : Working drawings—The blueprint stage has been reached. These are drawings which the builders depend upon for their construction work. Review—Usually at this stage a presentation of the work is made to the client by the architect. It is a time for last minute questions and possible modifications to the plan. Release of construction contracts—Bids for construction are accepted by the client from competing builders. On the basis of the working drawings, a company is selected and the construction contract, schedules, and costs are sealed. Construction—The building goes up, construction work has begun, the architect is available as ‘a consultant’ to the builders and clients. Maintenance standards and schedules—The establishment of maintenance standards, procedures, and schedules, out of any specialized maintenance requirements of new building and finished materials. Maintenance standards should fundamentally be based upon the environmental quality and aesthetic requirements of the user populations, not upon cost. Continued research—Research activities associated with the physical impact of mental health structures on their user communities. Research on physical planning pro- cedures for mental health facilities. Research concerning environment-behavior effects of new architecture on user populations. Review and feedback evaluation of the finished facility, its design, construction and operation—Finished facilities must be critically reviewed against the background of design and program objectives and hypotheses, as were articulated and specified in the architectuial program. Such information must be fed back into the next genera- tion of facilities before any true evaluation may occur. REFERENCES Recently published social planning articles by the Massachusetts Mental Health planning group include: FoGELSON, FRANKLIN, Statewide planning in mental health: an early report. Social Work, 26-33, 1964. DEMONE, HAROLD W., JR. The limits of rationality in planning. Comm. Ment. Hlth J. 375-81, 1965. DEMONE, HaroLp W., JR. Massachusetts—a prototype for mental health planning. Psychiat. Opinion 3, 25-32, 1966. SCHULBERG, H. C. and DEMONE, HAROLD W., JR. The impact of mental health planning. Psychiat. Digest 27, 33-41, 1966. SCHULBERG, H. C. Private practice and community mental health. Hosp. Comm. Psychiat. 13, 363-66, 1966. SCHULBERG, H. C. and WECHSLER, H. The uses and misuses of data in assessing mental health needs. Comm. Ment. Hlth J., forthcoming. DEMONE, H. W., JR. and FOGELSON, F. Innovation through mental health planning, submitted for publication. DEmoNe, H. W., Jr., SPIVACK, M. and McGRATH, M. Decision making issues in the development of community mental health centers. Submitted for publication. THE MENTAL HEALTH PLANNING PROJECT, Mental Health for Massachusetts. Commonwealth of Massa- chusetts, 1965. The importance of a rationally drawn priority development system should be underscored. The problems 526 Lal 1857 MAYER SPIvAcK and HAROLD W. DEMONE, JR. of introducing rational planning are discussed in DEMONE, The limits of rationality in planning, Comm. Ment, Hlth J. 375-81, 1965. American Institute of Architects, The Octagon, 1735 New York Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C., 20006. Hough, JANE E. Architectural Program Guidelines, Washington, D.C.; Architectural Consultation Section, Mental Health Facilities Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, March 1967. LINDHEIM, ROSLYN. Putting research to work. AIA J., 1966. ASSOCIATED GENERAL CONTRACTORS OF AMERICA, CPM in Construction: A Manual for General Con- tractors, Washington, 1965. CorLins, F. T. Manual-Critical Path Techniques—for Construction. Know How Publications, Berkeley, 1965. O'BRIEN, J. J., CPM in Construction Management, McGraw=- Hill, New York, 1965. (Received 5 April 1969) Résumé—Un environnement qui permet aux employés de jouir d'un haut degré de satisfaction humaine, en vivant et en travaillant, peut épargner a long terme des milliers de dollars, puisqu’ils ne voudront pas quitter leur emploi et le taux de productivité sera augmenté. En ce qui concerne I'assurance de facilités pour la santé mentale, on a raison de croire qu'un environnement de haute qualité, accueillant et concu avec sensibilité, peut contribuer a la réhabilitation rapide et heureuse de malades mentaux et enfin a des épargnes sociales et financiéres. Pour faciliter ce processus, on recommande un corps compréhensif, chargé de dresser des plans, y comprise une section responsable des plans physiques pour l'autorité de santé mentale dans chaque état. On a suggéré des domaines de responsabilité logiques et fonc- tionnels, considérés comme des étapes spécifiques d’un programme. (1) Plan compréhensif—coordination en grand et développement de plans pour la con- struction, dans tous les états, de facilités pour la santé mentale. (2) Plan du budget—plan de dépenses capitales, fondé sur des priorités, provenant d’analyses des besoins et des ressources. (3) Role de la législature—la surveillance d’action législative pertinente et de communi- cation avec des législateurs au sujet de questions, se rapportant a la santé mentale. (4) Organisation communale—plan pour la construction, en travaillant avec l'aide des représentants locaux. (5) Choix d’emplacements dans les états—sélection d’une zone large, dans laquelle on peut établir une facilité donnée. (6) Choix d’emplacement—Ile choix, parmi un nombre de sites alternatifs, d’un site parti- culier, qui convient le mieux aux critéres architecturaux et locationnels pour le projet qu'on veut réaliser. (7) Choix d’un architecte—participation au choix d’un bureau d’achitectes ou d’un seul architecte qui sera chargé de préparer un plan pour I'installation d’une nouvelle facilité ou pour la réforme d’une facilité qui existe déja. (8) Surveillance et gérance du contrat architectural—une approche libérale et rationnelle a la conduite du contrat architectural peut créer des environnements de meilleure qualité au méme prix ou a meilleur marché. (9) Programmes architecturaux—il faut établir une liste de nécessités pour le programme architectural et de spécifications pour la construction. (10) Plan de I'’emplacement—I’emplacement rationnel et esthétique et le dessin d’une structure donnée sur son propre terrain. (11) Dessins schématiques—diagrammes de organisation projetée et études de fonction et de forme, avant qu'on prenne des décisions sur le plan final. (12) Etudes de dessins préliminaires—évaluation explorative de plans alternatifs appropriés aux renseignements qui résultent des diagrammes de fonction qu'on a faits au cours du travail schématique antérieur. (13) Dessins de plans finaux—a cette étape on prend des décisions quant au plan, ayant évalué les solutions alternatives de la phase antérieure. Les études architecturales se dévelop- pent en dessins détaillés pour le batiment final. (14) Epures—on est arrivé maintenant a I’étape du ‘blueprint’, c.a.d. des dessins, sur lesquels les entrepreneurs comptent pour faire leur travail. (15) Révision—a2 cette étape I'architecte présente le travail au client. C’est le moment de poser les derniéres questions et de faire quelques modifications dans le plan. (16) Adjudication de contrats pour la construction—le client accepte des offres pour la construction, faites par des entrepreneurs concurrents. Aprés avoir étudié les épures, le 42-778 0—71—pt. 6——10 1858 Mental Health Facilities: a Model for Physical Planning client choisit une compagnie, et le contrat de constructions, les prévisions et les frais sont fixés. (17) Construction—le batiment se dresse, le travail de construction a commencé, I’architecte est a la disposition des entrepreneurs et des clients. (18) Programme de niveau d’entretien—1’établissement de niveaux d’entretien, de méthodes et de programmes, selon les besoins spécialisés de I’entretien de nouveaux matériaux de construction et de finissage. On devrait baser le niveau de I'entretien sur la qualité de I’en- vironnement et des besoins esthétiques des consommateurs, non sur la dépense. (19) Continuation de recherche—activités de recherche associée a I'impression physique des structures de santé mentale sur ceux a qui elles sont destinées. Recherche sur les procédés de plan des facilités de santé mentale. Recherche au sujet des effets que produit la nouvelle architecture sur la conduite des consommateurs. (20) Examen et évaluation rétroactive de la facilité complétée, de son dessin, de sa con- struction et de son fonctionnement. On doit passer en revue d’un oeil critique les facilités complétées, en tenant compte des objectifs et des hypotheses de dessin et de programme énoncés et prescrits dans le programme architectural. On doit tenir compte de tels renseigne- ments pour la prochaine génération de facilités, avant d’aboutir a une évaluation sire. Zusammenfassung—Eine Umgebung, die einen hohen Grad menschlicher Zufriedenheit fiir diejenigen bietet, die dort leben und arbeiten, kann schliesslich Tausende von Dollars ersparen, da die Arbeitnehmer ihre Stellen behalten, und ihre Leistung steight. Wenn es sich um die Maoglichkeiten fiir die Behandlung von Geisteskrankheit handelt, glaubt man mit Recht, dass eine erstklassige Umgebung, die mit Gefiihl und Wohlwollen entworfen ist, zur frithen und erfolgreichen Sozialisierung der Geisteskranken beitragen, und dadurch zu gesellschaftlichen und finanziellen Einsparungen fithren kann. Um diesen Vorgang zu ermdglichen, wird eine umfangreiche Planungseinheit, einschliesslich einer Abteilung fiir die Planung der Gebdude fiir jede fiir die geistige Gesundheit zustédn- dige Behorde empfohlen. Folgende funktionelle Gebiete, sichtbar gemacht als spezifische aufeinanderfolgende Schritte, sind vorgeschlagen worden. (1) Umfangreiche Planung—grossrdumige Koordination und Entwicklung von Plinen zur Errichtung von Anlagen zum Schutze der Gesundheit auf Landesebene. (2) Haushaltsplanung—Planung fiir Kapitalausgaben, die sich aus der Analyse der Bediirf- nisse und der verfugbaren Mittel ergeben. (3) Einbeziehung der Gesetzgeber—Uberwachung der fachbezogenen, gesetzgeberischen Tatigkeit und Verbindung mit Gesetzgebern iiber Fragen der Planung fiir die geistige Gesund- heit. (4) Organisation der Gemeinschaft—Planung der Anlagen in Zusammenwirkung mit ortlichen Vertretern. (5) Bestimmung der Baupldtze auf Landesebene—Wahl eines weiten Gebiets, innerhalb dessen der beste Platz fiir eine bestimmte Anlage gew#hlt werden kann. (6) Wahl des Bauplatzes. Die Wahl eines besonderen Bauplatzes, aus einer Reihe alter- nativer Baupliitze, der den baukiinstlerischen und standértlichen Kriterien fiir das bestimmte Projekt am besten entspricht. (7) Wahl eines Architekten—Teilnahme an der Wahl eines Architekturbiiros oder eines Architekten, der fiir den Entwurf des Geb#udes fiir eine neue Anlage oder fiir die Renovierung einer alten verantwortlich sein wird. (8) Uberwachung und Ausfithrung eines mit dem Architekten abgeschlossenen Vertrags— eine grossziigige und rationale Inangriffnahme der Ausfiihrung des mit dem Architekten abgeschlossenen Vertrags kann Umgebungen von hoherer Qualitit bei gleichen oder niedrig- eren Kostern hervorbringen. (9) Programmierung des Bauvorhabens—Aufstellung einer Liste von Erfordnissen fiir das Arbeitsprogramm und von spezifischen Bestimmungen fiir den Bau. (10) Planung des Bauplatzes—zweckmissiger und &4sthetischer Entwurf und Bau eines Gebiudes auf dem dazugehdrigen Boden. (11) Schematische Zeichnungen—Organisationsdiagramme und Funktion—und Form- studien vor den endgiiltigen Entscheidungen iiber den Entwurf. (12) Vorausgehende Entwurfstudien—eine erforschende Abschétzung der alternativen Ent- wiirfe in Ubereinstimmung mit dem Informationsmaterial folgt aus den Funktionsdiagram- men der fritheren schematischen Zusammenstellung. (13) Endgiiltige Entwiirfe—Entscheidungen iiber die Entwiirfe werden wihrend dieses Stadiums getroffen; nach der Abschitzung der alternativen, wihrend des vorhergehenden 527 528 1859 MAYER Spivack and HAROLD W. DEMONE, JR. Stadiums gefundenen Losungen, entwickeln sich die architekturischen Studien in ausfiihr- liche Entwiirfe, die schliesslich das Gebdude umfassen werden. (14) Bauplane—das Stadium des endgiiltigen Plans ist jetzt erreicht worden. Die Bauunter- nehmer verlassen sich darauf, wenn die Bauarbeit beginnen soll. (15) Uberpriifung—gewdohnlich legt nun der Architekt dem Kunden den Bauplan vor. Es ist nun Zeit, die letzten detaillierten Fragen zu stellen und den Plan eventuell abzuidndern. (16) Freigabe der Bauakkorde—konkurrierende Bauunternehmer bewerben sich bei dem Kunden um den Bau. Auf Grund der Baupline wird eine Firma gewiéhlt und der Bauvertrag, das Programm und die Kosten werden vereinbart. (17) Bau—das Gebiude geht in die Hohe, die Arbeit am Bau hat begonnen, der Architekt steht den Bauunternehmern und den Kunden als Berater zur Verfiigung. (18) Massstéba und Programme der Wartung—Feststellung der Massstibe, der Massnahmen und der Programme fiir die Instandhaltung, mit Bezug auf irgend welche besonderen War- tungserfordnisse der neuen Bau—und Appreturstoffe. Das Instandhaltungsniveau sollte wesentlich von der Qualitit der Umgebung und von den #sthetischen Bediirfnissen der Ver- braucher, nicht von den Kosten, abhédngen. (19) Weitere Forschung—Forschung, die sich mit dem physischen Druck der der geistigen Gesundheit dienenden Vorrichtungen auf die Verbrauchergemeinschaften befasst. Erfor- schung der Massnahmen fiir die Erhaltung der geistigen Gesundheit auf dem Gebeit der Bauplanung. (20) Uberpriifung und riickwirkende Abschitzung der vollendeten Anlage, des Bauplans, der Konstruktion und der Wirksamkeit der Anlage. Die vollendeten Anlagen miissen kritisch iiberpriift werden, in Bezug auf die Ziele und Voraussetzungen des Plans und des Programms, wie sie im-Programm des Architekten konkretisiert und spezifiziert wurden. Solches In- formationsmaterial muss der nichsten Errichtung von Anlagen zugrunde gelegt werden, ehe man eine zuverldssige Abschidtzung machen kann. 1860 Mental Health Implications of the Crganization of the Large 3cale Physical Environment Mayer Spivack, M.C. P. (City Planner) Robert S. Weiss, Ph.D. (Sociologist) Gerald Caplan, M.D., D, P, M, (Psychiatrist) Alan P. Sheldon, M. B,, B3.Chir., D.P. M., 5. M. Hyg. (Psychiatrist) Herbert C. Schulberg, Ph.D., S.M. Hyg. (Psychologist) In December of 1966, a team of investigators in the Laboratory of Community Fsychiatry at Harvard Medical School were asked to present testimony to the Department of Health, E£ducation and Welfare on what they termed "environmental hazards" to be considered in the planning of programs for that federal agency over the next fifty years. Headed by a city planner, the team focused on mental health issues that intersect with the structure and organization of the physical enviroament. This very timely series of multidisciplinary discussions, focusing so directly on problems especially relevant to our field, provided the context for a useful forum ia which to evaluate ideas which this planner had long felt were crucial issues for urban planning. The large scale physical environment affects the lives of men chiefly at the points where individuals or groups of individuals meet together and 1, Research supported ia part by a grant from The Permanent Charities, Inc., to the Medical Foundation, Inc., and from a National Institute of Mental Health contract, #PH43-66-1159, to the Laboratory of Community Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. 2, Director, Environmental Analysis and Design, Laboratory of Community Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. Former Associate Director of Research for Mental Health Center Planning: the Medical Foundation, Inc. 1861 interact. Both the large and small scale physical environments of the city constitute organized sets of sub-systems, which aside from the organizing principles of economics, transportation, and other physical-ecological patterns, are formed around, and in turn give supporting structure to, the social and personal lives of their inhabitants. The physical environment may therefore be seen as propitious and supportive when it ""works'' properly and 'agrees'' with the living patterns and needs of its inhabitants. It is inhibiting when its structure interferes with, distorts, or prevents the performance processes and movements associated with basic life-space needs. Incongruities result when the structure, form, or plaa of the physical world isolates individuals from one another, or thrusts them into constant conflict, Further problems arise when the environment unequally supports the activities of one group over another by virtue of space allocations or rights to territory or by cutting a group off from the mainstream of life as is often the case in housing projects and mental hospitals. Social dis- organization may occur in environments which inappropriately match the needs and living patterns of the user population. Critical areas for planning include not only the interaction of man with man, machine, building and transportation system, but also at earlier points, where the necessity for control over the environment is manifested, man's communications, which act upon others who in turn control an environment which in turn acts to modify or limit his own further behavior. Generally, then, it may be said that the political status of men and their communities, the delicate balance of freedom from excessive control, and the freedom to themselves control their lives, environments, and their communications or efforts at the control or adjustment of the 1862 environment, are among the most critical issues in circular, mutually regulating relationships, which link behavior and the physical environment. Incongruity is produced wherever one's voice in the control over environmental issues is lost. Such a loss of vote and veto over large and small issues can in itself constitute a considerable danger to the mental and social and political health of the individual and society. As a result of this kind of frequently accidental disenfranchisement, the individual may suffer serious losses and deprivations in still other areas, and come to view himself, not without reason, as a victim of social forces and physical circumstances beyond his control. Thus, a defect in control occurs when the information flow or feedback from the user fails to reach its mark, and the communication path is seriously interrupted. Here the environment may itself be at fault, for a major positive attribute of a well organized environment is that it provides wide access to decision-making process and power centers where control actions are taken. When deprived of opportunity to participate in the dialogue concerning these issues, individuals in the community run the risk of inheriting a man-made environment which is out of control, and widely unrelated to their needs. The structure and organization of the man-made environment may prevent distinct and far-reaching personal, social, and cultural obstacles by the following routes: 1. Individuals and groups may be forced to operate within a too limited environment. The world may ''close in' on them as in a ghetto or urban slum. To some extent new towns and suburbs are prone to this problem when too few opportunities for diversion or change of activity patterns are presented. 1863 2. When the environment is insufficiently structured and fails to provide a clear set of instructions to the users suggesting how they might use it, people often find themselves at a loss for something to do or somewhere to go. Many public institutions such as mental hospitals, housing projects and schools are so designed. Thus, a criterion for a successful environment may be one which contains a wide spectrum of clear alternative frameworks for social and personal behavior (behavior settings). 3. Behavior supporting environmental structure may be culturally inappropriate to the life patterns of the subculture using it. However rigid or loosely structured, it is essential that the structure be well matched to the variety of social and personal needs common to the lives of the users. Brand new renewal housing and vertical housing projects often are disrup- tive to the network of interdependent social relationships common to the former ''slum' dwellers who often must move into them. 4. The environment must be plastic, it must be able to change over time in order that it may be adapted to newly-emerging needs of its users. Buildings, both interior and exterior, as well as the city within which they are set, have an extremely loag life when compared with the rapidly changing populations and their constantly changing demand patterns. 4a. A stable population group will pass through sequential and predictable life cycle stages, each having its characteristic way of altering the patteras of individual and social behaviors, and their correspondingly appropriate physical settings. As individuals pass from one stage of the life cycle to the next they frequently move to a community better fitted to their new social and 1864 personal needs. Such moves are typically from shared rented quarters or a furnished room to newer rented apartment space in the city at the point of marriage, followed by a move, for the middle class, to owner-occupied housing in a suburb whea children arrive, back to rented or condominium quarters in the city as childrea mature and move away, and later, sadly, into nursing homes or housing for the elderly. Each of these changes marks the end of one living pattern and radical adjustment to a whole new life style. It is notable that here also are the common points at which personal and family crises occur. Some of these crises are borne of the changes in living patterns per se --such as the birth of a first child or the marriage of the last offspring, leaving the parents alone and comparatively lonely. These, in turn, may produce increased anxiety: for example, parents whose children have moved away may find themselves alone and ''rattling around" in too large a house in the suburbs. If they move to a smaller apartment closer to the city, they will have somewhat severed those extrafamilial and community ties which enriched their lives previously. In the new situation, they must go about energetically establishing a new set of friends and relationships with the community. Their efforts will be somewhat frustrated and certainly complicated by the fact that in their new niche neighborhood patterns and the conventions governing the boundaries between privacy and intimacy are changed. They have moved from a suburban setting where neighbors are far enough away and can therefore afferd to be friendly and visit or exchange favors often. In the new apartment they may find it more difficult to meet their neighbors across the hall who wish to remain nearly anonymous. They will have to establish their new acquain- tanceships through their employment if they are not already retired, or resort to other formal and institutionalized supports for their sense of 1865 community. This can be a difficult period for many people. Some may fail to successfully negotiate the change and retire into loneliness, TV-itis, depression, anomie, alcoholism or perpetual nomadism. In addition to the standing patterns of individuals who pass through the various life cycle phases there is the strong possibility that the life cycle phases themselves are changing in length both relatively and obsolutely, e.g. childhood is growing shorter, adolescence correspondingly earlier and also loager, adulthood and child-bearing earlier and longer, old age later and longer. These changes will both exacerbate and complicate the need for appropriate settings. 4b. Certain areas of the city may be subject to periodic shifts in population groups. The so-called grey areas and slums have historically been host to a succession of ethaic and racial groups. Each of these shifts in population type will bring with it 2 changed demand pattern for the environ- ment based upon its traditions, its sub-culture, relative social position, and degree of acculturation. Even in the unlikely event that such areas are kept in good repair, problems will arise which focus about the use of space. Most eastern cities have areas which give evidence of the inappli- cability of spaces designed for 19th century upper and upper middle class living standards and social patterns to the current needs of the poverty stricken Negro families. . 4c. Further changes may be imposed upon a stubborn, inflexible and therefore (in our terms) incongruous environment by general changes in the structure of the societies' living patterns as a whole, as for example from a society of busy, skilled interdependent craftsmen to an automated, anonymous and leisured society. 4d, Continuing difficulties are produced, as is well known, from 1866 the dual problem of absolute aad relative obsolescence of the man-made world, Absolute obsolescence is just another way of euphemizing the plain old age and decay of physical structures which cannot be or are not removed; and relative obsolescence is what happens to brand new hospitals before they are built. They are rarely designed according to the best and latest trends in medical practice and technology, may require years in planning and construction, and therefore have a high potential replacement rate and cost. As building technology accellerates, as is surely bound to happen, a greater variety of building types will suffer the same fate. It is important to remember here that technological innovations have rever- berating social and culturzl effects, and that a building obsolete for these reasons is not only obsolete relative to the newest construction techniques but is also not well adapted to the new needs of a society whose basic struc- ture has been changed by other technologies. 5. An tnirease in crowding is 2 somewhat predictable condition for the city dweller of the future, if it is not already with us to an undesirable degree. Every culture reacts to crowding or increased population density in a unique style and pattern: of compensation. New interpersonal and individual adjustments may arise based upon the previous, less crowded history. These new social styles and adjustment patterns will exhibit varying degrees of individual and social pathology, which derive from the original and also the changing values of the culture, which are relatively different from other cultures in similar states of population concentration and explosion. It is hard to differentiate the pathologies of crowding from those attributable to the often associated conditions of poverty, relative political disenfranchisement, low social status and consequent exposure to persecution and prejudice, and physical confinement irrespective of human 1867 density. However, it is almost certainly true that the dynamics of behavior under overcrowded conditions--so far only studied in dense animal popula- tions --are to some extent operating in our own human social systems. The various units within which individuals live--the marriage, the family, the neighborhood--each require some protection against undesired invasion. Crowding interferes with their boundaries, e.g. when families are squeezed into too few rooms, the relationship of the married couple cannot be bounded from the children; when many families are squeezed together, the children become the wards of the neighborhood, rather than members of a family, and traditional control of children by their parents is disturbed. It would be well to learn what we can from new studies of what happens to Americans under conditions of simple crowding as exper- ienced on military ships. 6. Isolation. When the organization of the environment is incomplete and discontinuous --when areas of the city or parts of buildings are func- tionally isolated from the main body of the city or from its sub-units--an inequity is created. The isolation of man from man, and of men from their resources, constitutes a threat to the economic strength, social, and mental health of whole populations. 6a. Isolation and the Individual. Individuals are rarely singled out for isolation, but the experiences of accident victims, explorers, and the research results from sensory deprivation studies point to the basic need for continuous and organizable sensory experience without which men suffer from acute personality disorganization and hallucinations. Such experiences, of course, cannot happen in a social context. 6b. Group Isolation. When groups are isolated en masse from the mainstream of society, unreasonable hardships are produced in the 1868 most minute areas of their daily lives. The Columbia Point Housing Project in Boston is an example of such physical isolation of a lower income group. The large complex of public housing buildings is situated at the end of a point of land which extends into Boston Harbor, near a foul dump, and connected to the city by a long, unpopulated, dreary road. The populations of this and other similarly situated areas cannot move out of their island- like situation without an automobile which they are often unable to afford. Public transportation is either not available or infrequent and may involve long travel times and many change-overs before a work destination in the city may be reached. Deprived of access to the more common services and resources, such a community must often do without what they cannot themselves supply. Even such basic resources as emergency hospital care may be dangerously far removed. Further disadvantages are incurred as social isolation and the stigma of unfamiliarity brands the children of such communities as outlanders ia their schools. The additional factors of a high concentration of large, poor, ill-educated, and ill-housed families with few members employable or employed provides little in the way of opportunities for mutual assistance in any but the morally supportive sense, and may increase the ''contagion' of maladaptive or undesirable modes of social behavior among the inhabitants, especially the children. 6c. Social Isolation within the City. Rooming house areas, often the large sprawling skid-row sections of the city, apartment hotel districts which are the "homes' of countless thousands in every large city, are filled with individuals who constitutionally lack either the physical strength and ability or the social skills necessary for the establishment of viable relationships with any but the most primitive and fundamental resources in the immediate neighborhoods. These same people frequently 1869 lack for the same reasons a supportive and psycho-socially necessary circle of friends and acquaintances. If they are without immediate family located nearby, or, as is sometimes the case, are estranged from family, then they may be truly isolated within the most populous urban areas. The lack of facilities which could enrich the lives of such people in our cities is a significant addition to their burdens. t 6d. A major hazard in a metropolitan area is an inadequate transportation system. For instance, lack of transportation between sub- urbs and central city may maroon many women, especially newcomers, in bedroom communities where they may be far from friends and may spend their days in soul destroying idleness and boredom. 7. Dispossession. Many individuals and families in downtown areas of nearly all American cities now face the sometimes severe psychological and social stresses created when they are forced to give up their homes to a renewal or highway program. Such programs usually fail to adequately deal with relocation problems of the displaced, let alone provide the neces= sary connections to emergency services for the kinds of trauma associated with these moves. People tend to grow ''roots, '" in other words they appear to invest themselves emotionally in the safety and security of an enduring home ~ place. This need to establish territory may be one basic attribute of all higher forms of living things, man included. 8. Danger, in its more commonly recognized forms, seems to lurk in particular kinds of unregulated public spaces. Central Park in New York and other similar public areas have recently received an unusual amount of bad publicity due to their high incidence of violence of various sorts. 1870 Public spaces, the roadways, parks, parking lots, vacant lots and alleys are often legally nearly a no-man's-land. Responsibility for the upkeep and quality of such environments is often either unclear or divided in an irrational fashion among a multiplicity of city and state departments. Most public agencies pay far too little attention to the details of good design and maintenance of such areas, and it is not surprising, therefore, that in their neglect, these spaces are really non-settings in which anything can, and often does, happen. Most parklands are an indispensable boon to any urban area, However, the more intensely used or travelled parts of these places need some degree of structure and control over their use. Responsi~ bility in all its ramifications, legally, physically, and socially, is a key issue in the preservation of safe public spaces. Neighborhood involvement in the responsibilities of administration, maintenance and control of pub- lic spaces in their areas, perhaps under changed legal conditions, can do much to make these areas more useful. 9. Complexity. Urban areas, as they continue to spread and grow, are becoming more complex in their organization as well as physically larger. Connections between points are often invisibly linked by under- ground transportation systems. Subway travellers often have unclear con- ceptions of their path between points, or the relationships of discrete geo- graphic entities within the city whole. Associated with this cognitive inabil- ity to grasp the order of the environment there may be indications of psychic stress appearing in the forms of disorientation and restricted movement patterns. 10. Active government-sponsored programs which seek to extensively alter the physical environment are multiple, such as demonstration cities 1871 and urban renewal and highway programs. Centralized ma ster planning of the urban ecology has dangerous limitations based on the limited conpre- hensiveness of our knowledge of urban ecological, and city-building, com- munity building dynamics. The notion that the range of experience, aesthetic tastes and ideas of a handful of designers, developers, and planners is sufficient to satisfy the life-space requirements of communities of 500, 000 individuals is a questionable one, and may diminish the ecolo- gical, social, and economic viability and diversity of these communities. It almost certainly increases the experiential monotony. Even the best of phased master plans may suffer from these stubborn shortcomings. New planning policies, techniques, and requirements could more finely dis- tribute economic planning and design responsibility among the professionals and the future users of these areas. There is a need for phased information feedback to the planners of these projects with seriously expanded evaluation follow-up studies. 11. An Unstable Environment. Paradoxically, in the future we may be exposed increasingly to a hazard emerging from improvements in trans- portation. Supersonic plane travel, which suddenly transports us to new cultural surroundings and upsets our biophysical rhythms by rapid traversal of time and date lines, may result in disorientation and lowered efficiency for hours or days. Judgment during that period is likely to be defective, and unless arrangements are institutionalized for a mora- torium to provide an opportunity to recover from the crisis before serious work is undertaken, we will be exposed to major stress. This discussion of cause and effect relationships which links the large scale urban physical environment to the mental health of populations, 1872 while neither exhaustive or prescriptive, suggests a range of concerns within which urban planners and policy makers, social scientists and mental health specialists may usefully collaborate. 1873 ROLE AND TRAINING OF HEALTH EDUCATION AIDES Robert E. Knittel, Robert C. Child and John Hobgood The current national expenditure for health services represents 6% of the Gross National Product. There is increasing concern in government circles that the expen= diture for health services be better coordinated so that a greater benefit be derived from health service expenditures. At the same time, there is a tendency to increase the amount of money spent for health services, and it is estimated that the proportion of Gross National Product spent for health services could be tripled to 120 billion dollars or $600 per person per year. Two basic concerns are perceived: first, that of efficiency of the system which might be measured in terms of costs-benefit ratio; and, second, that of availability, i.e. that health services be so abundantly located that all persons may avail themselves of these resources. Anderson has postulated two fundamental characteristics which condition the operation of the entire structure of health services and which are related to the pro- blems of efficiency and availability. These elements, which he characterizes as ex- ceedingly elastic, are (1) the variability of the perception of illness and what people Robert E. Knittel, Ph. D., is Research Associate in the Community Studies Unit and Robert C. Child, M. A., Assistant Director for Training and Consulting Services of the Community Development Services at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois. John Hobgood, M. A., is professor of Anthropology at Chicago State College, South. They wish to acknowledge the assistance of William G. Robinson, M. P. H., Health Educator, Chicago Health Department, and to thank the Chicago Board of Health for its cooperation. 42-778 0—71—pt. 6——11 1874 do about it, and (2) the necessary discretionary judgment and responsibility (together with the authority) that is required of physicians, the chief gate~keepers of the system. Taking into consideration both of these fundamental characteristics, the vari- ability of perception of illness and what people do about it is reflected in the fact that, although we have such a relatively large expenditure for health services and have a great desl of knowledge in terms of prevention and cure of disease, there are still large segments of our population, particularly in the lower socio-economic levels, with higher than average incidences of disease and mortality. The use of non-professionals has increased considerably with the advent of government financed programs to aid the disadvantaged and the poor. Reissman? esti- mates that 150,000 non-professional positions have been established through poverty and other federal legislation. The use of such non-professional aides has been known in the field of public health for a number of years: among the Indians and Eskimo of Canada as of 1958, among farm workers in California in 1961 = and among the Navajo Indians as early as the middle 1950's. The use of such personnel in over-seas programs, often under the title of village worker or community aide, is well documented. Some other uses of health aides have been described by Hoff, 4 Wilson and Hall .3 and Fitzig.® General evaluations of the use of para-professional personnel have been made by Reissman’ and Perlman and Jones. 8 Training of aides and program develop= ment have been described by a number of agencies,’ and an extensive bibliography -on training for non-professionals has been compiled by the Office of Economic Opportunity. 10 Three principal roles appear to be perceived by the agencies employing aides. 1875 These are: 1. As one who helps to overcome native superstitions and beliefs which im= pede modern health practices through education and demonstration, usually in underdeveloped areas. 2. As one who helps people overcome apathy or inertia to adopt good health « practices and to take advantage of existing health services in ghetto areas or other regions where consumers of health services are difficult to reach. n 3. As one who supports professional health people, performing routinized tasks which assist in attaining health professionals’ goals. 12 The latter two roles are those principally encountered in the literature of the United States, and the first role is sometimes represented in the performance of these two latter roles. Among aide characteristics which have been found to be important in their maximum efficiency use are: age, sex, training, and status as professional or non= professional. A high school level education and middle class background are required in some programs, while some elementary education and ghetto background are re=- quired in others. Although Relssman'S states that the basic criterion for aide type: 14 workers is that they be indigenous, Perlman and Jones point out that this in itself it not enough. Increasing emphasis is being placed on the ability and personal qua- lities of recruits. Indigenous workers are by no means typical residents, although they share many characteristics of the communities in which they work. In a training project for Health Education Aides in Chicago, in which the authors were involved, twenty persons with an educational level equivalent to high 1876 school were selected on the basis of their interest in the problems of ghetto residents. Many of them were former residents of slum areas who had "made it up and out" and were sufficiently distressed by conditions encountered and emotionally motivated to want to do something about it. Although most of the health aide projects reported in the literature have had some elements of education of the residents by the aides, the Chicago project was centered about the idea that the principal task of the Health Education Aide was to motivate the residents and change their attitudes with regard to environmental sanitation practices. The project was directed by William Robinson, health educator in the rodent control section of the city health department. Consultants called in by the U. S. Public Health Service met with all administrative persons involved, including the officer in charge of rat and vermin eradication, the chief of the environmental sanita- tion section, and representatives of the Mayor's Office. The goals and objectives of these acmintstiators were carefully reviewed, and the training designed to meet the following needs: substantive training in the technical aspects of rodent and vermin control; understanding of motivational factors affecting the residents of slum areas; imparting skills and understanding in the changing of attitudes of slum residents towards their environment; and skill in face-to-face contact with slum area residents on an individual basis. The latter component was required because the project was to be directed toward reaching the "unreached" on a door-to-door basis as well as those residents who were less socially isolated. To understand the training program which was conducted for Health Education . Aides in Chicago, one must first be aware of the assumption underlying the concept of . 1877 Health Education Aide as that concept influenced the training design; namely, that '~-, the Health Education Aide can be conditioned, through training, to be sensitive to human concerns and problems. This assumption may be looked at as more Rogerian than Skinnerian in that it is assumed that man is in a constant state of learning and development and at a given moment acts or reacts as the product of experiences in his total environment rather than assuming that man's actions are responses to direct stimuli in the punishment-reward pattern. 15 The Health Education Aide is basically an action person in that he attempts to combine the meeting of immediate needs with experiential learning for the resident. He is an action person, however, only at such time as he has determined his direction for action in a given instance. This determination is made by the aide on the basis of what he finds, discerns, or uncovers in the environment of the people with whom he is working. He is concerned, not only with helping a given individual see the relationship between uncleanliness and the presence of roaches or rodents, but also with the barriers which may exist to block basic understanding of the problem. He must be concerned to the point of being willing to act on issues, problems, and needs which are not necessarily confined within a rigid job description of the Health Edu= cation Aide. Returning to the characterization employed earlier, the Health Education Aide is Rogerian in that his actions are based on a determination which ideally is the result of a total testing of the environment of the individual family or person with whom he is working. The aide may occasionally use Skinnerian techniques in terms of motivating individuals to action, but his orientation is grounded in a basic optimism 1878 concerning the ability of individuals to learn and grow. This conception of the role of the Health Education Aide embraces what has been termed the helping relation= ship, a relationship which is predicated on doing whatever appears necessary to a given situation, but, at the same time, maintaining a constant concern for the digni- ty of the individual who is the recipient of the help being given. 16 The alternative styles of offering help or being of service, which the Health Education Aide has in his repertoire, are a major element of the concept. It is here that the helping rela- tionship is either abetted or aborted as the aide selects, from a series of methods, an approach which, for him best fits the particular situation being confronted and deter= mines the degree of aide involvement appropriate. The Health Education Aide is one who, either through initial sensitivity, or through training, can bring himself to the point of withholding judgment in a given instance, until a sufficient amount of data from the environment have been collected which will support a decision appropriate to that condition. The aide who can with= hold judgment, who can give attention to the environment, and who has at his com= mand a number of ways of reacting to human need situations (and with which he is comfortable) is the person most likely to respond in an appropriate fashion to that human need. Central, also, to an understanding of the concept is the element of expert= ness in areas of technical knowledge including such things as specific public health programs, building codes, laws affecting tenant=-landlord relationships and the various roles played by and services offered through social agencies in the community. Not only a knowledge of the technical considerations in these fields is required, but also 1879 an understanding of how these things work, who makes things happen, and how things get done in the total environment, is necessary to the effective functioning of the Health Education Aide. In summary, the Health Education Aide is a generalist in the broad field of human relations, but a technician in terms of the knowledge of the elements of human interaction, and a teacher or conveyor of these skills to others. The motivation of the aide stems, largely, from his initial concern for the welfare of people, buttressed by the shock of confrontation with the conditions that slum residents find common in their living patterns and the dedication which often results from that shock. In the field of health, and other areas, a major factor in our nation's acce= lerated social concern is the dichotomy existing between how needs are perceived by the persons who are experiencing them and how those needs are identified by persons on the outside. If the goal of the essentially "outsider" side can be generally regarded as one which supports the growth of self-reliance in individuals and family groupings, then a beginning will have been made in developing problem-solving strengths in the people to whom help is being extended. If self-reliance can be enhanced at the in- dividual and family levels, corporate extension may follow. WV Therefore, the role of teacher of the problem-solving method constitutes a great part of the work of the aide. He must, in effect, build a positive psychology which is the opposite of the negative behavior inducing self-fulfilling prophecy. 18 He carries with him an essen=- tial optimism about the almost limitless potential of human development. Yet he is realistic in the knowledge of the blockages which bar such development. But first, people must care enough to want to solve their problems, and this is the benchmark 1880 which the aide seeks fo discover. 1° He tests for the depth of concern and he builds on what he finds. In the Chicago setting, the role of the Aide involves a "personal" approach, one in which tact and restraint is exercised, along with an appreciation of individual differences. The aides function in a number of ways, bringing land- lords and tenants together, acting as conciliators, mediators, and advisors. The dimensions of the aide role can be explored in terms of the kinds of acti- “vities in which they engage. They move in rapidly on problems of malnutrition or other serious health matters. They offer housekeeping ids to tenants and assist them in finding landlords or others to whom they pay rent. Encouragement is extended in the creation of a climate for a willingness on the part of landlords to provide phy- sical improvements to buildings and, on the part of tenants, to clean up buildings. They assist the landlords by suggesting ideas on how to communicate effectively with tenants, how to collect rents, and how to encourage sanitary practices. They help tenants find more suitable housing, and they support building and fire inspectors in developing data for use in legal actions against owners of unsafe or dilapidated build- ings. The aides act as facilitators, in providing a hinge relationship between land- lord and tenant, between tenants and the administrators of schools, social centers, agencies, and other institutions. They function not only as facilitators, but as organ- izers and coordinators as well. Most importantly, their role as educators provides the greatest degree of residuality in the long-term goal of developing a sense of indi- vidual problem-solving adequacy. 20 Because of their role as educators, the Chicago health education aide train- ing design was particularly directed toward combining technical environmental 1881 sanitation materials with motivation and attitude change materials. A better under= standing of, and practice in, applying the substantive knowledge, with a view toward producing motivation and attitude change, could result in better utilization of the knowledge by those contacted by the health education aides. The training design drew on various disciplines including anthropology, social psychology, sociology, and human relations training, in addition to extensive exper ience in the field of community development. The motivation and attitude change component of the design attempted to begin where the trainees were, to draw on their existing relative knowledge, whether gained formally, intuitively, or experientially, reinforce that which was correct and useful, negate that which was not, and relate their existing knowledge to theory. Much of this is accomplished by the trainees them=- selves through the training design. General contributions from specific academic disciplines were diverse. It was assumed that the trainees already had a certain Soiree of what has been termed "folk wisdom" in regard to social relations and interpersonal communication. The subjects covered included: the importance of micro-environments, the dynamics of cultural and intra-personal change, differences in ethnic backgrounds, the role of the parti- cipant-observor and its relation to group problem solving, the consequences of per= sonal change, styles of the helping relationship and the expected effects of these styles, problem solving methods, perception and its relation to perceived differences, group process, feedback, exercises in relating to an individual, the concepts of status and role, the role of formal organizations and their limitations, institutions and their modification, the family in various ethnic groupings, and demographic information 1882 and its relation to the particular. Some base line data of a city planning nature were also elicited from the trainees after their field trips in the neighborhoods. One problem experienced by the trainers was that persons accustomed to impart- ing only pochilont information in a lecture class sometimes found it difficult to adjust to sessions designed to aid in motivation and attitude change. This latter type of learn- ing is highly personal and depends on internalization of values as well as information by the trainee, and also requires a better self-understanding by the trainee. Such self-understanding is sometimes accomplished by sensitivity training, usually conducted in a setting isolated from the work environment. The training design did not attempt to introduce sensitivity training, as it was felt that the time available and setting were not favorable for it. Some of the trainees who had previously had sensitivity training, indicated that the sensitivity training would have been more helpful after the motiva- tion and attitude change training. Technical information can most easily be given in standardized textbook, lec- ture and audio-visual fashion. However, the application of the technical information was often reinforced by using related technical information in exercises designed to in- crease skills in interpersonal areas. For example, in a problem-solving session the problems chosen for solution by the group were real problems experienced in their field work, or an exercise in force field analysis would be centered around a movie on rodent control. Such use of related technical material gives the trainee a better tie-in between information giving and attitude change. One of the assumptions of the trainers was that before the trainees could moti= vate others to change, they themselves must be motivated to do the job. Motivation on their part, it was assumed, depended considerably on what they perceived the 1883 administration's attitude toward their work to be. Their motivation to solve problems and to bring about changes in attitudes and motivation, it was felt, would be directly related to the way in which they saw their superiors, on all levels, viewing their func- tion. Administrative cognizance of the importance of the trainees’ job must be demon- strated by a concern about the problems which they face in their field work, no matter how trivial they may seem. The administration does not have to be able to solve all these problems, but it should be able to speak to them intelligently, to give under- standable reasons for the way things are which cannot be changed, and to explain what steps are to be taken to improve that which can be changed. Such problems may range all the way from reimbursement for carfare, to fear of being out on the street after dark. None of these can be considered too trivial. Because of the importance of communication between administration and the trainees, the trainers developed rapport with the administration, gave feedback freely and arranged for feedback sessions with responsible administrative personnel. The trainer was a consultant as well as a trainer, but never assumed administrative pero= gatives or duties. Sixteen months after the start of the Health Education Aide program in Chicago, an evaluation of the HEA's work was made by the authors, 2! based upon interviews with HEAs, tenants, landlords, and administrative personnel. Results of the work of the HEAs are evidenced in three areas. The first is that of the individual tenant families, particularly in regard to the kinds of things that the tenants can be helped to do and understand, which in turn help them to upgrade their particular personal situation. The second area is that of the understandings which can be developed between tenants 1884 and landlords, which result from meetings arranged by the HEAs. From these meetings have resulted such things as physical improvement of building or premises, rent collec- tion improvement, better care of buildings by tenants, procurement of housing for large families and other benefits. The third area is concerned with the HEAs work with other agencies which includes a determination of which agency is capable of meeting a given need or acting in a given situation. Two conditions, tenant turnover and tenant contentment, posed serious diffi= culties in relation to the effectiveness of the HEAs in all three areas. Tenant turnover is very heavy in certain "port of entry" areas. Tenant contentment represents a con- dition where the tenants are comfortable with poor housing, stating, in effect, that they see little hope in changing, and therefore, are intransigent with regard to change. In a sense, the HEA has become a coordinator, as well as an educator, and an organizer of individuals and agencies for the purpose of alleviating the problems of families in Chicago neighborhoods. He selects appropriate agencies and secures their cooperation in a coordinated effort to assist one family. Sometimes he is not selective, but must rather choose at random. He must test avenues and resources for immediate crisis situations, make judgments, and solve the problem. For example, when finding a family without food, he may try to contact anyone he can until he comes to someone who is going to give food. Quite often it may be a voluntary organization. Some generalizations, derived from the interviews with the HEAs, tenants, and landlords, and which need to be further tested, are: I. Greater cooperation of the tenant will be obtained if the HEA is able to help him do something about the problems which have first priority in the tenant's mind. 1885 Greater cooperation of the tenant toward desired goals will be obtained if the tenant views his acting in accordance with the HEA's wishes as "help" to the HEA, which is given in return for "help" from the HEA to the resident, i.e. in reciprocating action for the HEA's assistance in obtaining clothing from welfare, the tenant will "help" the HEA by cleaning up her own kitchen, or otherwise improving environmental sanitation practice. A greater number of residents will show favorable behavior change when both the tenant and the landlord are involved in the HEA strategy, than if the stra= tegy involves contact with the tenant or landlord alone. If desirable behavioral change has not occurred after 12 HEA visits, no desir- able change will be forthcoming regardless of the number of visits. If desirable behavioral change has occurred on each of three successive visits, a continuation of favorable change will probably occur. Severe social and physical isolation are contributing factors to poor environ= mental sanitation. Most of the tenants assisted by the HEAs do not belong to any community organization, and most do not belong to any church. General acceptance and trust of the HEAs by the tenants has prevailed, and the HEAs attribute this to the fact that they do not promise anyone anything, but simply state that they will "try". Promises of "trying to help" by the HEA to the tenant do not have to be large promises in order to gain cooperation with desired goals. The poorer the environmental sanitation conditions encountered on the premises, the more sensitive the tenant will be to discussion of those conditions. 1886 9. There is little concern among tenants as to the professional qualifications of the HEA, but rather emphasis on the ability of the HEA to "help" the tenant in terms meaningful to him. The HEAs indicate an awareness of the need to exercise tact, to give compli- ments where these are appropriate, and to maintain a high level of tolerance for the situations in which they find themselves. It is considered important to be fair and friendly in all situations and to be non-judgmental of the past. In effect, the HEAs are saying, "The past is of no interest, only the present and only tomorrow, and the start we make now in this present situation is the important thing." It appears that the HEAs usually get rather directly to the question of cleanli- ness of premises, and they seem to be able to sense at what point to be complimentary and solicitous, and at what point to be directive. They state that they can never be angry, or they will not win the confidence of the people with whom they are working. Something mn always be found on which the householder may be complimented. There is an awareness, also, of the pitfalls of running errands for people in need and of not helping them to work out their problems themselves. At times suggestions are presented very directly. If conditions warrant it, some forceful man-to-man, or more often woman=to-woman, talk takes place. "How long has it been since you washed and changed that baby?" "When did you last feed him?" "You wash and change that baby right now!" The visit begins with an inquiry as to how the family is doing and whether they have any problems. Often, serious problems are mentioned that have to be dealt with before the sanitary condition of the dwelling is discussed. If an improvement in 1887 housekeeping is needed, advice is given and usually accepted. A return visit is then made about a week or ten days later to see if there has been any improvement. Often, wihiedlthy conditions are related directly to the physical condition of the building. In these instances, gross neglect by. the landlord is often asserted by the tenants. One of the tasks of the HEA is to contact the landlord, and to attempt to bring about a meeting of the minds of both landlord and tenant on housing conditions. This task requires sensitivity and tact on the part of the aides. The work of Jouaing the landlord and getting him to meet with the tenants is often time consuming and exasperating. The tenants are encouraged to clean up the building in order to make a good impression on the landlord. The aides then have to make sure the work is actually done and that the landlord shows up for the meeting. Frequent success of these methods was indicated in tenant's responses to questionnaires. Other methods include an advisory role to landlords who are often inexperienced in communicating with tenants, collecting rent, and gaining tenant respect for norms and standards of behavior, which are often taken for granted by the landlord. Little work is done by the HEA with community organizations. The work con- centrates on organization of tenants within buildings to establish norms and standards to which all con aspire. Problems which appeared particularly acute were those re- garding physical and social isolation, a condition in which the mother seldom got out of the apartment and was severely isolated from any social norm setting mechanism. Simple items can be very significant. For example, a housewife cannot wrap the far- bage in a piece of newspaper if the family does not get a daily paper, a not unusual situation. 1888 The Chicago Health Education Aide program indicates that persons who have some close association or familiarity with the ghetto areas either through having grown up in the area before it became a slum, or through having been involved in work in the area, who have some high school or college education, can do an effective job in the health aide role, i.e. helping people overcome apathy and inertia in relation to adop= ting good health practices and taking advantage of existing health services in ghetto areas or other regions where consumers of existing health services are difficult to reach. Although not part of the original work plan, it has also been shown that HEAs can be effective in bringing about meaningful communication between landlord and tenants which can result in change of behavior in both for improved housing standards. Further research plans on this program include an assessment of the effects on tenant's behavior of various approaches and the permancy of behavior change when it does occur. Differing types of tenant resistance to change also must be explored, in order to develop more unified approaches which can then be transmitted through training. It is the consensus of the HEAs that short training periods of about two weeks, followed by field experience are the most desirable. They say that it is not until the actual application of training to the field situation that real learning occurs. They also add that training should be conducted at regular intervals to update and exchange information, as suggested by Reisman. 22 The team and group approach to problem solving used by the Chicago HEAs has served them very well, in their estimation, to= ward keeping a continuing learning process alive. This is encouraged by the project director, who gives the HEAs time to work out problems on their own in a group 1889 setting, without directive monitoring of the group. The staffing of the HEA program has been characterized by a high retention rate, upward mobility for those leaving the staff or who have been placed on loan to other units, and high morale. The program has been expanded with the addition of 45 more Health Education Aides, which constitutes a tripling of the present staff, and the addition of a second professional health educator in a supervisory capacity. Supervisors for this type of HEA program have been trained by the U. S. Public Health Service, Community Environmental Management, Cincinnati, Ohio. These trainees were drawn from rodent control programs in several cities where such programs were either in progress or beginning. These trained supervisors have either initiated HEA programs or have trained their existing program personnel in the environ= mental sanitation-motivation methods in Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, Hoboken, Nashville, Newark, New York, and Philadelphia. 23 HEA type workers for rural areas have been trained in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and Mt. Carmel, Illinois. 42-778 0—T71—pt. 6——12 3. 10. 1890 Footnotes Anderson, Odin W. Health Services: Problems, Prospects, and Projections. Lecture delivered at the American Institute of Planners Conference, May 12, 1967, pp. 17-18. Riessman, Frank. "Strategies and Suggestions for Training Non-Professionals," Community Mental Health Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer, 1967), p. 103. ° Heath, Alice M. "Health Aides in Health Departments,” Public Health Reports, Vol. 82, No. 7 (July, 1967), pp. 608-614. Hoff, Wilbur. "Older Poor Adults Trained as Home Health Aides," Public Health Reports, Vol. 83, No. 3 (March, 1968), p. 184. Wilson, Dorothy and Madelyn N. Hall. "Use of Male Auxiliaries Saves Nurses' Time," Public Health Reports, Vol. 83, No. 3 (March, 1968), p. 185. Fitzig, Charmaine McMaster. "Nonprofessionals Yeomen of Community Health Team," Public Health Reports, Vol. 83, No. 3 (March, 1968), p. 185. Riessman, op. cit. Perlman, Robert, and David Jones. Neighborhood Service Centers (Washington, D. C.: Offices of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development, 1967), pp. 54-62. To cite a few: Schmuis, Aaren, Implementing Non-Professional Programs in Human Services (New York: Center for the Study of Unemployed Youth Graduate School of Social Work, New York University, 1967); U. S. Department of Health Education and Welfare, Public Health Service, Training the Auxiliary "Health Worker", Public Health Service Publication No. 1817 (Washington, D. C.: Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office); Kern County Health Department, Guide to Planning and Administration of Community Health Aide Programs (Bakersfield, California: Division of Health Education, P. O. Box 997); Knittel, Robert E., Robert C. Child, and John Hobgood, Training Guide, Community Organization Manual, Part I: Environmental Health and Sanitation Education (Cincinnati, Ohio: National Center for Urban and Industrial Health, Offices Urban Environmental Health Planning, 1967); and Riessman, op. cit. Offices of Economic Opportunity, Parent and Child Centers (Washington, D. C.: mimeo, no date). 11. 12. 13. 15. 16. 17. 18. 1891 Hoff, op. cit.; Heath, op. cit.; and Fitzig, op. cit. Hoff, op. cit.; Heath, op. cit.; and Wilson and Hall, op. cit. Reissman, op. cit. Perlman and Jones, op. cit., p. 56. An analysis of these polarities is contained in Carl R. Rogers and B. F. Skinner, "Some Issues Concerning the Control of Human Behavior," Science, Vol. 124, No. 3231 (November 30, 1956), pp. 1057-1966. This dialogue "A Symposium" is reprinted as Chapter Seven, "Decision Control" of the recently published The Triple Revolution: Social Problems in Depth, ed. Robert Perrucci and Marc Pilisuk (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968). Rogers has described this involvement: . a helping relationship might be defined as one in which one of the participants intends that there should come about, in one or both parties, more appreciation of, more expression of, more functional use of the latent inner resources of the individual. Carl R. Rogers. On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961), Chapter 3, "The Characteristics of a Helping Relationship," p. 40. Although he is concerned principally with the establishment of new institutions in support of black independence, the remarks of W. H. Ferry can be extended to all disengaged people who are seeking the intimacies of total involvement: "But what blacktown most wants, whitetown cannot confer. Blacktown wants independence and the authority to run its own affairs. It wants to recover its manhood, its self-love, and to develop its ability to conduct a self-reliant community . . . It wants the experience of self-reliance, that highest of whitetown's virtues, with all its satisfactions and pains. W. H. Ferry, "The Case for a New Federalism," Saturday Review, June 15, 1968, p. 15. The population of the lower social-economic classes are in the unenviable position of bearing a large number of such prophecies. "The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true." Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1957), Chapter 11, "The Self=Fulfilling Prophecy," p. 423. 20. 21. 22. 23. 1892 Many explorations have been made of the relationship between the degree of concern about problems and the eventual solution of those problems by the persons experiencing them. A popular rendition of theoretical findings which can be used with widely diffused audiences is J. H. McPherson's Care, Commitment, and Involvement (Midland, Michigan: The Pendell Company, 1966). The theory of self-initiated learning identifies qualities such as those exhibited by the aides in carrying through their role: " . . . a profound trust in the human organism . . . sincerity, realness, absence of a facade . . . able to accept the whole student--to prize him as an imperfect human being with many feelings, many potentialities . . . genuine confidence in the capacity of the human organism . . . the ability to understand . . . reactions from the inside . . . concentrates on creating a facilitative climate and on providing resources." Carl R. Rogers, "Learning to be Free," NEA Journal, March, 1963), p. 29. Knittel, Child, and Hobgood, op. cit. Reissman, op. cit. A film on the role of the Health Educator Aide and a manual on environmental sanitation for HEAs is available from Consumer Protection and Environmental Health Service, Environmental Control Administration, Office of Training and Manpower Development, Training Institute, U. S. Public Health Service, 5555 Ridge Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202. 1893 RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN HOUSING AND HEALTH IN SOME MICHIGAN CITIES 1968 - 1970 The purpose of this document is to share some insights into the relation- ships between housing, in the broad sense of the neighborhood scene, and health, in the broad sense of the well-being of citizens. The frame of reference is the Michigan Health Survey.* The interpretative remarks are the product of thought of many colleagues who have contributed to the knowledge brought to bear in this interpretation of the results. Thus, for these emergent ideas, any positive and contributive aspects must be shared with authors, teachers and co-workers while the style, opinions, omissions, and relative emphasis of the material are my responsibility alone. TCobort hewds . Robert Lewis, Ph.D. Professor, Office of the Dean College of Human Medicine Michigan State University and, Consultant Statistical Research & Development Michigan Department of Public Health %* Adrian, Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Muskegon are presently participating. Dated: September 28, 1970 1894 THE SOURCE OF INFORMATION The Michigan Health Survey* began in 1967 with the intention of starting and then improving a routine and continuing process of observing and recording information about the physical environment, the population, the recognized health concerns, and the medical care received. It is a local health department surveillance program, with state central direction for technical affairs of coordination, scientific aspects of sampling and analysis, and aid in interpreting and disseminating the results. Local health personnel are trained to collect, analyze, and disseminate the results by making presentations in neighborhoods. The basic purpose is to keep the public advised as to the state of its health, to provide a basis in evidence for location, magnitude and timing of specific health programs, and to provide a common basis for coordinating the several community resources which contribute to the improvement of the health of all the people. City-wide sampling observations have been going on since the beginning of 1969 in Adrian, Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids. At the present time, the program is also city-wide in Lansing and Muskegon. Flint (Genesee County) is a county-wide program. The quality of information has been steadily improved over this period through repeated training, detailed work on the recording document, the supervision and the methods of presenting summary results. * The program has been supported by a variety of interests and resources: - Local Health Departments - time, effort and dollars - Michigan Department of Public Health - time &effort - Michigan Area Regional Medical Program - planning grant #1502 RM-00053-01 - National Center for Health Services Research & Development Contract = # HSM 110-69-239 ~ Comprehensive Health Planning = Area Wide "B" Agencies (1969-70, Three areas only) 1895 The base of the work is the federal census block map numbering system which provides versatility in showing results on demand for any selected grouping of blocks (a nursing district, a census tract, a suspected high- risk area, a neighborhood) and also provides for analysis relating some other record system (say mental health services) to survey results. All results are shown by geographic area, thus positively protecting citizens from inadvertent revelation of personal affairs. Neighborhoods have been defined in each city by reference to block-by- block appraisal of the quality of maintenance of dwelling structures, and such other information as the geographic distribution of recipient families of Aid-to-Dependent Children, infant mortality, reported illegitimate births, reported Tuberculosis and Syphilis. These '"neighborhoods' are demonstrated to be different, by analysis of the environmental, demographic and health information from the sampling program, and by analysis of selected health services delivered in those areas. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ARISING FROM THE RESULTS TO DATE The cities are unique. They differ as to growth and deterioration and differ as to the resources which can be brought to bear on identified con- cerns. However, the same general kinds of neighborhoods are observed in all the cities. Similar rates of reported diseases, and of medical and dental utilization, are reported for neighborhoods which appear similar as to the state of the environment and the population structure. The neighbor- hoods are observed to be in various stages of a process of change by popu- lation replacement. In order to express these ideas in more detail, some working terms are: 1 2) * 1896 Stable Neighborhood: A small area occupied by families of similar cultural background. Change may be going on (as in any living system) but the rate of change is comparatively slow. In this "steady state", the replacement of families moving out is by new families not remarkably different in cultural background, values, and social perceptions from their predecessors. The definition appears to be applicable without regard to cultural attainment or esthetics in a given neighborhood. Transitional Neighborhood: This term is used to indicate the situation wherein newly ‘arriving families are remarkably different as to cultural background and behavioral patterns, from the predecessor occupants. The transitional state appears related to deteriorating physical environment, where the previous, aging occupants depart by migration or death after long-time occupancy, leaving behind a poorly maintained, aging structure* in a setting which is not estheticly desirable to their cultural descendents. The replacement family is likely to be young and short on money, because they need a cheap place to live. : Some kinds of junk are reflections of different behavior patterns, and help to identify transition areas. Collapsing sheds and fences reflect a lack of maintenance, which can be thought of as a behavioral characteristic in the older population. Accumulated junk, such as abandoned automobiles and appliances, seems to reflect the emergence of a replacement cultural group with behavioral patterns which may be attributable to life patterns of poverty. Follow-back conversations suggest that local policy in property taxation may be an important element, acting to discourage the maintenance and improvement of dwelling structures, out-buildings, and premises, and thus, in the long run, to hasten the obsolescence of an older area. 1897 The idea is beginning to emerge that in the course of time, the density of young, poor families increases in a transitional area. At first, there are very few.* One would anticipate that the function is not linear but rather an S-shaped curve in time. If the hypothesis holds to be tenable, then there may be a predictable point along this time=- density function (a socially critical value), when the emergence of a poverty culture may be irreversible. In terms of spatial distribution, the geography suggests a wave=-form moving out from areas known to have been a poverty culture (''core area') at the time of the 1960 Census. The total area in transition seems to be expanding at an increasing rate, in the several cities for which information is available, and may be two or three times as large as the core area of 1960. DISCUSSION AND TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS Neighborhood Leadership In the course of transition by cultural replacement, the leaders of the remaining older culture are acknowledged in their role; their effectiveness among their constituents does not necessarily change, but as time goes by the constituency itself fades away. In the beginning, the replacing families are so sparcely scattered as to have no means of communication and no basis for leadership development. When the density of poor families does increase to the point where leadership might emerge, one could guess that the subjects chosen for issues may reflect a crucial need for political visibility. Much of the recent attention of medical and health professionals to deficiencies in medical services has been in response to the crisis-oriented leadership of the terminal transitional areas. Strong allegations have been made (perhaps as part of the process of welding together a constituency). * Maps of location of recipient families for Aid-to-Dependent Children show sparce scatterings of young poor families in early transitional areas. 1898 There appears some evidence at this time, from preliminary analysis of medical utilization rates and the location of hospitals and doctors’ offices, that some of the claims are debatable. In the meantime, the reaction has served to concentrate limited resources, thus to draw attention away from citizens with similar needs, but living in areas which have not yet gone the full route of transition. The Provision of Medical Services in Transitional Areas The emergence of a poverty culture may be characterized by an increasing importance of the interaction effects of health, social, and environmental concerns in a given family. Illnesses and social disabilities become inter- dependent and the friction can magnify and distort pathologic conditions which might otherwise be quickly resolved by the physician.* Within a given metropolitan area, peripheral growth and accelerating central replacements of cultural groups will cause a parallel evolution of the nature of recognized medical needs. These should be matched by evolving, collaborative functions of medical and social resources. Transitional areas need planning attention to meet the needs of aging people and to prepare for emerging pediatrie/poverty medical needs. The immediate concerns may range from services for high geriatric risks in neighborhoods in the early stage of transition, to a mix of geriatrics and pediatrics concerns (but in different ethnic groups) at the intermediate stages of transition, to a host of interrelated social and clinical ills at the terminal stages. * The bump in the street: One lady, living alone, responded to the question "do you ever have trouble from ndse in your neighborhood?" by saying "yes, there's a bump in the street." She had seen the doctor eighteen times in the past year for her arthritis. The physician might not know of the re- lationship between the noise of cars hitting the bump (the painful loss of sleep) and the apparent ineffectiveness of his prescribed treatment. The lady was frustrated, the doctor was frustrated; the quality of the physical and social environment has influence on the quality of medical care. 1899 The Provision of Health and Health-Related Services For neighborhoods in the early stages of transition, fundamental pre- ventive health concerns include: a) Positive encouragement of environmental maintenance, to slow the process of deterioration. b) Professional preventive and supportive health and social attention for aging people. This might include extending medicaid and medi- care to include these functions. c) In-the-home advice ‘and professional support for newly arriving poor young families (to improve understanding of resources and attitudes in the unfamilar setting, to resolve specific health and social disabilities and to slow the process of mobility). d) Consideration of projected future population of transitional areas in the planning of municipal resources such as schools, hospitals and clinics. In a neighborhood just starting transition, filled with aging people, the school facilities are likely to be also ancient = which,a few years later, the newly arriving children will inherit. In the meantime, there is reason to consider out=- patient and special clinics for the aging population. For neighborhoods in intermediate stages of transition, environmental deterioration is found to be further advanced. Maintenance of structures is such as to require extensive remedial work. Rubble is likely to be more of the accumulated type, although collapsing sheds and fences also increase. There is likely to be cross-cultural friction, often between young and old people (those hot-rodders!) (That old biddy!). There are a variety of specific program approaches that come to mind which may have special importance when applied in intermediate transitional neighbor- hoods. Each seems to require a more preventive than remedial outlook on the 1900 part of the agencies that may be involved. Some examples are: a) b) ce) d) e) Education for both children and adults to provide broad rational understanding of the life-scene in which they live (provide a basis for the enhancement of dignity). Attention to social (stress) environments of pre-mothers. The reduction of infant mortality can be achieved by improving the quality of life: well-maintained neighbor- hoods have low rates. Communicable disease control. Tuberculosis, Syphilis and many other diseases depend on socio-environmental characteristics, as controlling elements in the patterns of disease occurrence. Reduction of psychic and physical stress. Disabilities and pregnancies are made more difficult by intrusions on the peace of the daily scene of life. Attention to the quality of municipal housekeeping. Some specific concerns are the maintenance of streets, the materials and workmanship applied in the mainte- nance activities of utility companies, the removal of rubble and refuse, and education efforts for environ=- mental neatness on the part of the residents. The function of governmental and private agencies are a part of the human community, and their successes and omissions bear on both housing and health. Most of the above-mentioned areas of work appear to require collab- orative efforts of several professional disciplines working together at the street level. This appears to require, in turn, a more versatile use of funds in local agencies, so that workers can cross the boundaries set up by 1901 categorical line budgeting of time and effort. It appears to require less of the reference to last year's activities reports by budget examiners, and more reference to the current and changing state of affairs to which the efforts are directed. It appears to require a new look at the accumulated statutes which have been passed on to guide and control operational functions. In the foreseeable future, there will be an increasing proportion of families that are '"poor' in comparison with others. The conditions of life that emerge when poor people are densely settled, negatively interacting with each other and with the rest of the community, lead to immensely complicated interactions of economic, environmental, medical, health, and social concerns for each individual caught up in it. In this condition of life, the physician, the envirommentalist, the nurse, the social worker, and the education have a pretty slim chance of success in their jobs as they are defined today. The Importance of Preventive Functions The prevention of extensions of poverty culture is of the most extreme importance to my mind, Not only because of the short-range problems of delivering effective health services and medical care, but because by defi- nition this condition of life - this absence of well-being - is exactly the target of the institutions in which I am employed. The relationship between housing and health is inseparable: Deteriorating housing quality in the mid-city areas is extensive and clearly defines where the poverty culture will be in the next ten years if the deterioration is left to continue. As it goes on, health and social problems will mount, tax receipts will go down, and the telephone requests for more services will continue to take all of the time of all the professionals that can be hired. Let's get ahead of the problem! 1902 Senator Percy. Thank you very much indeed. The session is adjourned. (Whereupon, at 12:45 p.m. the committee adjourned, to reconvene on Monday, October 5, 1970.) Oo NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS—1970 HEARINGS BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS OF THB UNITED STATES SENATE NINETY-FIRST CONGRESS SECOND SESSION ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS PART 7—RURAL HOUSING WASHINGTON, D.C.,, OCTOBER 5, 6, AND 7, 1970 2 Printed for the use of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 42-778 WASHINGTON : 1971 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.8. Government Printing Office Washington, D.C. 20402 - Price $1 SELECT COMMITTEE ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS GEORGE McGOVERN, South Dakota, Chairman ALLEN J. ELLENDER, Louisiana JACOB K. JAVITS, New York HERMAN E. TALMADGE, Georgia CHARLES H. PERCY, Illinois RALPH W. YARBOROUGH, Texas PETER H. DOMINICK, Colorado PHILIP A. HART, Michigan MARLOW W. COOK, Kentucky WALTER F. MONDALE, Minnesota ROBERT DOLE, Kansas EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts HENRY BELLMON, Oklahoma CLAIBORNE PELL, Rhode Island KENNETH SCHLOSSBERG, Staff Director CLARENCE V. MCKER, Professional Staff Member for the Minority (II) CONTENTS CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WITNESSES Monpay, OcToBER 5, 1970 Henry, Aaron, president, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, State of Mississippi. 0 a a Ll Margolis, Richard J., chairman, Board of Directors, Rural Housing Alliance. a ER aL IG os Dolbeare, Mrs. Cushing N., managing director, Housing Association of Delaware Valley. os I A A i Tuespay, OcTOBER 6, 1970 Gunther, John J., executive director, U.S. Conference of Mayors, on behalf of the National League of Cities and U.S. Conference of Mayors, ac- companied by Robert Josten, legislative counsel, and Larry Snowwhite, legislative assistant oo ooo oi cme aS ECG Sn a LIL UD Rucker, George W., research director, Rural Housing Alliance___________ WepNESDAY OcTOBER 7, 1970 Gish, Pat B., director, Eastern Kentucky Housing Development Corpora- tion, Whitesburg, By... ho os Ooh Cre bias Cochran, Clay L., chairman, Board of Directors, National Rural Housing Coalition, accompanied by Robert E. Johnson, vice chairman, and Tom’ Moore, member ofthe board. ol aot ab audi, Lo Statements: Cochran) Clay Dues J met San 0 ca dd uN a mt cl oh LL oe Prepared statement... ooo 2. Cir Ll nt a Dolbeare, Mrs. Cushing N.C 0 oa all Prepared statement... coos Su cobalt s SoS CHsh, Pal. i ee ier La RL a Prepared statement. i. Jari od en Gunther, Johnidl oo... do ds A he a nae SLL Henry Aron... a. Margolis, Biehawd J... oe a la RE Rucker, Georee W...0... J. oll alo on a Ll rs eo Prepared:glotoment, iy da SS dam BEG A es ren Walsh, Albert A., administrator, Housing and Development, a single, comprehensive housing program administration. _________________ Prepared statements of James E. Upchurch, Jr., Wray Bailey, and Charles Melvers. 0 port aie 1 Communications to: Clay L. Cochran, executive director, Rural Housing Alliance, from Charles Beer, director, Division of Agricultural Science, Technology and MaDagemEnt. ool SLi ooh ea i a de ate SS GE a Hon. Clifford M. Hardin, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture, from Clay L. Cochran, executive director, Rural Housing Alliance, Angus 3, OO ae Hon. George McGovern, Senate Office Building, from Barbara W. Moffett, secretary, Community Relations Division_______________ Kenneth Schlossberg, staff director, Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, from Cushing N. Dolbeare, managing director, Housing Association of Delaware Valley... _____..__.____ .____.. (III) Page 1903 1921 1968 1996 2003 2029 2050 2050 2050 1968 1970 2029 2043 1996 1903 1921 2003 2004 2091 2022 2068 2068 2022 1969 Iv Miscellaneous articles, publications, ete., entitled: Page “All Their Days, All Thelz Nighte'?.. olla leah alh 1941 “Area Housing Rated Below Par,” from the Clarksburg (Miss.) Press Register, February 10,0000... od i. a an, 1921 “Effort To Help East Kentucky Housing Called Ineffectual,” from the Louisville (Ky.) Courier Journal, October 8, 1970____________ 2111 “Elderly Woman Dies as Fire Levels Home,” from the Clarksdale {Migs} Press Register, January 24, 1970. - 2 2 oom 1920 “Financial Times Reports: Southeast Seen as ‘Pauper’ of American elon a nies 1920 “Housing for Mississippi’s Problem Areas” .___.__ __..____..______ 1917 “Government Neglecting Rural America, Senate Told,” from the Courier-Times, October'8, 1070.00 0 Ja mil Joo oa 2113 “Lists of Plans, Bulletins, Slide Sets, and Miscellaneous Publications om Rural Housing. Ln ie as 2068 “NAACP Aide Scores South on Housing,” from the Washington Pont; 0etolorif 1970. cit 3s Srl «min rs rhs Se pi st fe 1909 “Neglect of County Areas Described to Senate,” from the Denver (Colo. Post, Ootoheri 8, il O70, ihe rr ma rimmin = = po moma Sig mE 24 2107 “New Agency Urged for Rural Emergency Housing for People Not Covered by Current Programs,” from the American Banker, Oetohol SHOT). iN L re Ran bbe mm ih 2 mh 2 imo mo 2112 “Regulations Said to Hurt Worker,” from the Palm Beach Post, Oectober9, 197001 Jo ovis gn) a Lombeslioiiprinne Lunia - 2109 “Rural Areas Are Termed Overlooked in Housing Aid,” from the New York Times, October13, 1970.00 ool dee ido inn ad bone 2108 “Rural Housing Action Asked’... enon emi awe 3 1919 “Rural United States Neglected, Cochran Tells Senate,” from the Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald Journal, October 8, 1970. __.______._____. 2106 “Rural United States Neglected, Panel Told,” from the Columbus Digpateh; October S070. . tennant na wit stm nr in 2108 “Senate Panel Hears Rural Housing Plan,” from the New York Times, Oetober6, VO7D: «oa ee oo Baie A GIN 2110 “Text of the Rural Development Amendment—Title IX: Rural Development’ 0 00 yo Si el pn I EO LE 1933 “U.S. Housing Called a Way to Pen Poor,” from the New York Daily News, Oct. 6, 1970... 0... oe nnerp mma mms wnt m= minis 1909 “U.S. Housing Program Helps Few Rural Poor,” from the St. Louis Post-Dispateh, Oetober-1l, 1070. .% li ood ravi 2108 HEALTH AND HOUSING MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1970 U.S. SENATE, Serect COMMITTEE ON Nutrition Axp Humax NEEDS, Washington, D.C. The select committee met at 10:10 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 1318, New Senate Office Building, Hon. George S. McGovern (chair- man of the committee) presiding. Present: Senators McGovern, Yarborough, Percy, and Dole. Staff members present : Kenneth Schlossberg, staff director; Gerald Cassidy, general counsel; Clarence McKee, minority professional staff member, and David Cohen, minority professional stay member. The Cratrman. The committee will be in order. Today the select committee begins 3 days of hearings on the prob- lems of substandard housing in rural areas. It is a shocking but, I think, relatively unrecognized fact that almost two-thirds of all the substandard housing in the United States is in the rural sectors of the country. We have already had medical testimony regarding the terrible effects that such housing has on the health of the people who reside in these bad housing conditions. Our witnesses this week are going to document the actual existence of this kind of housing, analyze why so much of it still exists and then try to point us in the directions that we need to move to elimi- nate once and for all substandard housing of that kind. Our first witness this morning is a distinguished citizen of the State of Mississippi, a distinguished American, an old personal friend of mine, Dr. Aaron Henry, who is president of the State conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Dr. Henry, we are honored to have you as the leadoff witness on this subject, conditions in rural America, with special reference to rural housing. STATEMENT OF AARON HENRY, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ASSO- CIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE, STATE OF MISSISSIPPI Dr. Henry. Senator McGovern, chairman of the committee and all the other titles you work under, as you mentioned before, my name is Aaron Henry. I am from Clarksdale, Miss. I serve as NAACP chair- man and T serve on the national board of directors of the NAACP, and the national board of the SCLC. (1903) 1904 I want to express my appreciation for being here today, and I am really torn between presenting the national picture as compared to an in-depth study of the immediate area in which I live. So what I would like to do would be present generally the national picture and a few excerpts from a special study we have done of my county, and I would like to also include the general findings of this study from our county with the record, if you will so permit that. The CuarmaN. You may proceed in any way you wish, Dr. Henry. Dr. Henry. It is customary at these appearances to compliment the committee—on its past as well as its present efforts. This is a com- mittee for which I can fulfill that custom without hypocrisy, but I also feel compelled to chide you a bit for tardiness. With these hear- ings, as I understand it, you are beginning to take a look at the relationship between housing and health. I must say that many of us, who have followed your work in the past and watched the television coverage of what Senator Mondale has called “The Liberal Road Show”—doing that essential job of making the Nation look and see hunger and despair—were wonder- ing when you would get around to noticing the shacks and hovels those hungry people were inhabiting. Many of us were wondering when we would notice the housing, and when you would notice the shacks that people lived in, as we studied the hunger problems, and paid little or no attention to the housing in which they lived. Your assignment from the Senate is to look at the broad problem of nutrition and human need, and you can’t do that without looking at housing—the shameful housing of the poor, the ill, and the hungry. That is true not only in the obvious visual sense; it is true in the medical, the economic and the social sense. Increasing the food available to a family that lives in decaying, tumbled-down shacks located in the midst of contaminated drainage ditches and the pollution of an inadequate outhouse ends up by pro- viding a better diet to the parasites that infest people forced to live like that and to the bacteria that those conditions spawn—not to the people themselves. Providing medicine to treat the worms, dysentery, tuberculosis, pneumonia and the myriad other diseases which stem directly from inadequate shelter, heat, and sanitation may increase the market for pharmaceuticals, but it is not going to result in healthy people, unless we also do something about that inadequate shelter, heat and sanitation. The President said it a year and a half ago, in his message on food, when he pointed out that “special efforts must be made to see that the benefits of proper foods are not lost amidst poor health and poor sanitary conditions.” The leadership of the American Public Health Association said it less than a year ago before this same committee when they insisted that a program “to improve housing for the poor is urgently needed as a health measure.” They pointed out that 1t “is simply impossible to maintain health in houses that are physically unsafe and do not have elementary sanitation features.” They concluded that “housing may be at least as important to health as hospitals.” 1905 How can this committee—how can anyone—talk about human need without talking about housing? Housing is what we always have to come back to, 1s the anchor of our total lives, and for the poor it is usually bad housing. This is what the family always has to come back to—the adults from their jobs, however, adequate or inadequate; the kids from their schools, however good or bad, however segregated or unsegregated. So, this committee needs to look at housing—and poor people need this committee to look at their housing, and I think this committee is, hopefully, ready now to begin to take a look at housing. When you do, you are going to find a lot of familiar landmarks. I am not just talking about finding yourself in the same communities among the same people living in the same hovels that you saw them in when you were there looking at hunger as an index to poverty. There are some other familiar landmarks you are going to find. When you looked at hunger, you found that it didn’t result just from neglect— “benign” or otherwise—but that its shape and charac- ter could be traced in part to the results of certain Government poli- cies and programs. Just as farm price policies contributed to the hunger problem, those and other Government programs—including housing programs—have helped to shape the housing problem. Farm programs which encouraged and underwrote the American equivalent of the “enclosure movement” forced people off the farms and into the metropolitan ghettos. Housing programs that encour- aged and underwrote homeownership for the middle class and sup- ported the boom of the tract developer, combined with highway pro- grams that pandered to the same social groups and forces, have resulted in “suburb-izing” America, facilitating the flight from the inner city, which was “red circled” by the Federal Housing Adminis- tration for years, and facilitating also the flight of the middle class from the rural areas and small towns, which have similarly been “red circled” by the housing credit institutions, both public and private. The result is a suburbia that has been aptly characterized as a series of white nooses around black necks in the metropolitan areas, and a rural and small town America where the poor have been increasingly “the people left behind.” The fact is that the highway program has destroyed more housing than the public housing pro- gram has built. Urban renewal has eliminated twice as many houses as it has produced. When you looked at hunger, you found that Government programs that were ostensibly aimed at meeting the problem, often had other agendas—disposing of surpluses that had developed from the farm producers, for example, or helping the grocers to sell more goods through the food stamp system. Our housing programs have also been aimed at needs other than those of the people in bad housing. The oldest of them, the FHA insurance program, was admittedly aimed at reviving a lagging construction industry and we still tailor our housing activity to the needs of the builders and developers. And when we do set out to reach “moderate income” families, we do so by subsidizing the mortgage bankers and the money-lenders in the hope of thus getting them to serve markets they would not serve otherwise. Meanwhile, what has happened? Among other things, the cost of 1906 money has gone up so fast and the price of land has risen so steeply, that we have found ourselves pricing people out of the housing market faster than we expand the programs to reach them. We have now gotten to the point where poor people—those with incomes under $3,000, say—can’t even afford the operating and maintenance costs of adequate housing on a reasonable share of that income, let alone pay part of the capital costs of getting the housing. Instead, they must pay a third to a half of their income for housing that is inadequate and indecent, while the middle and upper income families of the Nation only pay 15-20 percent of their income for housing that is incomparably better. Let me suggest another familiar—and very crucial—landmark that you will find once you get into the field on housing. The Nation’s food programs weren’t reaching a lot of people because the Federal Gov- ernment had abdicated its responsibilities and left the job up to the local power structure. Consequently, in hundreds and hundreds of the poorest counties in the country, even the grossly inadequate programs that existed were not being used. This happens very frequently when the Federal Government ties its assistance programs to the State or local government. They, in many instances, are insensitive to the poor and the needy. Housing in America suffers from that same Federal abdication. The oldest and deepest housing subsidy—public housing—is federally funded all right, but it is totally dependent for its implementation and its administration on local housing authorities—agencies of State and local government. One result is that the Nation’s nonmetropolitan counties, which contain more than half the Nation’s poor and two-thirds of its bad housing, have gotten only one-fifth of the Nation’s public housing. Another result of this permissive approach is that where there is public housing, it is frequently regarded as the local power structure’s equivalent of concentration camps for the poor. It is not Federalism—new or old—but feudalism, when the State government of Mississippi, my home State, tells local government that they can’t participate in a national program like urban renewal unless they enact a specific ordinance to offset a general statewide ban. As the song says, “Everybody knows about Mississippi.” T have hams trying to get you down there, and when I do, T will play it or you. The newer programs of so-called assisted housing are predicated on an even more permissive structure. They require action by private institutions at the local level and generally manage to give the local governmental structure a veto power as well—just to be on the safe side. As a result, the affluent, white suburbs continue to say “No” to the poor—black or white. In the rural areas and small towns, if the zoning restrictions and the community opposition doesn’t block housing for the poor, the lack of credit institutions and of socially motivated people who can also qualify under FHA and Farmers Home’s definition of the kind of “community leaders” to which they will entrust their scarce resources for assisted housing probably will. Finally, when you put all those pieces of the food program 1907 together, and the problems encountered within the food program, you found a need so prevalent that it constituted a humiliating reproach to the richest nation in the world. You found a program that in terms of size and scope was totally inadequate to that need; and you found that the character and administration of that program meant that it not only hadn’t, but couldn’t serve those most in need. I submit that when you put the pieces of the housing problem together, you are going to come out with the same stark conclusions, or worse, 1f anything. There has been a lot of talk in the last couple of years about a hous- ing crisis. But the word “crisis” generally refers to a temporary situa- tion and for people living in the Nation’s worst housing, there is nothing temporary about it. You know that, like I do. This committee heard a few weeks ago about the housing conditions in North Bolivar County, about 15 miles from where I live in Mis- sissippi, where less than one house in three has piped water and the rest have outhouses or nothing at all. The people in those houses have lived there all their lives and, in most cases, their parents lived that way before them. To me, Senator McGovern, that is not a crisis, it is a scandal. It is a thing that has been with us a long time. We have had public housing in this country for a third of a century and it still has not reached one-tenth of the people eligible for it. That, too, is not a crisis, Senator, but a scandal. Moreover, there are families in this country whose incomes are too low to get them into public housing under present procedures—even if there were public housing available. What I am really saying is that even the programs we have, if they were executed to their fullest possibility, they in their present form would not serve a great num- ber of people who are poor and need housing, because when you deal with the 70 percent figure that the Federal Government is willing to provide to supplement the cost of housing, there still leaves a 30 per- cent figure, and in many instances this 30 percent figure is much higher than the average poor person can afford. Even if there were public housing available, and I can’t see how that can be regarded as anything but a scandal, that the programs that we have in themselves are not adequate, even if they were exe- cuted to the fullest extent. Bad housing in America is a scandal that is not going to be ended until we stop looking at the problem in terms of builders, bankers, “starts,” codes, markets, credit risks, subsidy mechanisms, management techniques and all the rest, and start look- ing at it in terms of people—of human need. And that is another reason that this committee has a job to do. Some people think that we can solve the problem with technology —and we have “Operation Breakthrough.” But industrialized hous- ing is no more housing for the poor than conventional housing. The inborn or the ingrained obstacles are the same in both of these kinds of institutions. At the best the cost savings are not going to make as much differ- ence in monthly housing expenditures as a 2 percent change in inter- est rates. Some people think we can solve the problem by amending this program, expanding that one and maybe adding another. But we already have so many housing programs that even the bureaucrats are 1908 ready to consolidate them, and this is perhaps preposterous, but in all of the programs we have, we still do not have programs that will do the job that has to be done. ; J "So in our consolidation and in our expansion we still are going to have to come up with new legislation and new programs if we honestly want to face up to the problem of housing and be sure that the country with the greatest national gross product of any nation in the world no longer puts up with the fact that many of its citizens, too many of its citizens, have no housing at all, are sleeping in parks, or the house that they live in that they call a house is nothing more than a building that you can study the stars through the roof and the earth through the floor, if one would but take a casual look. The problem is not technological and it is not programmatic—it is political. Every commission, committee, task force or what-have-you that has looked at the problem has reached that conclusion—but they don’t want to say it quite that plainly so they call it a “question of commitment.” And that, too, ought to be a familiar landmark to this committee. While I am critical of what we have, I am critical because we are not dealing with a question of ability, Senator McGovern. We are dealing with a question of will and the only reason why we don’t have programs and projects that sufficiently deal with this problem of housing is because we don’t have the will in the law-making body of this Nation, the Congress and the Senate, to come forward with the kinds of programs that can do the job. Many of you are from the same kinds of areas that I live in. Still, we get all hung up on whether or not to vote for a certain piece of legislation because it might help some poor white or some poor black, and this is politically defeating. But if we have got to the point in America where to help the poor is a political noose, then I think that much more than housing is going to have to be changed in the whole political system. So, you have got to do on housing and health the same sort of job you did on hunger and health. First, you have got to make the nation face up to the facts: That there is a housing scandal. By the previous statement I don’t mean to say you have solved the problem of hunger. You have pointed it out. Consequently, you have more than one job to do. You have to finish a program on hunger and carry on a program in housing at the same time. Just as you did for hunger, you have got to make it impossible for people to say, “We didn’t know it was that bad.” Of course, you and I know that is a dodge for a lot of people anyway. Many of us have seen the bad housing that many people live in. Then you—and the rest of us—have got to make the Government face up to the facts: That its programs haven’t and won’t provide “a decent home * * * for every American family,” and we have got to demonstrate why that is so. Then, and only then, will the Nation, and the Government put an end to the housing scandal. I have confidence from my association with the gentlemen on the panel through the years that you are very much concerned and that you will get on with this job and get it done. But you know, many of 1909 us, and as you know, I am going to be around as often as you permit me to continue to remind you of the fact that housing is still a prob- lem, and I am going to be around te continue to remind you that hunger and health are still problems. | : I hope that you will permit me to come back from time to time to share with you my views. Thank you. [From the Washington Post, Oct. 6, 1970] NAACP Ame Scores SourH oN Housing Federal housing programs are being ignored in some parts of the south and rural slums perpetuated to drive out blacks who might exercise new voting muscle, a Mississippi rights official said yesterday. Aaron Henry, president of the Mississippi branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, also told the Senate hunger committee that in effect some local officials have veto power over certain federal programs. “One result is that the nation’s nonmetropolitan counties, which contain more than half the nation’s poor and two-thirds of its bad housing, have gotten only one-fifth of the nation’s public housing,” he said. “Another result . . . is that where there is public housing it is frequently regarded as the local power structure’s equivalent of concentration camps for the poor.” He said this was true because local officials are uncomfortable that blacks, in the majority in some parts of the South, are increasing their voter registra- tion and electing more and more black officials. Henry said he himself had been born in a tenant farmer's shack like some of the tumbledown shanties pictured in big blowups posted around the com- mittee room. “Consequently 1 speak from a real-close-to-it situation,” he said. No federal program can do much to improve substandard rural housing unless the federal government bypasses state and local officials, Henry said. [From the New York Daily News, Oct. 6, 1970] U.S. Housing CALLED A WAY To PEN Poor WasHINGTON, Oct. 5 (News Bureau)—‘“Local power structures” particularly in the South, look on public housing as a way of perpetuating “concentration camps for the poor,” Congress was told today. Aaron Henry, Mississippi state chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, made the charge before the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. The committee, headed by Sen. George S. McGovern (D-S.D.), began three days of hearings on decayed rural housing, in which half of the nation’s poor live. Henry called the situation “a national scandal,” surpassing even the problem of widespread hunger in America, which McGovern’s panel made headlines exposing last year. Henry joined other witnesses in blaming the nation’s present housing ills on the fact that local housing authorities often have the last word on how federal housing money will be used in their areas. CITES RACE RATIO “One result is that the nation’s non-metropolitan counties, which contain more than half the nation’s poor and two-thirds of its bad housing, have gotten only one-fifth of the nation’s public housing,” Henry said. Asked by McGovern why some localities are reluctant to help the poor find better homes, Henry said : “The unhappy answer to that question is that, in parts of the Southern area, the ratio (of blacks to whites) is too high to be comfortable to the power structure of the communities and they would rather the black and poor emi- grate to Detroit, Chicago or New York.” Richard J. Margolis, board chairman of the nonprofit Rural Housing Alli- ance, followed Henry with a slide presentation of dismal housing in the South, the West and other areas. He told the committee that “if all of our areas were 1910 struck by hurricanes, the resulting emergency, would be no greater than the emergency we now confront in rural America.” The CraRMAN. Thank you very much, Dr. Henry. You have been very candid and forthright with the committee, as I knew you would be, and I think we accept in the spirit in which it was intended, the chiding that you gave us in your opening statement, that this com- mittee has a mandate that goes beyond simply looking at hunger. We have another aspect in our mandate relating to human needs, in which housing and environmental health are very important. Senator Percy has been after me and other members of the committee for months to turn our attention to some of the health and neighborhood living conditions that make it very hard even when people are well fed to lead normal, healthy lives. As you state in your statement, much of the food to a person living in these hovels goes to the parasites and goes to the other illnesses that stem directly from bad housing and bad sanitation. I do want to say in partial defense that the committee’s decision to stay on the hunger problem as our major focus so far is that we have been faced with a very frustrating and difficult problem in that more than a year ago the Senate of the United States passed a very strong food reform bill, the Food Stamp bill, that would have eliminated most of the hunger and malnutrition in this country, and for a year the House of Representatives has been sitting on that legislation. Dr. Henry. That is the will I am talking about. They haven’t got the will to pass it. The Cuamraman. We felt that while the Senate had discharged much of its obligation, passing strong legislation a year ago to reform our food stamp program, that we still had a job to do in keeping the attention of the Nation and of the Congress focused on that un- finished business in the field of hunger. Now, I personally hope that every Congressman who goes back to face his constituents this fall will be asked why no action has been taken on the hunger front. I sincerely hope that before the House recesses, that they will get that food stamp legislation out on the floor and act on it favorably. It is not considered in good taste around here to criticize the other body, but I have no hesitance in saying that the House of Representa- tives has a moral obligation to the American people not to sit on that hunger legislation any longer. They have had it for a year last September, and the time has come to move. If they had moved months ago, I think this committee would have felt more clearly our responsibility to move on and start looking at housing and health and some of the other issues. Now, we are moving into that area, as you know, at the present time. We have had a number of hearings already in the field of environmental health, but the primary hope is on bad policy and health care and these other related matters. Let me ask you a few questions, Dr. Henry, more specifically about your statement. Could you describe to this committee the structure of the newer so-called assisted housing programs? That is, what are these private institutions that you have mentioned which are empowered with 1911 deciding whether or not this program is made available to needy families? : Dr. Hexry. I would like to read to you from a section of guidelines from McComb County: Under the present guidelines projects constructed under the rent supplement program must be located in a community which has officially approved partici- pation in the program. If the community does not have a recognized workable program as required by section 101(c) of the Housing Act of 1949, a sponsor is required to secure an enabling resolution from the elected officials of the city and/or county as the case may be in order to participate in the Federal rent supplement program. ' Most rural communities do not have workable programs. Most rural communities do not have the political clout to demand that a county board of supervisors or a city government institute a workable program which is demanded by the law that provides for the housing that they want. This is where we are so tied up and bogged down. The Cuamman. What, in your opinion, Dr. Henry, is the reason behind the State and local governments’ reluctance, or in some cases their refusal, to implement public housing projects in these rural areas? Is it a matter of changing local and State laws, or is it a matter of trying to change the bias of State and local people toward these rural housing possibilities, which are now possible within existing law? Dr. Henry. Senator McGovern, the unhappy answer to that ques- tion is, particularly in the southern areas of our Nation, the ratio of whites to blacks is too high to be comfortable to the power structure of the communities, and they would rather have many of the blacks and poor whites migrate to Detroit and New York, and Michigan. You always hear about this spreading out of the black population nationwide, so that everybody will have its share of us, or its share of the poor, and it is here where, if decent housing were built, this would be an encouraging activity to cause people to remain where they are. It would have its effect upon the political system of a com- munity in terms of who remains in office and who goes out of office, because the number of people who live there certainly are going to have something to say about what the political structure is with the possagy of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the recent reenactment of that act. So we are even skeptical of family planning systems that are being mentioned in the South, as to whether or not this is not also a genoci- dal trick to reduce the poor black and white population to a point where it will be no threat to the affluent to the power group that is now running the community. It is really an attempt, shamefully, to get as many of us to move out of the area as possible, and when we do that, all we do is increase the slums of Chicago, Detroit, New York. The Caamrmax. I think that is a shocking statement that you have made at one point in your testimony that very few Americans are probably aware of. If I can find it, I would like to underscore it. You state— The highway program has destroyed more housing than the public housing program has built, and urban renewal has eliminated twice as many houses as it has produced. 1912 What has happened to the people, then, who have been displaced, if we are moving backwards in providing decent housing? Dr. Hexry. What we do, we tear down a whole section, under whatever guise we term it, highway development, or renewal. There is no provision made for the people who live in these areas, except to expand the impoverished ghettos in other sections of the city. They come in with the high-rises and the apartments that are so expensive that the people who formerly lived in the area cannot move back into them, and they come in with a number of dwellings per family, particularly in the urban renewal, that the statistics show are mostly half in terms of the dwellings per family they have destroyed as compared to the dwellings per family that they have rebuilt. The Cramrman. One more question, Dr. Henry, before I turn to Senator Percy. I would gather that many of the people in your area are living on incomes of $2,500 and $3,000 a year, somewhere in that range? Dr. Henry. 51 percent of the people in my State, Senator, earn less than a thousand dollars a year. The Caamman. Even those that go up to $3,000 a year, is there any kind of public housing program, or a housing program of any kind in which the Federal Government is involved that can help people of that kind ? Dr. Hexry. No. You see, as long as you have the 70 percent top in terms of assistance, you still are talking about 30 percent of the guy’s earnings, say, if he does earn $3,000, going into housing. The Cuarraman. That would be his contribution to federally assisted housing ? Dr. Hexry. Yes. That is the minimum that he would be required to pay, 30 percent. It can go higher. The Caamrman. If he is earning $3,000, then that takes a third of his income. Dr. Hexry. That is right. The Cuarman. The Department of Agriculture would say that it takes at least another third of that income, $1,400 to $1,500, to feed a family of four or five people. Dr. Henry. They haven’t got into clothing yet. The Cramrrman. In rural areas, he is a farmer, and he has to have something for seed and equipment to keep his farming operation going. So in a sense, there is very little in the way of federally assisted housing. Dr. Henry. I am saying the best program we have in housing today will not do the job. The Cramrman. For families in that category. Dr. Henry. Yes, sir. The CrammaN. Thank you. Senator Percy ? Senator Percy. Dr. Henry, it is good to see you. I have seen some of the conditions in Mississippi, as you have pointed out. Dr. Henry. We were glad to have you down. Come back. Senator Percy. Thank you. The Chairman has mentioned some lethargy in the other House, 1913 and the possibility that poor taste is involved in criticizing the other House. I think when we face conditions such as we do today, I will take the chance of having some bipartisan poor taste and say that they are pussyfooting around and dragging their feet. When we have problems such as this, one shouldn’t stand back and say nothing. I think we ought to get the food stamp program out. 1 also believe that the family planning program over there is bottled up through some personal request of the retiring speaker. It is outra- geous to hold up legislation that is desperately needed to solve great problems that we face. But I also say that those who live in glass houses have to be careful about throwing stones, and we have a few programs here in the Senate today, such as the popular election of the President, that are blocked. We can’t seem to get it out. In addition, the House-passed Nixon family assistance program, which is a giant step forward to a more dramatic method of solving the problem of poverty, rather than just “poor housing” the poor, is blocked in the Senate. We can’t get that out of committee, much less get it on the floor of the Senate to be voted up or down. Dr. Henry. But, Chuck, you don’t consider this, again, the negli- gence being predicated on the Nation’s inability to do it, but, again, it is predicated on the will of the people who occupy the seats in the Senate, and the seats of the House, to be concerned enough about housing and, as you have mentioned, the food program and others, to pass them. We have got the economic base to do it. We have the greatest gross national product of any Nation that ever dwelt on the face of this earth, and we are doing some things poorly, poorer than some Na- tions who have a much lower gross national product than America does. Senator Percy. I think you have tried in these hearings to appeal to even the most conservative mentality. You have tired to say that we are looking at an investment in human beings, and that the costs to society in future years of poor housing and all the rest is going to be great indeed. We are looking at what poor housing does to the physical aspect of life of the occupants. I wonder if you could comment on what it does to the mental well-being of these people. As you know, we have more hospital beds occupied by the mentally ill than we do the physically ill today. There is a correlation between physical well-being and mental well-being. What does it do to a soul to live in the kind of filth that you indicate exists in rural America? Dr. Henry. Let’s take, for example, say, a family of 10 living in a three-room shack where three of four of the children are school age, going to school. One of the girls is out of high school and is trying to court in the front room and mamma and daddy are having an argu- ment in the second room, and the little brother is pulling the cat’s tail and everybody is having a goround here. How do you deal with the capacity to concentrate and to learn, study, in a situation where usually the lighting facilities are insuffi- cient, the attitudes of members of the family generally are so crowded that they are involved in this kind of a private situation where no- body has any kind of privacy to do his own thing. 1914 It is all interwoven and intertwined. Consequently, to develop a personality, to develop a set of values or standards in these kinds of conditions, is next to impossible, because you are so involved with being the victim of the consequences of what others are doing around you at any given time. Now generally in the area where people come out of housing that is so inadequate in terms of structure, in terms of conditions, as some of the shacks we see around the wall here. I see one about like what I was born in in Mississippi. I was born the son of a tenant farmer. Consequently, I am talking from a “real close to it” situation. You have the overall feeling as you dwell in this kind of sub- standard housing that nobody cares about you, that you are not going to end up being anybody. Your momma and daddy always tell you you are not going to be nothing, and you make up your mind you are not going to be nothing. When you see such squalor and poverty around you, no running water, and outhouses, it is a kind of depressing feeling that perhaps would be to some degree assisted if there were mental institutions available, or psychiatric assistance available to the people who live in these squalid conditions, but that is absent, too. So the luxury that you mentioned in terms of how can we deal with them in terms of their psychiatric responses with assistance in the psychological field, unfortunately that help is not there. So we have a real bad situation where people just get lost in the shuffle. Senator Percy. We are, of course, trying to look for answers. You have given us a picture of the conditions that exist, but one after another of the solutions that have been proposed within the past or present have been defeated. Public housing, for example. One of the latest hopeful proposals is “operation breakthrough,” and yet on page 9 you mention that some people think we can solve the problem with technology, and we have “operation breakthrough,” but industrialized housing 1s no more housing for the poor than con- ventional housing. Are you discrediting the whole program of “operation break- through” as not offering any hope for lower-cost housing? Dr. Hexry. Not in terms of offering no hope at all, but as an inadequate program. Breakthrough is not going to do it, because you have the same built in State-Federal relationships that result in the local politicians having to say what will be done and what will not be done with the lives of the poor, and that is where the poor people live. Until we somehow envision and work out a program that is federally based, with the Federal Government working directly with the citizens of the area to be helped, without the citizens to be helped having to sell their souls to the local politicians and power struc- ture—I know it is perhaps unheard of, or it is very difficult for you all to make up your minds that you are going to bypass some Gover- nor, and come into States and work directly with the people who need it, but this is the way you are going to be able to solve the housing program. . You are not going to be able to solve them with the built in nega- tives that call for more of a man’s income for housing than he can afford to pay, that calls for more of a political solution than he can produce in terms of the people who run his community. 1915 It is sometimes better not to delude a poor man into feeling that now he has something and then you do it and you find it doesn’t work. That is why many people are losing faith with what we call the “system” today. Because 1 came out of college, apple pie America, I thought the reason that America wasn’t running right was folks didn’t know better, and foolishly set out on a mission to educate the world, and I found out everybody knew, but me, what was going on, and it was a question of nobody cared. Senator Percy. You have made a comment about public housing being the equivalent of concentration camps for the poor. As you know in the 1968 housing bill we did make illegal any further high- rise public housing for families. So we recognized an error of 30 years’ standing in creating these so-called concentration camps. We at least started to work on that problem to make the housing more scattered housing, lower-rise hous- ing, which would not have the problems of public housing. The problem you point out about the highways is a problem that has been a great one, and the only solution I can develop provides that wherever the highway program tears down housing, we take out of highway funds the money to replace that housing. We have just passed this proposal in the Senate and I hope the House will accept it. There is a $2 billion surplus in the highway trust fund, and we are deficient in housing funds. It seemed like such a logical, simple solu- tion, and I was just delighted that Jennings Randolph, the Senator in charge of the Public Works Committee, accepted that principle, and that they have gone on to expand it. Here we have to work together with the House. But I wonder if you could be a little more specific as to what kind of Federal housing policy you would suggest to avoid the problem of having the local power structure create what amounts to concentration camps. What do we need to do now beyond what has been done in recent times to organize better, to provide better housing ? Dr. Henry. I think it requires perhaps more faith in the people who are to be served by public housing than maybe the lawmakers of the Nation are willing to go with. Unless we look carefully at the income base of the people that we are talking about who inhabit poor housing, and deal either coopera- tively or directly with the Federal Government-to-people groups, thus bypassing the legalisms that bog you down and really determine on the front end if you are involved in other things in your com- munity that the power structure does not appreciate, you are auto- matically out of whatever housing there is going to be, because they control who goes into it. I say a direct program from HUD probably, and there are a lot of problems in HUD right now with some personalities, but hopefully it won’t be that way always. If we get the legislation, we feel we can make the legalisms of the legislation become a reality, and if we take a position, I would say, of perhaps 90 percent subsidy, particularly in families with $3,000 or less income, which would require them to pay a minimum of 10 percent, rather than as now, a minimum of 30 percent, which most of them cannot afford, I feel that the cost of 42-778—71—pt. T—2 1916 housing, if we dealt directly from HUD with the people, would cut out the State funding situation and would reduce the cost appre- ciably, and we could get much more done this way than having, say, a middle man to get his cut before the poor get whatever they get. That is why I am very strong for direct Federal-to-people pro- grams, not only here, but in other programs as well. I haven’t gotten very fast with the idea at all, although I have been yakking about it a long time. But if we keep on arguing about it, maybe we will con- vince enough of you all one day that this is the way to do it. Senator Percy. In your testimony you state that inner-city areas have been “red circled” by FHA. As you know, this is an area that Senator Brooke and I have been pounding at for about 4 years. Dr. Hexry. You have been on it a long time. Senator Percy. We have required FHA to go into these so-called “red circled” areas of poverty where we need the housing the most, and take the risk involved. We will absorb the loss, if any, in Con- oress. ~ Have you seen previous evidence that FHA has not changed its mind, and if you have specific instances, can you provide these to me? Dr. Henry. I can provide you with the names of many people who have tried to become involved in FHA -financed homes that are poor, and are not in the veteran categories or in the guaranteed situations. Senator Percy. I was shocked to find out that FHA was set up to subsidize the affluent and the middle-income people. If you have got it made, you can get an FHA loan. We tried also to provide homeownership opportunities for very low-income people. All they need is $200 down, or equity, and an interest subsidy. We now have that program, and have had it for several years, and I have been disappointed. It has not taken hold in the rural com- munities. It is a direct Federal program to the community. Dr. Henry. It demands a workable program on the part of the county or the city government, wherein the housing is to be built, and this is where you get bogged down, because of the fact that the people who are to be served do not have the goodwill of the political entity in the area that has to agree that this is a workable program for this area. That is why we have to find a way to circumvent that. Senator Percy. In the rural communities that you know of, are there local organizations who can reach out to low-income people to provide the technical assistance and knowledge as to how they can become aware of the programs the Federal Government has and take advantage of these programs? We know the home builders act as promoters. They get their way through the Government maze and the Government redtape. We are trying to get at the rural poor so they can organize and get at these programs. Do you think the structure exists locally if we can finally somehow bridge the gap? : Dr. Henry. I don’t think it exists in the federal system in terms of an ombudsman-type activity that we are going to need to do this, 1917 to acquaint the people with how to fight their way through the Government redtape and maze. 1 think the best thing we have now is the Rural Housing Alliance, which is dealing in terms of propaganda and education with many people in the rural areas. The NAACP does some work in this area, and the Urban League does some work in this area. But I think it is in the private sector where the greatest amount of information is being disseminated about what the Federal programs are. Now, here, again, is a service that perhaps is germane to the poverty program, the housing program, if it is to be workable, that we institute some kind of an ombudsman corps into it, because the fact that the program is there and the people not knowing about it, No. 1, and, No. 2, how to get it, leaves only those that the people who do know about it want to tell how to come in. Now, I know there is no kind of ombudsman situation in HUD and perhaps we don’t have that opportunity through the Senate nor through the House, but I would recommend it as very wise. Senator Percy. Dr. Henry, I want to thank you very much for your testimony. It is very helpful. The Crarrman. Thank you, Dr. Henry. Dr. Henry. Thank you. (The supplemental document follows :) Housing FOR Mississiprr’'s Poor SPECIAL PROBLEM AREAS I. INTRODUCTION Many of the national guidelines governing low and moderate income housing projects are not flexible enough to meet the needs of our particular locality. Since Architects and Contractors must design and build under the influence of prevailing regional construction standards, geographic location, climatic conditions, soil analysis, local building codes, etc., so should National HUD- FHA guidelines be adaptable to cope with specific local situations. It is almost always an error to assume that urban oriented regulations will also work in small rural towns. Not only does geography make a decisive difference, but local attitudes, habits, economic structures, institutional mannerisms and traditions must be considered and dealt with if local projects are to meet the needs of the poor in a given area. Recommendation That, National HUD-FHA guidelines be made adaptable to cope with specific local conditions of rural areas. II. AMOUNT OF RENT SUPPLEMENTS PER TENANT Under present regulations, by waiver of restrictions, rent supplement pay- ments cannot exceed 70% of the fair market rent for each housing unit. This provides services to a great many low-income families, but it is an obstacle for the thousands in our hard-pressed area who are unable to earn the remain- ing 30%. A great many of our people are too poor to live in low-rent housing projects. The present program design does not permit these people to have a chance for a decent home in which to rear their families. The high cost of construction automatically results in an average rent of $175.00 per month per unit. With Mississippi's average welfare payment being slightly above $30.00 per month, and with the maximum 70% rent supplement restriction, we are unable to reach the desperate poor with decent housing. This dilemma is further compounded by: (1) the current transition from manual farm labor to mechanical and chemical techniques in farming, (2) cuts in acreage allotments, (3) annual farm subsidy payments to large farm 1918 operators for not planting, (4) discrimination and the lack of adequate job opportunities which have forced hundreds of our people to live, grow and develop their ideas for life in lamentably below standard houses. According to the 1960 Census Report, 579 of all housing units in Coahoma County, Mississippi, were considered substandard. Over 629% or 10,319 families have annual income of less than $3,000,000 ; two thousand four hundred twenty- eight families with income less than $1,000.00. The local USDA Food Stamp service reports that they serve several hundred families which have no income at all. The present 709 rent supplement limitation will not reach the hard-core poverty stricken people in the Mississippi Delta. It is essential that special impact, rural oriented, housing programs be developed to accommodate these deprived families. Without increased supplemental help from the federal government, these people will never have a decent home. They will never escape to better neighborhoods. Recommendation That, a special increase in the amount of the rent supplements and/or greater participation on the part of the government in off-setting the present con- struction cost. This will go a long way toward meeting the desperate housing needs of Mississippi's Poor. III. RESOLUTION OF APPROVAL TO PARTICIPATE IN FEDERAL RENT SUPPLEMENT PROGRAM Under present guidelines, a project constructed under the Rent Supplement Program must be located in a community which has officially approved par- ticipation in the program. If the community does not have a recognized “Workable Program,” as required by Section 101 (c¢) of the Housing Act of 1949, a sponsor is required to secure an enabling resolution from the elected officials of the city and/or county, as the case may be, in order to participate in the federal Rent Supplement Program. Most rural communities do not have “Workable Programs.” This requirement is an obstacle for many energetic and deserving groups who possess the will and the ability to sponsor housing projects. Human rights organizations, such as the NAACP, Urban League, SCLC, etc., would find it practically impossible to secure an enabling resolution in many of our southern communities. In many instances, the communities who refuse to pass an enabling resolution are the communities where improved housing is most needed. It is somewhat contradictory to expect community officials to approve a private group’s participation in housing, when the officials themselves have made absolutely no effort to provide public housing or enforce housing codes which are at their immediate discretion. In addition, this requirement is not consistent with the requirements pertinent to other federal supplementation programs. Community approval is not a prerequisite for the large subsidy payments made to farmers, nor is local approval required for Veterans Admin- istration supplements, ete, ete. Recommendation That, the resolution requirement be eliminated and that a program, by the sponsor, showing how the project will upgrade the community, be substituted. IV. DISPLACEMENT BASED ON GOVERNMENT ACTION While one of the eligibility criteria for rent supplement payments is that the tenant is displaced or will have been displaced because of government action, we have another form of displacement based on government action which relates to an exodus from the farms to the nearby towns and cities. Annual farm subsidy payments to large farm operators for not producing together with recent minimum wage requirements, have caused an overwhelming dis- 1 The family unit and home life of individuals are the bases of our society. Many of the social ills of our nation and many of the frustrations seen in our young people today can be traced back to over-crowded, unsanitary and inferior living conditions during the formative years of child development. The reactions can be seen on the streets of our cities and countrysides. To a large extent many of these disturbed people come from areas like ours. They migrate north, east and west and fail to adjust because of built-in bias and revenge. Inferior environments tend to support inferior thinking, 1919 placement of farm laborers. It has left hundreds of our people jobless, home- less and with no where to turn. In a few instances where adequate shelter may be available, without the increased supplementation, it is not possible for decent and sanitary housing to accommodate these suffering people. The jobless situation does not encour- age private investment in housing for the poor because of the high risk for returns. Recommendation That, this herewith described displacement factor which is a result of government be considered a tenant eligibility factor under the Rent Supple- ment Program. V. AIR CONDITIONING FOR LOW-INCOME HOUSING UNITS Air Conditioning has been considered by many as a luxury, but in our humid sub-tropical region it is as much a necessity in summer as is heat in winter. Present regulations will not allow air conditioners in 221-(d) (3) rent supple- ment projects. According to the State Climatologist, our average humidity point is about 75 percent. It is not unusual to reach 100 percent. The situation is further compounded by the fact that we live in a river valley area. This extreme humidity factor means that there is very little natural movement of air except for occasional frontal waves. Mechanically forced air is essential for com- fortable living and sleeping. Air conditioners are almost standard equipment on automobiles sold in this immediate Delta area. One can hardly purchase a car without a factory in- stalled air conditioner. Further, Post Office Buildings and Military Installa- tions located in areas with climate like ours all require air conditioning. Recommendation That, any regulations regarding priorities for low-income housing should definitely include a provision for air conditioning. If and when the true purposes for federally assisted housing programs are to reach maximum effectiveness, there must, of necessity, be certain flexible advantages built-in to meet individual locality needs. Your immediate and full support of either or all of the points described above is solicited. Any action taken with regard to these proposed improve- ments should be retroactive to include on-going projects. Rural Housing ACTION ASKED 67.3 percent of the bad housing in this nation exists in rural America. Three- fourths of the families who live both in poverty and in bad housing live in rural America. In 1949. Congress established the national goal of “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” Twenty years later, one out of every four houses in rural America is “substandard” most housing is a good deal worse than “substandard” . . . . millions of rural families live now in homes that are not decent and in environments that clearly are not suitable, It will take 7 million assisted rural housing units during the 1970’s if we are to begin to meet the housing needs of low-income rural Americans. At present levels of assisted housing activity, we will not come-up with those 7 million units in a 100 years. Our present programs simply are incompetent for that 10-year task. The laws are badly written and underfunded ; the administering agencies lack ade- quate personnel and enthusiasm. Private housing institutions and credit sys- tems of rural America are insufficient; too often, they are non-existent. To get an adequate housing delivery system, we must make fundamental changes in our approach to housing, and we must be willing to invest massive resources—human as well as monetary . . . NACD finds that— The housing crisis, affecting millions of rural Americans, constitutes a national emergency ; People have a right to decent shelter, and it is the responsibility of the national government to assure that right; 1920 Our housing efforts must be freed from the insensitive workings of monetary policy, so housing can be treated for what it is—a human need. NACD endorses— The findings and, in general, the recommendations of the 1969 National Rural Housing Conference ; The National Rural Housing Coalition's effort to raise publicly the issue of rural housing needs and to elicit a genuine national commitment to respond to those needs. NACD resolves to work toward the development of a national commitment to meet the housing needs of rural Americans. FINANCIAL TIME REPORTSS SOUTHESAT SEEN_AS “PAUPER” OF AMERICAN REGIONS LonpoN (AP)—The Financial Times described the Southeast United States Monday as the Poor Man of America with little immediate chance of catching up with the rest of the country. The respected business daily carried a five-page special survey on Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and the Carolinas. It was the harshest on rural areas but complimentary to some cities. “There is rural poverty in the south on a scale that is truly appalling and that survives in only a few pockets of western Europe,” the newspaper said. “Side by side with this are some of America’s fastest-growing and most pros- perous cities. Atlanta is the choice example.” The survey sketched setbacks to the South’s traditional industries—cotton and tobacco. It explained the seniority system in Congress allowing veteran southern Democrats to chair committees and channel federal funds to their home areas, but it said this is not enough. It will have to be by industrial expansion on a scale unrecognizably larger than at present exists, that the region will catch up with the prosperous North- east, or Middle West or Pacific Coast, the paper said. “For this to happen will require not only the inflow of private capital, but the creation of financial structures far above today’s level,” the paper added. “Despite the rapid growth of Atlanta and Miami as financial centers, the Southeast can still boast no bank the equal of the giants of New York, Chicago or California. Why, the hills of Mississippi harbor what may be the only remnants of the cashless society in America. “These are not cashless in the sense that they live by credit cards, but rather that no money of any sort ever crosses their palms. They are so poor that they are actually not part of the money society. Desegregation of southern schools, the paper said, has led to white children leaving public schools for hurriedly established private ones, with a general lowering of educational standards. It also predicted President Nixon's southern strategy, if successful in estab- lishing the Republican party in the South, would sacrifice the benefits that “entrenched Democratic congressmen have won for it in Washington.” [From the Clarksdale (Miss.) Press Register, Jan. 24, 1970] ErpErLY WoMAN Dies As Fire Levers Home An elderly woman became the third house fire victim in a five-week span Friday when she died in flames which engulfed her two-room frame residence at 2513 East Second. The victim was Mrs. Rosie Phillips, 76. Engines Nos. 1 and 3 responded to the call shortly before 6 p.m., and were on the scene approximately one hour. Firemen said that Mrs. Phillips had already expired when they arrived on the scene, and stated that apparent cause of the tragedy was a faulty vent in a wood heater in the front room. A neighbor turned in the alarm. The structure, which was heavily damaged, was owned by Mrs. Vince Parolli. Mrs. Phillips’ death brought to three the number of fatalities under similar circumstances since Dec. 16. Two infants perished on that date as result of a house fire on Fifth Street. 1921 [From the Clarksdale (Miss.) Press Register, Feb. 10, 1970] Area Housine Ramen Brrow Par More than 60 per cent of the dwellings in Coahoma County’s four incor- porated towns are either in “deteriorating” or “sub-standard” condition, accord- ing to a survey conducted here this summer by the Southern Regional Edu- cation Board. The survey was developed by Dan Stroud of Lambert, an intern in resource development with SREB, and the results were released today by the North Delta Economic Development District. Stroud could not be reached today for additional data on the survey, but an NDEDD spokesman said “federal criteria” were used in determining which houses fell into the various categories. There were three broad categories of housing—standard, deteriorating and substandard. Clarksdale has a total of 5,953 housing units and 40 per cent of them, or 2,397 of the homes, were deemed to be standard. There were 1,984 houses (33 per cent) that were listed as deteriorating, and another 1,572 (27 per cent) that were classified as sub-standard. Friars Point had 362 housing units and only 86 (23 per cent) were listed as standard. Eighty-eight were classed as deteriorating and 188 were listed as sub-standard. Jonestown’s 354 houses are mostly in the latter two categories too, accord- ing to the survey. A total of 168 (47 per cent) were scored as sub-standard, while another 98 (28 per cent) were listed as deteriorating, leaving only 88 (25 per cent) as standard. Lula’s 138 houses has 39 per cent, or 54 homes, listed as standard. Forty more housing units (28 per cent) were described as deteriorating and 44 (33 per cent) were deemed sub-standard. The CramrmaN. Our next witness is Mr. Richard Margolis. Mr. Margolis is chairman of the board of directors of the Rural Housing Alliance. It is my understanding that you are going to show us some slides. STATEMENT OF RICHARD J. MARGOLIS, CHAIRMAN, BOARD OF DIRECTORS, RURAL HOUSING ALLIANCE Mr. Marcoris. That is correct, Mr. Chairman. I am Richard Margolis, chairman of the board of the Rural Hous- ing Alliance. The Rural Housing Alliance, or RHA, is a nonprofit membership organization concerned with the problems of poor hous- ing, water, sanitation and other essential community facilities in small towns and rural areas. RHA is dedicated to research, education and technical assistance. We are here in that role to share our concern and our information with members of the select committee at the re- quest of your chairman, Senator McGovern. We appreciate this opportunity to tell you what we know about rural housing. I think you will agree it is a cheerless topic. The housing problem in America has long been on the national conscience, but seldom in the national budget. Thirty-four years ago President Roosevelt noted that “We have for too long neglected the housing problem for all our lower-income groups.” President Roosevelt was right, but the neglect has persisted to this day, particularly in rural America. Twenty-one years ago the U.S. Congress formally committed the Nation to a policy of providing “a decent home and a suitable en- vironment for every American family.” Congress was right, but the 1922 policy remains unrealized and the pledge unredeemed, particularly in rural America. hi Clearly we as a nation have promises to keep, and in the opinion of the Rural Housing Alliance time is running out. Today as a direct consequence of massive indifference on the part of our Government, we face a full-scale housing famine in rural America. This famine— this daily hunger for housing—is as painful and as destructive of human life as hunger for food would be. And, as you well know, rural Americans are no strangers to that kind of hunger either. This morning, through the medium of pictures and words, includ- ing a little poetry I would like to tell you something about the hous- ing famine in rural America and what it is doing to 13 million Americans. They are the victims. About half of them are children. The shacks and hovels they inhabit—in villages and rural areas throughout America—account for more than two-thirds of the Na- tion’s bad housing. We will be discussing an emergency of truly monstrous propor- tions. If all of our 50 States were simultaneously struck by hurri- canes, the resulting emergency—the deaths, the destruction, the short- ages of water and sanitation and shelter—would be no greater than the emergency we now confront in rural America. But rural America has never been declared a disaster area. Nearly all the photographs, both on the screen and in this room, were taken by George Ballis, a man who has put rural America into sharp and melancholy focus. I might add here, as a general caveat, that any account of suffering told by a nonsufferer is inadequate. No one can fairly describe what he has not fully endured. Moreover, many of the rural families whom IT have interviewed over the years have had few words left to speak. They literally have been too sapped for words. Yet I have relied almost entirely on what rural Americans have been able to tell me and show me, and I have ignored most of the “scientific” literature on the subject, trusting that one can learn more about hell from Job than from the Census Bureau. Mr. Chairman, let me now show the slides, along with a narrative and a little poetry. [Slide shown of Charles Adams house.] Let us begin, then, with the part of the housing famine that is immediately visible—the shacks themselves, which can be found back in the hills and off the dirt roads in every State in America. [Slide shown of woman with hand on post.] There are more than 3 million of them. This one is in Immokalee, Florida. “Immokalee” is a Seminole Indian word. It means “my home.” [Slide shown of Rosebud No. 3.] There are Indian families in South Dakota and elsewhere on the plains who live in tents and old car bodies, in the dead of winter. [Slide shown of Rio Grande, Texas—shed and tent leanto.] There are Chicano families, like this one near Rio Grande, Texas, who simply camp out the year around. They have no heat, no plumbing, no electricity—and no place to go. [Slide shown of shack with hole in wall, man and dog in distance. ] There are sharecroppers in South Carolina, and throughout the Deep 1923 South, who sleep each night behind rotting walls and under leaky ceilings. A farmworker once told me, “We've moved around a lot, but we've always lived in the same shack—the one with leaks, debts and troubles.” [Slide shown of tarpaper shack—smoke from a fire outside.] It might be a tarpaper shack in Georgia [Slide shown of mobile home and child.] Or a mobile home, such as it is, in Collier County, Florida [Slide shown of row of houses with porches and debris.] Or it might be an authentic rural tenement. This one happens to be in California, but others just as bad can be found in New Jersey or Illinois or New York State—indeed, wherever the rural poor are gathered. Families who occupy these unspeakably miserable apart- ments often pay more than $50 a month for the privilege. The land- lord comes around every Saturday to collect, and if you don’t have the money, out you go. [Slide shown of stone pile foundation.] Anyway you look at it, life in such places is precarious. John Ruskin described the idea of “home” as “a place of peace; the shelter, not only from all injury [Slide shown of Indian child in front of doorway.] But from all terror, doubt and division.” Of course, Ruskin had never seen a shack. [Slide shown of large woman with back to us, looking at two shacks.] To the shack-dweller, home is where troubles accumulate, terrors multiply and doubts are brutally confirmed. Partly these doubts are about one’s self, about one’s own worth. But partly, too, they are doubts about America. [Slide shown of boy carrying wooden crate.] Because the rural poor had brought the American dream, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. They believed in hard work and initiative. They believed if they kept lifting those crates and toting those bales [Slide shown of everyone bent over large field, one man in fore- ground.] If they kept bending over—no matter the pain, no matter the weariness, no matter the miserly wages—then someday, somehow, they should be rewarded in the traditionally American manner [Slide shown of Prosperity boxes, with man pruning.] That is, they would achieve prosperity, and with it a house—the historic symbol of prosperity in America. Surely these rural families have kept their end of the bargain. [Slide shown of another fieldworker’s shot.] Surely they are the hardest working, least complaining, least rewarded sufferers in America. [Slide shown of woman and two children at doorway.] The sum total of their failure, which is really our failure, is contained in the shack. The gloom of a sharecropper’s shack, or a Navajo’s hogan, or a PH Sent farmworker’s jerry-built hovel, is the distilled darkness of his day. [Slide shown of face of girl in window.] Here it is in the shadowy two-room shack, and not in the sunlit fields, where the doubts pile up. As a sharecropper has remarked, “In a bad house, troubles do tend to batch.” Part of the trouble stems from the total impossibility [Slide shown of family eating around table.] Of this—of having a normal family life, having a place where everyone can gather. This 1924 family is eating together in its new house in Parlier, Calif. The house was built with the help of their own sweat and a low-interest mort- gage from the Farmers Home Administration. The family is lucky to be out of its shack. People in shacks don’t eat together, if they eat at all. [Slide shown of boy in doorway spooning can.] They eat on the run, on their feet, alone, like this boy who lives near Greenville, Miss. One irony of shack-living is that while family togetherness is at a premium, the individual 1s seldom alone by choice. [Slide shown of mother and child on bed, lots of other children in room.] He has no privacy. There is no way of escaping from the crowd or the clutter-—no place to put away one’s clothes, to watch television, to converse, to be one’s self. Noise, crowds, nerve-shatter- ing pressures—the classic depredations of urban life—are the daily tormentors of rural families. [Slide shown of bedroom where eight people sleep.] Eight people sleep in this bedroom. The lack of privacy and the toll it takes on family moral is incalculable. The grandmother of a large farmworker family told me that in spite of her best efforts, she found herself con- stantly yelling at the children. “Out of my way,” she kept saying, “can’t get by.” [Slide shown of children on porch.] Out of my way, can’t get by. No place to play, can’t get by. You're on my feet, can’t get by. Stand up and eat, can’t get by. [Slide shown of kitchen clutter.] Trying to clean, can’t get by. Hate to be mean, can’t get by. [Slide shown of Sylvester children around stove.] Get away from that stove, can’t get by. Told you to move, can’t get by. [Slide shown of lady putting shoe on baby.] Can’t get by, can’t get by, Can’t [Slide shown of dresses hanging on wall.] Lord, when I die, just let me by. It is hardest on the children. [Slide shown of boy on tricycle.] Their days are without structure, without definition. They are victims of the same eternal chaos and clutter which plague their parents. It is a case of disorder and early SOITOW. [Slide shown of girl with doll.] Children need toys. As the dis- tinguished psychiatrist Dr. Erik Erikson has pointed out, “The small world of manageable toys is a harbor which the child establishes, to return to when he needs to overhaul his ego.” [Slide shown of two girls near tire.] But shacks afford few har- bors; and shack children, to whom play should be a natural inspira- tion, generally lack both the space and the equipment. [Slide shown of two boys with train tracks in bedroom.] But no sooner does a family move into better house than toys appear. One needs space and privacy for toys—and a sense of possibilities. If a child plays, he is not defeated. [Slide shown of children on stone path in front of new house.] Like everyone else, children need a certain amount of order in their lives. It’s not available in a shack, but when a child is lucky enough to move into a decent house, he discovers, with Ruskin, that home can be “a place of peace free from doubt.” This house, in front of which the 1925 children are so scrupulously sticking to the straight and narrow, was built by self-help methods outside Ft. Myers, Fla. ; [Slide shown of boy reading in front of mirror.] Shack children don’t reach much. Often there is no light to read by. We can pour billions of dollars into our schools—and we should—but if we are really serious about education, we will get children into decent houses. Note the mirror. One finds mirrors in shacks, but in the new houses there are mirrors where a child can see himself, get a sense of his own value. A person’s worth is also reflected in the eyes of his friends. [Slide shown of girl on telephone.] You can’t have a decent social life if you live in an indecent house. I asked a young woman in the South 1f she had ever had a party at her place. She looked at me as though I had asked her if she had ever flown to Mars. What she said, in effect, was as follows: [Slide shown of shelves with groceries on them.]| This house is not for parties: No cake. [Slide shown of picture on page 11 of “All Their Days, All Their Nights”—wall with mop, et cetera.] This house is not for dancin’: boards break. This house is not for laughin’: walls shake. [Slide shown of woman standing behind latticework, her arms folded.] This house is not for celebratin’, that’s for sure! This house is not, for livin’—unless you’re poor. This house is not for living—that is a simple statement of fact. Shacks are for dying. The housing famine kills. For example, the infant mortality rate is considerably higher in rural America than in other regions of the country. [Slide shown of Indian woman with babe in arms at doorway of hogan.] Likewise, maternity death. In 1964 41 of every 100,000 mothers living in nonurban areas died from diseases associated with childbirth. The rate in America’s suburbs that year was only 25 deaths per 100,000. Bad health in rural America derives in part from inadequate food, in part from inadequate medical care—and in part from indecent housing. [Slide shown of Nancy Sylvester’s stove in shack.] It can get very cold in a shack. Often there is only a woodburning stove to warm the house, and sometimes there is no wood. On Indian reservations, a week’s supply of wood may cost $12. No wonder the incidence of tuberculosis and of most other respiratory diseases in rural America is estimated to be more than twice the national average. No heat—— [Slide shown of woman pouring water into bucket.] And, as a rule, no running water. A shortage of clean water curses nearly every shack-dweller. [Slide shown of woman holding bucket next to shack.] “A suitable environment, for every American family” should begin with clean water [Slide shown of pump in foreground, privy in back.] Not with a pump and a privy, which are standard equipment in rural America. The privy, of course, is a germ paradise, and the pump nearby is frequently tapped into a cesspool. Disease is everywhere. 1926 [Slide shown of three privies.] For example, here are excerpts from a report to the South Carolina Commission for Farmworkers concerning Peters Field, a rural slum near Charleston : “The Charleston County Health Department considers the area dangerous in that it is low-lying and marshy. infested with various species of rodents capable of carrying disease.” [Slide shown of drainage shot.] “At present,” the report continues, “the people of Peters Field have no drainage and no sewage lines or septic tanks. As a result, raw sewage flows in existing ditches, backs up forming soggy weeded areas, and during rainy seasons is a posi- tive menace to water supplies.” [Slide shown of woman washing window.] Having painted this dreary picture, the writers of the report then complain of the residents’ “lack of ability or knowledge to practice good health.” But just staying alive in Peters Field seems evidence enough of sound health practice. And despite the unbelievable muck outside, most of the shacks are swept clean inside. [Slide shown of Rosebud transitional house.] At the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota TI had the privilege of helping to plan and participate in the transitional housing program. The tribe built 375 small houses, like the one you are looking at—complete with electricity, heat, bathrooms and running water. The Public Health Service there reports that since the families moved into the new houses, hospital admissions have declined 30 percent. There are also fewer cases of head lice and of diarrhea. That was a demonstration project, and one of the things we demonstrated was that decent housing and sanitary facilities are helpful to people. No surprise. But the Federal Government has never repeated the transitional housing project anywhere else in America. In other words, we proved we could beat the housing famine and end the suffering—at a cost of about $6,000 per house—and then we proceeded to let the famine rage. What, exactly, does that demonstrate? You be the judge. There was a boy at Rosebud who lived in a log hut. School officials made him take a shower when he came to school and sometimes his teacher called him a dirty Indian. Naturally when the boy got into his new house, he was most eager to take a bath. Here is how it turned out: [Slide shown of glass water jugs.] Almost every day his teacher called him a “dirty little Indian.” He couldn’t take a bath, the pump was miles away. [Slide shown of Sylvesters’ new bathroom.] Then they got a house with hot and cold faucets and a glistening tub. Their first night he climbed in and put his fingers under the spout. He laughed. He splashed. He wouldn’t get out. Now, since truth and water are hard to come by, his teacher still calls him a “dirty little Indian.” But he knows it’s a lie. [Slide shown of house and pipe in foreground. man raking in back- ground.] Have we given up on rural Americans? Certainly they have not given up. Against all odds they fight on—against disease. despair, defeat. Do you see that figure in the back of the picture? He is raking 1927 dirt. There is no grass because there is no water, but he is making the place a little neater, a little more livable. That is a common sight in rural America—raking dirt. [Slide shown of outside shack with fern pot.] The families make desperate efforts to transform shacks into homes. One can see it in their flower pots [Slide shown of family in front of shack in Three Rocks, bush surrounded by wire fence.] And in their attempts at landscaping. This family lives in Three Rocks, Calif. [Slide shown of rosebush next to shack.] And this carefully tended rosebush is alive and well in Goshen, Calif. The rose is part of the American dream—a decent house, a yard, a garden. Incredibly, the dream lives. [Slide shown of woman leaning against clothesline post.] Quite literally, people who are house-starved dream in their sleep about four-bedroom homes, just as people starving for food dream of five- course dinners. A woman who lives with 10 children in a three-room shack has told me about her recurring dream: “I’m in this new house. It has lots of rooms. I'm in there, kind of floating around and thinking, ‘I won’t wake up, I won’t wake up.” It’s a funny thing, I always dream in brick and board, never in black.” [Slide shown of woman in print blouse, towels behind her.] Ques- tion: “Did you ever come close to getting a better house?” Answer: “Close but far, I guess that’s where we always are.” [Slide shown of new house.] Once we heard they were building houses for people like us. We asked our pastor if he heard what we heard. [Slide shown of men raising wall.] He said, yeah, he heard it and it may be so. So we started getting ready: [Slide shown of man with nail in mouth.] You know, hoping a little faster; but then, I don’t know. [Slide shown of pile of old boards.] I guess it wasn’t so. Mr. Chairman, there are many rural Americans who believe their leaders in Washington do not know they are suffering. [Slide shown of mournful girl.] If they knew, they would do some- thing about it, wouldn’t they? These families have kept the faith. They have kept alive the dream. [Slide shown of four boys staring at camera.] But their children are growing skeptical—and angry. What we are witnessing, in effect, is a revolution in sagging expectations. Now the rural poor are watching Washington, because the Federal Government is their last, best hope. And perhaps they are our last best hope. For by saving 13 million fellow Americans, who still believe in America, we may also be saving ourselves. [Slide shown of strip photo of eyes through crack.] I believe that America’s future is reflected in the eyes of these children. I believe we can exorcise the rot from our rural landscape and from our na- tional conscience, that by building decent houses for all Americans we can begin to build a decent society. Simply to try would be an act of the highest patriotism. 1928 Thank you. This concludes my presentation. The Cuamrmax. Thank you very much, Mr. Margolis, for that very moving presentation. Mr. Margolis, it appears that public housing exists at present mainly in the urban or the metropolitan areas. Are these public housing programs presently structured just for urban areas, or could they, or should they be extended to the rural sectors of the country? Is something wrong with the existing legisla- tion, or what is it? Mr. Marcoris. Well, Senator, I believe that 38 percent of the counties in America have no housing authorities, public housing authorities, and most of these, a large majority of those 38 percent are in rural areas, precisely in the counties where we saw the shacks. Speaking for myself, I would say that as long as the law is so written that local officials and local citizenry have direct veto power over whether or not there is public housing in that area, there will not be an effective public housing program in rural areas. So if legislation were to be written, and if the public housing law were to be amended, I would think we would have to eliminate that veto power. The CraRMAN. You used the figure 13 million people who are in need of housing, who live in substandard housing now. I notice most of the pictures that you showed are black people. Does the problem relate primarily to black citizens, or is it one that cuts broadly across all of rural America? Mr. Marcoris. It is much broader than black people. It relates to Spanish-speaking people, both Mexican Americans and Puerto Rican citizens. It relates to the American Indian, to whites in Appalachia, and other States. I believe that there is probably not a State or a race that is not suffering from bad rural housing. The Cramrman. I was impressed with the statement you made about the new housing on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. T visited that project on a number of occasions. I understood you to say that immediately following the construction of that housing, or shortly thereafter, there was a very sharp drop in the hospital load and the patient care load in that community. Mr. Marcorts. That is correct. The drop was 30 percent in hospital admissions. There was a comparable drop in outpatients, which I didn’t mention, and it was a most encouraging demonstration project. What was discouraging was that it was a one-shot project, and no agency in the Federal Government took up the cudgels to apply this knowledge to other programs. There were five Federal agencies that cooperated on this Rosebud transitional housing program, including HUD and OREO. The Cramrvan. It has been my understanding that the statistics on improved health and the sharp reduction in patient-care and hospital-care demands have also been accompanied by remarkable school attendance improvements, which would again seem to indicate the central importance of a decent house in giving people higher goals and better motivation. Mr. Marcouts. That is correct. The house seems to be a catalyst to 1929 all kinds of good things that can happen when it is a new house, and all kinds of bad things when it is a shack. The house plays a very central role. ] The CramrMaN. Which, in your judgment, of the existing pro- grams are most effective in terms of meeting the housing shortage in rural areas? Mr. Marcorzs. Senator, I don’t believe there is an effective program in rural areas. The Caarrman. None at all? Mr. Marcorzs. None. There are programs that have potential to be somewhat more effective. You mentioned public housing. Certainly the Farmers Home Administration direct loan program could be more effective with more money and less redtape, and perhaps, as Dr. Henry men- tioned, a greater will on the part of the agency to apply their funds to low-income rural housing. The Cramryan. Last Saturday, Senator Javits and I, representing the committee, visited some of the worst housing conditions in the South Bronx in New York. I have not seen that area at close hand before. Senator Javits had. But both of us were deeply shocked by the terrible conditions that we saw there. Is it your judgment that by neglecting housing in rural America and the other environmental conditions in rural America, that in a sense we are contributing to the problems of the cities by encourag- ing migration of people out of these less-populated areas of the country into cities already overcrowded ? Mr. Marcoris. There is no doubt about that, that the housing famine in rural America has been one of the chief causes of the mass migration into the cities, and for the poor it has been a case of out of the rural frying pan into the urban fire. They get nothing out of their migration; but the city suffers for it. The Cuamrman. Thank you very much. Senator Percy? Senator Percy. Mr. Margolis, I wonder if you could tell us a little how the rural housing alliance works, how are you financed, what kind of projects do you undertake, how did you get into being? Mr. Marcorzs. The rural housing alliance is approximately 4 years old. It is financed primarily—its administrative funds—by the Ford Foundation, and it works from time to time on contracts with Govern- ment agencies, most notably the Office of Economic Opportunity. For the contracts, the Rural Housing Administration provides technical assistance, VISTA workers, and so forth. We generate a great deal of research in rural housing, and educational research and technical assistance are a tripod function. We were originally devoted to self-help housing, and at that time we were called International Self-Help Housing Association, and 2 years ago when it became clear that self-help housing was only one good way of getting people out of their shacks and into decent houses, we held on to that and expanded and broadened our goals into all kinds of housing. 1930 Senator Prroy. I have often wondered what would happen if you took a city like Modesto, Calif., which I think has 95 square miles of area, and took the same number of people, and took all those citizens and just compacted them into the condensed areas of the urban com- munities in America, what would happen to them in a period of 6 months, a year, 2 years. You hear the old story about what happens to the grandmother and children packed into one room. Part of it is the condensation, the difficulty of getting away from each other. So, maybe in the rural communities you may have cleaner air, and maybe cleaner water. You have despicable housing conditions, but at least you can get out and get on the front—it is not a front lawn, but it is ground, anyway, and get away from each other for a while. Yet, people leave those conditions and go up to what I consider even worse conditions in the cities sometimes. What can we basically do, though, to keep jobs in rural com- munities? Isn’t this the fundamental problem, that unless there are jobs created in these communities, people are going to migrate? They don’t migrate because they have poor housing. They know they are going into poor housing. They migrate because there simply isn’t any economic base there, and they migrate because welfare pay- ments are low in the South, perhaps, and higher, in the North. They go up, maybe to get on welfare or to get job opportunities, but it seems to me that a basic change must be made in the orientation of our job opportunities in the country if we are to stop the migra- tion. Mr. Marcoris. I agree that these areas need heavy economic devel- opment. T am not so sure that getting out of the shack is not one of the prime motives, however, for leaving. The shack is such a catalyst to despondency, such an enveloping symbol of their despair, and lack of prospects, that any opportunity to leave the shack would seem hopeful. So I think job development and housing development is a simul- taneous attack, that that would be the answer. Senator Percy. I think that boredom is probably one reason to get away. Sometimes in the past they haven’t realized how bored they were. Television, possibly, has changed that. You mention in your book the role that television plays in the lives of residents in several homes that you have shown us. Did you want to elaborate on its effect on the family in a rural area, in a hovel, where they somehow have a television set? Mr. Marcorts. I think television, for one thing, is a definite force in rural America now. There are an awful lot of TV sets. I think it is frustrating for us. I think it paints a world out there, depicts a world out there to the rural American that is unavailable to him. It is a consumer world. It is a world where everyone drives a car and lives in a very nice four-bedroom house, and everybody seems to have plenty to eat and wears good clothes and does come and go exactly as they please. The TV world, particularly the world of the soap opera, which the women shack-dwellers watch, quite often religiously, is to some extent, 1931 a false world, but to the extent that it is not available to shack- dwellers, it is a true world, and he knows, because of this, that there is something out there that he doesn’t have, but it is there, 1t exists, and it is real to him, and I think this is not only frustration, but it ends in anger and defeat, because it simply dramatizes the trap that the TV-viewer in the shack finds himself in. Senator Percy. Lastly, in your book you mention several people who obtained housing through self-help projects. Do you want to elaborate on the nature of these projects? Mr. Marcos. Self-help housing in the United States is usually sponsored by nonprofit organizations in the local areas, administered by that nonprofit organization, and this organization generally re- cruits groups of low-income families who gather together and on a mutual-help basis work on perhaps six houses, perhaps 20. They obtain their mortgage most frequently through the Farmers Home Administration, a low-interest mortgage, and by this method several thousand families have moved into decent houses in various parts of the country. Also by this method various communities have found their voice, since self-help housing is not simply a sweat equity method. It is also a community development equity. I think there is potential in self-help housing that we have not utilized, partly because sponsorship organization funds are extremely scarce and have become scarcer over the last two years, since OEO has put very little money into self-help sponsors. Senator Percy. I want to thank you very much, indeed, and join the chairman in saying that your presentation is helpful. Mr. Chairman, for the record, I think it might be interesting for us to insert the figures for section 235, homeownership, of the housing bill, allocated by areas. These are figures of October 1969. Ten percent of housing, under 235, was in the blighted areas. Sixteen percent was in the core of the city, and 47 percent in the city, but outside the core. Only 27 percent was in the suburbs and rural areas, I would say a vast preponderance of that in the suburbs, so that a very, very small percentage of the programs that we have really hoped would go into the rural communities are actually going into there. The percentage change from June, 1969, to October in the suburbs and rural zoning is only 3 percent, increase, from 24 percent to 27 per- cent. So we have a great deal to do in this area, and we welcome the help of the Rural Housing Alliance. The CrarmaN. Senator Dole? Senator Dore. I am wondering what research the Rural Housing Alliance has done in the Midwest. Specifically, I refer to the States of Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and that area. Mr. Marcoris. Senator, being a nonpaid chairman of the Rural Housing Alliance and not a staff member, I would like to defer that question to Dr. George Rucker, who will be here tomorrow. He is the research director of RHA. I don’t feel qualified to answer that. Senator Dore. I think it is an important question. In my hometown 42-778 0—71—pt. T—3 1932 of 6,500 we find conditions not much different than those shown this morning. I do believe that a lack of public awareness and public will to do something is responsible. It is not, as you point out, confined to any one area of the country. It is a problem in all parts of rural America. It can be in my State of Kansas, or some Southern State, or Cali- fornia. Have you had an opportunity to visit any areas in the Midwest ? Mr. Marcowrts. Yes. Not Kansas. The Dakotas, Minnesota, Wiscon- sin, Indiana. Senator Dore. I would imagine that they would be very much the same. Mr. Marcos. I would suspect very much the same as Kansas. There are rural slums and rural shacks in every state in the Union, and it is true that they are concentrated more in some areas than in others. But I know particularly that in Nebraska and that belt of States, in the grain basket, there is a very serious problem of rural housing. Part of the famine exists there. Senator Dore. There is one matter that might be of some interest. The Farm Bill Conference is considering a new section which I cosponsored that has been approved by the conference regarding rural America and rural development, including, as Senator Percy pointed out, a start in the direction of fulfilling the needs that have not been fulfilled in rural America. So there is an effort by the Congress, at least a recognition of the problem, though I am not certain we go much further than that, as Senator McGovern, who supported this amendment, is aware. We are cognizant and are making some effort to move forward. Mr. Chairman, I would like to have the text of the rural develop- ment amendment included in the record at this point. (The material referred to follows:) © 0 J OO Ov BB Ww ND MH 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 1933 124 TITLE IX—RURAL DEVELOPMENT SEc. 901. The Congress hereby finds that the technology responsible for the unrivaled abundance of American agri- culture has also been largely responsible for the elimination of millions of farm-related jobs. Since 1940 an estimated twenty-five million displaced farm and rural residents have migrated, chiefly to metropolitan areas, primarily in search of new economic opportunities. Presently, 20 per centum of the adult urban population are former rural residents. The Congress further finds that despite a slowdown in the peak migration of approximately one million people a year in the 1950°s, movement of people from rural areas still continues at a high rate. By the year 2000 or soon there- after, one hundred million more Americans will be added to the one hundred forty million already living in our cities and suburbs. Unless this Nation makes a commitment of sufficient magnitude to reverse the present trend toward ex- cessive concentration of population, two hundred forty million people will be crowded together in four giant strip cities. Al- ready, 70 per centum of our population lives on less than 2 per centum of our land. The Congress further finds that the devastating con- sequences of the population shift are evident everywhere— in both urban and rural America. Countless rural com- munities, once thriving and prosperous, are facing social and AY. 00 ed THO HOR G0 TAD ed pb fk 0 tlhe — w 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 1934 125 economic bankruptcy because too few residents remain to support essential public services and cwic institutions. On the other hand, our large cities are facing gradual strangula- tion. Our giant cities are finding themselves increasingly unable to deal with the large influx of uneducated rural migrants who are ill-prepared for, urban living. The con- gested traffic arteries, the pollution of the water and the air, the soaring crime rates, the housing blight, and the simple lack of adequate elbow room are rapidly making our larger cities unlivable as well as ungovernable. The Congress further finds that the legislative program provided for herein is vital to American agriculture. If we are to continue to have a viable commercial agriculture, it will be necessary that we continue to support the price of cer- tain commodities and that we have some control over surplus production. However, farm price-support programs can never provide an adequate standard of living for a large number of rural residents. Even a farm program providing 100 per centum parity for all crops would not provide a de- cent standard of ling to farmers who are too old or too uneducated to adapt to the new farm technology, and to farm- ers who are unable to secure enough capital to build an effi- cient farming operation. No system of farm price supports can adequately provide for farm day laborers, migrant 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 1935 126 workers, and sharecroppers who are displaced by the new technology. The Congress is, therefore, committed to a sound balance between rural and urban America. The Congress considers * this balance so essential to the peace, prosperity, and welfare of all our citizens that the highest priority must be given to the revitalization and development of rural areas. LOCATION OF FEDERAL FACILITIES Sec. 902. In that it is the intent of Congress to mini- mize further impaction on already overcrowded metropolitan areas, Congress hereby directs the heads of all executive de- partments and agencies of the Government to establish and maintain departmental policies and procedures with respect to the location of new offices and other facilities in areas or communities of lower population density in preference to areas or communities of high population densities. The Presi- dent is hereby requested to submit to the Congress not later than September 1 of each fiscal year a report reflecting the efforts during the immediately preceding fiscal year of all executive departments and agencies in carrying out the pro- visions of this section, citing the location of all new facilities, and including a statement covering the basic reasons for the selection of all new locations. PLANNING ASSISTANCE SEc. 903. Under authority of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, the Department of Housing and ON = OU apn QO IND ed © 00. re] 10 1 12 13 14 15 16 37 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 127 Urban Development and the Department of Agriculture are authorized to provide assistance to States planning for the development of rural multicounty areas not included in eco- nomically depressed areas. In enacting this legislation, the Congress made it clear that the purposes of the program was to help preserve and utilize our great human and economic investment in small towns and in less populous regions. : The Congress is deeply concerned that the key goals of these programs are not being met or even approached. It is, therefore, the purpose of this section to provide the Congress with information sufficient for it to determine whether the non- metropolitan planning program is meeting certain national priorities and goals. The Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Secretary of Agriculture shall submit to the Congress a joint progress report regarding the operations of such program not later than September 1 of each fiscal year reflecting the efforts under such program during the immediately preceding fiscal year. The first such annual report shall be submitted not later than December 1, 1970, and shall cover the period beginning August 1, 1968, the date of enactment of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and ending June 30, 1970. INFORMATION AND TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE Sec. 904. Planning and development activities depend upon well-informed and well-educated community leaders and RO. OD rime CRE CC pe GOT IN pk Bt Dips php TR TE 14 15 16 7 18 19 20 21 22 23 25 26 1937 128 citizens. Small communities and less populated areas often - lack the resources and technical assistance necessary to in- sure that the level of their understanding and knowledge regarding planning and development activities is adequate. Since fod ingredients are essential to the development of these areas, it is essential that the Congress evaluate the actions of the Department of Agriculture in providing such assist- ance, either through the Department of Agriculture or in cooperation with others. The Secretary of Agriculture shall submit to the Congress a report not later than September 1 of each fiscal year reflecting the efforts of the Department of Agriculture regarding the providing of information and technical assistance to small communities and less populated areas during the immediately preceding fiscal year. The first such annual region shall be submitted not later than Decem- ber 1, 1970, covering the period beginning July 1, 1969, and ending June 30, 1970. The Secretary shall include in such reports to what extent technical assistance has been pro- vided under other Federal programs and through land grant colleges and universities and through the Extension Service programs of the Department of Agriculture. GOVERNMENT SERVICES SEc. 905. In that adequate government services are es- sential for an acceptable quality of life in rural areas, high- est priority must be given to extending to rural areas the same government services which are available to urban areas. The © O00 eq. LO UCU HER EIC0 DD ped Ce eb CO RD i fo 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 1938 129 Congress 1s especially concerned that rural communities be provided with adequate telephone services, adequate water and sewer systems, high quality medical care, and superior educational facilities. The President is requested to submat to the Congress a report not later than September 1 of each fiscal year stating the availability of these and other govern- ment services to rural areas and outlining efforts of the exec- utive branch to improve these services during the immediately preceding fiscal year. The President is requested to submit the first such annual report, covering the fiscal year ending June 30, 1970, on or before December 1, 1970. FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE REPORT Suc. 906. Extensive revitalization of rural America will require special fnanciol assistance and since such finan- cial assistance is not available through normal credit channels, the President is requested to report to Congress on the possi- ble utilization of the Farm Credit Administration and agen- cies in the Department of Agriculture to fulfill this financial assistance requirement. The President is requested to submit the report requested by this section on or before July 1, 1971, together with such recommendations for legislation as he deems appropriate. Passed the House of Representatives August 5, 1970. Attest: W. PAT JENNINGS, Clerk. 1939 Mr. Marcoris. Thank you. The Cuamman. Thank you, Mr. Margolis, for your testimony here today. We appreciate it. Mr. Marcoris. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I would like to be made part of the record a booklet entitled, “All Their Days, All Their Nights.” The Cuamrman. Without objection, it will be made part of the record. all their days, all their nights Notes on Rural America by Richard J. Margolis Rural Housing Alliance, Washington, D.C. 1969 (1941) 1942 1943 table of contents PREFACE — page 6 ALL THEIR DAYS — page 9 ALL THEIR NIGHTS — page 19 DAWN — page 25 1944 preface There is a song Chippewa Indian women sometimes sing to their men: You keep walking around trying to remember what you promised. But you can’t remember. The rural poor might sing that song to America; it could be their national anthem. Among the promises we Americans have not kept is the one Congress made two decades ago when it formally committed the nation to a policy of providing “a decent home and a suitable environ- ment for every American family.” The millions of shacks and hovels which today pock the American landscape should remind us of that unredeemed pledge. If not— if we fail to take due note of basic commitments made to fellow citizens — then we betray both them and ourselves. A forgetful nation is best forgotten. The purpose of this paper is to jog our collective memory by noting some of the human consequences of bad housing. My thesis is simple enough: the product of this one broken promise has been millions of broken lives; and not all the fine programs nor all the fine men can put them together again. What we need are men and programs to prevent future breakage. Any account of suffering told by a non-sufferer is suspect. No one can fairly describe what he has not fully endured. I am aware of this and can offer no rebuttal other than the thin hope that this report will speak for those whose time on earth is often unspeakable. Many of the families I interviewed had few words left to say — they were too 6 1945 sapped for words. Yet I have relied almost entirely on what they were able to tell me and show me, and I have ignored most of “the litera- ture” on the subject, trusting that one can learn more about hell from Job than from Dante. I owe these families a debt of gratitude for their assistance and their patience in answering my many questions, some of which must have seemed rude and unsympathetic. If there were a correlation between the quality of housing and the quality of hospi- tality, then the families I have met would be living in palaces. I have always been uneasy about interviewing people in pain — there is the danger of becoming a kind of sociological voyeur — and over the years I have adopted the practice of paying them for their time and trouble. My purpose is not to be charitable but to make it clear to the person I am interviewing that he is helping me, and that in all likelihood I am not helping him. To the extent that the interview is itself a kind of promise, it is fraudulent. The reporter may not feel like a powerful official when he enters a shack but he may seem like one to the family. He is the affluent world come to pay them a visit; he is there, he says, to discuss their housing conditions. At last someone has noticed! Is it unreasonable for a family to hope that this concerned stranger may be heaven-sent, that he will hurry back to The Place Where Decisions Are Made and spread the news? Many families live under the delusion that the nation’s leadership does not know they are suffering. If the leaders knew, they would do something about it, wouldn't they? Richard J. Margolis May 5, 1969 - Georgetown, Conn. 1946 1947 L all their days This is where I lived long ago, when I was a child. What I remember most is running wild, running in and out of the shack from dark into light and back into dark. I had this crazy plan to catch the daylight in my hands and carry it into the room with me. My thought was to throw light at the gloom, don’t you see? Nearly everyone in America wants to live in the country, far from the noise, the crowds, the pressures of city life. “Authentic Rural Charm,” proclaim the sub-division advertisements. “All the Advantages of Country Living.” Terms like “open space” and “green acres” have slipped neatly into the American lexicon of aspirations. You don’t have to be affluent to like the country. Recently I asked an elderly black farmer in South Carolina if he had ever considered living in the city. This was his exact answer: If you don’t live in the country you're a poor butterfly. Wings cut, can’t fly. Many families who have been forced to move to the city in search of jobs would agree their wings have been cut. They yearn to fly home. As a mother on welfare in New York’s posh Westchester County puts 9 42-778 O- 71 - pt. 7-4 1948 it, “It seems as if back home you could just dump your problems in the field.” Back home is Alabama, but she will never go back to stay. “I 5» couldn’t live that way anymore. No bathroom, no closets, no nothin’. Some do go back, but in defeat and without expectations. “Out here,” says a Georgia woman who returned to a rural shack after living ten months in a town public housing project, “out here I don’t look for hot water, I don’t look for much of anything.” Lack of decent housing is not the only problem such families face. They also lack money and jobs, clothing and food, and control over their own lives. But bad housing is the constant and visible symbol of their sufferings. The gloom of a sharecropper’s shack — or a Navaho's hogan, or a migrant farmworker’s tarpaper hut —is the distilled dark- ness of his days. “We've moved around a lot,” says a California farm- worker, “but we've always lived in the same shack — the one with leaks, debts and troubles.” It is in the shadowy, two-room shack, and not out in the sunlit fields, where the troubles pile up. Here is where the children sleep, two and three per reeking bed; here, on the floor in a dark corner, is where they eat (when there is food); here in the makeshift kitchen is the rat’s door, a hole in the floor; here is the blackened stove that heats a portion of one room (when there is wood: in the winter on the Great Plains a week's bundle of wood costs as much as eight dollars); here is the rusty metal tub in which clothes, dishes and children are scrubbed; here are the family’s clothes, tied up in tight bundles, piled into cardboard boxes (lots of faded shirts and kerchiefs, no coats or shoes); and there, atop a battered bureau, is the porcelain “bank” into which coins are dropped against the landlord’s Saturday morning visit. (Rent ranges from five to twenty-five dollars a week. For the sharecropper the “rent” is paid in work on the landlord’s land. It is a kind of “sweat non-equity.” The landlord can evict the family at whim — if they get “uppity” or if farm machinery makes them obsolete.) “In a bad house,” a sharecropper has remarked, “troubles do tend to batch.” There is no place in a bad house to iron out one’s troubles, either in private or as a family. “The whole front room: was filled with beds,” recalls a former shack dweller who, with his wife and eight children, now lives in a better house. “There were just narrow aisles between the beds, like a dormitory in a school. Except there was no room to study. We had another room in the back but the only way you could get to it was to walk out the front door and around the house and through the back door.” He was lucky; few shacks have back doors. Noise, crowds, nerve-shattering pressures — the classic depredations of urban life — are the daily tormentors of low-income rural families. The toll they take on family morale is incalculable. “I keep yelling at the children,” says the grandmother of a large farmworker family: “‘Out of my way . . . can't get by.” I try to stop, but I can’t.” 10 1949 1950 Out of my way, can’t get by. No place to play, can’t get by. You're on my feet, can’t get by. Stand up and eat, can’t get by. Tryin’ to clean, can’t get by. Hate to be mean, can’t get by. Get away from that stove, can’t get by. Told you to move, can’t get by can’t get by can’t get by can’t Lord, when I die, just let me by. The shack, then, is both the medium and the message. Its gloom generates a kind of creeping helplessness that steals upon one: it can’t be fixed, it can’t be fixed, it can’t be fixed. “When it leaks in one room,” says a Mississippi woman, “we move into another.” The struggle is endless. Most rural shacks are old — I have seen some more than a century old — yet somehow the families manage to keep them from falling down. (This may come as a surprise to officials who think new housing for low-income families creates too many “main- tenance problems.”) They also manage to keep the shacks clean, often against incredible odds. For example, here are excerpts from a report to the South Carolina Commission for Farmworkers concerning Peters Field, a Negro rural slum near Charleston: “ . . The Charleston County Health Department considers the area dangerous in that it is low lying and marshy, infested with various species of rodents and insects capable of carrying disease. “. .. At present, the people of Peters Field have no drainage and no sewage lines or septic tanks. . . . As a result, raw sewage flows in existing ditches, backs up forming soggy weeded areas, and during rainy seasons is a positive menace to water supplies.” The report complains of the residents’ “lack of ability or knowledge to practice good health,” but just staying alive in Peters Field seems evidence enough of sound health practice. Despite the unbelievable muck outside, most of the shacks are swept clean inside. In America a man’s house is not so much his castle as his crown, his emblem of achievement and status. “Well,” a sharecropper said as 12 1951 I entered his house, “now you see how we live.” He was half defiant, half ashamed. The public humiliation of living in such a place was as painful as the private vexation. When a man is helpless, he feels less a man. One day in the San Joaquin Valley in California I came upon a middle-aged man sitting in front of his scrap-board cabin, his hat pulled over his eyes, while his wife berated him for failing to fix something around the house. The man was wearing an old army shirt. Often he sits outside the door and watches the sky sail by, remembering Paris and the war. Then she decides to mop the floor, but the pump is dry. Help me, she storms. Help me. He's scared she'll cry. Well, what's a man for anyway. C'est la vie, cest la cotton-pickin’ vie. 13 1952 The chagrin of living poorly in an affluent society is all the more poignant in an age of mass communications. Almost any time of the day a sharecropper or a farmworker can switch on his tv set for a glimpse of Mainstream America — the fancy food it eats, the fancy cars it drives and the fancy, split-level houses it inhabits. Many Americans are dismayed that poor people should have tv sets at all. The aerials atop the shacks strike them as a shabby paradox, some ultimate treachery of the poor. There are 78 million television sets in this country, and only 60 million households. The tv set and the used car are often the poor man’s only link to survival. The car takes him to work (if there is work to be had); the television takes him to a never-never land, a daydream he can make as bright as he wants just by turning the “contrast” dial. Thus television is both irritant and opiate. It reminds the man who owns nothing that most other Americans own a great deal, and at the same time it allows him to lose himself temporarily in the wall-to-wall wilderness of the consumer's world. The daytime serials, choked with ersatz conflict with which the viewer can identify without suffering their consequences, seem particularly mesmerizing. Women sometimes watch them for hours on end, while the children run about. “After I finish cleaning I mostly sit down and watch the stories.” — wife of a migrant farmworker, mother of four It’s time, it’s time, it’s time to turn to As the World Turns. Will Kitty get a divorce today? Will true love run its course today? Oh it’s true, true, true as a wedding ring: Love Is a Many Splendored Thing. Amazing! Your hands are as soft as your daughter's, yet they're constantly in dishwater. (keep still, keep still) The light, the light, The Guiding Light shines on the Edge of Night. Can Stanley ever forgive Henrietta’s wicked past? Will there be a new cast? Oh it’s true, true, true as children cling: Love Is a Many Splendored Thing. You're in good hands with But you can’t take the country out of (later, later) Another, another, Another World, well-knit, lovingly perled. Look at the gorgeous clothes she wears; she’s got a man who really cares. Oh it’s true, true, true as angels sing: Love Is a Many Splendored Thing. 14 1953 Grease, dirt, gravy . . . even bloodstains. Fantastic! (Put it in the bucket) Television has another advantage: it dispels loneliness. The isolation of life in a rural shack can be hard to bear. Few people come to call; it is hard to be sociable in a two-room shack. I once asked a woman in South Carolina if she had ever gone to a party. She looked at me open-mouthed, as if I had asked her if she'd ever flown to the moon. “I'd like to have a party some time,” she said. “I surely would.” This house is not for parties: no cake. This house is not for dancin’: boards break. This house is not for laughin’: walls shake. This house is not for celebratin’, that’s for sure! This house is not for livin’ — unless you're poor. pi E61 1955 1956 IL. oll their nights The anhinga, or snakebird, has a long, slender neck of glossy green. It frequents the Florida Everglades. One sees it from the highway perched on a stake in the river, watching for fish, ready to dive for the main chance. People from all corners of the nation come to explore the Everglades and to photograph the snakebird. As for the black and Spanish-speaking farmworkers who live in the area, the anhinga is not so much to be admired as it is to be envied. Anhinga, anhinga, two wings and a wish. Skim the river, dive for fish. Anhinga, snakebird, forty sticks and a nest. In a tree above the river, safe from the river, little birds sleep in your nest. Snakebird, easy-take bird, I don’t care to swim I don’t care to skim I don’t care to fly I don’t care to die I just want a place for my baby. Hey, anhinga, build a little nest for me. The longing is strongest at night. “Do you know, I often have dreams about living in a big house,” a black woman in South Carolina told me. She had ten children living with her in a three-room shack. 19 1957 “It’s usually a two-story house, old looking from the outside but nice and new inside. It has lots of rooms. I'm in there, kind of floating around and thinking, ‘I won't wake up, I won't wake up.” It’s a funny thing, I always dream in brick or board, never in block.” An Apache Indian on the San Carlos reservation in Arizona, who has lived most of his life in a brush-covered “wickiup,” tells of his recurring dream: “T am walking up a grassy hill with my father. There is a chestnut tree at the top. When we get there we can see the valley. My father says, “This hill belongs to us. It is waiting for a house.” ” Such dreams linger. “Sometimes I wake up from one of those dreams,” says the lady from South Carolina, “and I just know I got to do something. I'll go out and get hold of a newspaper and read all the ads. I've even gone and looked at the houses — from the outside. “There was this time I got the trailer fever. I kept trying to borrow money to buy one of those trailers. And another time I got busy with contests. You know, those puzzles they have in magazines. There was one contest you could win a beautiful new home. They had a picture of it: it was white with green shutters. Lord, I worked at it for days on end, and after I'd sent it in they wrote back and said I'd won. But not the house. I'd won some books that cost me thirty dollars.” People who live in good houses shouldn’t throw bones to the poor, yet many Americans assume the poor require little else. The lady from South Carolina continues: 20 1958 “I've never been in a split-level house, but this white lady I used to work for, she had a daughter who was buying one and she told me all about it, It sounded beautiful. When she got all done telling me about it, she said, ‘Pearl, I just know you'd love to work there.” “I said, ‘I'd love to live there, too.” ” Hope stays alive. From time to time it draws breath from rumors of new government programs. “They built a project in town years ago,” recalls a sharecropper, “and they brought Joe Louis down for the ground-breaking. We all came and cheered. But no Negro ever got in that project.” A Georgia farmworker remembers: “I heard the Farmers Home was giving out loans for houses. So I konked my hair and put on my coat and tie and went to see the Man. He said I'd heard it wrong.” QuEsTION: Did you ever come close to getting a better house? ANsweR: Close but far, I guess that’s where we always are. Once we heard they were building houses for people like us. We asked our pastor if he heard what we heard. He said yeah, he heard it and it may be so. So we started getting ready — you know, hoping a little faster — but then, I don’t know . . . I guess it wasn’t so. At night the temperature sinks and tempers may flare. Sleep is often impossible, what with the baby crying, the children fighting for bed- space, and everyone complaining about the cold. There are never enough blankets; it’s best to sleep with one’s clothes on. (Tuberculosis and other lung diseases caused by continual exposure to damp and cold are common killers in low-income rural areas; and infant mortality is especially high in the rural South and in states with large Indian and Mexican-American populations.) “The children wake up tired,” a mother complains. “Me, I'm always tired.” Sometimes at night one needs to go outside. If there is a privy —a bucket often suffices — it might stand 200 yards away from the house, across a field of thistles, broken glass and, in the dark, a swarm of real and imagined snakes. Mrs. Ortega of Goshen, California, who joined a self-help housing project and now lives in a new house, recalls her nights in a shack. “I used to dread going out in the dark. Somebody would always have to go with me. Even now sometimes I wake up and think, ‘Who should I get to go with me? Then I remember — I can stay in the house.” 21 1959 1960 Tino, wake up. Huh? I have to go out there. Again? I'm big, Tino. It’s like that when I'm big. mmmmmm Don’t go to sleep. Get up, Tino. Come with me. Ashmrl. What? Ask Marie. She did it last time, Tino. It’s not fair. Tino, there’s no moon . . . and the snakes. Do you want a snake to bite me, Tino? I'll die. Do you want me to die? It won't be my fault, Tino. You see what I go through every night, every time I have to . .. where’s my pants? At night one’s fears come true, even if one’s dreams do not. The night belongs to snakes and lizards, bats and rats. “I haven't slept good since that night a lizard ran over my face,” says a Georgia man. “I think it was a lizard.” A Florida woman says she couldn't sleep one night because of the rats running through the shack. Finally she got up and persuaded her husband to take her into town. They went to a movie, the only one in town, but they soon left. “I kept hearing rats on the rafters,” she says. “I was afraid they’d fall on me.” The shack heightens terror. In some cases there is no electricity: one cannot turn on the lights to make “it” go away. Nightmares are common. There is a little black girl in South Carolina who each evening before she goes to sleep attempts to pull out her eyelashes. I have asked several child psychologists why she does this to herself. One says, “She is afraid of her dreams.” Another says, “She has no more tears; she is trying to cry.” A third says, “What she sees in the house offends her.” The shack echoes to the rain. It is not a cozy rain, the sort that falls on Robert Louis Stevenson's “pleasant land of counterpane;” it is hard and hostile, and it booms against the tin roof. If the leaks don’t wake you, the noise will. “I don’t go to church,” a woman in Mississippi told me, “but some nights I lie in my bed and I hear the rain and I try to pray.” Anyway You lay me I'll stay. Anywhere You bear me I won't care. Lord, hear my prayer : help me care enough to pray. God, God, let it rain all night, let it rain all day on a roof I can call my own. Let it rain someday on my home. Anyway You lay me I'll stay. 1961 1962 11. dawn It was still dark that first night in the house when I got up and started to clean. The children got up too; they were lonely in their separate beds. Then Pumpkin yelled, “Mama, come quick and see.” We all stood at the window and watched the sunrise. I've seen the sun rise before, lots of times, but never, never like that. Occasionally, thanks to self-help housing and a scattering of other government-aided programs, a low-income rural family succeeds in buying a decent house. When that happens, everyone in the family tends to form a better opinion of himself. In front of the house there are flowers; inside there are mirrors (perhaps because it is no longer painful to look at oneself), closets with a few new clothes in them, a table at which children can study and around which the whole family can sit and eat . . . and bedrooms, enough for everybody. A field worker with a new house near Ft. Myers, Florida, spends all his spare time working in his front yard. “I've always longed for a lawn,” he says, and he’s made his a horticultural wonder. Another self-help home-owner in Ft. Myers spends most of his time enjoying the privacy of his bedroom. “I come home, I eat, and I go to bed. Sometimes I lie there and listen to baseball. Sometimes I just go to sleep. When I wake up in the morning, I hate to leave the room. Man, it’s great.” 25 1963 mA At the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota, where about 500 new houses have been built recently, the children are still fascinated by the bathtubs. They won't stop splashing. Almost every day his teacher called him a dirty little Indian. He couldn’t take a bath, the pump was miles away. Then they got a house with hot and cold faucets and a glistening tub. Their first night he climbed in and put his fingers under the spout. He laughed. He wouldn't get out. Now, since truth and water are hard to come by, his teacher still calls him a dirty little Indian. But he knows it’s a lie. The child knows he owns the new house; it’s a way of owning him- self. One night in their new house a father asked his son to turn the tv down. The boy complied but he also complained: “Isn’t this my house, too?” 26 42-778 O - 71 - pt. 7-5 1964 It is wrong to assume that the child in a shack takes his condition for granted. Like his parents, he has glimpsed the world and he wants his just portion. There is a family in Immokalee, Florida, who built a house. (“Immokalee” is Seminole for “my home.”) The parents bought some used furniture for the extra rooms, taking the advice of the store- keeper who told them new furniture would cost too much. But when the furniture was delivered, the two teenage daughters promptly sent it back. “Who do they think we are anyway?” one of them asked. “Aren’t we good enough for their new furniture?” A costly question, but no doubt a healthy one. In Talbotton, Georgia, which is near Warm Springs (where F.D.R. took the waters: “We have, for too long, neglected the housing problem for all our lower-income groups.” — 1936), I met a nine-year- old boy who had “improved” his housing. It’s a rather complicated story. Apparently (thinks the visitor) the cardboard wall above the boy's broken cot has been torn from a box Of GIFTS & WHATNOTS GIFTS & WHA. The boy has painted over it a great hall, a splendid pink palace with crooked colonnades, Spanish moss, purple phlox. At night grinning butlers and maids carry trays from one end of the painting to the other (or so the visitor fancies). In the morning Squire chases Obliging Fox while Elegant Lady, just a dot on the corrugated dream, sniffs the sweet GIFTS & WHATNOTS GIFTS & WHA. The visitor sniffs too, and asks the mother, Where did he see a house so . . . complete? Suh? The painting, it shows fine imaginative powers. Yassuh. He says the house he drew is ours. He was a lucky child: he had gotten hold of a paint brush. “The small world of manageable toys,” notes Erik Erikson, “is a harbor which the child establishes, to return to when he needs to overhaul his ego.” But shacks afford no harbors; and shack children, to whom play should be a natural inspiration, usually lack both the space and the equipment. I once visited a mother and her boy living in a one-room cabin near San Antonio. “Does he have any toys?” I asked. The boy overheard. “I'm too old for toys,” he said. He was six. But if by some miracle the family finds a decent home, toys suddenly appear. The dolls, the wagons, the rocking horses — all the bright devices of play and fantasy — join the household as everyday com- panions. In Immokalee, Barbara Jean has a new rocking horse. Barbara 27 1965 1966 Jean is four-years-old. She got the rocking horse soon after she and her family moved out of their tiny shack and into their new, three- bedroom house. She keeps the rocking horse in her bedroom, a room she has all to herself, and she calls it Marvel the Mustang. 30 Marvel the Mustang rides all night. Sodol sometimes. Marvel the Mustang doesn’t bite. Me neither sometimes. Marvel the Mustang's not alone. He's in my room always. Marvel the Mustang a home, his own place . . always. 1968 The CramrmaN. Our last witness this morning is Mrs. Cushing Dolbeare, Housing Association of Delaware Valley. STATEMENT OF MRS. CUSHING N. DOLBEARE, MANAGING DIREC- TOR, HOUSING ASSOCIATION OF DELAWARE VALLEY The CuarMaN. Mrs. Dolbeare, the committee has had access to your prepared statement, and I notice it is lengthy. Would you be willing to summarize the most important points you wish to make today, and then we can reserve the balance of time for questions, if that is agreeable. (The prepared statement of Mrs. Cushing Dolbeare follows:) 1969 ~ ASSOCIATION 1601 WALNUT STREET/PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA 19103/(215) LO 3-4050 of Delaware Valley - OFFICERS BERNARD M. BORISH PRESIDENT CARL A. BROWN VICE PRESIDENT CHARLES W. CAMPBELL VICE PRESIDENT MURIEL EDGERTON VICE PRESIDENT THOMAS V. LEFEVRE VICE PRESIDENT ALICE W. LIPSCOMB VICE PRESIDENT BERTRAM WOLFSON VICE PRESIDENT MICHAEL STRONG COUNSEL BOARD OF DIRECTORS ALINE AMMOND CLARA BALDWIN ALMANINA BARBOUR - ELIZABETH L. BEARDSLEY LYNWOOD F. BLOU JERRY BORTMAN ARTHUR F. BRUNNER BEVERLY BUDER VERNON BURTON MICHAEL CHURCHILL THOMAS COLGAN JERRY F. FENTON THOMAS K. GILHOOL W. WILSON GOOD FREDERICK P. GRUENBERG PETER HEARN LAWRENCE HENRY IRWIN HOROWITZ MATTIE E. HUMPHREY JAN KRASNOWIECKI FRANCES MAY MARTIN L. MCNAIR DOROTHY Ss. MoNTaomERY' DR. CARLETON C. RICHARDS MALCOLM SCOTT, JR ROBERT T. STROMMEN RICHARD K. TAYLOR DONALD C. WAGNER DAVID A. WALLACE EDWIN D. WOLF ROSE WYLIE HONORARY DIRECTORS NELLIE R. BRIGHT M. TODD COOKE, JR. JEFFERSON B. FORDHAM HON. ABRAHAM L. FREEDMAN PEARCE M. GABELL WILLIAM i» JEANES by ME. HON. THEODORE ©. SPAULDING HON. NOCHEM §. WINNET STAFF CUSHING N. DOLBEARE MANAGING DIRECTOR JULIA ROBINSON ASSISTANT DIRECTOR October 12, 1970 Mr. Kenneth Schlossberg Staff Director Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs United States Senate Washington, D.C. 20510 Dear Ken: Returned herewith is the transcript of my testimony before the Select Committee. I have included additional copies of three of the charts in the hope that they can be inserted at an appropriate point in the transcript. If not, I assume that eager readers will find them in the finer print of the prepared statement. I would like also to reiterate my suggestion that the Select Committee consider field hearings in Philadelphia. I think that over the years Philadelphia has made a more serious and successful effort to get housing programs to work than any other big city, and I can suggest numerous individuals end organizations who can testify to the total ineffectiveness of our present housing solutions. If you do decide to come, I'll be glad to be of whatever assistance I can in seeing that you get some witnesses who can tell it like it is. Sincerely, Cushing N. Dolbeare Managing Director Enclosure THE HOUSING ASSOCIATION OF DELAWARK VALLEY IS A CITIZENS' ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO THE GOALS OF A DECENT HOME AND DECENT LIVING ENVIRONMENT WITHIN THE MEANS OF EVERY FAMILY IN THE REGION, FREEDOM OF HOUSING CHOICE, AND EQUALITY OF HOUSING OPPORTUNITY. WORKING IN THE CITY AND THROUGHOUT THE REGION, THE ASSOCIATION 18 SUPPORTED BY ITS MEMBERS AND BY THE UNITED FUND OF THE PHILADELPHIA AREA. pee 1970 PREPARED STATEMENT OF CUSHING N. DOLBEARE, MANAGING DIRECTOR, HOUSING ASSOCIATION OF DELAWARE VALLEY BEFORE SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON NUTRITION AND HuMAN NEEDS, UNITED STATES SENATE, OCTOBER 5, 1970 I welcome this opportunity to testify here today and the investigation 2 which this committee is conducting in housing, because I am thoroughly convinced that the key to the solution of our housing problems lies in public recognition of the extent of our housing needs, of the total inadequacy of present housing programs, and of the scale and cost of measures needed to deal with them. Present housing legislation is an incredible maze of complexities, ambiguities, and good intentions. Twenty-one years ago the Congress of the United States proclaimed the national goal of providing "a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family." Twenty-one years, and almost as many major housing bills later, housing. is -still*in its infancy. If housing programs in this country are to come of age, we need to deal with the full extent of our housing problem, not with the marginal impact of token programs and funding. Nearly a decade ago, this nation made a commitment to land on the moon by 1970. Our space program and our national efforts were oriented toward that goal, and legislation and appropriations were made in the light of the needs of that program and that commitment. In this decade, we should make a similar commitment to the eradication of poor housing, poor nutrition, and poor education, and to the achievement of social justice. This can only be done by measuring our needs, and tailoring our programs to those measurements. In marginal terms, we are making progress. This year marks the highest budget request ever made for low and moderate income housing subsidies -- a sharp contrast to the first two decades following the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, during which it was not unusual for the government to make a profit on its housing programs. Nevertheless, our expenditures and aspirations in housing are far less than the amounts which we spend on other domestic programs, such as highways, health services, agricultural subsidies, or medicare. It is an even tinier fraction of the amount which we currently spend on defense. The accompanying charts show budgeted fiscal 1971 outlays for housing compared with other programs, and by type of housing expenditure. Because we believe a reordering of national priorities is essential to achieving social justice in the United States, the Housing Association for the past year has vigorously opposed the continued involvement of the United States in the war in Vietnam, which we regard as completely frustrating to efforts to move the country as rapidly as it must toward becoming a nation in which justice and human needs come first. We are convinced that as long as military and defense expenditures are such a substantial proportion of our national hudget, no serious effort will be made on the national level to spend the two to three billion dollars per year which is the minimum we believe is necessary to solve our critical housing problems. If we are to remain a free society, our nation's first priority THE HOUSING ASSOCIATION OF DELAWARE VALLEY IS A CITIZENS' ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO THE GOALS OF A DECENT HOME AND DECENT LIVING ENVIRONMENT WITHIN THE MEANS OF EVERY FAMILY IN THE REGION, FREEDOM OF HOUSING CHOICE, AND EQUALITY OF HOUSING OPPORTUNITY. WORKING IN THE CITY AND THROUGHOUT THE REGION, THE ASSOCIATION IS SUPPORTED BY ITS MEMBERS AND BY THE UNITED FUND OF THE PHILADELPHIA AREA. FEDERAL BUDSET FOR FISCAL YRAR 1971, Expenditures by selected functions (in millions of dollars) NATIQIAL DFFENSE $73,583 Veterans benefits $8,475 General $4,084 Source: The Budget in Brief, Fiscal Year 1971 (Tis bar should be 3 feet, £ inches long) = — Space 23,400 Agriculture $5,364 Highways $4,600 Other ~ Comuerce, Transportation £8,785 Housing| Other Housing and Community Development £1,499 , Education and Manpower Health Yedicare $8774 Dther 14,09 Velfare payments £5,455 po Spire Public Assistance ami welfare 1.61 FISCAL 1971 OUTIAYS FOR HOUSING BY TYPE OF PROGRAM (in millions of dollars) Net Pe tranee® 8,356 Direct federal financing without subsidy Subsidy without federal capital investment . $789 R Assistance to sponsors of low or moderate income housirg 438 TOTAL $752 Source: Special Amalyses, Budget of the United States, Fiscal Year 1971, p. 208 GL6T FISCAL 1971 BUDGET OUTIAYS FOR HOUSING, BY DEPARTMENT in millions of dollars Net income Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation $117 Other agencies $95 TOTAL $732 Source: Special Analyses, Budget of the United States, Fiscal Year 1971, p. 208 €L61 1974 must be to meet the critical education, health, welfare, nutrition, and housing needs of our own people. Evidently, we will not do this so long as we participate in the Vietnam war. Domestically, the housing and building industry has suffered disproportion- ately from the inflation which is a direct result of our military involvement. Private construction has been brought to a virtual halt, penalizing not only the poor but middle class home buyers as well. Largely as a result of our participation in the war, the monthly minimum cost of housing to the unsubsidized home buyer has doubled in the last decade. In 1960, three bedroom row houses were being sold in Philadelphia for $12,000 with thirty year mortgages available at six percent. This worked out to a monthly payment of $72, and over the life of the mortgage, total charges of $26,000, including interest, in the unlikely event that the original purchaser remained in the house for thirty years. Today, that purchaser would be lucky to obtain a comparable house for $18,000 and a mortgage at nine percent, including the insurance premium. This works out to a monthly payment of $145 at a total cost over the life of the mortgage of $52,000, including interest charges. For the first time, housing in this country has become a majority problem, rather than a minority problem. Just as the problems of nutrition cannot be solved by food programs alone, the problems of housing cannot be solved by housing programs alone. Providing assurance of an adequate income to every American family is basic to solving our housing problems, although that step in itself will not accomplish the job. In the sixty-one years since the Housing Association was established, our major concerns have evolved from an emphasis on code enforcement and eliminating substandard housing to a concern with the need for consumer-oriented housing subsidy programs and the elimination of racism and exploitation from housing institutions, prublic or private. After stressing code enforcement, urban renewal and housing supply programs for half a century, we finally acted on our realization that people live in substandard housing not by choice but because they are forced to do so. Evidence, if any were needed, of this lies in the fact that people living in substandard housing pay a higher portion of their income for shelter than their more affluent brethren who are relatively adequately housed. The remedy, therefore, lies not so much in attacking structures as in giving people the means to fix them or leave them. Hence, the conclusion that the basic housing problems of low income families cannot be solved without raising their incomes to an adequate level, through employment opportunities, through income maintenance, or through housing allowances. For this reason, the Housing Association enthusiastically supports a guaranteed income at the BLS budget for a minimum level of adequacy, currently $6,600 per year for a family of four, The importance of income maintenance to the solution of low income housing problems cannot be over-emphasized. Too few people, within or outside the field of housing, appear to realize that this country has no housing programs designed to work for low income people. We have charted actual current costs in subsidized programs, and find they range in many instances well above rents for existing standard units. COMPARISON OF HOUSING COSTS IN PHILADELPHIA'S SUBSIDIZED PROGRAMS (Bars represent minimum and maximum costs as of September 1970) Monthly cost Desirable income level at 20% shelter- 1" LETTER [TTT income ratio $10,000 gooo —1% UTHIETITR 100 6000 voop iid 4 2000 = Welfare Projects Used Leased PUBLIC HOUSING Housing Association ofSDelaware Valley Nonprofit Nonprofit: with rent supplements TAT HTH $8000 $15,000 $20,000 @24.000 SALES HOUSING UNDER 235 Monthly payment (principal, interest, taxes, insurance) [THE Utilities and repairs (est.) GL61 1976 Public housing, in theory, is a low income program. Yet public housing rents in Philadelphia are so high that fully seventy percent of public housing tenants are paying more than twenty percent of their incomes for rent -- the theoretical level required in public housing. Even the lowest rents in public housing projects cannot -- using the twenty percent income standard -- serve families with incomes below $2,000. Yet, as recently as 1960, this was the only income level where there was an absolute shortage of units in the Philadelphia area. Above that level there were problems of quality, choice, and availability but, as the chart on general housing need shows, in absolute numbers there were enough. We estimate that 1970 will show that the shortage level has risen to about $4,000. In other words, there is a shortage of units renting for less than $67 or valued below $8,000. The federal government has recently estimated that in 1969 it would have required income supplements of roughly $10 billion to raise all households in the United States above the poverty income level established by the Social Security Administration -- a standard incidentally which is based on the cost of food, not housing. This level, however, is where public housing begins to serve. The so-called low and moderate income below market interest programs serve an even higher income level, as is shown on the accompanying chart showing actual charges under various subsidized programs in Philadelphia and, again at 20 percent, the income level served by the programs. Not quite two weeks ago the Senate approved an experimental housing allowance program for low income families. We believe this is a cautious first step in the right direction, pending an adequate income maintenance program. We believe that housing allowances should be provided for all in need and should cover the difference between one fifth of income and the average rent of housing of the size required. To promote broader housing opportunities, subsidies should be calculated on ametropolitan area basis. The program approved by the Senate, however, is predicated not on need but on the existence of vacancies. This, during one of the most acute housing shortages we have even known, a shortage shows every sign of getting worse before it improves. Tying housing allowances to the existence of vacancies strikes us as similar to keying food programs to the type and extent of agricultural surpluses rather than to human needs or, to take another example, as similar to tying medical assistance to the availability of health care. This would undoubtedly have kept down the cost of medicare, but it would have provided only a fraction of its benefits. While I approach housing from the standpoint of someone who has spent her entire professional career in big cities -- Baltimore and Philadelphia -- I am convinced that there is in reality very little difference between the housing needs and the housing problems of big cities and those of small towns, or rural America. My attendance last year at the Rural Housing Conference and my participation on the Board of the National Rural Housing Coalition has deepened this conviction. The differences, if they exist, are apparent and not real -- slightly different programs, slightly differently administered by different federal departments. The realities of poor housing are the same and so are their causes -- lack of money and a society which is basically unresponsive to GENERAL HOUSING NEED IN THE PHILADELPHIA STANDARD METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA — 1960 HOUSEHOLD INCOME COMPARED TO COST OF HOUSING OR ITS VALUE Household income: Rent or value Less than $2000~ $4000~ $2000 399 999 Less $33-67 rent or $67-100 rent or, Over $100 rent or $12,000 value than $4000-8000 value ~ $8,000-12,000 value $33 rent or $4000 value Basis of comparison is assumption that households can afford rent equalling 20 percent of income or purchase of house costing twice annual income. While this is very rough, the median rent-income ratio in Philadelphia in 1960 was roughly 20 percent, although very low income people paid much more. Note that this leaves out any consideration of size, quality, or availability. Housing Association pf Delaware Valley LL61 1978 the needs or desires of those who are poor, who are black or brown, or who are regarded as different, whether that difference be that the family lacks a male parent, or is elderly or is too large to fit comfortably in one to three bedroom subsidized units. The Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders laid the blame for the polarization of our society clearly at the door of white racism. While it may not be fashionable to take commission reports seriously more than a few weeks after their release, the Housing Association has begun to explore the extent of racism in housing institutions. As housing reformers, we are ashamed and appalled. The litany of racism in housing is a long one. Overt and federally sanctioned housing discrimination which confined black families to poorer cities while federal mortgage programs helped millions of white families to buy suburban homes; inequities of the housing market which have made housing more expensive at every level for blacks to buy or rent; racially exclusive policies of banks and mortgage companies which make it more difficult for minority home owners to finance home improvements and force blacks to be more dependent on subsidized low rent programs; slum clearance which bulldozed under the homes of tens of thousands of minority families and forced them into more expensive units, often still substandard, or on to endless relocation lists for alternate housing. The Housing Association is convinced that housing programs and policies, more than any other single factor, are physically responsible for the growing separation in our society between black and white, rich and poor, urban and suburban. In Philadelphia and elsewhere in the nation, our suburbs are open to middle income and affluent whites, and closed to all others. Only one new family in six in the Philadelphia region is or can be served by the present new housing market. This means that only one family in six will be directly served by the plans for regional growth on which our regional planning commission is concentrating. To serve an economic cross-section of our population adequately, we should provide new housing for all income levels at least in proportion to their relative share of the population. This would mean that instead of sub- dizing only 6,000,700 of the 26,000,000 new or rehabilitated units now in our national housing program, we would be subsidizing more than 12,700,000 units. Instead, we may well fall short of our quantitative housing goals, because there are not enough households who can afford what is presently being built. (See Chart) Before embarking on any such major expansion of housing subsidies, we need to totally revamp our programs so that they are consumer rather than producer- oriented. As long as we limit housing subsidies to particular projects and particular producers, we will not have the kind of consumer choice which we should be providing. Therefore, instead of subsidizing producers, we should establish a framework within which the bulk of new construction would be moderate cost housing -- town houses or the equivalent now widely prohibited by zoning regula- tions -- with subsidies available to those households desiring to live in newly 9-2" -1L~-0O BLL-TY DISTRIBUTION OF HOUSFHOID INCOME, U.S., 196@ compared with "BALANCED" DISTRIBUTION OF 26 MILLION HOUSING UNITS TO BE BUILT OR REHABILITATED BY 1979 and PROJECTED DISTRIBUTION OF THESE UNITS BASED ON CURRENT GOALS AND TRENDS in mill ons of units DZ HOUSEIOD INCOME, 1969 TI WBATANCED"® HOUSING DISTRIBUTION 2B PROJECTED HOUSING DISTRIBUTION 5 E 7 Income . under $2000 $2000-5000 $5000-8000 $8,000-15,000 Over $15,000 No program Public Below market Some new, Can afford available Housing intérest rates mostly apart~ new housing ments or town houses 6.61 1980 developed areas but unable to afford the economic cost of housing. Nor should the subsidies necessarily be limited to interest writedowns, or annual con- tributions of the public housing variety. It would cost the federal government less to give away a 235 house, than to subsidize it over the life of the mortgage. This suggests that we might well experiment with outright equity grants, to reduce the mortgage cost to a level which low or moderate income people could reasonably be expected to carry. If the focus of housing programs were on the consumer, we would certainly do so. Not only are present subsidy programs totally inadequate to meet housing needs, but even if subsidies were available, present municipal zoning and building regulations would preclude development. In part, this is understandable. Few municipalities think they have the resources to provide the services and facilities needed if low income families are to have the amenities provided for most suburban Americans. Instead of requiring local contriibutions, either through tax rebate as in public housing or in other forms, it would make far more sense if Congress gave additional subsidies to communities welcoming low income housing. Revenue sharing proposals might, for example, be framed in the form of cash grants to local municipalities and school systems, subject only to the proviso that they be spent on providing services or facilities which serve low income families. I once calculated that if we devoted the money we are now spending in Vietnam to such ends, we could make a $100 payment per low income household to each municipality and a $500 payment per low income child to each local school system and still have enough money left over to bring all low income families up to the poverty line. In our present society, perhaps the key to opening suburban communities to low income families is to provide an obvious fiscal advantage to doing so. It might be worthwhile to speculate what our society would be like if suburban communities pursued low income families as ardently as they now woo industry. Where white middle income families are involved, this country has shown itself able to adopt broad-scale housing programs capable of meeting the needs of millions of Americans. The FHA is a prime example. These successful programs have one major characteristic: they are consumer-oriented. If house and buyer met the eligibility standards, they were insured. Despite all the complaints, many of them valid, about FHA policies and shortcomings, the fact remains that millions of Americans have been served by its programs. With minor exception, those served by FHA in new housing have been white middle income families. Why not extend the benefits of housing programs to poor and black people in the same way. There are many ways through which housing programs could be more responsive to consumers. Federal legislation should impose new consumer oriented requirements, such as the following: A requirement that local housing authority boards be predominantly of low income people. A requirement that local authorities certify as eligible all applicants within incomes below maximum admission limits, and that these limits be related realistically to the cost of housing in the community. 1981 A requirement that applicants be given a choice of tenure, type and location of housing, with the subsidy applied against the rental or mortgage payment for a unit of the applicant's choice. A requirement that the federal government itself construct housing or provide subsidies in communities where local authorities or agencies are unable or unwilling to provide adequate amounts of subsidized housing. A requirement that tenants be given a voice in management," where federal subsidies are involved, regardless of the type of ownership. A requirement that local agencies and authorities provide adequate maintenance and services to maintain a decent environment and provision of the necessary subsidies. A requirement that FHA repair serious defects in all housing which it insures. An extension of rehabilitation loans and grants to home owners where necessary to meet housing code requirements or federally established standards of decency. A requirement that renewal programs be responsive to the community affected, with all project activity in residential areas at the behest of or with the concurrence of community controlled representative project area committees, and with renewal leading to the transfer of ownership of land and, where possible, control of local institutions to the communities affected. A requirement that, until adequate levels of funding are available, housing and related subsidies go first to those in greatest financial need. A requirement that benefits of all federal programs be withheld from institutions which are found guilty of racial discrimination. The foregoing are suggestions. We hope that they will be considered but, more important, we reiterate that the key to solving housing and other social problems is not through a proliferation of programs, experiments, rhetoric, but by placing the public interest first, by reordering our priorities, and by establishing an open society, with respect for all. October 2, 1970 1982 Mrs. Dorseare. Thank you, Senator. I am glad to summarize, and 1 think Mr. Margolis and Mr. Henry made the job easier for me. We don’t have any housing programs that work for the really poor. The housing programs that we do have are inadequate in scale and in concept to deal with the needs of the poor. : I approach this problem not from the viewpoint of a resident of rural America, but rather as someone from a citizens’ organization, from the fourth largest metropolitan area in the country, Phila- delphia. We have been concerned with analyzing housing problems and proposing solutions for 60 years, and we have tried to focus our major attention not on whatever program was operating at the moment, but rather on the scale of how well we are meeting our hous- ing needs. I am convinced from having participated in the rural housing conference and from my participation as a board member of the Rural Housing Coalition, that there isn’t really much difference be- tween the housing problems of urban America and rural America. In fact, I respect the major reason that two-thirds of our sub- standard housing is in rural America is that we have so many more low-income people in rural America, proportionately. Differences exist, but the problems are essentially the same. The programs are also essentially the same. They are slightly different programs, administered slightly differently by totally different agencies. The problem essentially is poverty and the fact that our society is unresponsive to the needs of poor people or black people, or differ- ent people, whether that difference be large families, or families headed by a woman, or families who happen not to live in the cities or suburbs. In 1960, we made a commitment to land on the moon during the decade. We didn’t say “Let’s appropriate $1 billion or $2 billion for space and see how far that gets us.” We said, “Let’s go to the moon,” and we appropriated what it took to get us to the moon. It is our view that we should do this with the housing situation. We should say, “What is the extent of our housing needs, and what is it going to take to solve them?” And then we should legislate the programs and appropriate the moneys necessary. There is a chart in my testimony that shows the budget expendi- tures by functions in many areas of government. The bar for housing—one and a half billion dollars proposed by President Nixon—is about three-quarters of an inch long. In that same chart, the bar for defense would be almost a yard long. It is 33 inches. (The chart follows.) DISTRIAUTION CF HCUSTHOID IVCOME, U.S., 1969 compared with "3ALANCFD" DISTRIBUTIC! OF 28 MILLION HCUSTNG UNITS TO 3% BUILT OR REHABILITATED BY 1979 and PROJFCTFD DISTRIBUTION OF THESE INITS BASED ON CURRMNT J0ALS AND TRENDS in millions of units 22,6 ZZ woussioid TNCOME, 1969 Tm "RATIANCED" HOUSING DISTRIBUTION = PRCITCTYD HEUSTMG DISTRIBUTION 12,1 \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ N N . Je— pt el I ren fl —— Soe — Foy — re] ry Fad pe] Income under $2000 $2000-5000 $5000-3000 £8,000-15,000 Over $15,000 No program Public Below market Some new, Can afford available Housing interest rates mostly apart- new housing ments or town houses €861 1984 Mrs. Dorseare. Unless we reorder our priorities and change this direction and effectuate our withdrawal from Vietnam, we are not going to solve our housing problem, or our other critical domestic problems. The Vietnam war has had an impact not only on lowering the amount of Federal money which is available for essential social pur- poses, it has had a very direct impact in the area of housing. In 1960 it was possible in the Philadelphia area for people to buy $12,000 houses and get 30-year mortages and make monthly payments of $72, and this meant that any white family in Philadelphia with an income of $4,500 or more could, if he wanted to, purchase a new house. Black families couldn’t because we had discrimination on top of income problems. Senator Dork. With reference to the war, the problem, as I assume, existed before the Vietnam war. Why didn’t we come to grips with it then, if you now say it is the war that stands in the way of its solution ? Mrs. DoLBeARE. The war is not the only thing standing in the way of solution, because obviously we didn’t solve it before the war. But I don’t think we can possibly solve it as long as we have the drain of war expenditures. Certainly the housing problem has become more critical over the last decade, because of inflation brought about by the war, and by its impact on private sector housing programs. We are relying heavily on the private sector in housing. As IT was saying, in 1960 a man with an income of $5,000 could pur- chase a three-bedroom house in Philadelphia with a monthly payment of $70. Today he would have to pay $145. The price of the house has increased from $12,000 to $18,000, and the interest rate has increased from 6 percent to 9 percent. Senator Dore. You charge everything up to the war in Vietnam, and the only point I make is that we had the problem before, and I assume we are going to have it after the war, even though we are on the way out in Southeast Asia, and expenditures are down. It may be something else after Vietnam. I think, in fairness, it has been lack of will, perhaps on the part of those of us in Congress. We can stand up and say if we didn’t have the war and reordered our priorities, but I think we are in the process of reordering the priorities, and I think at the top of that list is peace instead of war, which I think must be first before we can even do the very things necessary that you point out. Mrs. DorBeARE. I think essentially we are in agreement: We do have to reorder our priorities, and we have to do so at a very rapid pace. I would like to ask you, if you would, to look at the chart titled “Comparison of Housing Costs in Philadelphia’s Subsidized Pro- grams.” The key point of this chart is that we have no programs in housing which meet the needs of low-income people. (The chart follows.) : COMPARISON OF HOUSING COSTS IN PHILADELPHIA'S SUBSIDIZED PROGRAMS (Bars represent minimum and maximum costs as of September 1970) Nonthly cost Desirable income level at 20% shelter- income ratio $10,000 8000 6000 4000 2000 Welfare Projects Used Leased PUBLIC HOUSING Housing Association of Delawarz Valley Nonprofit Nonprofit: $8000 $15,000 $20,000 24.000 with rent SALES HOUSING UNDER 235 supplements . Monthly payment (principal, interest, taxes, insurance) [ITH Utilities and repairs (est.) g861 1986 Mrs. DorBeare. It is as simple as that. The chart shows, using Philadelphia figures, and current figures, the cost of housing under « series of programs. The first four bars are public housing in Phila- delphia. Public housing has four different rent scales. The poorest people in public housing—and more than half are in this category— are those on welfare. They pay the highest rents, from $75 to $105. Then we have families in projects; families in rehabilitated hous- ing; families in housing which is rented from private operators. The lowest rent for any of these is $33 a month for some few low- income people in housing projects. That is the lowest figure available under any subsidized program. Yet at 20 percent of income, $33 is what a family earning $2,000 a year should be paying for housing, and in 1960 in Philadelphia we had 166,000 families in the metropolitan area with incomes below $2,000. Indeed, if you will look at the chart titled “General Housing Need in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area—1960,” you will see that was the only area where we had an absolute shortage of housing in 1960. I suspect that now we have an absolute shortage of housing that would serve people in the income level of $4,000 and below. (The chart follows.) GENERAL HOUSING NEED IN THE PHILADELPHIA STANDARD METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA —- 1960 HOUSEHOLD INCOME COMPARED TO COST OF HOUSING OR ITS VALUE Household income: than $2000~ $L4000~ $6000 16,000 fi i 682,000 units Rent or value Less $33-67 rent or $67-100 rent or, Over $100 rent or $12,000 value than $4000-8000 value ~ $8,000-12,000 value $33 rent or $4000 value Basis of comparison is assumption that households can afford rent equalling 20 percent of income or purchase of house costing twice annual income. While this is very rough, the median rent-income ratio in Philadelphia in 1960 was roughly 20 percent, although very low income people paid much more. Note that this leaves out any consideration of size, quality, or availability. Housing Association #f Delaware Valley L861 1988 But the point is, while we had a shortage of housing at the bottom of the income scale, we had housing programs serving people with incomes of $4,000 to $6,000 to $8,000 (areas where we had more hous- ing than needed), and the problems were quality, availability, and distribution. Yet, we have been able to legislate and fund housing programs in this country which have operated and operated well. We do this whenever we are talking about a program that serves white, rela- tively affluent Americans. The FHA program is a prime example. We are still doing that. We haven’t added much to our public hous- ing appropriations, we havn’t deepened any housing subsidies, but we did pass a program this year benefiting people at higher income levels. That is because when these people needed help they got it a lot faster than anyone else. I would like you to look at my final chart, comparing income dis- tribution and housing production, which shows you how far we are falling behind on subsidized housing. The first bar in each set shows the number of households by income level, the first set is income under $2,000, where we have no programs at all available; then the $2,000 to $5,000 income range, roughly that served by public housing, and below market interest rates; and finally the private market. Not only do we have no programs available for families at the lower end of the income scale, but if you look at the upper end, there are 10.4 million families. Yet, under our current effort to produce 26 million housing units in the next 10 years, we will be producing 12 million housing units for families in that income range. Then we are likely to wonder why there won’t be enough demand, and then we are likely to legislate housing programs for people with incomes over $15,000, so they can buy the houses. Instead, we should be producing housing units at the bottom of the income scale, giving priority to the poorest, and work up, so that finally we are producing housing for the affluent. Until and unless we do that, we are going to accelerate the polariza- tion that has been occurring in our society, of which I believe housing is the root cause. It has been housing programs that have enabled white Americans to separate themselves from black Americans and move to suburbia, and rich Americans to remove themselves from poor Americans. Unless we redress that imbalance in housing, we will find that more ond more people are moving farther and farther apart from -each other. Thank you. The Craamrman. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dolbeare. You stated in your prepared statement that before embarking on a major expan- sion of housing subsidies, we need to totally revamp those programs so that they are consumer-oriented, rather than producer-oriented. Could you enlarge a little on what you mean by that? Mrs. DoLBeaRE. Yes, indeed. Every housing program that we now have provides money, either to a builder or an authority, or a financ- ing institution. We don’t have housing programs that simply give money to people and say, “Look, you can’t afford housing. Here is money for you to spend on housing so you can get better housing.” 1989 So we create housing authorities, and we hedge ourselves around with all the restrictions that Mr. Margolis and Mr. Henry talked about. We subsidize banks with a below market interest rate. ; In Germany after World II the Government said to the financial institutions, “Look, we have a housing shortage, and for each mark you invest in lucrative enterprises at a high interest rate, you have to invest a mark in housing at a much lower interest rate. It was as simple as that. Germany came closer than any other coun- try to solving its housing shortage. We give more money away in subsidies to a bank than it would cost us to give the same home to a low income family. The Carman. We saw situations in New York, and we also had testimony before the committee earlier the growing problem of aban- doned buildings, where the landlord closes up the building either because he can’t pay the taxes or can’t keep up the mortgage pay- ments or the maintenance costs. Would you think that working out some kind of an assigned risk mortgage pool where perhaps the banks might be called on to supply a certain percentage of resources to that pool to make loans to these high risk areas, where buildings are now being abandoned for lack of credit? Mrs. DorBeare. I don’t really think that would help much. I think it would help some. But it seems to me the basic problem is that low- income people can’t pay what housing costs. Those public housing rents on my chart were the amounts that the housing authority in Philadelphia needs for maintenance and operation. The Federal Government pays the full capital cost of housing. Yet we expect the private market to supply a decent house for ‘comparable rents, or we expect low-income people to pay what it costs for decent housing plus taxes, plus utilities, plus maintenance, and the arithmetic just doesn’t add up. It seems to me that adequate income, either through employment, or direct subsidies, or through housing allowances is basically the answer to that. If people could pay for decent housing, they would live in decent housing. I think there is all a great deal of evidence to indicate that. I think really we need to raise the incomes in the areas, and then the mortgages wouldn’t be poor risks. The Cuamrman. You are convinced, then, that that is really the key to the housing problem, to put more income into the hands of the poor families that presently can’t purchase adequate housing? Mrs. DorBeaRe. Let me say this: I don’t think we can possibly solve our housing problem without solving the poverty problem. I do think we could end poverty and still have a housing problem-— because we are not producing housing in the volume we need, and we are not solving the problem of discrimination. So we need to do more than raise incomes, but we can’t do anything unless we raise incomes. The Cramrman. I think one other problem is the one that Dr. Henry referred to when he said we are knocking down more houses than we are building, because of the urban renewal projects, high- 1990 ways and other programs which are destroying existing housing, but not replacing it. Mrs. DorBeare. That is true, and we are also abandoning more housing than we are knocking down, simply because people are forced to squat in abandoned and derelict structures, because they can’t pay the rent an owner needs to be solvent. It is much broader than urban renewal. It is a basic ability of our society, apparently, to respond to the needs of low income people. The CHAIRMAN. Senator Yarborough, did you have questions? Senator YArBorouGH. Yes, Senator McGovern. I want to congratu- late you for continuing these hearings, and examining the relation- ship between inadequate rural housing and health problems. Mr. Margolis said there was a hunger for housing, as well as for food; and we added to that a hunger for medicine or health care. I don’t want to engage in repetition, but the President’s Com- mission has recommended that we build 26 million housing units in America in the next 10 years. This ties right in with what you have been saying, Mrs. Dolbeare, about the fact that we are knocking down and abandoning housing while slipping into slums due to a shortage of new housing. The last data I saw indicated that we are building about one million new houses a year. It would take about two and a half million new housing units a year to keep America under its present status, and keep us from slipping into the slums. We won’t even begin to pull people out of the slums unless we are constructing at least that many new units; regardless of the cost, or who is building them. We are doomed to bigger slum areas, regard- less of whether people have money in their pockets or not, unless we build houses for them to live in. I think that is crystal clear, - Mr. Chairman. I want to ask all of the panel, Mr. Henry, Mr. Margolis and Mrs. Dolbeare, about another matter that has come to my attention with reference to housing and poverty in rural areas. I am getting complaints from my State that under the Economic Development Administration that we created to put money into depressed areas, primarily rural areas, that they can hardly get a grant under EDA now, that the grants are being made in urban areas. Have you done research on that, and do you know the status of the problem? What is the EDA doing to put money into the rural counties? Has that dried up to a trickle, as it has in some areas of my State of Texas? Mr. Henry. EDA is also bogged down in the Federal-State re- lationship thing, with the monstrosity that you call the workable program. It can not move on any program unless the county or the city or municipality has agreed that such a building program is what they would like to have. EDA has to overcome the same difficulties as does the FHA, or any of the other housing programs, in being able to help the poor to get the political muscle to get the kind of workable program that 1991 the poor feel they need, or that are needed for the poor to build the same houses you are talking about. ; Now, EDA is just as guilty of negligence as most other agencies, and perhaps more so in many instances, because of the construction of EDA, which takes in several counties in a district, not just one. It is hard enough for them to deal with a program when you have only got one municipality, or one county government to contend with. When you have six or seven county governments and 12 or 15 municipal governments, you have to agree on a single program called a workable program and, baby, you have got it. Senator YarBoroueH. Even in my State where they have been able to get together and agree on programs, they are unable to get money in the rural areas from EDA. The information I have is that they are pumping money from EDA into cities, on urban pro- grams, and not to try to stop the flight of people from the rural areas, by making it possible for them to live in the rural areas. Mr. Hexry. Well, you know, a part of the plan is to get rid of as many poor people, black and white, in the rural areas. Senator Y arBoroueH. Mr. Chairman, I think our staff should start inquiry of EDA. TI think that a direct question won’t get results. I think we need to find out how much money they have loaned over the last 5 years, and then see where it has gone. The CrarrMaN. Would the Senator yield at that point? It is my hope that after we hear from some of the witnesses, and as the Senator knows, we have been hearing from a number of people over the last couple of weeks, that perhaps following the adjourn- ment of the Congress, or the recess, or whenever it is, that we can then reconvene the committee later this fall, and call in some of the Government witnesses from EDA and from the various other housing agencies to raise not only this question, but a whole range of questions that have been in my mind, and I think in the minds of other members of the committee, as to why we are not making more prog- ress on the housing front. Senator YArsorouGH. I want to raise another question along this line, too, about the rural areas. One of the best agencies for helping the rural areas has been the Farmers Home Administration. It has made production loans and it has made home building loans. It may not have worked in some of the States or some of the counties represented here, but it has worked well in my State. In the last year and a half, the loans have dried up. Where they have had an office in three counties, FHA has consolidated them into one office, and left one man there to operate it. He tells us, “My full time is taken up just processing the papers.” He can’t go investigate on the land to make a report, and so no loan is made. I am further advised that when the Farmers Home Administra- tion does lend money, they express a willingness to lend money to build a home, but not for production loans. Farmer’s organizations tell me that the average small farmer, without a production loan, can’t plant a thing. He is told “We will lend you money to build a home if you can keep your production going and get a production loan.” It forces him out. He is foreclosed. 1992 It takes both parts, including that production loan, to get his seed and feed and fertilizer on the land to raise a crop. I am talking about the family farmer mainly. The Farmers Home Administration is ostensibly willing to make the loans to build homes, but actually avoids doing so by saying, “No, we don’t have the money for the production loan,” and the man has to have the pro- duction loan first, even if he is living in a shack. Mr. Henry. And these people are at the will of what is known as the county committee, that deals in the selectivity of how they spend, on whom, the funds that they have, and this is where you get into a racial, class bind, because the biggest thing wrong with FHA is that there is not enough money in it to go around to all the people who need it. Usually those who need it least get it first. You know how the county committees are elected, all the farmers in the area, and these are the guys who determine which farmer, or who gets how much of what there is, and you get right back into the same system of dealing with constituencies of people that you favor one over the other, and there is a lot to be desired in the county committee system in terms of the being an agency that is aboveboard and dealing fairly with all the citizens in the county. Senator Yarsoroueu. The question is raised, too, whether some of the people at the top don’t kind of like to see this rivalry at the county level because it saves them from putting any money into the county. Mr. Henry. I think that is part of it. Senator Yarsorouen. If they get an argument, they don’t have to advance money for the program. In my State, out of 254 counties, some 60 percent of those counties lost population from 1940 to 1950. Another 60 percent lost population from 1950 to 1960. It is mostly the same counties, but there is some shift. Now from 1960 to 1970 we have approximately 85 counties that gained population, and about 170 counties that lost population. That population flight was so bad that even the bankers and so-called power structures in those thinly settled counties are alarmed, and they are trying to get the loans in there to protect their interests. Yet they are still told, “We will make a home loan, but not a production loan,” and without a production loan, you are out unless you are a big operator or a big corporate farmer. Mr. Hexry. You have got to have both. Senator YarsoroueH. Even in the pictures shown here this morn- ing, there is a kind of existence in that shack, but without a produc- tion loan or credit somewhere, a man can’t live in that shack. He starves, or leaves, or goes and gets on the relief rolls in the city. You have to have both home and production loans to have a decent farm living, or even subsistence. Mr. Henry. But the home loan does deal to some extent with the housing problem. The production loan does not. It is easier many times for the poor to get a production loan, because it still leaves you in this mobility group. Next year you probably won’t be here. Senator YarBoroueH. There is a structure under the law. If we 1993 could get these laws implemented with the feeling and the meaning and get money put into them with appropriations, we have a struc- ture that could do something. We have a legal structure to do some- thing, if we have the will to do it. Mr. Henry. I think we have a program, but I think you and I would have to agree that we can devise a better program. Senator YarsoroucH. Oh, sure. I didn’t mean this was adequate. It isn’t getting the job done. Housing is too little and too late, and production loans are being cut off. What I am pointing out is that it takes time to pass new laws. If we put money into existing programs, and above all, after you have appropriated the money, if we have the will to see it spent right, that would do a lot. Mr. Henry. That would help. Senator YarBoroucH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think we ought to call the appropriate Federal officers here and ask them why they cut off the production loans. They know you have to have a production loan to put a crop in the ground. The Cuamrman. I think the Senator’s point is well taken, and I am sure the committee will want to call those officials to answer those questions. This concludes our session this morning. The committee will resume tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock, and the leadoff witness will be Mr. John Gunther, the executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Thank you, Mr. Henry and Mrs. Dolbeare. (Whereupon, at 12:20 p.m. the committee was recessed, to recon- vene at 10 a.m., Tuesday, October 6, 1970.) ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1970 U.S. SENATE, SELECT COMMITTEE ON Nutrition Ap Human NEEebs, Washington, D.C. The select committee met at 10 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 1318, New Senate Office Building, Senator Charles H. Percy pre- siding. Present: Senators McGovern and Percy. Staff members present : Kenneth Schlossberg, staff director; Gerald S. J. Cassidy, general counsel ; Clarence V. McKee, minority profes- sional staff member; and David Cohen, minority professional staff member. Senator Percy. The hearings will come to order. Senator McGovern, the chairman of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, announced that the committee’s third week of hearings will deal with environmental health problems. The hearings will concentrate this week, Monday through Wednesday, on the crisis of rural housing and the failure of existing Federal pro- grams to adequately deal with that crisis. The hearings yesterday were exceedingly interesting. Today we have a fine roster of witnesses: Mr. John Gunther, Mr. George W. Rucker, Mrs. Pat Gish, and Mr. James H. Harvey. I would like to explain why we have a shortage of Senators this morning. The Democrats are holding a caucus and Senator McGovern sends his regrets. They will be finished shortly before 11 o’clock. I am on a conference committee this morning that begins promptly at 10:30, both House and Senate members, and I must be there to help constitute a quorum so that we can transact that business which has priority and then send it to both floors of the House and Senate. So we will conduct these hearings for about a half an hour and we will have to recess them for about 25 minutes until Senator McGovern resumes the chair. We are sorry about this matter, but as you know we are getting toward the end of the session now and we are trying to get an awful lot done in the week or so that remains. Our first witness this morning will be Mr. John J. Gunther, execu- tive director, U.S. Conference of Mayors. Mr. Gunther, we welcome you. We would appreciate it if you would introduce your associates. « We have a copy of your testimony. You can give this testimony exactly as is or we can incorporate it in total in the record or you can summarize it, if you want. Proceed just as you see fit. (1995) 42-778 O—T1—pt. 7—F 1996 STATEMENT OF JOHN J. GUNTHER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, U.S. CONFERENCE OF MAYORS, ON BEHALF OF THE NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES AND U.S. CONFERENCE OF MAYORS, ACCOM- PANIED BY ROBERT JOSTEN, LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL; AND LARRY SNOWWHITE, LEGISLATIVE ASSISTANT Mr. Gu~nTtaER. Thank you, Senator Percy. I am accompanied by Robert Josten, legislative counsel; and Larry Snowwhite, legislative assistant; in our offices of the National League of Cities and U.S. Conference of Mayors. I am John Gunther, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. I appear before this committee on behalf of the more than 14,800 cities in all 50 States which are represented by the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. We are pleased to have this opportunity to discuss with you briefly the critical relationships between the problems and needs of the Nation’s rural areas. There can be no mistake that so-called urban problems and so-called rural problems are in reality much the same. These problems can no longer be categorized as such. Inadequate housing, insufficient jobs, an absence of necessary public facilities and schools, are situations which can no longer be viewed in a localized context. They are truly national in scope and they depend upon the development of national strategies. We are witnessing an increasing movement from rural areas to central cities. People wishing to escape from unpleasant situations in their rural homes often make their way to the larger cities of our country. Unfortunately, they are more often than not rudely awakened to the fact that escape is impossible. In the central cities they find they are no better off, and in many cases are in worse circumstances because they lack a familiarity with their new sur- roundings. The illusion that a rural resident can find a new life and happiness in a central city is often no more than a cruel joke. We are also witnessing another type of movement. Many indi- viduals and families who are financially able to do so are moving from the central cities to the suburbs. Preliminary figures on the 1970 census show that for the first time, suburbanites outnumber central city residents. Of the 25 largest cities, 13 lost population in the decade between 1960 and 1970. St. Louis declined 19 percent, Cleveland dropped 16 percent, and Pittsburgh fell 15 percent. At the same time, 24 of the 25 largest metropolitan areas gained population, often dramatically. The Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, for example, grew by 38 percent. The result of rural to central city movement and central city to suburb movement means that our core cities are increasingly being left with those individuals and families who are least able to take care of themselves and require the highest level of Government assist- ance. Needless to say, the mayors of major central cities in this country have concluded that if any solution is ultimately to be found to the problems of core cities, great attention must be paid to re- juvenating our rural areas. The fact that these problems are national in character requires a national response. This response must come from Congress in the 1997 form of programs designed to provide the necessary assistance to both central cities and rural areas which will enable the creation of healthful, productive living environments. The Federal Government does not have a good record in this regard. Too often we suffer from overwhelming redtape and severely inadequate funding. Federal housing programs provide a classic example. In the 1968 Housing Act Congress declared that the Nation should establish a goal of providing 26 million new or rehabilitated housing units in the next 10 years. Six million units of this total were to be for low- and moderate-income families. In the 2 years since the pronouncement of that goal, construction of conventionally built and rehabilitated units has been about 17 percent less than the initial target. In fact, total production has been less than the amount needed just to keep pace with population growth and losses of existing units. Naturally, inflation and the tight monetary policies believed necessary to curb it have crippled the Nation’s housing industry. The second annual report on national housing goals submitted by the President to Congress points out that housing production has declined sharply in the past year, and over the past 4 years has been more than 1 million units short of the volume needed to keep pace with the Nation’s growing population. It also points out that in- sufficient progress has been made in replacing or rehabilitating some 6 million substandard units. While the Congress established a national housing goal in 1968, it went only part of the way in providing the funds necessary to do the federally assisted part of the job. And even the minimal funds that were made available were delayed considerably by the con- gressional authorizations and appropriations process. The projections for production included in the original 10-year plan assumed timely enactment of the full amounts of appropriations and fund authoriza- tions provided in the Housing Act of 1968. This assumption, un- fortunately, proved to be too optimistic. Funds for the fiscal year 1969, which were originally sought well before the beginning of that fiscal year, were only finally approved, and then at somewhat reduced levels, in July of 1969, actually the beginning of the next fiscal year. Funds sought in the budget for the fiscal year 1970, which ended on June 30 of this year, were ulti- mately made available late in November 1969, approximately 5 months into the fiscal year. And again for the current fiscal year 1971, which is already 3 months gone, we are facing an identical problem. We do not yet have an appropriation bill for these vitally needed housing programs. Congress did its part by approving a bill in early August. The President, however, saw fit to veto that appropriation bill, and it now appears that there may be no appropriation bill for the Department of Housing and Urban Development until after this vear’s elections. Because we feel that our urban and our rural problems are really national problems, we urge that a national policy be developed which will focus Federal programs and funds to encourage the orderly and balanced development of all urban and rural areas in the country. Our strong belief in this kind of policy led our organizations in 1998 1968 to sponsor the work of the National Committee on Urban Growth Policy. i Sut The urban growth and new community development provisions which have been incorporated in the 1970 Housing Act, which has been passed by the Senate and is pending in the House, are an outgrowth of the work of that committee. It was the work of that committee that ultimately changed the position of League of Cities and Conference of Mayors from one of great doubt and skepticism about a program to build new communities to one of very strong support for a balanced kind of program. This year’s housing act has the ingredients to bring about the balanced kind of program which we seek to achieve. The mayors of our Nation's cities struggle daily with the problems which have resulted from the rapid expansion of urban populations. They are well aware that their communities need adequate tax bases, improved community services, and increased job opportunities. They would like to develop or maintain attractive living environments for citizens of all social and economic backgrounds, and they would like to see metropolitan areas in which there is a social and economic balance. Among the points which our two organizations have urged must be included in a national urbanization or urban growth policy are the following: 1. A specific policy for the settlement of people throughout the Nation to balance the concentration of population among and within metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas, while providing social and economic opportunity for all persons. 2. Imaginative, innovative, and efficient uses and conservation of land and other natural resources. 3. Revitalization of existing communities and careful planning and support of new communities as integral parts of regions or metro- politan areas. 4. Programs to develop a strong urban governmental structure and to improve the responsiveness of institutions of general govern- ment to the requirements of balanced urban growth. 5. Programs to expedite the adaptation of technical advances to improvement of the human environment and the requirements of urban growth. : Some examples of specific actions which must be taken at the Federal level including the following: ; 1. Coordination in the Office of the President of all Federal grants- in-aid and other programs affecting urban growth and economic development. 2. Location of Federal installations, awarding of Federal contracts, and provision of incentives to influence industrial locations and population movement with due consideration given to their effects on national urban policy. 3. Federal financial support to eliminate fiscal disparities among States and local units of government, including sharing of Federal revenues on an unrestricted basis with the states and directly with the cities. 1999 As you can see, we believe that the ultimate answer to the problems which exist in our rural areas and our central cities depends upon the development of a true national urban policy. I would like to discuss in more detail two specific actions which should be taken at the Federal level to meet our national problems. The first is reform of the present welfare system. I need not go into detail and describe the activities of the past year and a half with respect to the proposals designed to make changes in the current welfare law. I do want to emphasize, however, that the mayors of our Nation’s cities are in a unique position to see the damage that is being in- flicted upon our citizens by the terribly inadequate welfare system we have today. Many mayors are frustrated not only because they see the damage that the system is doing, but also because their hands are relatively tied, and they are prevented from doing anything to remove the inflictions heaped upon our citizens by the present inequities. The present welfare structure is inefficient, inequitable, inadequate, and steadily becoming more expensive, despite the statistics indicat- ing a decline in the percentage of the population living in poverty. Reform of the present welfare system is imperative if we are to achieve our goals of equal opportunities for all our citizens regardless of where they may reside. In addition, reform of the welfare system could do much to reverse the trend of population movement from rural to central city areas. Another critical element which must exist in a national urban policy is the concept known as revenue-sharing. Under revenue- sharing the Federal Government would return directly to State and local governments a portion of the Federal income tax receipts. These funds would be made available without the usual guidelines and restrictions found in most Federal categorical grant-in-aid programs. Revenue-sharing is designed to provide immediate relief to State and local governments which are unable to raise additional revenues on their own through such devices as sales and property taxes. Revenue-sharing could give less affluent State and local govern- ments a new ability to provide much needed services for their citizens. In addition, by increasing the capabilities of more rural- oriented States, revenue-sharing can play a major role in stemming the tide of migration from rural to urban areas. In conclusion, I would like once again to acknowledge the common bond which central cities share with rural areas. Cities and rural areas are dependent upon each other, and the Nation’s economy is dependent upon a healthy balance of population and economic activity between urban and rural areas. We call attention once more to the critical importance of a conscious effort by the Federal Gov- ernment to create a national urban policy. And we urge the im- mediate enactment of the urban growth provisions of the 1970 Housing Act, the pending welfare reform measure, and an initial program of revenue-sharing. Thank you, Senator Percy. 2000 Senator Percy. Mr. Gunther, I thank you very much indeed. I would like an extension of your statements on page 6. The purpose of these hearings, of course, is to concentrate on environ- mental health problems and you have given us a broad spectrum of solutions down the line. I would like to draw you out a little bit in your own knowledge of the danger to public health and individual health prevented by inadequate housing and inadequate programs. You indicate on page 6 that the damage that is being afflicted upon our citizens by the terribly inadequate welfare system we have today is very great. You do not mention specifically where you would like us to go on that. As you know, the Congress has before it now the Nixon Family Assistance Program. Do you support the principle of such a welfare reform program as family assistance as envisioned by the adminis- tration proposals? Mr. GuntaER. Yes, Senator. In June of 1969 the Conference of Mayors specifically endorsed this principle and we worked very closely with the Hineman Commission in getting up its report which supports this effort and we have a special committee of mayors chaired by Carl Stokes of Cleveland, to help pursue this. We have testified in both the House and Senate in behalf of the administration measure. We think it could stand a little bit higher than minimum levels, but basically we are supporting the administra- tion proposal. Senator Percy. When you say on page 6 that “The present wel- fare structure is inefficient, inequitable, inadequate, and steadily becoming more expensive * * *” could you expand on those com- ments, particularly as they relate to the effects on the individual: the individual’s health, his physical or mental well-being? What is the present system doing to the human being, to his spirit, his soul, his physical environment and so forth ? Mr. Gu~taER. Well, I guess the people who are being hurt most by the present system are all of those who are not even in it. They are totally excluded. There are large pieces of our population that are not eligible for any part of the welfare system at all. We have no general relief in America. The concept of general relief has never caught on here and the only government that provides general relief is the city. In other words, the city has to do something for all those people who are poor and out of work and maybe disabled, who live in the city and can’t qualify for one of the various categorical welfare programs. Those that do qualify for welfare are dependent on State laws. The amounts are very low in many States, particularly in the rural- oriented States and the red tape, the welfare machinery, the constant checking up on whether the welfare recipient did a day’s work and/or if some of the children in the family earned some money with a paper route or something like this, is degrading and really discourages work rather than encouraging it. ~ That is one of the reasons why we think that a general basic income policy is a much better substitute and it would separate the benefits from the services. Right now the people who issue the benefit checks are those that are supposed to be given the services. 2001 Too many of the people who are supposed to be rendering service are really doing an inspection job, they are not helping the indi- vidual, they are making sure that the recipient is still qualified for the benefits. We think services should be separated from benefits. Some people I notice in some of the discussion up here on the Hill about what should be done about the family assistance program are suggesting that maybe we should put the benefits part through and forget the services. Well, it would not work. The service part is very, very important and we at the local level feel that we should be given a chance to administer these services. The benefit program can be totally sepa- rated from that and we have no desire to have our name on the check that the recipient gets. Senator Percy. When you say the system is inequitable and you talk about categorical grants, are you saying that if an unmarried mother has eight illegitimate children, she has no problem about getting welfare? She is in a category that is easily identified and she is eligible for it and gets it immediately, there is no father in the home and so forth. But you have a tougher problem if you have a married couple who have three legitimate children and the father, because of an inadequate education or whatever it may be, has an income of $2,500, grossly inadequate to raise his family. So long as they are married, they don’t fit this category and they are sort of out in the cold. Isn’t that right? You are saying family assistance will treat every- one equitably and will look at the end result of society and try to help those who have been helping themselves as well as those who are not in a position to help themselves very much? Mr. Gunrtaer. That is correct, Senator. Even a worse circum- stance exists if the father has a low-paying job, very low-paying job, the family is not eligible so that by working he may be depriv- ing his family of welfare. Presently he and his family could be better off if he didn’t work, and this just makes no sense. Senator Percy. And also you are saying that it is not very good for society to just say, “Well, here is your condition and we will make it up.” Somehow you have got to look behind this condition and put the investment into the human beings, upgrading them to the point where they can stand on their own feet. That is what you don’t now have. Mr. Gu~taER. That is very true, Senator. . We have seen in the last 4 or 5 years a real deterioration in the availability of health services to poor people. More people now have funds with which to purchase a less available commodity—that is, health services—and 1t seems to us that the Federal Government has the responsibility to help make certain we have more doctors, nurses and health facilities. It just does not work to put more money into this stream to bid for the very same services. This undoubtedly is one of the reasons why the cost of health services has skyrocketed faster than any other commodity that the people need. Senator Percy. Can you give me your thought on housing? What 2002 can the local government do to aid in the solution of the housing crisis by revising local housing codes or by changing local zoning ordinances? What do you see that cities can do for themselves to improve the housing situation without any reference to Federal Government ? Mr. GuntaEer. Changing the codes is clearly something that cities have to do. The Federal Government, in fact, has been requiring the cities in order to receive Federal aid to do this. Unfortunately, it only applies to the central city. The question of zoning is really one beyond the central city—the acre, half-acre, and two-and-a-half-acre lots are something out in the suburbs. I sat in on meetings where, for example, officials here in Wash- ington down at HUD have told the mayor of San Francisco, “You have got to do something about all those acre and half-acre lots out in the suburbs.” Well, he cannot do any more about that than the officials at HUD. In fact, he can do a lot less. They can cut off the water and sewer aid to the suburbs and that might change things in a hurry. But the codes are being changed. It is difficult, but I think cities are facing up to it and doing it. As you know, in your own State Chicago has greatly modern- ized its code. San Francisco is trying, the board of supervisors has it right now. New York has been upgrading its code. Part of Operation Breakthrough is really moving in that direc- tion and we are cooperating with Secretary Romney. We think that he probably is on the right track with Operation Breakthrough. It is probably an unfortunate time to be trying it and since no money is available to build the housing. Senator Percy. I am delighted that the Chairman is back now, so we will have no break in the continuity of these hearings. Once again I am extremely sorry to have to leave myself, but I do thank you, Mr. Gunther, for your very fine testimony. The Chairman will carry on. Mr. GunTaER. Thank you, Senator. The CramMaN (presiding). Thank you very much, Senator Percy, for sitting in for me. I want to say to our witnesses today as we move into the closing days of this session, there are more and more conflicts that are difficult for us to resolve on our schedule. There is an important conference now in progress for the majority members of the Senate. The Senate was called after we scheduled this hearing today. I thought I should come and say I do apologize to you, Mr. Gunther, and the other witnesses. There is one additional question that I wanted to address to you’ I have been very much interested for a long period of time in the problem to which you addressed yourself for a more balanced settle- ment of the population in the United States. I come from a State where in the last census there was an indication we lost 20,000 people over the past 10 years. . We view that with the same kind of concern that people in the congested metropolitan areas view the growing congestion. I wonder 2003 if you could address yourself to one aspect of the problem that I understand you have not yet referred to and that is the need to look at our transportation situation as a means of encouraging a more balanced settlement of the population. Would you have any thoughts on that, Mr. Gunther? Mr. Gunrtair. I think we have many different transportation problems, Senator. One of the things we really don’t have is a transportation system. It is very easy to go from here to Chicago on the Interstate. It gets more difficult when you try to get off the Interstate and go to any of the places in between or when you get to Chicago, to get around there. You can go great speeds for hundreds of miles, but it is more difficult to move a few miles. We need a balanced transportation system in our metropolitan areas. We think the law that passed Congress yesterday and was sent to the President on mass transit provides another important piece of a system. Now in the less-populated areas the transportation is even more lacking of a system. The Appalachia Commission has invested much of its money in developing an adequate means of communication, which is really transportation in the rural areas. We have no expertise in the Conference of Mayors and the League of Cities on transportation in the rural area. We know that most of us who work for the organization came from the Middle West and many of us from small towns or the rural area, and we know a bags bs about it and we know it has not changed for the good since we lett. This is a problem which is not unlike the other problems we have in the urban areas. It is a lack of a system. No one really looks at the whole thing and works out how you are going to do it. The Cuamrman. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Gunther. I will read your testimony with interest and I apologize again for not finding it possible to be here for your entire statement. Mr. GuntaER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. The CrarMAN. Our next witness is Mr. George W. Rucker, who is the Research Director of the Rural Housing Alliance. We are pleased to have you as a witness, Mr. Rucker. You may proceed in any way you see fit. STATEMENT OF GEORGE W. RUCKER, RESEARCH DIRECTOR, RURAL HOUSING ALLIANCE Mr. Rucker. Thank you, Senator. We appreciate the invitation to appear. I thought that in the interest of time perhaps I would file my statement and summarize part and read part. (The statement of George W. Rucker follows:) 2004 PREPARED STATEMENT OF GEORGE W. RUCKER. RESEARCH DIRECTOR, RURAL HousiNG ALLIANCE My name is George W. Rucker, and I am on the staff of the Rural Housing Alliance, a non-profit educational and technical assistance organization concerned with better housing for low-income people in rural areas and small towns. I edit the monthly Low Income Housing Bulletin, published by that organization. I appreciate your invitation to appear before you on the issue of environ=- mental health. I will not attempt to discuss the inter-relationship between housing needs and health -- not only because it seems to me self-evident; but also be- cause you have had witnesses far more qualified to go into the details of that relationship. I will confine my statement to three general points; the dimensions of the housing problem, the apparent inadequacy of our programs for dealing with it, and some evident inequities of those programs. The Extent of Housing Need In discussing housing need in America, we are hampered by a couple of things. One is the lack of an agreed-upon definition as to what con- stitutes housing need, or even what constitutes decent housing. The most commonly used definition of "substandard" is housing which is di- lapidated and/or lacks those essential plumbing facilities that most of us take for granted (frequently in multiple arrangements): hot and cold running water, a bath or shower, and an inside toilet. This definition -- which someone summarized as "a nearly watertight box with pipes in it" -- is an extremely narrow one. Note that there is no allowance in it for structures which are not dilapidated but are still a long yay from being desirable, and are getting further away from it. The Census Bureau attempted to introduce a category of "deteriorating" in 1960, but found it difficult for their enumerators to judge on a uniform basis and everyone ended up by returning to the old plumbing and dilapi- dation rule of thumb. The Douglas Commission called this measure of quality "hopelessly in- adequate' and painted out that it leads to "a gross understatement of housing needs.” 2005 It doesn't consider, for example, the adequacy of heat, or of light and ventilation, or of the amount of living space available -- both in terms of numbers and of size of rooms. It fails to take into account the cost of the housing, though I would argue that a household which shorts its food, clothing, and medical budgets in order to occupy a "standard" unit also exhibits a dimension of housing need. Finally, we have no very clear guidelines as to what constitutes a "sujit- able living environment" even though this is .a part of our pledge to "every American family." If we can agree -- as I think we must -- that segregated housing, however adequate the units themselves, is not "decent" housing, it becomes even more obvious that our national needs go far beyond the data on "substandard" structures. We are also hampered by the fact that we don't bother to collect anything even resembling detailed information about housing except once a decade. As a result, the most complete data we currently have are more than ten years old and it will be another year or more before we can fully update our information on the basis of this year's census. Meanwhile, the most recent national figures we have on housing -- and they cover only broad aspects -- are from a sample taken in mid-1968. These indicated that almost 5 million households still lived in units which were "substandard" by the accepted definition. Two-thirds of those were located outside tlie metropolitan areas. I have indicated the details that are avail- able from this 1968 data in Table 1. It is worth noting that more than half of the non-vhite families in non-metropolitan areas occupy substandard hous- ing. That "incidence" -- as it is called in the statistical trade -- isal- most eightéen times as great as for white households in metropolitan areas. In addition to this basic, and generally recognized, core of housing need, I have attempted, in Table 1, to estimate some additional aspects -- though they can only be estimates until we have the refined data from the current Census. For a measure of crowding, I have used the standard of more than one person per room -- also widely accepted. While we don't have 1968 data, we know that in 1960, 97% of all households in otherwise standard units were overcrowded. If that incidence were reduced by as much as one-fourth be- tween 1960 and 1968", it would still mean that almost 4 million households were in that category as of the latter year. The estimates on Table 1 show how these would presumably be distributed among our categories of metro- politan and non-metropolitan and white and mon-white households. Another aspect of housing need on which we collect some details, at least every ten years, is the relationship of cost to income. In addition to the substandard units and to the crowded standard units, the 1960 Census showed that at least another 1/27 of the standard units were occupied by families that were paying more than 257% of their income in rent. Once again, we [footnotes 1 and 2 are on following page] 2006 don't know whether the situation has improved, stayed the same, or worsened on this aspect in the years from 1960 to 1968. Given the fact that housing costs have been going up rapidly in recent years, it is entirely possible that the incidence of over-costly standard housing has increased. Let us be very optimistic and assume that it too has been reduced by one-fourth in the intervening years. That would nonetheless leave a quarter of a million more households to add to our ledger on the backlog of need. If not a complete catalogue, Table 1 at least serves to remind us that the extent of need is a good deal more widespread than most people realize -- probably including one out of every eight households, and affecting some 34 million Americans (including almost 12 million children under 16.) The Inadequacy of Our Programs Our official goal, as stated in the 1968 Act, is 26-million new and re- habilitated units over the next decade, with 6-million of them receiving Federal subsidy. That goal appears to be almost as widely accepted as the recognition that we are not making a great dedl of progress foward it. Actually, the need as estimated by HUD in its Second Annual Report on the subject is 28.2 million new and rehabilitated units over the ten year per- iod, but it argues that 1.7 million of those will be taken care of by private, unsubsidized rehabilitation and therefore need not be included in the official targets. The other half-million units just seem to drop from view between pages 22 and 23 of the Report. Since HUD's estimates make no provision for eliminating overcrowding in otherwise standard units, I would suggest that the goal should be in- creased by 2- to 3-million units to provide for that need. This would bring the total up to 30-million, or an average of 3-million new and re- habilitated units a year. Even more obviously short of the mark, it seems to me, is the official goal in terms of subsidized units. 1 1c is by no means certain that the rate of improvement was that great, In his study for the Douglas Commission, Frank Kristof projected a reduction in the incidence of crowding in standard units of less than that over the full ten years 'til 1970. See Kristof, "Urban Housing Needs Through the 1980's." p. 20 2 Actually, the percentage is almost certainly higher, but to avoid any doublecounting I considered only the number of renters paying 25% or more of income that was in excess of the number of renters in overcrowded units. 2007 In assessing the need for subsidy, it seems to me one must begin with the level of "need" that I have outlined in Table 1. These figures represent households who have not been adequately served by the market mechanism, and we can assume that they will require help in getting out of that con- dition. If we also assume that the market mechanism will work no better for the 13-1/2-million new households which the Census Bureau expects will appear during the ten years covered by the goal or in replacing the losses from the nation's supply of standard housing which HUD expects in the same period, then we should add at least another -2-million to those already needing assistance. x When the data from this year's Census become available in sufficient detail to allow a close and accurate look at the current situation, we may find that the backlog of need is even greater than indicated im Table 1 -- in which case we would need to revise our target for assisted units upward. Since the past two years have been marked by a slump in housing output, leading to a worsening of the situation, rather than to achievement of the projected goal of 2.6-million units a year, it seems obvious to me that the target for assisted housing must be modified to take account of the changed situation. My own view is that a yearly level in the range of 1- to 1-1/2- million subsidized units (new and rehabilitated) is more likely to fit the need than the official 600-thousand unit goal. If we can question the adequacy of our targets for future action, the in- adequacy of past efforts seems certain. As set out in Table 2, 1968 data on income distribution indicate that there are 12-1/2 million households in what I would call the low-income category -- those whose income does not exceed the equivalent of $4,800 a year for a family of four. There are another 12 million households, whose income is above that but not exceeding the equivalent of $7,200 for the same size family. These I have roughly classified as "moderate-income" households, to fit the terminology in vogue in housing programs. If we regard these as the natural constituencies of our assisted-hbusing programs, we can see from Table 2 how far we are from serving them on any meaningful scale. The low-income programs -- which were the most numerous as of the end of last year only because public housing is a third of a century old, and the other programs comparatively new -- have not yet served 10% of that constituency, and in nonmetropolitan areas, they have not yet served 5%. If I am right in suggesting that the need for assisted housing is 1- to 1-1/2 miltion units a year -- I am really saying that we must do each year more than we have done in the past thirty years. Note, also, that the nonmetropolitan areas, with more than half the low- income families and two-thirds of the worst housing, have benefitted from only one-fifth of the impact of low-income housing programs. 2008 Inequity and Its Impact That is only one of countless pieces of evidence that can be marshalled to demonstrate that our housing programs have not necessarily gone where the need is. It is symbolic of the permissive character of Federal hous- ing programs that nearly 1,200 of the nation's counties -- that's more than a third of the total of 3,100-plus -- do not have any public housing even under reservation -- after more than thirty years! In Table 3, I have tried to take a look at the pace and the distribution of change. Again, we are hampered by the lack of comparable data in com=- parable detail over several benchmark periods. But, it seems to me that the indications we do have are disquieting. Between 1950 and 1960, we reduced the prevalence of substandard housing in the U. S. from 36% to 16%, a reduction of 20 percentage points. If we had done the same thing during the '60's, we would have wiped out substandard housing -- at least as defined by the Census Bureau. But we didn't -- we only did half as well, the '68 data indicate. Why? Maybe some of the other figures in Table 3 give us a clue. Between 1960 and 1968, the incidence of substandard housing for white families was more than cut in half -- from 13% to less than 6%; but for nonwhite families the improvement was not that rapid. Even more striking are the differences exhibited when we compare the 1960 and 1950 data on substandard occupancy in terms of income levels. For households in the lowest-income class (below $4,000), the prevalence of substandard housing was cut by about a third -- from one in two to one in three. For those in the $8,000- and- above category, the rate of improvement was much sharper -- going from one in fifteen to only one in forty. It will be interesting to see if that pattern is repeated in the 1970 data. I suspect that it will be and that it is the failure of our hous- ing system to deal with the hard part of the job -- eliminating sub- standard housing for those in the lower income ranges -- which explains the slackening of the pace of progress. Left to itself, the complex of assisted housing programs has a.certain tendency to zero in on the moderate-income rather than the lower-income sector, a reflection, I would guess, of our Calvinist desire to distin- guish betwesn the "deserving and the "undeserving" poor. The Budget Bureau has estimated that, of some 529-thousand assisted units targeted for this fiscal year, about 65% will go to households in the income range of $3,500 to $10,000, and only 22% to those with incomes below $3,500. Even more striking is its related estimate as to who benefits from Federal housing subsidies when you count -- as you must, in all fairness -- the subsidy represented by Federal income tax deductions for mortgage inter- est payments, property taxes, and real estate depreciation. Table 4 adapts their figures on this matter and it is very revealing. 2009 Note, in the first place, that almost 87% of the subsidy goes to housing via a non-housing program. It is another commentary on our national prior- ities and our lack of commitment to human needs that we forego almost $6-billion in taxes -- largely for middle and upper income families ~- and don't ever think about it; then spend less than $1-billion on low- and moderate-income housing and consider it a great national effort. Note also that almost half of the total Federal subsidy goes to families with incomes of $10,000 and above -- and less than 10% to those in the lowest income category, though we know that this is where housing misery and need is concentrated. In short, the lack of commitment in housing -- which is recognized by virtually all those who look at the situation -- has two aspects. The widely conceded one is in terms of magnitude -- whether we are willing, as your Chairman has put it, "to seek a new order of priorities” and to commit an adequate share of our resources to tke job. The other aspect of our lack of commitment has to do with its quality rather than just its quantity. I sat in a meeting with Assistant Secretary Gulledge of HUD and heard him deny that the Federal housing program has a commitment to everyone regard- less of income. That -- it seems to me -- is the real test of our national policy and its meaning. If we continue to "leave behind" the black, the Indian, the Chicano, the very poor of every description -- and especially those of them who lack visibility because they are on the back roads or in the decaying small towns of rural America -- then that twice-legislated pledge of ours is a hoax. There is no need to belabor the issue. The major point of all of this is to say that we badly need to take a close and critical look at the housing problém and at our programs for dealing with it. It sounds trite and obvious to say it, but we need a "Housing U. S. A." report to complement ‘Hunger U. S. A." -- without it, only part of this Committee's job is done. la 10/1/70 2010 Table 1 BACKLOG OF HOUSING NEED, 1968 (units in thousands) Metro Non-Metro Total White Non-White White Non-White All Occupied Units: 60,693 34,273 4,657 19,869 1,894 Households occupying piaC ; substandard units: 4,701 1,066 503 2,085 1,047 [Incidence] [82] [3%] [11%] [11%] [55%] 1,569 3,132 (metro/nonmetro totals) 142} [ 14%) Households occupying standard but crowded units:2 3,869 1,956 666 1,120 127 Additional households paying more than 25% of income in rent:P 262 93 169 — —— All Households in Need: 8,832 3,115 1,338 3,205 1,174 [Incidence] [15%] [9%] [297] [162%] [62%] 4,453 4,379 (metro/nonmetro totals) [112) [20%] Number of People in Households in Need:© 34,007 11,214 5,620 11,538 5,635 (Children under 16) (11,843) (3,589) (2,079) (3,808) (2,367) Notes: 3 Estimated; assumes a reduction in the incidence of crowding in standard units by one-fourth between 1960 and 1968. See also Frank Kristof, "Urban Housing Needs Through the 1980's: an Analysis and Pro- jection," page 20. b Estimated; "net" figures only (in excess of renters tabulated as over crowded); assumes a reduction in the incidence by one-fourth between 1960 and 1968. € Computed on basis of 3.6 persons per family in white house- holds; 4.2 persons per family in non-white, metropolitan households, 4.8 persons per family in non-white, non-metropolitan households. See "Trends in Social and Economic Conditions in Metorpolitan and Non- Metropolitan Areas," Series P-23, No. 33, September 3, 1970, Bureau of the Census. Metro refers to counties within Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas; Non-Metro refers to counties outside SMSAs. 2011 Table 2 Tr anaes So TrnIr FCTENTIAL CONSTITUZLICIES Total Metro Non-Metro Populations to be Served (Thousands of Households): Low-Income Households®: 12,550.0 6,137.0 6,413.0 Moderate-Income HouseholdsP: 11,849.0 6,932.0 4,917.0 Federally-assisted Housing (Thousands of Units)€: Low-Income Programs: Public Housing: 810.9 642.8 168.2 Rent Supplements: 69.2 51.9 17.2 Elderly Housing (Sec. 202): 41.0 34.1 6.9 HUD Rehab'n Loans & Grants: 28.8 28.3 5 FmHA Home Repair Loans: 18.9 3.6 15.3 Totals: 968.8 760.7 208.1 (Distribution) (100%) (79%) (212) Moderate-Income Programs: FHA-Assisted Rental (Sec's 221(d) (3)BMIR and 236): 163.6 154.6 9.0 FHA-Assisted Homeownership (Sec's 221(h) and 235): 29.8 25.6 4.2 FmHA-Assisted Homeownership: 296.3 56.3 240.0 FmHA-Assisted Rental Housing: 6.8 1.3 5.5 Totals: 496.5 237.8 258.7 (Distribution) (100%) (48%) (52%) Notes: 2 pefined as families with incomes of less than $1,500 for l-person; $3,000 for 2; $3,900 for family of 3; $4,800 for family of 4, etc. b Defined as families with an income range of $1,500-$3,000 for 1- person; $3,000-$5,000 for 2-person family; $3,900-$5,700 for family of 3; $4,800-$7,200 for family of 4; etc. c As of the end of 1969.. Sources: Number of low- and moderate-income households estimated from data in "Income in 1968 of Families and Persons in the United States," Series P-60, No. 66, Dec. 23, 1969, Bureau of Census; size and location of housing units from various HUD and FmHA reports. 42-778 O- 71 - pt. 7 - 8 2012 Table 3 CHANGES IN THE PREVALENCE OF ' SUBSTANDARD' HOUSING Percentage of all occupied units rated as substandard: 1950 1960 1968 All U. S. Households - 35.92 16.0% 7.7% Metropolitan Households - 21.0% 9.5% 4.0% Non-Metropolitan Households - 54.9% 27.7% 14.47 1960 1968 All White Households - 13.0% 5.8% All Non-White Households - 44.07 23.7% White Metropolitan Households = 7.3% 3.1% White Non-lietropolitan Households - 22.9% 10.5% Non-White lletropolitan Households = 28.2% 10.8% Non-White Non-Metropolitan Households - 77.3% 55.3% 1950 1960 Households by Income Levels: Incomes under $4,000 - 45.5% 31.87% Incomes of $4,000 - $7,999 - 14.12 8.8% Incomes of $8,000 and up - 6.67 2.5% Metropolitan Households: Incomes under $4,000 - 28.8% 20.9% Incomes of $4,000 - $7,999 - 9.47 6.17% Incomes of $8,000 and up - 3.3% 1.7% Non-Metropolitan Households: Incomes under $4,000 - 62.6% 44.0% Incomes $4,000 - $7,999 - 25.2% 14.2% Incomes of $8,000 and up - 15.8% 5.2% cable 4 = WHO GETS FEDERAL HOUSING SUBSIDIES (Estimates, in millions cf dollars, for Fiscal Yeal 1971) Income Level of: Estimated Under $ 3,500- $10,000 & Type of Subsidy FY'71 Subsidy $3,500 $10,000 above Direct public housing subsidy (thraugh local housing authorities): 646.0 413.4 232.6 -— Direct subsidy for FHA-assisted units (sec's 235 & 236 and rent supplements): 143.0 34.0 108.0 1.0 Indirect subsidy to FHA-assisted units (sec's 221(d) (3) & 202):2 12.0 3.6 8.3 .1 Indirect subsidy to FmHA-assisted units:bP 36.0 1.8 18.0 16.2 Direct & indirect subsidy on HUD rehab'n loans and grants (Sec's 115 & 312):C 43.0 24.9 17.6 .4 Indirect subsidy via Federal income tax deductions for mortgage interest, property taxes, and depreciation: 5,800.0 58.0 2,552.0 3,190.0 Totals: 6,680.0 535.7 2,936.5 3,207.7 (100%) (8%) (44%) (48%) Notes: \@Estimated not on basis of budgetary impact, but as difference between 3% interest paid by sponsor-borrower and 8% paid by GNMA. Assume average mortgage of $18,360 per unit. bEstimated on the basis of the difference between an average effective interest rate to borrowers of 5 1/4% and an 8% cost of money to FmHA. Assumes average loan of $10,500. Cassumes one-third grant and two-thirds loan for average of $5,350 per unit: allowing for amortization of loan portion with 3% interest. Source: Adapted from Bureau of the Budget data. 10/1/70 ke €10¢ 2014 Mr. Rucker. The first point which I would like to make and to which my statement attempts to speak is that housing need in America is substantially greater, I believe, than the nation-at-large realizes and than the Government figures and Government programs tend to reflect. In part, I think this is a result of an extremely narrow definition of substandard housing. The accepted definition has been sum- marized by one critic as amounting to “a nearly weathertight box with pipes in it.” The Douglas Commission, which did a very thorough job of look- ing at housing and housing problems in America, said, and I would agree, that the definition which we use of substandard housing “grossly understates” housing need. Among other things, it does not consider crowding, it does not consider the adequacy of light, ventilation, heat. Tt does not consider the Si of the cost of housing to income, though I would argue that a family which has to scrimp on its food budget or on its medical budget in order to live in something other than abysmal housing represents a hous- ing need just as much—or at least to some extent as much—as those who live in bad housing at less cost. Of course, the people who are worst off are those who pay an exorbitant amount of their income for housing, which is still not adequate. Of course, our figures on substandard housing have no provision for the suitability of the living environmental in which that housing may be located, although our national pledge is for a suitable home in a decent environment. The latest figures which we have on standard and substandard housing, again using this very narrow definition, are those from a 1968 sample that the Bureau of the Census did and it indicated that nearly 5 million households were still living in substandard housing. I would emphasize that two-thirds of those households were lo- cated outside of the metropolitan areas. Now if we attempted to add to that narrow figure some allow- ance for housing which may be rated as standard by the Census Bureau, but which is overcrowded or for which people are paying more than 25 percent of their income, this would probably increase our figure on housing need to something closer to 9 million house- holds, representing some 35 million people, including probably 12 million children under 16. The official housing goal, as Mr. Gunther indicated, is for 26 million units, 6 million of those to be assisted. But again it seems to me that since this goal figure is really based on eliminating over a 10-year period that rather narrow definition of substandard hous- ing, 1t understates the real need. If, for example, we were to allow for overcrowding in standard housing, or what the Census Bureau considers standard housing, we probably should raise that 10-year goal to something more like 30 million units rather than 26 million units. That is including, of course, new construction and rehabilitation. It seems to me that even more of an understatement exists in the goal for assisted housing units. For one thing, it seems to me we should start with all existing need defined more as I have indicated than just in terms of substandard housing as the Census Bureau defines it. 2015 That would require upping our goal for assisted housing. I sa that we should start with that, because it seems to me that that is our measure of where the existing programs, the existing housing market system, has failed people. And it is a fair assumption that those people who have been failed in the past by the system will need assistance to get out of their condition of housing need. It also seems important to me to note again what Mr. Gunther pointed out, that since the goals were established, our production has fallen far short. The situation has apparently worsened rather than improved so that again it seems to me the official goal in terms of assisted housing needs would have to be revised and revised up- ward to take account of those changed conditions and that deteriora- tion in the situation. Certainly if we can call in the question of the adequacy of our present official targets, there is no question that our past record of accomplishment is inadequate:in the field of housing—particularly I would argue, in the field of rural and small town housing. On the basis of 1968 data, I estimate that there are roughly 12 million of what I would call low-income households. That is, house- holds whose incomes did not exceed the equivalent of $4,800 for a family of four; and probably another 11 or 12 million households that might be called moderate income; that is, whose incomes were in a range from the equivalent of $4,800 to the equivalent of $7,200 for a family of four. . Now it is certainly true that not all of those 24 million house- holds need assistance, though I suspect that a very, very large por- tion of those in the low-income category do. But they do represent what we might consider as a natural constituency for our assisted housing programs. Yet when we take a look at that natural constituency of some- where close to 24 million households and compare it with the total number of assisted housing units which Federal programs have produced in 33 years, we find that the programs have not yet served 10 percent of the constituency and again in the nonmetropolitan areas they have served 1 less than half of that minuscule percentage. If, as I suspect, our goal for assisted housing should really be in the neighborhood of a million to a million and a half units a year rather than the 600,000 units a year, which is the official goal as of now, this would mean that we need to do more each year than we have accomplished in the past 33 years, because we have not yet put in place a million and a half assisted housing units. I would note also that while the nonmetropolitan areas of the country have more than half of the low-income families and, as I have stressed, two-thirds of the substandard housing, they have gotten—at least as of last year—around one-fifth of the assisted low-income housing units. I think it is disturbing also to look at the pace of our housing programs and their impact on our inventory. Between 1950 and 1960 we reduced the prevalence of substandard housing in the United States from 36 percent of all occupied units to 16 percent of all occupied units, a reduction of 20 percentage points. 2016 If we had done this same thing during the decade of the 1960’s, we would have wiped out substandard housing, at least that portion which is covered by the Census definition. But we didn’t. At least as far as the 1968 data show, and it will be another year before we have the data from the 1970 census, we only did half that well. I think that a partial explanation of that may be given in some subsidiary figures. Between 1960 and 1968 the incidence of sub- standard housing for white households was more than cut in half from 13 percent to less than 6 percent, but for nonwhite households the improvement was not nearly that sharp. Even more striking are the differences exhibited when we com- pare the 1960 and the 1950 data on substandard occupancy in terms of income levels. Again we don’t have comparable data for 1968 and it will be a while before we have anything comparable for 1970, but between 1950 and 1960 for households in the lowest income class, those below $4,000, the prevalence of substandard housing was cut about a third—from one in two households to one in three; but for those in the $8,000 and above income category, the rate of im- provement was much sharper. It went from one in 15 to only one in 40. It will be very interesting to see if that pattern is repeated in the 1970 data. I suspect that it will be and that it is the failure of our housing system to deal with the hard part of the job—elimi- nating substandard housing for those in the lowest income ranges— which explains the apparent slackening of the pace of progress. Left to itself, the complex of assisted housing programs has a certain tendency to zero in on the moderate income rather than the lowest income sector, a reflection, in part, I would guess of our Calvinist desire to distinguish between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. The Budget Bureau has estimated that of some 529,000 assisted housing units which they hope we will manage to produce in the current fiscal year, about 65 percent of those units will go to house- holds in the income range of $3,500 to $10,000 and only 22 percent of those to the income range of below $3,500. Even more striking is the Bureau’s related estimate as to who bene- fits from Federal housing subsidies. When you count, as you must, in all fairness, the subsidy which is represented by Federal income tax deductions for mortgage interest payments, property taxes, real estate depreciation. The first thing we notice is that of some- thing like $6.7 billion in estimated subsidies—again these are for the current fiscal year—$5.8 billion of that, or almost 87 percent, goes to housing via a nonhousing program; that is, via the Federal Internal Revenue structure and those income tax deductions. It is another commentary on our national priorities and our lack of com- mitment to human needs, it seems to me, that we forgo almost $6 billion in taxes—largely from middle- and upper-income families— and don’t even think about it; and then we spend less than a billion on assisted housing programs for low- and moderate-income families and consider it a great national effort. Note again that almost half of the Federal subsidy goes to fami- lies with incomes of $10,000 and above, and less than 10 percent, they would estimate, to those in the lowest income category, though 2017 we all know that this is where housing misery and housing need is concentrated. In short, the lack of commitment in housing, which is recognized by virtually all those who look at the situation, has, it seems to me, two aspects. The widely conceded one is in terms of magnitude— whether we are willing as you, Senator McGovern, have put it, “to seek a new order of priorities” and to commit an adequate share of our resources to the job. But this question of commitment has another aspect, it seems to me, and that goes to the qualitative rather than the quantitative aspect. I sat in a meeting with the Assistant Secretary for Honing Production and Mortgage Credit of the Department of Housing an Urban Development, and heard him deny that the Federal housing program has a commitment to everyone regardless of income. But that, it seems to me, is the real test of our national policy and of its meaning. If we continue to leave behind the black, the Indian, the Chicano, the very poor of every description—and especially those who lack visibility rh they are on the backroads or in the decaying small towns of rural America—then that twice-legislated pledge of ours is a hoax. There is no need to belabor the issue. The major point of all this is to say that it seems to me we badly need to take a close and a critical look at the housing problem and at our programs for dealing with it. It sounds trite and obvious to say, but we need a Housing USA Report to complement Hunger USA, and without it, only part of this committee’s job is done. Thank you, Senator. The CHamman. Thank you very much, Mr. Rucker, for your testimony. I think one of the most striking facts that you have brought out in your testimony, I have noticed it also in the prepared state- ment, is the very high percentage of Federal subsidized housin that goes to middle- and upper-income families. I think you sai something in the range of $6 billion, and only a fraction of that or a billion dollars of this, to families in the low-income category. Have you any way of knowing what percentage of poor families are not subsidized at all; are completely outside of the Federal housing program ? Mr. Rucker. I would say no, Senator, except in terms that we know that it is a very substantial number. We know some things about who they must be, because we know in terms of the Federal programs where they can reach. Public housing, which is the oldest and the deepest subsidy and so far has produced, largely by virtue of its age, the most assisted units, reaches fairly low with the Brooke amendment enacted by Congress last year. In theory it could reach everyone, but we know that it does not. We know that there are housing authorities which still have minimal rents in effect and where people at the very bottom can’t qualify. Even more important, I think, 1s the fact that we don’t have public housing programs in many instances in the area where it is most needed. We were intrigued by the report of the Rural Affairs Study Com- 2018 mission of Virginia in which they found that of 49 counties in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which they regarded as the most rural, not one of them had any public housing. Not one of them had any rent supplements. So we asked HUD how many counties in the country don’t have any public housing after a third of a century? And after scurrying around for a couple of days, they came up with a figure which indicated that 38 percent of the counties in the country don’t have any public housing yet, don’t have any even under reservation and I think we can safely say that there are very fot any, counties in the country which don’t need some public ousing. I Tew I live in Montgomery County, which is generally regarded as one of the highest-income counties in the country, and we need and fortunately have— (though not enough)—public housing. So we know that—aside from public housing—the big volume programs, the 235 program, the 236 program, Farmers Home’s 502 program, reach down into the upper lower-income range, but not down to those who are at the bottom. How many exactly, we don’t know, and that is one of the things that it is really a commentary—that this Nation, which must collect more numbers on more things than almost any other country in the world, does not really know just how many people there are out there that the programs as now constituted won’t serve. The CramrMaN. Is that part of the reason why you suggest that the need for a “Housing USA” survey of the kind that we had on the hunger problem ? Mr. Rucker. Absolutely, Senator. The Cramrman. I think that was one of the most arresting facts that first came to the attention of this committee almost 2 years ago, is that we didn’t really know very much about the statistics of the poverty in this country. One of the things that created the com- mittee, in the first place, was the argument that developed some 2 years ago as to whether there were any hungry people in the United States or not. There were very prominent Members of the Congress arguing that hunger was a fiction and scoffing at the fact that there was anyone in this country suffering from hunger. They could not believe it. So the first thing we had to do was to establish a statistical basis for it and I gather the thrust of your testimony here this morning at least in part is that we need more analysis of what the situation is with reference to housing, who is being left out, where they live, what kind of people they are. It is certainly fair to say that a high percentage of them are in rural areas, is 1t not? Mr. Rucker. I think that is a very safe assumption. We know that that is where the worst housing is. We know that incomes are by comparison lower in the small towns and rural areas than In cities. The CHARMAN. I am talking about people not reached at all— get no public housing. Mr. Rucker. Yes. We know that even the programs there are are not getting out to the rural areas and small towns on an equitable basis, even in terms of population, much less in terms of need; and then we can, I think, safely assume that those who are not being 2019 served at all probably are disproportionately in the rural areas and small towns. The CuammaN. Mr. Rucker, when you say that the projected unit goal in housing per year must be doubled—to go from, say, 600,000 to over 1.5 million units a year—what does that mean In terms of the Federal input? What are the dimensions of that prob- lem as far as demands on Federal budget and the Federal Gov- ernment ? Mr. Rucker. Well, Senator, to a very large extent that will de- pend on how we decide to finance it. It seems to me that in general we tend to finance our housing subsidy programs in a fairly un- economic way in the long run. We are the accountant’s equivalent of “penny wise and pound fool- ish.” Because of a thing that is called budgetary impact and because of the way in which we keep that budget as a Government, we end up actually spending more in subsidy under, for example, the in- terest-reduction programs, the mortgage-assistance programs, in which the Government pays a large part of the interest costs on a loan for a low-income or moderate-income family. We end up actually spending more of the taxpayers’ money than we would have to spend if we bought the house to start with and just gave it to them. Now I am not proposing that, but it seems to me a much more logical approach would be for the Federal Gov- ernment to make the loan at whatever interest rate or no interest rate, if necessary, letting him pay back whatever portion of that loan his income permitted. We would—I am sure—end up getting a good deal more housing for the taxpayers’ dollar. We need to recognize though that those loans represent, not gross expenditures that year, but, to a very large extent, investments, because many of those families are going to be able to pay back the loan and even pay some interest on it. But because of this thing called budgetary impact, we do it the hard way. We end up subsidizing the money markets on behalf of the low- and moderate-income family rather than subsidizing the low- and moderate-income family itself. So I can’t give you a figure, but it seems to me, whatever the figure, that when you consider that $6 billion—almost $6 billion—in foregone income taxes on interest rates, property taxes, et cetera—if we would take that amount and put it more directly and more efficiently into housing subsidies for those most in need, we would come a lot closer to doing the job. The CuamrMAN. You didn’t read your entire statement, Mr. Rucker. Tt is an excellent statement. There was one paragraph in the closing part of that statement I wanted to read to you and see if there is any further comment you might want to make on it, because 1 think it indicates the lack of commitment that we have brought so far to this very urgent and enormous problem, the fact that there are so many millions of Americans still living in hovels that are no better than some we would find in most primitive and under- developed countries. I would like to read from the closing lines of your testimony, that middle paragraph on the last page: The other aspect of our lack of commitment has to do with its quality rather ‘than just its quantity. I sat in a meeting with Assistant Secretary Gulledge 2020 of HUD and heard him deny that the Federal housing program has a com- mitment to everyone regardless of income. And then you add: That, it seems to me, is the real test of our national policy and its meaning. If we continue to “leave behind” the black, the Indian, the Chicano, the very poor of every description—and especially those of them who lack visibility because they are on the back roads or in the decaying small towns of rural America—then that twice-legislated pledge of ours is a hoax. I think that is a very important statement that points up the need for a greater commitment on the part of our Federal Govern- ment. I am wondering if there is anything you wanted to add or elaborate on that? Mr. Rucker. Only that it seems to me that we do need to recog- nize that that commitment must not only be in terms of its size— and there is no question that we have adequate resources, I think again the figures on what we forego in income taxes for middle- and upper-income taxes without ever paying any attention to it indi- cates that we have plenty of resources if we are willing to commit them to the job of eliminating bad housing in America—but I think we need to stress while we do that, and assuming that we can get that sort of commitment, the qualitative aspect of it to make sure that it goes where the need is greatest in terms of income and in terms of location. And speaking for the Rural Housing Alliance, our interest being in low-income people in rural and small town areas, that is the thing, the aspect of it about which we are most concerned, both in the past and in the future. The CHAIRMAN. Only yesterday the committee heard testimony stating that the Federal Government has destroyed more homes than 1t has rebuilt under urban renewal as the highway program and the urban renewal program together have knocked down more houses than have been replaced. Now are those homes that have been replaced under the urban re- newal project—to what extent are either the sale price of those houses or the rental cost geared to the income of the people that lived in the old structures that were knocked down? Mr. Rucker. I think it is clear that in all too many instances they have not been geared. That has been a vulnerability of the urban renewal program, which has earned the considerable attack, some- times by people who had other reasons for attacking it, I suspect, but nonetheless it seems to me everyone who has studied the urban renewal program, the reports I have seen, the comments on it, if you look again at the Douglas Commission report, at the Kaiser Committee report, has recognized that there has been a tendency to clear out low-income housing and replace it with housing which it did not meet the needs of the people who were being relocated or dislocated, and that relocation of those people has been inadequate. Where the General Accounting Office, I believe, has done some checking on what appeared in the statistics to be adequate reloca- tion and, of course, that is theoretically required under the program, they found that very frequently it was not adequate relocation. Of course, the whole problem of just moving people from where they may want to live raises a question of equity in itself. I think 2021 again this is particularly poignant in rural areas and small town areas and maybe Mrs. Gish, who is scheduled to speak today and comes from eastern Kentucky and knows Appalachia, will comment on it. The fact is that many of the people who live in clearly harmful and miserable circumstances in rural areas don’t want to leave them. They don’t want to be forced out. But as long as our programs tend to concentrate in other areas, they are going to be forced out. They are either going to be forced out or they are going to have to stay in those miserable conditions. The Cuamman. I think it is an interesting fact, Mr. Rucker, that yesterday Mr. Margolis of your organization told the committee that in his judgment there were roughly 13 million Americans who were living in really bad substandard housing. That figure comes very close to being the same as the number of people that we estimate that are suffering from acute malnutrition and hunger. The committee has estimated that figure somewhere around 14 million and it is difficult to know the exact number. But what is emerging more and more is this hard-core poverty-stricken people who are ill-housed and ill-fed and doubtless ill cared for in terms of their health needs. It is further interesting to me that only last Saturday the Federal Government announced the new unemployment figures that 5.5 per- cent, much of that in the construction industry where the slowin down occurs, does it not strike you as a cruel paradox that wit this urgent need for additional housing, the urgent need for new health facilities, better nutrition, that at the same time that unem- ployment rate is rising, it idles men who need work and who stand side by side with these mounting areas of neglect in housing and health elsewhere? Mr. Rucker. Absolutely, Senator. Tt is, it seems to me, a humiliat- ing commentary on American society that this paradox, as you call it, exists. The CuamrmAN. I want to thank you for your testimony, Mr. Rucker. IT now have to announce to the other witnesses who were scheduled today that because of these conflicts that I referred to earlier, that involve not only me but all of the other members of the committee, that we are going to recess until 2 o’clock, and I would like to ask Mrs. Gish and Mr. Harvey and the other witnesses who were scheduled to testify this morning if they would accom- modate the committee schedule and come back at 2 o’clock to com- plete the testimony. Is there any witness who is scheduled to speak this morning who is unable to come back at the 2 o’clock session? Well, if not, then the committee will resume again at 2 p.m. this afternoon in this same room. Thank you. (Whereupon, at 11:08 a.m. the committee recessed, to reconvene at 2 p.m. of the same day.) (The committee was unable to reconvene at 2 p.m. and the re- maining witnesses were requested to submit their prepared state- ments for the record. The statements follow :) 2022 AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE, INC., Philadelphia, Pa., November 18, 1970. Senator GEORGE MCGOVERN, Old Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. DEAR SENATOR McGovERN: We appreciate very much the opportunity to respond in writing to questions the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs would have put to us had the opportunity for oral testimony been realized. We regret the delay in getting answers to you but our staff, once back in the field, necessarily must put immediate human and program needs ahead of every- thing else. ‘We do hope however that these questions and answers may be included in the record and will be considered seriously by the Committee, along with our original testimony. For your convenience we have made the questions and answers an attach- ment to this letter. Sincerely yours, BARBARA W. MOFFETT, Secretary, Community Relations Division. PREPARED STATEMENTS OF JAMES E. UPCHURCH, JR., WRAY BAILEY, AND CHARLES McEVERS QUESTIONS FOR THE AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE First,, I would like to compliment you on the detailed critiques you have given of the various programs. Questions for Mr. Upchurch 1. I wonder why, if the difficulties with these programs are so evident as you have described them, why these difficulties are not being resolved by the various Federal agencies? g ; Answer. Federal agencies have not solved problems with low-income housing programs as described in our testimony because of widespread insensitivity on the part of federal bureaucrats to the problems of the poor. In most cases, the civil servants are not motivated to produce results in low-income housing. For example, the Farmers Home Administration charges local county supervisors with personal responsibility for errors made in 502 lending. While this is an admirable protection of government funds, the insignificant risk on the part of the government that would be created by a vigorous federal promotion of low- income programs in the South Florida area is a small price to pay for the creation of better housing for farm workers, but county supervisors are aware that their retirement pension may be jeopardized by lending errors and they respond by being overly cautious. 2. Regarding your recommendations, could you tell us what the present funding level is for sewer programs and what you think the level should be. Also, how large a staff do you believe Farmers Home should have and on what basis do you choose that figure? Answer. The Farmers Home Administration water and sewer funds in fiscal 1970 were $46 million in grant, 64 million in direct loan authority and $80 million in insured loan authority. The Farmers Home Administration has estimated that $11 billion worth of water utilities are needed for rural areas. Others feel that this figure falls far short of the actual need. The federal response, therefore, is hardly relevant to the need. If we want to meet a 10 year goal in housing en- vironment, it seems that $1 billion a year for water and sewer funds to the Farmers Home Administration is a minimal figure. With respect to the question regarding additional Farmers Home Administration staff, the agency’s own re- quest to the Bureau of Budget was for $146 million, which would increase the number of employees from 8,000 to 14,000. 3. How would the six rural housing development corporations actually function? Answer. Briefly, the six proposed Rural Housing Development Corporations would operate as follows : (1) Buy and develop sites for various federal low-income programs. (2) Lend “seed money” to local non-profit organizations desirous of spon- soring housing. (3) Construct, manage and sell “turnkey three” programs to rural housing authorities lacking expertise in this program. 2023 (4) Construct FmHA502 and FHA235 units where local builders do not participate. 5 (5) Make construction loans to organizations seeking to utilize 221-H Rehabilitation programs. 7 (6) Experiment with speeding up self-help programs by combining non- profit contractors with self-help labor. Questions for Mr. Bailey 1. Have you had any discussions with HUD about section 235 and the need to make it more adaptable to suit the peculiar needs of poor families? If so, what response have you received from HUD? Answer. We have discussed with HUD many changes and improvements to meet the needs of poor families. However, they generally have been negative or noncommital. Furthermore, it has been impossible to get written answers. This points up the lack of adequate channels of communications with HUD. There is a definite need to develop a communication system in order to guarantee a con- tinuing dialogue and interchange of ideas. I have not been able to satisfactorily open up these channels, however, it is my intent to enter into discussion with HUD on this concern. 2. Unfortunately, I think your experience with the New Point Road Urban Renewal Project is not unique. You know, Urban Renewal should really be called Urban Removal. Do you happen to know where the 600 families who were dis- located were relocated? Answer. This question raises the most serious problem of all concerning Urban Renewal: the lack of adequate and effective provision for relocation. The government should have a method of fixing responsibility at every stage of a project, with safe, decent, sanitary housing. The only way to assure this is to establish a hard and fast rule that adequate relocation sites must be prepared and approved before an area is razed. Elizabeth is an example of what can happen when this is not done. There was on paper ‘a plan to relocate the approximately 600 families who were to be displaced. However, in the interim between the planning and the execution, land was acquired by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority for construction of the New Jersey Turnpike, displacing about 200 additional families. An increasing population and other unexpected events added to the demand for housing, which the city was not able to meet. It is difficult to answer your question precisely, because of lack of adequate records, however, even a superficial investigation indicated that most people living in the urban renewal area were driven into already overcrowded housing, and many were driven out of Elizabeth and out of the state. May I add that I hope that this information and these suggestions will be helpful to the Committee. We would welcome your further interest in the prob- lems of Urban Renewal in Elizabeth. As I have indicated, the New Point Road Urban Renewal Project was begun nine years ago, displacing about 600 families, and the area still remains vacant. Much of our existing housing is sub-standard. An on-the-scene inspection by members of the Committee, or their representa- tives and a meeting with local people interested in and conversant with the situation would, I believe, be most fruitful both in clarifying the problems, which are typcial of many small cities, and in developing means of correcting them. y The American Friends Service Committee would be happy to arrange such a meeting. Questions for Mr. McEvers 1. You state that the small Indian communities find it almost impossible to obtain information on housing programs and how to put them to work. Has it ever been suggested that Bureau of Indian Affairs employ housing officers to assist these Indian communities in pushing their applications through the federal bureaucracy? If not, what would you think of the proposal? Answer. I believe the Bureau of Indian Affairs does have housing officers in many of its agencies. There are two major deficiencies in that system according to my observation. One is that these people are employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs rather than employees of the Indian groups themselves. In my initial statement I said that it is important for the people working with the local com- munities on housing problems to actually be responsible to those communities 2024 themselves rather than to some agency outside the community. This makes a very great difference in how the individual approaches his work and how the community participates in the planning and responsibility for it. The person who is on the payroll of an agency outside the community is subject to policy and program changes in that agency over which the local community may have no influence whatsoever. His performance, so far as being kept in the position and any consideration for any promotion is evaluated by his agency on the basis agency criteria—not by the community on the basis of the kind of performance the community considers to be valuable. For these reasons the most effective com- munity participation and responsibility requires that these people be members of the community, responsible to the community, rather than employees of an out- side agency. This answers the question in principle. Secondly, Bureau of Indian Affairs housing personnel in the areas with which I am best acquainted simply are not sufficient in numbers to do the kind of com- munity level organization work which I say represents the missing link in the housing picture. For example, the Western Washington Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs has one housing officer for the entire Western Washington area. This encompasses 18 reservations which are supposed to receive full services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In addition, in Western Washington there are 15 or more tribes and bands who are not on reservations, but still identify as Indian communities and need the kinds of special approaches I refer to in my statement if their housing needs are to be met adequately. The Small Tribes Organization of Western Washington represents some of these and there are others as well. These groups do not get housing services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and will not unless significant changes are made in policy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs as regards services to non-reservation groups and tremendous increases are made in Bureau of Indian Affairs appropriations for housing services. So my answer to this question, in summary, would be that Bureau of Indian Affairs housing officers (1) are not sufficiently accountable to the local Indian communities to meet the need I am identifying, and (2) are not sufficient in numbers or in identification with the local communities, and (3) are not at all committed to serve the Indian communities who are not on reservations or other trust land base. 2. Are you familiar with the experimental housing program at the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota? Do you consider this a model that might be successfully applied elsewhere? Answer. In regard to the experimental housing program at the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota I will have to say that I am not sufficiently acquainted with that to comment with any validity. I have read the printed report issued by Housing & Urban Development. My one general comment would be that with an Indian Housing Agency such as I propose, goals and objectives of the sorts described for the Rosebud Program would be encompassed normally and would not require the very special kinds of planning, preparation and evalua- tion that appear to have been involved in the Rosebud Program. My understand- ing is that it was several years in the planning, that it required extraordinary efforts on the part of the tribe, the Department of Housing and Urban Develop- ment, and the politicians interested in the Rosebud Sioux in order to bring it about. This seems to me to substantiate the point of view that housing which will really meet the needs of low income people in the Indian communities is not going to be produced in sufficient quantity from agencies which have to go to such very special efforts and great ends in order to encompass unique Indian needs. A special Indian Housing Agency would be in its essence attuned to these problems and could be expected to respond much more easily, directly, and fully. 3. What role if any does the Indian Health Service play in Indian Housing? Does it have funds to provide sewer and water facilities for housing developments? Answer. The Indian Health Service does have programs to provide water and sanitation facilities for new homes on Indian reservations. This is a tremendous asset. The availability of these programs make a difference of about $2.000 in the cost of new homes in the rural Indian communities in Western Washington. However, I would encourage the Committee to look at two aspects of the Indian Health Service’s program where, in my judgment, based on experience with the small tribes, change would result in greatly improved service to Indian housing development : (1) A new program philosophy is needed, in which there would be a clear commitment by Indian Health Service to enter into a comprehensive 2025 approach to the planning and provision of sewer and water facilities for each of the small communities. The present approach so far as the small tribes is concerned is ad hoc: housing project by housing project, crisis by crisis. This piecemeal approach apparently is dictated by personnel funding levels and personnel ceilings. The comprehensive approach would be more expensive for the small tribes, on a per capita basis, than for the larger ones and greatly increased appropriations would be necessary to meet this need. (2) Another new element of program philosophy is needed, which would involve continuing commitment to assist as needed in maintenance of sewage and water facilities. Present philosophy seems to be that once 'the facilities are constructed their maintenance becomes the responsibility of the tribe, housing authority, or individual home owner. Viewed from the point of view of the need to be sure the facilities continue to operate for health purposes, this sharp cutoff by Indian Health Service is unrealistic. Program planning and budgeting should provide for continuing consultation and material as- sistance as needed, as a part of the comprehensive approach to water and sewage problems proposed in Point 1 above. Implementation of these two new elements of philosophy would, of course, require greatly increased appropriations, particularly for Indian Health Service personnel. There exists the need for correction of deficiencies in existing facilities as well as construction of new facilities. Present funds for sewer and water facilities are used almost entirely in connection with current housing projects, either new homes or Bureau of Indian Affairs Home Improvement projects. Funds ear- marked for the new comprehensive, continuing responsibilities would be needed. As noted above, it also would be expected that the cost in proportion to popula- tion would be appreciably greater for the small tribes than for the larger ones; but the need in the small tribes is equally great or greater. A further element of the proposed comprehensive approach, which definitely would require additional personnel and additional funds would be the provision of assistance to tribes in preparation of the health-related aspects of housing pro- posals for such agencies as Housing and Urban Development, Farmers Home Administration, and Economic Development Administration. Present Indian Health Service staff simply is not sufficient for adequate assistance of this sort to the tribes. A final point in relation to services of Indian Health Service has to do with non-reservation Indian groups. All over the country there are tribes which for one reason or another are not on reservations or other federal trust lands, but are legitimate tribes or bands, function as communities, and need the special Indian- oriented services of the Indian Health Service in order to meet their health needs. Indian Health Service policy should be expanded to include such groups, where the need exists, in eligibility for all Indian Health Services. 4. Are you familiar with the self-help housing program? What success has this program had in Indian communities? Answer. The self-help program as it has operated on Indian reservations is not to be confused with the self-help programs of the Farmers Home Adminis tration. Some very different operational principles are applied. In my observa- tion those on Indian reservations have generally fallen far short of the Indian communities hope for them. Unfortunately the deficiencies too often have been charged to the Indians. I believe there are some basic fallacies in the way the programs operate which can be held accountable to a large extent for the diffi- culties that have been experienced. Financed by Housing and Urban Development, the Indian self-help projects are carried out under the sponsorship of Local Housing Authorities. They cannot be established, I believe, except under a local Authority. The development and establishment of local Housing Authorities is a long, arduous task. The technical procedure is complicated. It apparently cannot possibly be done with- out the participation of persons who are very sophisticated in Federal programs. Many Indian tribes who have the money even turn the paperwork over to their attorneys. The Indian communities of which I speak do not have money for attorney fees for this kind of purpose and do not have people in their ranks who are sophisticated in such programs and can contribute their time. Again, this points up the need for training local people and making money available to hire them to carry out the functions in the name of the local community. A Local Housing Authority apparently cannot function properly without either a paid 2026 staff person or the presence of somebody who can give a large amount of volun- teer and time energy. The Indian housing authorities in the area where I am acquainted does not have the funds from any source to hire people to do this job. Secondly, the planning of the self-help projects is entirely the responsibility of the Housing Authority; and operationally, as I understand the situation, members of the housing authority are prohibited from participating in the proj- ect in terms of occupying one of the houses. This means that the people who will live in the houses and theoretically may obtain ownership of them at some future date when the loan is paid off, have no effective authority in planning the homes. Efforts may be made by the Housing Authority to obtain their par- ticipation in the planning stages but they know that in the last analysis the Housing Authority makes the final decision. This hardly makes for a strong attitude of self-help participation. Still this is the nature of the relationships from the inception of the planning for the project. Thirdly, under arrangement between Housing and Urban Development and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Affairs provides the foreman to supervise the work on the project by the self-help participants. On the sur- face this seems logical. However, it means that self-help participants have no voice whatsoever in selection of the man with whom they are going to be working in the construction of the houses. The choice is made by the Bureau of Indian Affairs according to Bureau of Indian Affairs procedures. The man is considered a regular employee of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. His accountability is to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and any changes in his assignments or patterns of work are at the discretion of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. While his job is to help the people get the houses built, and this implies a responsibility to them, his accountability in terms of performance and supervision is not to the par- ticipants in the self-help project but rather to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. If the self-help participants or the housing authority are dissatisfied with his work or want to propose any changes, they do not have the authority to do this on their own. It must be agreeable to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and in effect be a part of the foreman’s instructions from the Bureau of Indian Affairs before it can be binding on him. This is not in accordance with the highly satisfactory self-help experience under Farmer’s Home Administration, where the people who are to own the homes hire the man themselves and he is responsible to them. Fourth, it appears to me that these projects have given too little attention to individual desires of the participants. The Housing Authorities seem to be expected to use standardized floor plans and elevations in any particular project. I do not know the source of this problem ; but I feel that its result is to decrease the participants’ sense of identification with the homes they expect to occupy, and therefore to reduce the quality of their participation in the project and the work required in a successful self-help system. Imaginative architecture and engineering are called for, built on the project participants’ own housing con- cepts. Money required now to retain high-priced people to develop “workable programs” and meet other inappropriate (for Indian communities) requirements of the housing agency, Housing and Urban Development, should be made avail- able to the local groups to develop their own ideas and really get involved. Another problem with the Indian self-help program, I believe, is that too often it has constituted the only housing program available to the community or tribe. People in dire need of housing have entered the program out of des- peration, but without the capability within the family to follow through on the volunteer labor requirements of self-help. Frustration has resulted on the part of the participants and on the part of those responsible for the projects. Self-help is great for some families, but not for all. It should not be rejected out of hand because of past difficulties; but other housing programs must be available con- currently for those whom self-help does not fit. Finally, the Indian self-help projects I have observed have neglected the preparatory involvement of the participants. I do not know of any instance where participants have experienced the extent and depth of training and development of rapport and mutuality within their own ranks, which charac- terizes the self-help projects sponsored by Farmers’ Home Administration in off-reservation communities. This is not just a matter of training in building skills, but rather involves planning, helping with necessary preparatory nego- tiations, psychological preparation for ownership and occupancy of a new home, and development of a definite attitude of cooperation and mutuality within the 2027 group, as well as necessary training in building skills. This also serves as a screening process to help prospective participants decide for themselves whether self-help really is the right approach for them. In summary, I would repeat that self-help is an important approach for those suited to it. It should not be rejected because of past problems. Rather, the problems should be analyzed, comparisons made with successful self-help pro- grams in off-reservation communities (of which there are many), and the program corrected accordingly. And other appropriate programs in addition to self-help should be made available simultaneously in order for the particular family to be able to select the one best suited to them. 42-778 0—71—pt. —9 ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1970 U.S. SENATE, SeLEcT COMMITTEE ON Nutrition Axp Human NEEDps, Washington, D.C. The select committee met at 9:40 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 1318, New Senate Office Building, Senator George McGovern (chair- man of the select committee) presiding. Present: Senators McGovern, Cook and Dole. Staff members present: Kenneth Schlossberg, Staff Director; Gerald S. J. Cassidy, general counsel; Clarence V. McKee, Jr., and David Cohen, minority professional staff members. The Cuamman. I would like to call on Senator Cook who will introduce our first witness. Senator Cook. Mrs. Gish, it is nice to have you here this morning. Mrs. Gisa. Thank you. Senator Cook. Mrs. Gish comes from Whitesburg in eastern Ken- tucky. I have an extremely good friend who probably is a mutual friend of ours who is quite an individual in Whitesburg, Harry Caudill. Mrs. Gisa. Yes, sir. Senator Cook. I might say, Senator McGovern, this gentleman wrote “Night Comes to the Cumberland.” Several years ago he and I served in the 1958 session of the Legislature together. Mrs. Gish and her husband operate a very fascinating newspaper in eastern Kentucky. They have probably involved themselves in the problems of Eastern Kentucky, the problems of the country, more than almost anyone else. It is a real pleasure to have you here this morning. Mrs. Gisa. Thank you. STATEMENT OF PAT B. GISH, DIRECTOR, EASTERN KENTUCKY HOUSING DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION, WHITESBURG, KY. Mrs. Gisa. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I live in Whitesburg, Ky., and work as director of Eastern Kentucky Hous- ing Development Corporation. This agency is an arm of the LKLP Community Action Council and receives money from the Office of Economic Opportunity. The area we serve is four counties—Leslie, Knott, Letcher, and Perry—in the geographic center of the Appa- lachian region and in the heart of the eastern Kentucky coal fields. The principal concern of the agency for which I work is the improvement of housing for low-income families, and I would like (2029) 2030 to thank the committee for inviting me here today to talk about our efforts. We have been working on housing problems for three years, but at the rate things are moving now we see at least 25 more years of work necessary to do away with the substandard housing that exists today, much less what will deteriorate each new year. My part of the country is rural, but it is nonfarm. It is covered with closely spaced mountains separated by narrow valleys. The people—83,652 in the four counties we serve—are scattered along the roadsides and up the hollows in nearly 23,000 households. More than half the families in these four counties have incomes below what the Federal Government determines is the “poverty line” and more than half the housing is substandard. A fourth of the families have incomes of less than $1,000 a year. One of the counties, Knott, has the lowest per capita income in Kentucky. Our counties vary greatly from the rest of the nation in the ratio of low-income families to middle and upper income. While the Nation as a whole has more middle- and upper-income families than it has low-income ones, our counties are just the reverse, and poor people are in the majority. More than a fourth of our families are receiving public assistance in order to stay alive, and many others are on fixed pension incomes. Many work at jobs which do not pay wages enough to support what we as a nation consider an adequate standard of living. : Still other families exist on no real income at all, except the Fed- eral food stamps they receive each month after an exhaustive day of standing in a crowded line at the county courthouse. I might point out that although most of the people who live in the counties do not benefit from the natural wealth beneath their feet, these four counties sit on top of some of the richest coal, oil and gas reserves in the world. Our population differs from that of other areas in another im- portant way. We have a larger number of older people, many of them living in conditions which have been unthought of in most parts of the country for 40 years. Tt is not very unusual to come across a woman of 65 or 70 who still has to carry all the water for her household from a hillside spring some distance from her house, who still does all her washing with a tub and scrubboard, who de- pends on an open grate for heat during the bitter mountain winters, and who raises much of her own food in the summer. Most of these old people have spent their entire lifetimes in or near the places where they are living now. They would not want to move even if there were some place for them to go, and to my mind it would be the height of cruelty to force them to spend their last months and years away from the places where their lives are so deeply rooted. Many other families in our four counties include husbands and wives who are not yet elderly but are too old to leave and start over in other parts of the country. The men are not educated. They have spent their working lives in coal mining or logging or doing odd jobs, and they are past the age where they can obtain jobs with companies which have pension plans and other benefits available to younger men. Many of these men have tried to find jobs outside and have been forced to return to the mountains because they could 2031 not find work in other places which would pay them enough to move their families there. Of course not everyone is poor. Perhaps a fourth of the popula- tion has incomes which equal or exceed national levels because of the current boom in coal mining. In connection with coal, I would like to point out that the coal industry itself is facing a housing crisis and finds its efforts to attract skilled employees from outside eastern Kentucky hampered by the lack of suitable housing. During the past 10 years about 20 percent of the people who lived in these counties in 1960 have left to find jobs in other areas, con- tinuing the trend which has characterized much of Appalachia since the 1940’s—the young, and those others who can, move to places where the economy is better, and the old, the disabled and the poor are left behind to get along for themselves as best they can. The number of elderly jumped 22 percent between 1950 and 1960, and the 1970 census figures are expected to show another large increase in the number of residents over 45. Many of the families who remain live in what can be described only as shacks. The 1970 census figures on housing are not yet available, but the 1960 census classed nearly half the housing in the four counties as deteriorating or dilapidated, and my own ob- servation convinces me that the situation has not changed signifi- cantly in 10 years. More than half of all houses are frame structures built more than 30 years ago, many of them as mining camp resi- dences. Outdoor toilets are the rule rather than the exception in most areas outside the small county seat towns. Seventy-two per- cent of the owner-occupied housing is valued at less than $5,000. Against this background of housing need, the agency for which I work has been trying to use existing Federal housing programs to improve conditions: I wish I could point to huge successes, but the fact is that these and most other programs were not written for areas like eastern Kentucky, and in order to make them work at all we had to plead for exceptions or rule changes which require great amounts of time and effort to accomplish. For more than 3 years I have been involved in an attempt to construct 50 units of rent-supplement housing in Whitesburg, the county seat of Letcher County. First we had to convince the De- partment of Housing and Urban Development that there was a market for the housing: and that took 6 months. Then we had to obtain special concessions because of a difficult site—ours is a hill- side, because that’s the kind of land we have, and if we're going to build in our counties, we're going to have to build on the hills. Then we have to have a special design to fit the hillside land, and our architect, who is eminent in the field, decided on modular hous- ing as the only logical solution within the cost limits of the rent supplement program. That meant we hade to become an experimental project, since al- though the modular housing concept is trumpeted by the experts as the best solution, not everyone has accepted it as a valid method of construction. Then we found we had to have an 18-food-wide paved street—the only other one in town is Main Street. Several zoning changes and innumerable conferences and extensions of time 2032 later, we are about ready to begin construction of these 50 housing units. During all this time the interest rate has risen from six and a half to eight and a half percent, and the rent which must be charged to make the housing economically feasible has gone up correspond- ingly, so that what started as an attempt to provide decent new housing for families on public assistance now will have to become housing for families higher up the income scale. We also are taking advantage of a seldom used provision of the Appalachian Development Act which permits conversion of a loan for housing “seed money” to a grant when it is needed to make a project feasible. The Federal Housing Administration says there has never been another loan closed just like this one, and the FHA manuals don’t cover the situation, so no one is sure just yet how the final procedures should go. Hopefully we can work it out all together. The Federal Housing Administration’s section 234 interest-credit program for home ownership for low-income families has been accused of abuse in some parts of the country, but it hasn’t been abused in our counties because it hasn’t been used at all. FHA’s requirements in our area for public water and sewer service, lot size, location near a town, and so on, have prevented us from taking advantage of the program, but we still have hopes. Kentucky’s Federal Housing Administration director has been up to take a look at our situation and says frankly that his agency is virtually help- less when faced with the kinds of housing needs our people have. The Farmers Home Administration also has an interest-credit loan program leading to home ownership. The Farmers Home Office which serves three of our four counties made 14 loans for new housing dur- ing the fiscal year that ended June 30, 1970, and of these only five involved interest credits. Farmers Home is the Federal agency charged with meeting the housing needs of rural areas, but restrictive legislation, a staff totally inadequate in terms of numbers, an apparent reluctance to accept innovative building techniques and design and rigidly conservative administration have combined to prevent the agency from accom- plishing its task in Eastern Kentucky. Public housing programs should perhaps provide a major part of the answer, but they don’t. Letcher County, with 22,590 people, has 40 low-rent public housing units already built and 60 in the design stage, all within the county seat at Whitesburg. It took six years to get that first 40 units and is taking six more to get the next 60. Perry County has 129 units already built to serve a population of 24,373. Another 100 units for the elderly have been planned for more than 5 years, but are held up now because the Atlanta office of HUD had to put all its resources into the housing shortage created by a recent hurricane. Knott County is now building 60 units to serve a population of 15,306. Leslie County doesn’t have any public housing units at all; it established a housing authority and tried, but the Housing As- sistance Administration could never find a site which met its cri- teria. So the 11,383 citizens of Leslie County have to cope with inadequate housing because the Federal Government is not flexible 2033 enough to adapt its programs to the conditions which exist where the needs are. Put these 389 public housing units against 14,000 substandard houses in the four counties, and it’s obvious that public housing isn’t going to do the job soon either. Even if the number of public housing units could increase markedly, there is some doubt in my mind that public housing is the best answer. For one thing, it puts all the poor people in one place and marks them as poor. For another, many smalltown housing authorities are made up of very conservative people, and too often they are more concerned with collecting the rent than they are with giving a poor family a chance. I know that property has to be protected and I do not condone destruction of living quarters by tenants, but I believe that too often it is the “good poor” who are admitted to the scarce public housing that does exist in rural areas, and nobody is willing to take a risk with a marginal family in the hope that it might be helped toward permanent improvement with adequate housing. The Appalachian Regional Commission has a special program of housing assistance which provides “seed money” for housing projects. During the nearly 5 years the ARC has been in existence, this pro- gram has provided funds for a total of 6,145 housing units in the 13 Appalachian States; 50 of those are in one of our counties. But when you divide the ARC total by the 13 States, you come up with only 473 housing units per State. Kentucky has 49 Appalachian counties, so our portion would average out to less than 10 a county, or less than two houses per county per year built by use of Ap- palachian funds. So that isn’t the answer. We knew in the beginning that new housing was not going to be easy to come by, and we also knew that something had to be done immediately if people’s houses were to be kept from falling down around them. This was true particularly in the cases of many old people who were living in drafty, rotting homes with little pro- tection from the rain and cold and with no money to pay for the repairs needed to make their homes warmer and safer. Congressman Carl Perkins, who represents three of the four coun- ties we serve, called together a group of representatives of various Federal agencies in Washington and asked them to try to find some immediate solution to the problem of housing for old people in the mountains. What they came up with was a program which we call “Older Persons Home Repair.” In the past 2 years this program has provided materials and labor to repair the homes of about 1,000 elderly, blind, or disabled public assistance recipients who own their own homes. The program is the only one of its kind in the country. It is de- signed to demonstrate the use of title 1119 of the Social Security Act which provides grants for improving housing conditions of home owners receiving public assistance payments. It is designed also to demonstrate that a group of Federal, State, and local agencies can effectively combine their resources and coordinate their activi- ties to provide workable solutions to unique problems. The project involves grants from two Federal agencies. The De- partment of Health, Education, and Welfare has granted the Ken- 2034 tucky Department of Economic Security $580,000 to pay for grants of up to $500 each to purchase materials needed for repairs to homes of eligible homeowners. The Office of Economic Opportunity has granted the LKLP Community Action Council a total of $1,163,231 to employ older men to install the materials and make the repairs to the homes. LKLP in turn delegated the program operation to Eastern Kentucky Housing Development Corporation, the agency I represent. We have employed 69 men on home repair crews and have enough money to operate through next June 30. By that time we hope to have repairs completed on more than 1,350 houses. The U.S. Department of Labor has assigned 85 men from its Nelson-Mainstream and Concentrated Employment Program proj- ects to work along with our crews. In addition, the Department of Labor permits some of its enrollees to provide free labor to repair homes of families which are not eligible for the materials grant. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has made 1 percent interest loans through the section 504 program of the Farmers Home Ad- ministration to provide additional money for materials when it is needed. In most cases public assistance can raise monthly housing allowances to cover the loan repayment. Incidentally, last year FHA made only 144 loans for home repairs. Home owners who are eligible for the home repair grants are screened by a committee which includes representatives of local health departments, local community action groups, Farmers Home, EKHDC and public assistance recipients themselves. This commit- tee sets priorities on types of repairs to be made and decides on the basis of photographs and survey reports which homes are in the worst need. When this decision is made, the Department of Economic Security takes bids from local suppliers for the materials needed and accepts the lowest one. At this point Economic Security gives crews of the housing development corporation an order to begin repair work. When the home repair project began, we had ambitions of com- pleting work on 900 homes the first year. We soon found out that was an unrealistic goal, and work has settled down now to an average of 40 houses a month. Many of the houses turned out to be in far worse shape than we had anticipated. Often our work crews spend more time getting a house in shape to repair than they do in the installation of new materials. Sometimes the houses are so bad that the homeowner and the crew elect to tear down the existing structure and use what can be salvaged together with what can be bought with the $500 grant to build a new house. The home repair program has involved a variety of changes in the homes of the families involved. It has repaired leaking roofs, built ramps for persons confined to wheelchairs, installed pitcher pumps at sinks so water no longer has to be carried from the outside, rebuilt porches and railings to make them safer, widened doorways so that wheelchairs can get through, replaced rotting floors, sealed cracks and installed insulation, underpinned houses, replaced dan- gerous wiring, replaced falling or steep steps, installed new windows and doors, repaired chimneys and flues, rebuilt privies, installed light switches and sinks at levels where wheelchair patients can 2035 reach them, painted inside and outside where necessary, and installed drywall. More than two-thirds of all the houses which have received re- pairs are located on paved or all-weather roads, but occasionally crews have to carry materials up mountainsides by sled or on their backs and in one instance the materials had to go by boat to reach a family which has been isolated by the construction of a flood- control dam by the Corps of Engineers. This picture shows the mule carrying the materials on the sled after they had come across the lake. This is the man and his wife who lived in the house that was to be repaired. Some months of the year I think they cannot get out; we had to wait for the right kind of weather before we could get to the house. We are beginning a new phase of the project this month. For the first time home repair grants are being made available to families who are receiving aid to families of dependent children. Money has been allocated to provide grants for 250 families. We anticipate that the needs of these families will include the addition of rooms and perhaps other things such as the construction of simple built-in bunk beds and study desks to meet the special requirements of families with children. Recently a crew completed repairs on the home of an 87-year-old woman who had been forced to live in a chicken coop for nearly a year because her house, which was in poor shape to begin with, had been vandalized while she was in the hospital. Our crew was able to put the house into shape so she could move back into it, and the vocational rehabilitation service paid for a new hospital bed for her to use at home. She has shown marked improvement. Another crew finished work on the home of an 82-year-old man and his wife who lived in a house which their son had built for them about 10 years ago out of poplar poles which he cut from their mountainside farm. These pictures back here show the before and after appearance of that house. The home repair crew installed siding on the house, repaired the roof, put new floors in two rooms, built a new chimney, installed drywall and repaired wiring. The crew spent 700 hours of labor on the house, and the materials were bought with a $500 grant, plus a contribution of $100 from a special fund in our OEO grant and $220 from the homeowner. In addition, some lumber salvaged from a railroad depot was used. The total cost of the work, including labor, was $2,360. That man and his wife will be warm this winter for the first time in many years. Things don’t always work out this well because we are frequently unable to make all the repairs we would like with the money avail- able. One family which lives on a mountaintop includes a 69-year- old man, his wife in her 50’s, and their three school-age daughters. The survey report on the house indicates: The foundation has decayed all under house, letting floors drop down and drop away from walls; siding in bad shape; need both windows and doors; entire roof needs covering, leaks all over; wiring exposed ; toilet is dilapidated and about 75 feet from house; heats with open fireplace; chimney is put to- gether with mud open joints and very unsafe ; this house is dilapidated to a point I don’t see how it could be heated in winter time. 2036 What the survey report didn’t say, but our supervisor learned on his visit there, is that most of the walls of the house are lined with newspaper and cardboard and that the family digs its own coal for heating out of the mountainside behind the house. Our people also learned that the three teenage girls who live there are ashamed to go anywhere or to ask their school friends home to visit and that one of the girls recently dropped out of high school. The $500 grant available to this family won’t begin to do the work needed so we encouraged the man to apply for a loan from the Farmers Home Administration to buy extra materials. The FHA denied him a loan because he has a bad credit rating. I have known this family for about 5 years, and during all this time that man has been trying to get an FHA loan to fix his house. He has been turned down repeatedly because of his credit refer- ences but we thought this program might get him through. I can’t see how the family could ever obtain a good credit rating under the conditions it has to live in, and surely the Federal Government is not so poor that it can’t take a chance on the future of those three girls for $1,500. Our follow-up surveys of homeowners have found them gener- ally well satisfied with the work, and our survey people report that the repaired houses are well kept. The Department of Economic Security provides social service aides to assist the homeowners in getting ready for the repairs and in putting the house back in order afterward. Often the children of an elderly couple will contribute money for a new linoleum, or a new heating stove, or curtains. Fre- quently the repairs inspire the homeowner to spend some of his own limited resources in further fixing up. Nearly all the homes which we have repaired have outdoor toilets. The small amount of repair money and the restrictive Kentucky plumbing code have prevented us from doing much to improve the situation except to rebuild outhouses which were dilapidated or to build new ones where there had been none at all. Last year the Appalachian Regional Commission made a $25,000 grant to a Ken- tucky Environmental Health Demonstration project for some ex- perimentation with sewage disposal systems. This money is providing for the installation of several kinds of sewage disposal systems which will be evaluated over a period of about 3 years. Included are elec- tric and gas incinerator toilets, private aeration systems, recirculat- Sz sank, and several different kinds of trenches for septic tank elds. We have helped with this experiment by building rooms for the toilets, digging ditches and doing all the installation work the plumb- ing code will permit us to do. Although the final evaluation won’t be made for some time, experience so far indicates that the incinera- tor toilets are a quick and practical way to provide indoor toilet facilities. They are somewhat expensive—about $400—but operating ois are very small and the units are convenient and easy to keep clean. One of these incinerator toilets was installed recently in the home of a 69-year-old mother who cares—all alone—for her three mentally retarded children aged 39, 35, and 32. All three of her children are in wheelchairs and must be lifted by her. The repairs made to her 2037 home and the installation of an indoor toilet will permit her to go on at home for a while longer. The savings to the Government are obvious. The costs of home repair work generally run from $1,500 to $3,500 a house, including labor and materials. Our experience has shown conclusively that the $500 grants allowed by section 1119 is not nearly enough. At today’s prices the repairs would hardly be visible if the homeowner had to buy both materials and labor from the $500. We believe that the ceiling on the grants should be raised at least to $3,500 and that the Federal-State matching formula should go from 50-50 to 90-10. We also believe that States should be required to make use of the home-repair provisions of section 1119 and that the benefits should be extended to recipients of social security as well as to public-assistance recipients. One group of needy people which doesn’t benefit from this kind of project now is the renters, who often live in the very worst hous- ing. T would like to see some kind of provision worked out which would permit repair of rental property to make it fit for occupancy and at the same time would bind the landlord to a contract so that he could not raise the rent for a long period. An evaluation of the home repair project by Spindletop Research of Lexington, Ky., concludes that the program is “highly successful by most standards” and that similar programs could be developed in other areas by reproducing the basic design to fit the particular needs and resources of each situation. In the July-August issue of “Welfare in Review” magazine, Jeffrey Kell, who conducted the evaluation for Spindletop, concludes that “the economic effect alone would be sufficient to justify * * * widespread adoption” of the project, but adds that “the prime justification is being able to pro- vide immediate assistance to people for whom a long waiting period could be disastrous.” (The complete Spindletop report, titled “Rural Home Repair—A Local, State, Federal Demonstration,” may be ob- tained from the Kentucky Department of Economic Security, Frank- fort, Ky.) The men who do the home repair work are a story in themselves. The project was designed to provide worthwhile employment for men 52 years old or over. The average age of the crew members is 56. These men are former miners or loggers or odd-job men who were unemployed when we hired them. They did not have the train- ing to move to other areas for work. Only a few had any carpentry or other building skills. Some of them couldn’t read a ruler or hold a hammer or paintbrush properly. But they have learned well, and some have become expert enough at installing drywall and doing other repair work that they are able to supplement their incomes by doing private work on weekends. The work record-of the men has been impressive. They get to work on time and they put in a full, hard day. There is very little absenteeism, even in the worst winter weather. The supervisory staff also is made up of older men. The man who has charge of work crews in two counties is 71. The average age of the supervisors is 54. Crew members have an average of four dependents each. They 2038 make $1.78 an hour, and they get a $10,000 group life insurance policy, hospitalization coverage, sick leave and two weeks vacation. Eastern Kentucky Housing Development Corporation has been greatly impressed with the willingness and ability of the home re- pair crews to learn and to work, with their obvious pride in their war and with their pride in doing something which is helpful to others. As a result of this, we asked Charles Moore Associates of Essex, Conn., a major architectural firm, to design for us a low technolo building system which could provide jobs for men such as these in the construction of new housing for poor families. The firm has designed a system involving a panel of Eastern Kentucky hardwood, gypsum board and expanded steel mesh sandwiched together with a filling of polyurethane foam. These panels could be built in a fac- tory by Eastern Kentucky men, then used to construct homes. The plumbing and electrical work for the houses would be contained in a core unit to be manufactured elsewhere and imported at first, then later to be manufactured in the mountains as the capabilities of the workmen improved. Our cost figures show that using this system we could erect a three bedroom house of adequate size to meet Federal agency stand- ards for $10,000, including the costs of labor and materials, ap- pliances, land and site development. The panels can be used in a wide variety of house designs, ranging from traditional to con- temporary. We have been trying to find financing for such a factory, but so far without much success. We had hoped to benefit from a Special Impact grant made by the OEO to our area, but the Kentucky River Area Development District, which has charge of the Impact money, apparently lacks confidence in the ability of Eastern Kentuckians to do things for themselves and instead awarded the money we needed to an outside construction firm which had not previously shown an interest in the mountains. Those of us who have been involved in the home repair project are proud of it and of its accomplishments, but not a one of us pretends that it is the ultimate answer to providing adequate hous- ing for poor people. For when our crews get through with these houses, they are not yet standard; it’s impossible to make them so with the money available. But the project is a holding action to serve until new housing can be made available. : One hallmark of the Home repair project has been the coopera- tion of agency representatives at all levels—Federal, State and local. A working committee of representatives of 16 different agencies has guided the program from its beginning. Meetings are held in Wash- ington three times a year, and the committee visits eastern Kentucky and inspects some of the repaired homes once a year. Communication is easy and frequent between formal meetings. When problems arise, all agencies involved are consulted and the necessary changes are made quickly. This method of operation is not always smooth, but it is effective. Perhaps this same kind of working committee setup could be enlarged to include representatives of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Economic Development Adminis- 2039 tration, so that resources needed to assure quicker production of new housing would be available. It may not be possible to solve the housing problems of the whole country, but maybe we could solve the housing problems of one small segment. I offer four counties in eastern Kentucky as a proving ground. I wish this Senate committee well as it turns its attention to the profes of housing those whom it has so recently helped to obtain food. Thank you. The Cramman. Thank you very much, Mrs. Gish. That was an excellent statement. I am impressed again today with the difficulty that you and others have in trying to adapt these Federal programs to the cir- cumstances in your own area. How do you feel about proposals to give the States a freer hand in these programs by providing them with the funds and letting the States and local communities have more to say about how they are adapted to meet their own needs? Mrs. Gisu. I am not really sure that giving it to the States would be the best answer either. It seems to me that the way things get done is when the local community can deal directly with Washing- ton. Frequently the people of the State capitals are not as aware as they might be about conditions out in the country either. The Cuamrman. Well, you say at the bottom of page 5, “Kentucky’s Federal Housing Administration director has been up to take a look at our situation and says frankly that his agency is virtually help- less when faced with the kinds of housing needs our people have.” What can we do about a situation like that? The Congress au- thorizes these funds, I am sure, with the intention of meeting the needs of people who are without housing. What can we do about this apparent bottleneck of red tape or whatever it is that makes it difficult to apply the program? Mrs. Gis. Somehow or other it seems to me that the manuals that the agencies go by maybe need to be more flexible and to give these people permission to adapt their standards to local needs and conditions. So frequently something is written in Washington or in Frankfort, in the case of Kentucky, which applies to most places but not all places and there has to be some way to get those few places that the standards can’t apply to into the action. The Crarrman. I notice that you make the same general complaint about the Farmers Home Administration on page 6. You say, “Farmers Home is the Federal agency charged with meeting the housing needs of rural areas, but restrictive legislation, a staff totally inadequate in terms of numbers, an apparent reluctance to accept innovative building techniques and design and rigidly conservative administration have combined to prevent the agency from accom- plishing its task in eastern Kentucky.” Now is that part of the same problem that a Federal program is supposed to be well designed and meet the needs of rural people and yet so far down in restrictions and regulations and lack of imagina- tion that it does not work? Mrs. Gis. Yes, sir. Our default record in Farmers Home in our three counties is 5 percent, and for a program that is designed to 2040 help poor people it just seems to me that is not enough—they are not willing to take a risk on anything. We had a house which was designed by a couple of Yale archi- tecture students and was built by some Nelson-Mainstream people for a man who is legally blind. This man, his wife and three chil- dren live in the house and we were selling it to them for the cost of the materials involved in the house which was only $6,200. I don’t know whether you are familiar with Yale University architecture or not but it does not look like a thing you commonly see in rural areas. It is a beautiful house up on a hillside with natural wood siding but it has angles to it that are not ordinarily seen. It took us 214 years to get Farmers Home to approve the loan for that man although the house is obviously worth about $12,000. Last week we closed the loan. They simply could not see that any- body would want to buy the house that this man had bought. He is only paying $19 a month, he is down to the 1-percent interest level and the family will be able to live there for the foreseeable future certainly. In terms of rental projects I think they are limited to $300,000, the total amount of the project they can insure. That does not do anything with costs as they are today. We have only three people in the Farmers Home Administration office to serve three counties and we only recently got those, and it is just not working the way it is supposed to. The CuamramaN. As long as we are on this subject of delay and red tape, I was struck again—this is another part of our Federal program—by the Federal food stamp program in which, as you know, this committee has been interested. You say at the beginnin of your statement on page 2, “Still other families exist on no rea income at all, except the Federal food stamps they receive each month after an exhaustive day of standing in a crowded line at the county courthouse.” Now why do people have to stand all day long to pick up a few food stamps? What is the reason for that? Mrs. Gisu. That is the only place they are issued. If you are going to get them, that is where you have to go. The courthouse in our town is impossible to get through on the first 3 or 4 days of the month. You cannot get through the halls in the courthouse, and in the summertime it is really unbelievable how hot it can be. People have to come in and bring their children and so on and stay all day with them. Of course the food has run out at home so they have to come the first of the month. Even with the new more liberal food stamps it is really not enough to do all that needs to be done in terms of feeding families. ~ People faint in the food stamp line. Recently a woman had a mis- carriage there. There is no place for them to sit. It is an all day proposition for anybody who comes in. The CuaRMAN. Are you familiar with the simplified reforms that were made in the Senate Food Stamp bill still pending over in the House of Representatives? Mrs. Gisa. No, sir, I am not. The Cramrmax. We passed legislation in the Senate which T hope would eliminate this kind of problem. It provides for the distribu- 2041 tion of stamps in a number of different areas, including banks and post offices and by direct mail. Mrs. Gisa. Well, mail it seems to me would be the best way in our counties because so many people have to come in from way out in the country and it costs them $5 or $10 just to get into town. The CmammanN. The new law would iy that, too. We are very hopeful the House will act on it before they adjourn. The more I listen to witnesses talk about our housing programs, as other Federal programs, the more convinced I am that maybe what we need around here is a special select committee just to eliminate red tape, to break some of the bottlenecks in these Fed- eral programs. I talked with a very large housing construction executive just last night who told me he was almost at the point of despair trying to participate in these programs, that he has a professional staff of accountants and experts and other people who can figure out those big forms and yet the delays and the bottlenecks that he has to surmount have almost driven him to the point where he is ready to leave the business. So T can appreciate how much more difficult it must be for a small community of the kind that you come from to deal with regulations of that kind. Mrs. Gisa. Well, you would think it would be fairly simple for them to get together, they all work for the same government, but the Farmers Home people don’t speak to the Federal Housing people and the Federal Housing people don’t know the Farmers Home peo- ple and neither agency knows the other’s regulations and you just can’t seem to get all the programs together. They are all there but the chickens and the eggs don’t come together at the same time to produce anything. The Cuamrman. Well, IT know Senator Cook has some questions. I have some other questions I could direct to you but we have Mr. Cochran waiting with a very important lengthy statement. I want to give Senator Cook a chance to ask some questions. Senator Cook. Thank you, Senator. I think what is difficult for people to understand really when we talk about the present system of food distribution—this is why the committee was so enthusiastic about changing the rules and standardizing the regulations. A year ago I directed this to Senator McGovern because we have a number of people in the mountains who frankly, make a living by charging people who come to the county seat to receive their food stamps, and some people make a substantial living at this. This is why it was with great enthusiasm, I think, that everybody on our committee last year recommended that this kind of a distribution system be made and that we could not quite understand why you had to take food stamps to the bank every night and put them in the vault when they left the stamps in the post office. Mrs. Grsu. TI think it is a measure of conditions in the mountains though that people have to make a living by bringing their neigh- bors in for stamps. Senator Cook. That is correct. Now isn’t that your problem that the Federal agencies on a loan basis when they prepare these manuals they have no conception of a manual to be prepared to construct homes in the mountains, and 2042 secondly they provide for absolutely no leeway whatsoever in those manuals? Mrs. Gis. That is right. Senator Cook. I understand from your testimony, Mrs. Gish, that what you are really saying in all of this is that if there is a select committee, as Senator McGovern said, the select committee should spend its time combining as closely as possible one agency to do this instead of a half dozen competing agencies. Isn’t this really what we are talking about? Mrs. GisH. I think there is a need for some way of getting to- gether, whether one agency or some method of having all the agen- cies work together, but there has to be something done to get it so that the housing can get to the people who need it. Senator Coor. The point that interests me, you said that when you had a meeting with Congressman Perkins you established the older person’s home repair program and that program has worked very well except you feel the $500 limit should be increased. This was an experimentation but it was an experimentation that func- tioned and it worked and we now realize that the addition to that program is to increase it. You can see that there is an increase necessary because when OEQ gave a million plus dollars to pay the repairman you could only get $500 for materials and then I understand the need to increase the amount of money for materials. This program has worked, as you said, except for the fact that it should be increased. Mrs. Gis. Yes. Senator Cook. You meet three times a year; you meet there, you meet in Washington, and this degree of cooperation to make the pro- gram work is what is really lacking in the others. Mrs. Gism. Yes. Senator Cook. It is what is lacking in the Farmers Home Admin- istration in its relationship with the various agencies in the moun- tains. The fact that if a modern house is built in the mountains, Farmers Home can’t quite understand this because if they want the situation taken care of, they want four walls that are absolutely perpendicular to each other and they want a floor and they want a ceiling and they want a door and they want four windows. Mrs. Gisa. Yes. Senator Cook. This is what has to be overcome. Isn’t that what you are really saying? Mrs. Gis. Yes. Senator Cook. When you said they are all working for the same government, I thought so when I came here, too, but I think they all feel they are a government in themselves, each agency, and they really don’t want to give up any authority, they don’t want to give up any power, and I think mostly because they don’t want to give up their position. I think if we spent some time to coordinate and consolidate we could answer the problems in eastern Kentucky. It is difficult for anybody to understand Leslie County and the county seat of Hyden, a county that has no railroad to go through it at all and probably has more coal reserves left in it than any other county of its size in the world. 2043 Mrs. Gisu. That is right. Senator Cook. There is no railroad that comes anywhere near its borders. I think this is the kind of thing that is difficult for peo- le to understand when we talk about modernization. When some- ody writes a regulation that public housing has to be on an 18 foot paved street, they really ought to do it right and say there ought to be curbs and gutters and everything else, because as long as they are going to make it ridiculous for places like eastern Kentucky and sections of eastern Tennessee and West Virginia, they might as well make it ridiculous all the way. Mrs. Gisa. They are already in there, I didn’t mention them. Senator Cook. These are the exceptions you had to fight for. Mrs. GisH. Yes. Senator Cook. That is that lack of flexibility that you felt? Mrs. Gis. Yes. Senator Cook. It is difficult to understand, Mr. Chairman, but in counties where there are 11,000 people there are no zoning regula- tions, there just aren’t, and it is going to be many, many years for anybody to think that there will be. It just isn’t a practical way to operate in that part of the country, very frankly. Thanks, Mrs. Gish, very much for coming. Mrs. Gis. Yes. The Cuamrman. Thank you for your testimony, Mrs. Gish. Mrs. Gis. Thank you. (The prepared statement of Mrs. Pat B. Gish follows:) PREPARED STATEMENT OF PAT B. GISH Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, my name is Pat Gish. I live in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and work as director of Eastern Kentucky Housing Development Corporation. This agency is an arm of the LKLP Community Action Council and receives money from the Office of Economic Opportunity. The area we serve is four counties—Leslie, Knott, Letcher and Perry—in the geographic center of the Appalachian region and in the heart of the Eastern Kentucky coal fields. The principal concern of the agency for which I work is the improvement of housing for low-income families, and I would like to thank the committee for inviting me here today to talk about our efforts. We have been working on housing problems for three years, but at the rate things are moving now we see at least 25 more years of work necessary to do away with the substandard housing that exists today, much less what will deteriorate each new year. My part of the country is rural, but it is non-farm. It is covered with closely spaced mountains separated by narrow valleys. The people—83,652 in the four counties we serve—are scattered along the roadsides and up the hollows in nearly 23,000 households. More than half the families in these four counties have incomes below what the federal government determines is the “poverty line” and more than half the housing is substandard. A fourth of the familes have in- comes of less than $1,000 a year. One of the counties—Knott—has the lowest per capita income in Kentucky. Our counties vary greatly from the rest of the nation in the ratio of low-income families to middle and upper income. While the nation as a whole has more middle and upper income families than it has low-income ones, our counties are just the reverse, and poor people are in the majority. More than a fourth of our families are receiving public assistance in order to stay alive, and many others are on fixed pension incomes. Many more work at jobs which do not pay wages enough to support what we as a nation consider an adequate standard of living. Still other families exist on no real income at all except the federal food stamps they receive each month after an exhaustive day of standing in a crowded line at the county courthouse. (I might point out that although most of the people who live in the counties do not benefit from the 42-778 0—T71—pt. ——10 2044 natural wealth beneath their feet, these four counties sit on top of some of the richest coal, oil and gas reserves in the world.) Our population differs from that of other areas in another important way. ‘We have a large number of older people, many of them living in conditions which have been unthought of in most parts of the country for 40 years. It is not very unusual to come across a woman of 65 or 70 who still has to carry all the water for her household from a hillside spring some distance from her house, who still does all her washing with a tub and serubboard, who depends on an open grate for heat during the bitter mountain winters, and who raises much of her own food in the summer. Most of these old people have spent their entire lifetimes in or near the places where they are living now. They would not want to move even if there were someplace for them to go, and to my mind it would be the height of cruelty to force them to spend their last months and years away from the places where their lives are so deeply rooted. Many other families in our four counties include husbands and wives who are not yet elderly but are too old to leave and start over in other parts of the country. The men are not educated. They have spent their working lives in coal mining or logging or doing odd jobs, and they are past the age where they can obtain jobs with companies which have pension plans and other benefits avail- able to younger men. Many of these men have tried to find jobs outside and have been forced to return to the mountains because they could not find work in other places which would pay them enough to move their families there. (Of course not everyone is poor. Perhaps a fourth of the population has incomes which equal or exceed national levels because of the current boom in coal mining. In connection with coal, I would like to point out that the coal industry itself is facing a housing crisis and finds its efforts to attract skilled employees from outside Eastern Kentucky hampered by the lack of suitable housing.) During the past 10 years about 20 per cent of the people who lived in these counties in 1960 have left to find jobs in other areas, continuing the trend which has characterized much of Appalachia since the 1940’s—the young, and those others who can, move to places where the economy is better, and the old, the dis- abled and the poor are left behind to get along for themselves as best they can. The number of elderly jumped 22 per cent between 1950 and 1960, and the 1970 census figures are expected to show another large increase in the number of residents over 45. Many of the families who remain live in what can be described only as shacks. The 1970 census figures on housing are not yet available, but the 1960 census classed nearly half the housing in the four counties as deteriorating or dilapi- dated, and my own observation convinces me that the situation has not changed significantly in 10 years. More than half of all houses are frame structures built more than 30 years ago, many of them as mining camp residences. Outdoor toilets are the rule rather than the exception in most areas outside the small county-seat towns. Seventy-two per cent of the owner-occupied housing is valued at less than $5,000. Against this background of housing need, the agency for which I work has been trying to use existing federal housing programs to improve conditions. I wish I could point to huge successes, but the fact is that these and most other programs were not written for areas like Eastern Kentucky, and in order to make them work at all we have to plead for exceptions or rule changes which require great amounts of time and effort to accomplish. For more than three years I have been involved in an attempt to construct 50 units of rent-supplement housing in Whitesburg, the county seat of Letcher County. First we had to convince the Department of Housing and Urban Develop- ment that there was a market for the housing, and that took six months. Then we had to obtain special concessions because of a difficult site—ours is a hillside, because that’s the kind of land we have, and if we're going to build in our coun- ties, we're going to have to build on the hills. Then we had to have a special design to fit the hillside land, and our architect, who is eminent in the field, de- cided on modular housing as the only logical solution within the cost limits of the rent supplement program. That meant we had to become an experimental project, since although the modular housing concept is trumpeted by the experts as the best solution to the current housing crisis.not everyone has accepted it as a valid method of construction. Then we found we had to have an 18-foot wide paved street—the only other one in town is Main Street. Several zoning 2045 changes and innumerable conferences and extensions of time later, we are about ready to begin construction of these 50 housing units. During all this time the interest rate has risen from six and a half to eight and a half per cent, and the rent which must be charged to make the housing economically feasible has gone up correspondingly, so that what started as an attempt to provide decent new housing for families on public assistance now will have to become housing for families higher up the income scale. We also are taking advantage of a seldom used provision of the Appalachian Development Act which permits conversion of a loan for housing ‘seed money” to a grant when it is needed to make a project feasible. The Federal Housing Administration says there has never been another loan closed just like this one, and the FHA manuals don’t cover the situation, $0, no one is sure just yet how the final procedures should go. Hopefully we can work it out all together. The Federal Housing Administration’s Section 235 interest-credit program for home ownership for low-income families has been accused of abuse in some parts of the country, but it hasn’t been abused in our counties because it hasn't been used at all. FHA’s requirements in our area for public water and sewer service, lot size, location near a town, and so on have prevented us from taking advantage of the program, but we still have hopes. Kentucky's Federal Housing Administra- tion director has been up to take a look at our situation and says frankly that his agency is virtually helpless when faced with the kinds of housing needs our people have. The Farmers Home Administration also has an interest-credit loan program leading to home ownership. The Farmers Home office which serves three of our four counties made 14 loans for new housing during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 1970, and of these only five involved interest credits. Farmers Home is the federal agency charged with meeting the housing needs of rural areas, but restrictive legislation, a staff totally inadequate in terms of numbers, an apparent reluctance to accept innovative building techniques and design and rigidly conservative administration have combined to prevent the agency from accomplishing its task in Eastern Kentucky. Public housing programs should perhaps provide a major part of the answer, but they don’t. Letcher County, 22,590 people, has 40 low-rent public housing units already built and 60 in the design stage, all within the county seat at Whitesburg. It took six years to get that first 40 units and is taking six more to get the next 60. Perry County has 129 units already built to serve a population of 24,373. Another 100 units for the elderly have been planned for more than five years, but are held up now because the Atlanta office of HUD had to put all its resources into the housing shortage created by a recent hurricane. Knott County is now building 60 units to serve a population of 15,306. Leslie. County doesn’t have any public housing units at all ; it established a housing authority and tried, but the Housing Assistance Administration could never find a site which met its criteria. So the 11,383 citizens of Leslie County have to continue to cope with inadequate housing because the federal government is not flexible enough to adapt its programs to the conditions which exist where the needs are. Put these 389 public housing units against 14,000 substandard houses in the four counties, and it’s obvious that public housing isn’t going to do the job soon either. Even if the number of public housing units could increase markedly, there is some doubt in my mind that public housing is the best answer. For one thing, it puts all the poor people in one place and marks them as poor. For another, many small-town housing authorities are made up of very conservative people, and too often they are more concerned with collecting the rent than they are with giving a poor family a chance. I know that property has to be protected and I do not condone destruction of living quarters by tenants, but I believe that too often it is the “good poor” who are admitted to the scarce public housing that does exist in rural areas, and nobody is willing to take a risk with a marginal family in the hope that it might be helped toward permanent improvement with adequate housing. The Appalachian Regional Commission has a special program of housing assistance which provides “seed money” for housing projects. During the nearly five years the ARC has been in existence, this program has provided funds for a total of 6,145 housing units in the 13 Appalachian states; 50 of those are in one of our counties. But when you divide the ARC total by the 13 states; you come up with only 473 housing units per state. Kentucky has 49 Appalachian 2046 counties, so our portion would average out to less than 10 a county, or less than two houses per county per year built by use of Appalachian funds. So that isn’t the answer. We knew in the beginning that new housing was not going to be easy to come by, and we also knew that something had to be done immediately if people's houses were to be kept from falling down around them. This was true particu- larly in the case of many old people, who were living in drafty, rotting homes with little protection from the rain and cold and with no money to pay for the repairs needed to make their homes warmer and safer. Congressman Carl Perkins, who represents three of the four counties we serve, called together a group of representatives of various federal agencies in ‘Washington and asked them to try to find some immediate solution to the problem of housing for old people in the mountains. What they came up with was a program which we call “Older Persons Home Repair.” In the past two years this program has provided materials and labor to repair the homes of about 1,000 elderly, blind or disabled public assistance recipients who own their own homes. The program is the only one of its kind in the country. It is designed to demonstrate the use of Title 1119 of the Social Security Act, which provides grants for improving housing conditions of home owners receiving public assist- ance payments. It is designed also to demonstrate that a group of federal, state and local agencies can effectively combine their resources and coordinate their activities to provide workable solutions to unique problems. The project involves grants from two federal agencies. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare has granted the Kentucky Department of Eco- nomic Security $580,000 to pay for grants of up to $500 each to purchase mate- rials needed for repairs to homes of eligible homeowners. The Office of Economic Opportunity has granted the LKLP Community Action Council a total of $1,163,231 to employ older men to install the materials and make the repairs to the homes. LKLP in turn delegated the program operation to Eastern Kentucky Housing Development Corporation. the agency I represent. We have employed 69 men on Home Repair crews and have enough money to operate through next June 30. By that time we hope to have repairs completed on more than 1.350 houses. The United States Department of Labor has assigned 85 men from its Nelson- Mainstream and Concentrated Employment Program projects to work along with our crews. In addition, the Department of Labor permits some of its enrollees to provide free labor to repair homes of families which are not eligible for the materials grant. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has made one-per-cent interest loans through the Section 504 program of the Farmers Home Administration to pro- vide additional money for materials when it is needed. In most cases Public Assistance can raise monthly housing allowances to cover the loan repayment Home owners who are eligible for the Home Repair grants are screened by a committee which includes representatives of local health departments, local community action groups, Farmers Home, EKHDC and public assistance recip- ients themselves. This committee sets priorities on types of repairs to be made and decides on the basis of photographs and survey reports which homes are in the worst need. When this decision is made, the Departnfent of Economic Secu- rity takes bids from local suppliers for ‘the materials needed and accepts the lowest one. At this point Economic Security gives crews of the housing develop- ment corporation an order to begin repair work. ‘When the Home Repair proiect began, we had ambitions of completing work on 900 homes the first year. We soon found out that was an unrealistic goal. and work has settled down now to an average of 40 houses a month. Many of the houses turned out to be in far worse shape than we had antici- pated. Often our work crews spend more time getting a house in shape to repair than they do in the installation of new materials. Sometimes the houses are so bad that the homeowner and the crew elect to tear down the existing strue- ture and use what can be salvaged together with what can be bought with the $500 grant to build a new house. The Home Repair program has provided a variety of changes in the homes of the families involved. It has repaired leaking roofs. built ramps for persons confined to wheelchairs, installed pitcher pumps at sinks so water no longer has to be carried from the outside, rebuilt porches and railings to make them safer, 2047 widened doorways so that wheelchairs can get through, replaced rotting floors, sealed cracks and installed insulation, underpinned houses, replaced dangerous wiring, replaced falling or steep steps, installed new windows and doors, repaired chimneys and flues, rebuilt privies, installed light switches and sinks at levels where wheelchair patients can reach them, painted inside and outside where necessary and installed drywall. More than two thirds of all the houses which have received repairs are located on paved or all-weather roads, but occasionally crews have to carry materials up mountainsides by sled or on their backs and in one instance the materials had to go by boat to reach a family which has been isolated by the construction of a flood-control dam by the Corps of Engineers. We are beginning a new phase of the project this month. For the first time Home Repair grants are being made available to families who are receiving aid to families of dependent children. Money has been allocated to provide grants for 250 families. We anticipate that the needs of these families will include the addition of rooms and perhaps other things such as the construction of simple built-in bunk beds and study desks to meet the special requirements of families with children. Recently a crew completed repairs on the home of an 87-year-old woman who had been forced to live in a chicken coop for nearly a year because her house, which was in poor shape to begin with, had been vandalized while she was in the hospital. Our crew was able to put the house into shape so she could move back into it, and the vocational rehabilitation service paid for a new hospital bed for her to use at home. She has shown marked improvement. Another crew finished work on the home of an 82-year-old man and his wife who lived in a house which their son had built for them about 10 years ago out of poplar poles which he cut from their mountainside farm. The Home Repair crew installed siding on the house, repaired the roof, put new floors in two rooms, built a new chimney, installed drywall and repaired wiring. The crew spent 700 hours of labor on the house, and the materials were bought with a $500 grant, plus a contribution of $100 from a special fund in our grant and $220 from the homeowner. In addition, some lumber salvaged from a railroad depot was used. The total cost of the work, including labor, was $2,360. That man and his wife will be warm this winter for the first time in many years. Things don’t always work out this well, because we are frequently unable to make all the repairs we would like with the money available. One family which lives on a mountaintop includes a 69-year-old man, his wife in her 50’s and their three school-age daughters. The survey report on the house indicates “the foun- dation has decayed all under house, letting floors drop down and drop away from walls; siding in bad shape; need both windows and doors; entire roof needs covering leaks all over; wiring exposed ; toilet is dilapidated and about 75 feet from house; heats with open fireplace; chimney is put together with mud open joints and very unsafe; this house is dilapidated to point don’t see how it could be heated in winter time.” What the survey report didn’t say, but our supervisor learned on his visit there, is that most of the walls of the house are lined with newspaper and cardboard and that the family digs its own coal for heating out of the mountainside behind the house. Our people also learned that the three teen-age girls who live there are ashamed to go anywhere or to ask their school friends home to visit and that one of the girls recently dropped out of high school. The $500 grant available to this family won’t begin to do the work needed, and so we encouraged the man to apply for a loan from the Farmers Home Administration to buy extra materials. The FHA denied him a loan because he has a bad credit rating. I have known this family for about five years, and during all this time that man has been trying to get an FHA loan to fix his house. He has been turned down repeatedly because of his credit references but we thought this program might get him through. I can’t see how the family could ever obtain a good credit rating under the conditions it has to live in, and surely the federal govern- ment is not so poor that it can’t take a chance on the future of those three girls for $1,500. Our follow-up surveys of homeowners have found them generally well satisfied with the work, and our survey people report that the repaired houses are well kept. The Department of Economic Security provides social service aides to assist the homeowners in getting ready for the repairs and in putting the house 2048 back in order afterward. Often the children of an elderly couple will contribute money for a new linoleum, or a new heating stove, or curtains. Frequently the repairs inspire the homeowner to spend some of his own limited resources in further fixing up. Nearly all the homes which we have repaired have outdoor toilets. The small amount of repair money and the restrictive Kentucky plumbing code have prevented us from doing much to improve the situation except to rebuild out- houses which were dilapidated or to build new ones where there had been none at all. Last year the Appalachian Regional Commission made a $25,000 grant to a Kentucky Environmental Health Demonstration project for some experimenta- tion with sewage disposal systems. This money is providing for the installation of several kinds of sewage disposal systems which will be evaluated over a period of about three years. Included are electric and gas incinerator toilets, private aeration systems, recirculating tanks and several different kinds of trenches for spetic tank fields. We have helped with this experiment by building rooms for the toilets, digging ditches and doing all the installation work the plumbing code will permit us to do. Although the final evaluation won’t be made for some time, experience so far indicates that the incinerator toilets are a quick and prac- tical way to provide indoor toilet facilities. They are somewhat expensive— about $400—but operating costs are Yery small and the units are convenient and easy to keep clean. One of these incinerator toilets was installed recently in the home of a 69-year- old mother who cares—all alone—for her three mentally retarded children, aged 39, 35 and 32. All three of her children are in wheel chairs and must be lifted by her. The repairs made to her home and the installation of an indoor toilet will permit her to go on at home for a while longer. The savings to the government are obvious. The costs of Home Repair work generally run from $1,500 to $3,500 a house, including labor and materials. Our experience has shown conclusively that the $500 grants allowed by Section 1119 is not nearly enough. At today’s prices the repairs would hardly be visible if the homeowner had to buy both materials and labor from the $500. We believe that the ceiling on the grants should be raised at least to $3,500 and that the federal-state matching formula should go from 50-50 to 90-10. We also believe that states should be required to make use of the home-repair provisions of Section 1119, and that the benefits should be extended to recipients of Social Security as well as to public assistance recipients. One group of needy people which doesn’t benefit from this kind of project now is the renters, who often live in the very worst housing. I would like to see some kind of provision worked out which would permit repair of rental property to make it fit for occupancy and at the same time would bind the landlord to a contract so that he could not raise the rent for a long period. An evaluation of the Home Repair project by Spindletop Research of Lexing- ton, Ky., concludes that the program is ‘highly successful by most standards” and that similar programs could be developed in other areas by reproducing the basic design to fit the particular needs and resources of each situation. In the July-August issue of “Welfare in Review” magazine, Jeffrey Kell, who conducted the evaluation for Spindletop, concludes that “the economic effect alone would be sufficient to justify . . . widespread adoption” of the project, but adds that “the prime justification is being able to provide immediate assistance to people for whom a long waiting period could be disastrous.” (The complete Spindletop report, titled “Rural Home Repair—A Local, State, Federal Demonstration,” may be obtained from the Kentucky Department of Economic Security, Frank- fort, Ky.) The men who do the Home Repair work are a story in themselves. The project was designed to provide worthwhile employment for men 52 years old or over. The average age of the crew members is 56. These men are former miners or loggers or odd-job men who were unemployed when we hired them. They did not have the training to move to other areas for work. Only a few had any carpentry or other building skills. Some of them couldn’t read a ruler or hold a hammer or paintbrush properly. But they have learned well, and some have become expert enough at installing dry wall and doing other repair work that they are able to supplement their incomes by doing private work on week ends. The work record of the men has been impressive. They get to work on time and they put in a full, hard day. There is very little absenteeism, even in the worst winter weather. 2049 The supervisory staff also is made up of older men. The man who has charge of work crews in two counties is 71. The average age of the supervisors is 54. Crew members have an average of four dependents each. They make $1.78 an hour, and they get a $10,000 group life insurance policy, hospitalization cover- age, sick leave and two weeks vacation. Eastern Kentucky Housing Development Corporation has been greatly im- pressed with the willingness and ability of the Home Repair crews to learn and to work, with their obvious pride in their work and with their pride in doing something which is helpful to others. As a result of this, EKHDC asked Charles Moore Associates of Hssex, Conn.; a major architectural firm, to design for us a low-technology building system which could provide jobs for men such as these in the construction of new housing for poor families. The firm has designed a system involving a panel of Eastern Kentucky hardwood. gypsum board and expanded steel mesh sandwiched together with a filling of polyurethane foam. These panels could be built in a factory by Eastern Kentucky men, then used to construct houses. The plumbing and electrical work for the houses would be contained in a core unit to be manufactured elsewhere and imported at first, then later to be manufactured in the mountains as the capabilities of the workmen improved. Our cost figures show that using this system we could erect a three-bedroom house of adequate size to meet federal agency standards, for $10,000—including the costs of labor and materials, appliances, land and site development. The panels can be used in a wide variety of house designs, ranging from traditional to contemporary. We have been trying to find financing for such a factory, but so far without much success. We had hoped to benefit from a Special Impact grant made by the OEO to our area, but the Kentucky River Area Development District, which has charge of the Impact money, apparently lacks confidence in the ability of Eastern Kentuckians to do things for themselves and instead awarded the money we needed to an outside construction firm which had not previously shown an interest in the mountains. Those of us who have been involved in the Home Repair project are proud of it and of its accomplishments, but not a one of us pretends that it is the ultimate answer to providing adequate housing for poor people. For when our crews get through with these houses, they are not yet standard; it’s impossible to make them so with the money available. But the project is a holding action to serve until new housing can be made available. One hallmark of the Home Repair project has been the cooperation of agency representatives at all levels—federal, state and local. A working committee of representatives of 16 different agencies has guided the program from its begin- ning. Meetings are held in Washington three times a year, and the committee visits Eastern Kentucky and inspects some of the repaired homes once a year. Communication is easy and frequent between formal meetings. When problems arise, all agencies involved are consulted and the necessary changes are made quickly. This method of operation is not always smooth, but it is effective. Perhaps this same kind of working committee setup could be enlarged to include representatives of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Economic Development Administration, so that resources needed to assure quicker production of new housing would be available. It may not be possible to solve the housing problems of the whole country, but perhaps we could solve the housing problems of one small segment. I offer four counties in Eastern Kentucky as a proving ground. I wish this Senate committee well as it turns its attention to the problems of housing those whom it has so recently helped to obtain food. The CuarMAN. We are now ready to hear from Mr. Clay Cochran who is chairman of the board of directors of the National Rural Housing Coalition who has prepared a very comprehensive statement on this total problem of rural housing which I have had the privi- lege of reading. We are most anxious to hear your testimony, Mr. Cochran, as one of the leaders nationally in this field of rural housing. You may proceed in any way you wish. 2050 STATEMENT OF CLAY L. COCHRAN, CHAIRMAN, BOARD OF DIREC- TORS, NATIONAL RURAL HOUSING COALITION, ACCOMPANIED BY ROBERT. E. JOHNSON, VICE CHAIRMAN, AND TOM MOORE, MEMBER OF THE BOARD Mr. Cocaran. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I have with me here this morning our vice chairman on my left, Robert E. Johnson, the director of housing of the Board of National Mis- sions of the National Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., and Tom Moore, executive director of the California Council for Health Plan Alternatives and formerly administrator of the California State Welfare Department who is a member of our board. They do not have statements but they are with me here so that in the process of discussing this problem they may bring some special knowledge to the committee. This is a lengthy statement and I apologize for it. I worked on it a couple of weeks with all the drafted volunteer help I could get to shorten it. We could not shorten it any more, but I will try to get through it as expeditiously as possible and request that the entire statement be put in so I can drop sections of it. The Cuarman. The entire statement will be made a part of the record. (The statement of Clay L. Cochran follows:) PREPARED STATEMENT OF CLAY L. COCHRAN, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, NATIONAL RURAL HOUSING COALITION Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, my name is Clay Cochran. I am the Chairman of the Board of the National Rural Housing Coalition. The Coalition is a voluntary membership organization, financed by membership dues and voluntary contributions and dedicated to the task of attempting to solve the problem of housing, including water and sewer for people in small towns and rural areas. Organized late in 1969, the Coalition was officially launched early in 1970. We hope, by research and education and persuasion to raise the problem of bad rural housing to a sufficiently high level in the public con- sciousness that it will compel corrective action.® On behalf of the National Rural Housing Coalition, I wish to express our appreciation for this opportunity to discuss these problems with you. We are very glad that this Committee is turning its attention to the housing problem of the rural areas and the misery, disease, and degradation which flow from their almost total neglect. I have great faith in the power of Com- mittees of the Congress to educate the American people, and the Congress, and to focus attention on problems and solutions. If in addition to your really great achievements in the field of hunger you can reach down and give people in 1 NRHC By-laws, Article I, Section 2: “The purpose of this organization is to carry .on a program of education and organization designed to provide a decent home and environment for every family or person in rural America.” 2 Qur interest is not in “saving” small towns and rural areas or turning New York City into a public park, but in providing shelter for people wherever they are, there and now. We are opposed to the policy of Little Bo Peep drift (*. . . leave them alone, and they will come home wagging their tails . . .” but we are no less opposed to postponing meeting the needs of people for shelter until they move to the location where the planners think they ought to be if the planners ever get around to agreeing with each other where people to be. We insist that minimum housing should be where the people want to be and the basic presumption should be that thev want to be where they are now. We are not unfriendly to planning—auite the opposite. We are not anti-urban. We are not opposed to proerams to facilitate development of crowth centers or new towns—quite the contrary. What we are opposed to is bad housing, bad water. and sewer pollution, and we think the primary emphasis should be on serving people where they are, not in- dulging in theoretical games which only justify failure to meet the needs now. 2051 rural areas, particularly the poor, a hand on housing, you will have established a record for dealing with human need which few have rivaled. HOUSING, WATER, AND SEWER AND OTHER ESSENTIAL FACILITIES IN RURAL AREAS—THE NEED I will not dwell in any detail on the scope and depth of the need for housing and related facilities in small towns and rural areas because the national authority on that subject, Dr. George Rucker, has already provided you the basic data. Suffice it to recall that of all the substandard housing in this country, two thirds of it is outside the Standard Metropolitan Areas (SMSAs) ; that 34,000 communities lack modern water facilities and 44,000 communities do not have modern sanitation facilities. We have no figures on the number of communities that lack the minimum facilities for community functions, for meetings, or day care, and other socially essential purposes. Last year, the first National Rural Housing Conference indicated a need for a total of new and rehabilitated units in the areas of our concern in the next ten years of 13.5 million of which 7 million or 700,000 a year must be subsidized units.® (These figures are already over a year old—so the goal for the next nine years must be increased to about 760,000 per annum to make up for the virtual total loss of one year. So here, we have in brief outline at least the contrast of need and response. The need is immense. The response is token. The Neglect of Rural Housing The primary blame for the neglect of the subject of rural housing must be placed on several Presidents, the Congress, and on the United States Depart- ment of Agriculture. Except for Farmers Home Administration, the Depart- ment of Agriculture and its agencies, especially its principal outreach agent, the Extension Service, have virtually abandoned the poor people of small towns and rural areas.®> As we dug deeper into this subject, we could not believe that the Department has produced as little and as meaningless material as it has on rural housing and community facilities, so we wrote to the Secretary to ask if he could help us. I am submitting a copy of the response with their attachment showing the total output of the Department and its related agencies over the last five years. The Department of Agri-business has not been very excited about rural housing, particularly for the poor. This recent letter augments the information gathered by the National Council on Agricultural Life and Labor two years ago. NCALL directed a letter to all Land Grant Colleges, asking them for information on their research and publi- cations into community development and rural housing and asking for the names of professors who were particularly interested in the subjects. A handful sent back intelligible replies which showed some interest. One sent back a letter saying that one engineering professor was interested in house plans, and that they had a pamphlet on selecting rugs for the farm home and another on more storage space for farm homes. The outstanding letter we received stated that if they could understand what we meant by our letter they would under- take to reply. Conclusions: The last agency in government likely to help low- income rural people on housing is the Extension Service, federal and state. It is a curious tribute to the metropolitan orientation of our society that these facts, particularly on housing, are not known to even literate, informed, interested people. When we first started using the figures, one Senatorial assistant said suspiciously, “Where did you get those figures?’ And after our response said, “I don’t believe them.” We told her that she would have to quarrel with the Bureau of the Census, not with us. No individual or society is going to attempt to deal with a problem until it knows and acknowledges the problem is there, and in our society it must be documented and quantified. Most of us have seen miserable rural housing, but until the Rural Housing Alliance began to publish its figures, I would have guessed that rural areas could account for not more than 20 or 25 percent of the problem. 1 “People Have A Right . . .”—to decent housing, report of the first National Rural Housing Conference. Airlie House, Warrenton, Virginia, June. 1969, p. 15. 2 Currently, the Extension Service is busy knocking on the doors of the ghettos for admission as consultants. 42-778—T71—pt. 7 11 2052 WHY ARE THE RURAL AREAS IN SUCH TROUBLE ON HOUSING AND COMMUNITY FACILITIES ? Why this problem exists in such magnitude is neither easy nor impossible to analyze. In the first place, this nation is in trouble across the board on housing. The Secretary of HUD says that 80 percent of our people, urban or rural, cannot afford to buy a decent home. In a nation of homeowners, this is a startling figure and the explanation runs the whole gamut of the sources of the housing problems. It starts with a deficiency of supply, brought about by high interest rates, skyrocketing land prices, outmoded zoning practices, outmoded production practices . . . all of these items are the direct or indirect result of public policy. Rather than raise taxes to finance a major war, we have played irresponsible games with monetary policy. The housing industry is particularly susceptible to crippling, has no built-in capacity for rolling with the punch when the costs of financing climb skyward. The crunch from the war and ill-advised fiscal policy, however, is just the culmination of long neglect, particularly in the low-income housing field. Sky- rocketing land prices are a tribute to inflation, to the lack of a land policy, and the existence of a tax system which encourages land speculation and does nothing to inhibit it. Zoning has made its dent in the supply; and outmoded production practices should bear some part, but a minor part, of the blame. This is part of the general picture. The Vested Interests But there is more. The Federal government has simply not acted responsibly on housing, particularly for low-income people. It spends $9 billion a year subsidizing poor housing through social security and welfare payments, but when dealing with housing production, it has not only been mightly parsimoni- ous, but worse, it has let housing—human shelter—fall victim to every little vested interest which could afford a ball point pen or expensive lobbyist. Inadequate Federal Programs Until very recent years, the Congress did little for housing for low- and moderate-income people except emit some moving rhetoric and establish (1) an insurance program for moderate-income people, designed to take the risk but not the profit out of private loans, and (2) set up a public housing program. Other programs were either little more than demonstration programs like the Farm Security Administration’s farm labor camps or they were almost in- variably ‘related to the making of war. They could not be called housing programs. Indirect Effects I should say the Congress has done very little directly on housing, that is to say, intentionally. But as a result of Congressionally-blessed programs, we have ripped more housing out of the cities than we have replaced, particularly for low-income groups; we have bulldozed down a lot of housing along our luxurious highways without any concern for replacing it; we have upended the cornu- copia of our national affluence to provide highways and.other roads which facilitated the migration of the more affluent out of the city into suburbia and contributed to the deterioration of our central cities; we have rewarded speculation in land through taxes. Tax on the Unearned Increment on Land We urge this Committee to direct its attention to the desirability of dis- couraging speculation in land by levying a special tax on unearned increment? and find ourselves in agreement with the “Supplementary Views on the Taxation of Land Values” which appeared in the report of the Douglas Commission.? ‘We would suggest further that the proceeds from this special tax be put into a low-income housing trust fund, half of it available to the Federal govern- 1 Thorstein Veblen classified this as “free income.” The Douglas Report says it is “found” income, i.e., neither earned nor stolen. 2 “Building the American City” Report of the National Commission on Urban Problems to the Congress and the President of the U.8., House Document No. 91-34, 91st Congress, 1st Session, pgs. 395-398. 2053 ment and half of it to state and local governments for approved housing projects, including land acquisition. The present capital ‘gains tax puts a premium on land speculation over many other forms of investment and is totally anti-social in its ramifications. UNWISE WELFARE PROGRAMS . . . A LURE TO THE CITIES . . . A PUSH FROM THE COUNTRY Also indirectly, Congress has subsidized concentration of our “huddled masses” in our central cities through a most unwise welfare program which ties Federal benefits to either the capacity or the willingness of state and local governments to pay, creating vast inequities in payments. The results should astonish none. In a country which makes a fetish of the economic man, we know that higher wages will attract manpower; we know that higher profits, in the absence of monopoly restraints, will attract capital; but we have happily assumed for almost 40 years that Federal welfare payments delivered on an uneven basis would not influence the location of people. Why should a poor woman with 6 kids who is denied ADC in Arkansas, or delivered a pittance, stay there and starve when her relatives tell her she can get $300 a month in Chicago? Even though she lives miserably on $300 a month in Chicago, racked by slum landlords, she can at least live—and she is there. Indeed, it is sur- prising that the movement to the cities has not been even greater. Discriminatory: Laws On the other hand, in rural areas we have dealt most generously with agri- business. We have handed out enormous subsidies to large-scale operators under the guise of aiding the family farmer; we have subsidized farm op- erators, packers, processors, and the whole agri-business complex by exempting them, more or less totally, from wage and hour laws, unemployment compensa- tion, part of social security, the right to organize and bargain collectively . . .. you name it, and we have come belatedly if at all to making these benefits available to rural and small town people. The American Enclosure Movement These discriminatory laws which resulted in lagging development of incomes in these areas at the same time facilitated the greatest enclosure movement in the history of the world, not excluding the drive to collectivize Russian agricul- ture.* This American enclosure movement which is the basic “push” behind the out-migration of millions of rural people in the last 20 years was the result of deliberate congressional policy.” This enclosure movement and the resulting out-migration—has created a crisis in the cities without curing the rural housing problem because rural areas have suffered from deficiencies in modern facilities and housing for so long that the out-migration did not make available decent housing even to those who remained. Heaven only knows how many families have been expelled from rural homes through this enclosure movement, and how many are still allowed to live in shacks for which the landlord no longer feels any need for maintenance. The victims of this enclosure movement, whether they moved to the cities or to the small towns or tried to settle out along a road somewhere have been the tragic victims of an almost equally effective EXCLOSURE movement, based partly on rascism and partly on their poverty. The poor or not so poor black who moved to the cities found poor housing, at very high prices, awaiting him ; the poor white who moved there fared little better because in this country, one’s passport to decent housing has to be stamped “majority” and affluent. If either side is wrongly stamped, like “Black” or “Chicano” or “poor,” you are in trouble. There has been a lot more attention given to the problems of the cities be- cause of the overt anger there and the justified uneasiness that someone is just about to burn down the penthouses or make them unuseable because the streets are either dctually unsafe or reported to be. But the problems in the small towns and rural areas are no less real or tragic. 1 This is not a tribute to the humanity of the USSR—they did not have our capacity to replace men and animals with machines. 2 For documentation, compare the appropriations for price support with the appropria- tions for FmHA and its predecessor agency to retain a family-type agriculture. 2054 In these areas there is very little public housing, and it is too expensive for many of the poor who frequently get no assistance except free food (and that recently) with which one cannot pay rent. And no other agency is available to provide housing or credit for housing except in token amounts. Even where a family can by some means secure the funds with which to build a house, land is very frequently not available at’ all either because of racial prejudice, bias against the non-affluent, or because as in the Mississippi Delta under its new anti-pollution regulations, it cannot be made available without the prior outlay of funds for construction of expensive water and sewer facilities, which is not forthcoming for one reason or another. When land is available, it is too often available at exorbitant prices. To get the focus off the South and Appalachia in this instance, I am advised that in Bismarck, North Dakota, the capital of that proud state, a building site will cost upwards of $5,600, including facilities and curbing which are required by law. That town is so beautifully organized that one does not even see the sprawling phenomena out along the highways where land is usually cheaper, but one sees its inevitable counterpart, i.e., the Capital of North Dakota is ringed by a moat of trailer “homes” which is the local substitute for a socially intelligent land and housing policy. The Socially Destructive Effects of “Red Circling” Within recent years, the public has finally become aware of what government officials and lenders and real estate people and some homeowners and some homebuyers or would-be homebuyers have known a long time, and that is that the Federal Housing Administration has “red circled” most of the central cities, i.e., they will not insure loans in those areas. The result of this policy, which still exists sub-rosa (where it always existed) was that a flow of credit into the central cities was cut off, leaving them to deteriorate under the dual impact of credit-privation and the accompanying evil of exorbitant charges for capital by those who ventured in after a quick buck. We are hopeful that despite his failure so far, Mr. Romney, who I consider to be a sincere, concerned, and in- telligent man, will be able to command his troops, sooner or later, to abandon this policy, but currently, they apparently wink as they salute. But this red circling phenomena has not been restricted to the central cities, where FHA as the appointed handmaiden of private investors has worked hand-in-hand with some less than creative forces, this red circling has been almost ubiquitous in small towns and rural areas since the memory of man runneth not . . . In other words, FHA never has functioned in small towns and rural areas except under exceptions to the rule, and it is still not doing so. To impute blame here in the normal moral sense is fruitless because Congress ap- parently never intended that FHA should be anything except a scow on which lenders, realtors, developers, surveyors, title finance companies, and the rest of the camp followers of the housing industry could ride when they could not get aboard the yacht operated by banks, insurance companies, savings and loan and other lenders, catering to the better quality (i.e., more affluent) folk. Whatever the various Congresses may have intended, FHA has in fact worked hand-in-glove with private groups, operating only where they would operate, and sharing their prejudices. In other words, they were in “business” to take the risk out of private credit for certain kinds of people, not to serve the public or housing consumers except insofar as the interests of the public and consumer happened to be equated with the interests of the housing business complex. Frequently, all of the housing ingredients are present in rural areas, except credit, and this was to have been FHA’s contribution, but it has seen fit to play a passive role, and play the piano only where it was invited to do so. This did not include small towns and rural areas. Public Housing in Rural Areas Public housing has also been largely an urban or metropolitan program. Once a reactionary court had thumped the New Dealers over the head on Federally- constructed public housing, the Congress created a public housing system of local authorities backed by generous Federal subsidy.! Unfortunately, that sub- sidy was not available to the poor wherever they happened to be but only where the local power structure was sufficiently wise or enterprising or humane to 1 Not generous enough. 2055 undertake the construction of public housing. (I feel compelled to add also that this is another Federal program (like welfare) which puts a premium not only on socially-conscious state and local officials, but also on the ability to pay. There is no doubt that many areas of this country, most of them based on agriculture, have taxed themselves heavily in an effort to provide public services of all kinds; and there was, and is in fact a limit to their ability to provide such services including housing. This is not news to the Congress or the Executive agencies, but one would think it were, considering the lagging response in so many areas, including food, housing, and health, with the record somewhat better in education.) The result of this policy is apparent. Public housing exists mostly in urban areas although there is a modestly encouraging trend in the other direction, in recent years. Unfortunately, this modestly encouraging trend is apparently the result of an increasing fail-function role in the cities, as well as a new solici- tude in rural areas, mostly for the elderly. For whatever reasons, and the Congress should have long since ascertained those reasons, the “red circling” of rural people has been as effective as in FHA’s programs.* FARMERS HOME ADMINISTRATION-—THE EVOLUTION OF A LIMITED RURAL HOUSING PROGRAM The main source of rural housing credit, as well as credit for rural com- munity facilities, is the Farmers Home Administration. Except for farm homes (not many) the housing program of FmHA is less than a decade old. For a quarter of a century Congress authorized and financed public housing and FHA (HUD) to meet some of the need in the cities, shutting its eyes to the fact that neither of these agencies really functioned in small towns and rural areas. Both agencies were depression babies, brought forth in that burst of social innovation which marked the end to our long pre-occupation with the mythology of laissez-faire capitalism and our almost total devotion to the myth of the comprehensive capacities of private enterprise to meet all economic needs which, morally, were worth meeting. Although, under the grim pressure of need, we were able to reach an uneasy concensus on these new functions, our capacity for grasping the reality of our economy was too limited to permit us to go a step further and recognize that they could function only in the cities, or perhaps there were enough realists— on the wrong side of the issue—who understood very well. Consciously and subconsciously, we have been led by the unseen hand of another facet of our mythology to assume for at least .a hundred years that whatever aid, the growth of our cities would redound, to the benefit of all; moreover, we have assumed, very comfortably, that there was some technological imperative (for which read “external economies of business”) which dictated that sooner or later, when we really became civilized as the result of ameliora- tive trends, that 90 percent or more of our people would live on 1 percent of the land, happy, prosperous, cultured, and secure. The place for people who were in trouble in rural areas and small towns was obviously in bigger towns. Elee- tricity, inside plumbing, paved streets, medical facilities, neon lights, the more gilded pleasures of the flesh, and lately, intolerable pollution, came first to the cities and (except for pollution) exercised a magnetic attraction for those who either wanted to escape from rural areas or who had no choice but to leave. For a wide variety of reasons, some real, some romantic, this was assumed to be good. Given such assumptions, which have run to the very core of our philosophy of social and economic development so strongly that they are in the nature of rationalized preconceptions almost religious in their sanctity, small wonder that the Congress should have moved easily with its constituency. The powerful “farm bloc” which exereised power in the Congress, more or less, for a generation was actually a coalition of farmers and their suppliers and creditors (including a lot of so-called farmers who were corporations, doctors, lawyers, and other absentee landlords). who were struggling to in- crease or protect their share of the American economic pie. They were much 1 And the nature of man is such that a decently sociallv-conscious group. like the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. should have had rural housing on its program this year for the first time in many years, if not forever, and they were organized in 1934, 2056 more concerned with increasing prices, decreasing the number of farmers, and holding wages down than they were in improving the quality of rural life by such exotic devices as subsidized housing programs. ; The result of all these forces and preconceptions was that neither in the New Deal days nor subsequently in the benchmark Housing Act of 1949 was any effort made to tailor the program to small towns and rural areas, except for the modest farm housing program of FmHA. The very promising farm labor hous- ing program of the Farm Security Administration, which was a conscious recognition of the need at a wholly different level of social consciousness and responsibility, was destroyed by agri-business in a drive to prevent the unioni- zation of hired farm workers and prevent the government from underpinning family farming by the development of cooperatives, and other similar programs, including liberal credit. Most people apparently assumed that if housing was needed in rural areas and small towns, FHA and public housing could function there. Any examina- tion of the facts would have revealed that the public housing program would have to function differently in rural areas because of the costs of administra- tion, the level of welfare payments and the skimpiness of Federal subsidy. By the same token, the facts would have revealed that a middle income housing program like FHA, created as the handmaiden of private lending institutions could not function adequately in rural areas because of the paucity of private credit institutions there. We left our preconceptions undisturbed. It would be less than candid to pass on without saying that there were plenty of people who would have countered any such moves with assertions that we were jeopardizing the society by subsidizing the undeserving poor at the expense of the thrifty and distorting technologically blessed patterns of growth by encouraging the surplus rural population to remain where they were. FmHA’s Hard Road—Uphill All The Way Be that as it may, it was another decade and more before the Congress dis- covered that Federal programs were not serving rural areas and approved a modest home ownership program to be administered by FmHA. The program was to be financed out of direct appropriations, a tacit admission that the private credit institutions were not out there. This was amended later—after years of starvation by the appropriations committees—to enable FmHA to make insured loans, but again the machinery was provided for FmHA to sell its paper at the top (in the cities) and lend the money in rural areas, another admission that the FHA-housing business complex did not function in small towns and rural areas. (There was also a farm labor housing program instituted but it was designed to serve farm operators and processors and only incidentally the farm workers. It has failed miserably. It has not even worked for the growers.) I'mHA Basic Structure Is Good In a sense FmHA, that battered and anemic stepchild of the New Deal, was ideally designed to operate a more or less direct lending program in rural areas. It has about 1700 field offices which are more or less accessible to rural people and therefore provides (given the money) the missing ingredient in rural housing, a source of credit at more or less reasonable rates. But, as indicated, using direct funds it was starved by a budget-conscious Congress worshipping at the feet of a balanced, more or less, budget and increasingly concerned with “budgetary impact,” particularly after we became engaged in a major, un- declared war which we have tried to finance out of funds denied social agencies or extracted from the consumer by inflation. Even after insured lending was approved the agency had to struggle with a Rube Goldberg apparatus for raising the money, among other devices begging labor unions and others to invest for the good of mankind instead of being able to secure funds rationally through the sale of guaranteed securities or some similar device. The Congress had refused to furnish government credit to rural areas and small towns. It now turned to insured loans but was very careful not to rouse the wrath of the privileged by invading the mortgage bankers field. Whatever was to be done was to be done only with the advice and consent, not of the Congress, but the vested interests who feared that any precedent set for serving the credit needs of rural areas might disturb their 1 Baldwin, Sidney, THE PoLITICS OF POVERTY. 2057 control of the rest of the country. Eventually, FmHA has been enabled and compelled to move more and more in the direction of a security marketing agency, but even currently the requirements that they peddle each mortgage, even in a package, is an oxcart system and so designed, under pressure from existing vested interests. But Congress Refuses to Provide Adequate Funds The FHA/HUD system had been grafted onto a private credit system and generous levies had been imposed on the housing consumer to finance this system, but after Congress had discovered that the same system would not work in small towns and rural areas, the Congress has continued to starve Farmers Home for administrative funds, to hamper it in securing the essential credit funds, and to put its implicit blessing on the ceiling which the President (for which read the Bureau of the Budget) imposes on it each year in the name of fiscal policy designed to finance a war without taxes. Workload Rises—Manpower Available Lags FmHA administers some twenty different programs. In eleven years the size of its program has increased something like 6249 but its available manpower has increased only 77%. For Fiscal 1971 FmHA requested $146 million in administrative funds but the President cut that back to $85 million and the Congress apparently will provide about that amount. There are other stringencies. Despite a backlog need of some $11 billion in community facilities in the FmHA areas, the funds available for last fiscal year in grants was only $46 million and the ceiling on direct loans is $64 million. If the maximum amount (both) were expended each year, it would be more than a century before the backlog of present need is met. Aside from FmHA’s inadequate resources for meeting its present service area needs, it is apparent that there is a serious gap in housing services. FmHA is restricted to towns of 5,500 and below and FHA does little in towns of 25,000 and below.? This leaves millions of people who are caught between FmHA statutory limits on service and FHA’s functional limits. The year is 1970. Incredible! Interagency Task Force on Rural Housing We were encouraged last year when, under pressure from Rep. Wright Patman, HUD and USDA created a Task Force now known as the HUD- USDA Rural Housing Coordinating Group made up of about a score of officials under the Co-Chairmanship of Assistant HUD Secretary Jackson and Assistant USDA Secretary Cowden. But so far the task force has produced a reasonably good analysis of what the origins of the problem are, a limited set of recommendations for improvement, and little else. We do not wish to reflect on the good will of the members of the task force, but we think the origins of the problem are primarily in the White House and Congress and we doubt Tops Tom Forces are going to take on either. (That is not the nature of task orces! Moreover, after the task force had indicated that the lack of credit institu- tions in rural areas made it difficult for FHA to operate there, the present Administration wiped out FmHASs above moderate income housing program with honeyed words about shifting the task to FHA. This is cold nonsense—and the fact that the Task Force could not influence the decision in an attack on rural housing this overt and obvious dampens our hopes for its usefulness. THE OPERATING POLICIES OF THE FARMERS HOME ADMINISTRATION REQUIRE CHANGE There is one more item I would like to take up before turning to some sug- gestions for remedial action, and that is the curious philosophy of the Farmers Home Administration in making loans to low income families. School children, when I was young, were taught that food, clothing and shelter were the necessities of life. I think that was in fourth grade geography about 45 years ago. I assume the same basic message is being gotten across 1 Farmers Home Administration entered fiscal 1971, with a backlog of 70,384 applica- tions piled on the desk, more than twice the size the backlog in July of 1965, and almost equal to their total Fiscal 1970 loan program. 2The 1970 Senate bill passed last week leaves this undisturbed. 2058 today at that level or earlier. But the operations of FmHA on housing loans, the guidelines, do not indicate that the policymakers of that agency were very rapt in their attention when the message came through. As a matter of fact, sarcasm aside, we think the FmHA people. know this as well as any 10 year old. The history of that agency is such that it was supposed to make loans only to families who could not get money from any other source. This meant that it was supposed to make risky loans, for social purposes considered that important by the Congress. Which meant, of course, that it should have been anticipated that its losses would run rather high. It follows ipso facto that if the loans are risky there will be losses, and yet, under the battering it has received from the vested interests in and out of the Congress for several decades, the agency has been inordinately proud of a loan loss (less than 19%) so low as to be a demonstration that it was not carrying out its mandate. This low rate of loss has been maintained, in fact, by repudiating the word of the law and the spirit of its sponsors. Why? The answer is easy to come by. The Congress authorizes and the Congress appropriates, but not infrequently it seems the left hand which authorizes and the right hand whieh appropriates do not belong to the same body. The agricul- tural appropriations sub-committees of both houses are the interpreters of the “spirit” of the credit laws governing FmHA, and the agency chiefs, through a long series of administrations, have leaned over backward to prove that they were sound bankers lest their agency be destroyed. That they in fact eroded FmHA’s social usefulness to save its bureaucratic life is obvious. Under more courageous leadership—in the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, the agency might have stuck to its guns, but the late administra- tor of FmHA, Howard Bertsch, asserted many times that he always got more generous treatment from the ostensibly tight-fisted appropriations sub-com- mittees than he was ever able to get from the USDA or the White House. Any Senator might recall, on another front, that the present FmHA water and sewer program was turned down by the Bureau of the Budget but the Aiken Bill with 93 Senate co-sponsors was enacted by the Congress. These illustrations tend to indicate the plight of FmHA and throw some light on its curious procedures on housing. With FmHA Housing Gets the Hind Teat ‘Whatever the reason, FmHA in dealing with a low income family, on a housing loan constructs a budget for the family including everything except SHELTER, ascertains the family income and subtracts the family budget from that income. The residual, whatever is left over, is the amount which FmHA considers to be the mortgage paying capacity of the family. Therefore, if a family has been paying $50.00 a month for a shack to some slumlord for years, and wants to buy or build a house costing half that amount per month, FmHA’s curious logic would result in denial of a loan on the grounds that the family has no rent paying capacity after the deduction of its other needs from its income. But It’s All Very Moral I wish to make it clear that FmHA officials justify this policy on the highest of moral grounds, i.e., that they will not be party to “boxing a family in” on a mortgage at the expense of food, clothing and medical care. They admit that they deny loans when the mortgage payment would be less than the family’s rent, because the slumlord may be willing to starve the kids in the family but not old Farmers Home. I have personally argued this with Farmers Home for about four years, and it is to their credit that they have the strength of their convictions. They improve neither their argument, nor the policy. The real money, of course, is that this morality is a key device for assuring the repayment of the loan, guaranteeing continued approval from critical con- gressional committees® albeit for a penny-ante program. No change will be made short of Congressional Action, if that is possible. Consider this specific example. In Putnam County Florida by use of VISTA workers and OEO funds, the Rural Housing Alliance built a demonstration house worth approximately $7-7500, which we offered to sell (for about $4600) to a woman with a decent credit record who had five children of her own and 1 Brehwon, Samuel Butler, passim. 2 Sauve Qui Peut. 2059 two grandchildren to house. She had been living in an incredible shack, a fire hazard, cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and degrading to a dog. At the minimum interest rate of one percent the cost of paying on the mortgage plus fire insurance came to less than $20.00 per month ($18.34). (Florida has a homestead exemption law, so taxes would not be a cost to her.) FmHA rejected her application for a mortgage on the grounds of (1) that she owned a lot—the one on which her old shack stood and (2) that they could not make the loan to someone who was “largely” (or “entirely” as one letter said) dependent on welfare. (About $1200 of her income is from ADC, the other $600 from fruit picking. ae arguments were both subsequently abandoned, under pressure from the Rural Housing Alliance in terms of FmHA’s own guidelines; but this poor woman did not get a loan because when all the chips were down and the regu- lations perused and the files cluttered with appeals, FmHA came down hard on the point that she could not in fact afford any kind of a house. RHA was told she should go to public housing instead. Inquiry revealed, unsurprisingly, that (1) there was no public housing unit available and (2) if it were the cost would be $32.00 a month compared to $20.00 for the home RHA was prepared to sell her. The significance of this illustration justifies the detail. Knowing that public housing is generally not available in small towns and rural areas we were attempting to ascertain how much subsidy would be required to get decent shelter for the rural poor through Farmers Home. Our assumption was that if the Congress would make available a deeper subsidy program including out- right grants that FmHA could combine one or both of these programs with its present authority and staff and reach deep into rural poverty. Doubtless such programs would enable Farmers Home to do some things it now can not do, but we are convinced that this alone would not do much in the foreseeable future for these reasons: (1) with limited manpower FmHA takes care of the applications of the more literate, more prosperous, people who come to it for loans. This limits the num- ber of really poor who can get through the agency, willy nilly; but assuming the Congress could provide more money it is obvious that under present guidelines (2) FmHA would not use grant money to reach much deeper into the poverty pile, certainly not nearly deep enough. As long as FmHA insists that shelter is at the bottom of the list, there is going to have to be a drastic improvement in rural incomes before that agency can have its guidelines and the people can have housing. Congressional pressure, enforced by FmHA’s policies have created a whole strata of people “out there” who are nom-persons. They cannot get decent shelter from slumlords; they cannot get public housing: and FmHA shies away from its responsibility by erecting hurdles the families cannot clear, in the name of morality, but in fact to protect the agency from criticism from the Congress. WHAT ARE WE TO DO ABOUT RURAL HOUSING AND COMMUNITY FACILITIES ?* First and foremost, the American people, including the Congress, must be made aware of the widespread need : that two-thirds of the bad housing is there, and that bad water and lack of sanitation destroy the health and lives of people. This must be brought forth in painstaking detail, hopefully in part by this committee, hopefully also by the press and the networks, TV and radio. This is a condition precedent to everything else, because it is our failure to recognize and acknowledge the size and shame of the situation which has left it virtually untouched for so long. There was hardly any hunger in America for a long time, you will recall, 1 One simplistic formula we must not fall for is the frequent reiteration that to ‘in- crease incomes” and private enterprise with a little hoist and subsidy here and there will do the job. In the first place, this country is not just about to increase the incomes of the lower income groups enough to enable them to buy adequate housing. Moreover, and more significant, if you can conceive of a dramatic increase in incomes, the problem would not be solved. Hunger could be eliminated in our society because we have or can produce the food on short notice, but a dramatic increase in income would only bid up the price of existing housing. We must increase the supply of housing, hopefully along with an increase in the incomes of the poor, but it is simplistic to equate the one with the other. 2060 none that anybody who was anybody knew anything about. The same is true of the misery, shame, degradation, disease and ill health which are the progeny of bad housing and lack of community facilities. Even when someone fished out some ugly stories on hunger, the comfortable had ready responses. The reports were (1) exaggerated, (2) isolated, (3) about to be corrected, (4) correction would cost too much, (5) involved an assault on states rights and local autonomy, and (6) almost any other argument which would delay and obfuscate. But when the facts were made clear and people knew, something was done . . . maybe not enough, but a very great deal com- pared to the recent past. So it must be on housing and health. PROGRAMS MUST PROCEED AT SEVERAL LEVELS AND ON SEVERAL FRONTS SIMULTANEOUSLY To some extent programs to deal with the problems already exist. Some of them need only to be expanded. Some need to be reoriented. All of them need a tremendous increase in funds. But there will have to be more than this. On the Nature of Social Progress When I was teaching a course on the nature and causes of poverty at the University of Oklahoma half a moon-age ago, I resorted to an old pedantic device to try to get students to wrap up some ideas in a phrase. The remedy for poverty, I advised them, lay in “ameliorative pluralism” and “pragmatic opportunism.” At exam time they were supposed to explain these jawbreakers and reveal thereby their increased sophistication. First we discussed the ameliorative pluralism. Since the causes of poverty were many, the attack upon it must be many faceted. No one program would do the job. The programs would have to be tailored to the groups, the individuals, the areas, the occupations, the cultures and backgrounds . .. but most im- portantly, be pluralist . . . enough of this “thirty dollars every Thursday,” pro- hibit the poor from consuming alcohol, reduce the birthrate, increase social security, socialize monopoly industry . . . The solution had to be pluralistic and evolutionary, changing as knowledge grew or new problems were created by resource exhaustion, utilization of ersatz materials, or cybernetics. The second half of this bag of wisdom was “pragmatic opportunism.” If we wish to attack a problem, almost any problem, pragmatic opportunism is a solid concept in a society like ours, and maybe any kind of society. At any given moment a person who knows what he is talking about knows that, e.g., the federal government should revise the public housing law, deepen the subsidy, restructure the authorities, encourage tenant organization and participation, and make the federal government the builder of last resort. But no matter how obvious the need for something is, it often happens that “circumstance won’t have it so.” Various forces at play will prevent the enact- ment or execution of all or part of a specific program, and the function of the concept of pragmatic opportunism is to teach men to play all fronts simul- taneously in a social crusade with the knowledge that if the intelligence and force is sufficient, it may be possible to solve a part of a problem one way when the door to a more rational and economical means is closed for whatever reason. I mention these concepts to throw light on the suggestions which follow. There are a variety of ways in which all or part of the housing and community facilities’ problems in rural areas can be solved : some of them would only touch one segment; others, if all were enacted, would result in wasteful duplication ; some would play the happy role of creating a healthy institutional competi- tion. . . . In considering this problem we have tried to come up with a whole series of suggestions in the hope that if the climate is not right for one of them, how about an alternative, or maybe half an alternative. Would you buy a quarter? At this point we would like to submit for your subsequent consideration a provocative speech delivered by Albert Walsh, Administrator, Housing and De- velopment Administration, New York City, at the recent NARHRO Housing ‘Workshop in Chicago in which he yields to the frustrations all of us have in the housing field and calls for a one-step agency that can handle all of these problems so that we can escape the toils of the conflicting bureaucratic rules, gappy laws, and dodging of responsibility, . . . Under the one-stop program, there would be one great big beautiful agency to whom the Congress would 2061 delegate the responsibility of handling the housing needs of all of the people who require public housing assistance in any form. A man goes in and when he comes out he comes out with an answer. There is a program for everybody and nobody is sent back to the gutter. ! We like this proposal very much. It is a product of knowledge and experi- ence and a first rate mind. We want the proposal considered; we would like to see it pass in some form. But not until we've taken a look to see if the struc- turing and the organization can meet the need. A Federal Capital Budget—A Truth in Accounting Lew Another recommendation we have is the enactment of a capital budget system for the Federal government, a “Truth in Accounting Law.” Vested interests we shall always have with us, Mr. Chairman, but the power of a vested interest very frequently rests as much on the prevailing precon- ceptions (the mythology) of the community and the sanctity of the resulting procedures as it does on the ability of the vested interest to finance elections or influence members of the Congress. Voodooists can kill people and economie voodooism can kill programs and sicken a society. There is no ally—for those who are casually or actively opposed to programs designed to increase equality of opportunity in this country—so powerful as our present Federal Account- ing system. . Under this primitive system we equate the cost of a children’s hospital with a bomber, a loan for a house with the expenditure by the Pentagon of $28 million a year for public relations. There is a real economic difference between operating costs and capital formation costs. Every business in this country would be in bankruptcy court if it used the Federal accounting system. But most impertant for our discussion . .. the present accounting system makes it possible to kill off essential programs because of their “budgetary impact.” The distortions that arise from this are maddening. If FHA insures a loan by the Podunk Bank to John Doe and thereby obligates the Federal government to pay off that loan if it becomes necessary, that has no “budgetary impact.” It is not an expenditure. But if the Federal government borrows that same money from the Podunk Bank and lends it to the same family, that is an expenditure. The first action is blameless and wealth-creating, and does not frighten the community or run into trouble with the Congress, but the second action blows our collective minds because it jeopardizes the republic by increas- ing the national debt. This is in the nature of pure mythology, i.e., economic voodooism, but there it is. We propose that this source of policy distortion and social stupidity be laid to rest at last, and the way to do this is to establish a capital budget. EITHER REORGANIZE THE CONGRESS OR CREATE A NEW DEPARTMENT OF RURAL AFFAIRS Our third recommendation is that there be a Congressional reorganization act to put the authorization and appropriations of funds for housing and community facilities in the hands of one committee in each house. At present, Banking and Currency authorizes, but subsequently one set of subcommittees acts on, HUD funds and a totally different pair operates on FmHA. Banking and Currency dictate the structure and function of HUD, but FmHA is controlled in part by the Agricultural Committees and in part by Banking and Currency. More important, FmHA’s housing program is inextricably tied to its other programs which are under the control of a committee whose principal interests are the agri-business programs of the USDA. The Rural Housing program is an orphan child. If the Congress cannot reshuffle its functions along these or some similar lines, then we urge that there be created a Department of Rural Affairs into which economic development part of the USDA’s research and Farmers Home’s housing and community facilities be placed under the control of a new committee strue- ture in Congress. With all respect to the men who sit on the Agriculture Committees of both Houses, including the Chairman of this Select Committee, most of those members are primarily concerned with commercial agriculture and that is too narrow 1 Pure mythology is not without its less than innocent touters, nor are all witch doctors naive, e.g., not those in the Economics Department of the University of Chicago. 2062 a motivation to add up to their being able to perform a dual function satis- factorily. We Need a Federal Home Owners Mortgage Bank Our fourth recommendation is that the Congress create a Home Owners Loan Authority, a Federal housing bank, which would be financed out of public funds and authorized to issue securities. Representative Sullivan’s bill, Wright Patman’s rural development bank bill, and others include the gist of what is needed. Generally the need is for an institution to which low income people and groups working with them could go for housing credit on terms as low as are available from any other agency. FmHA should get its funds from this bank so that the benefits of the bank could be hybridized with the field personnel of FmHA." We think that all of the below market interest rate programs of the Federal government should be financed through this bank. The costs of the present interest subsidy programs are staggering, and we do not believe that the public or the Congress is going to support programs this uneconomical on the scale necessary to do the job. We think the mythology of budget impact and the private credit groups have got to stand aside in the interests of the preservation of the Republic. Public Housing and Rural Housing Need Under present law, on first blush it appears that the most hopeful prospect for improving housing and facilities for the small town and rural poor is the public housing program. The trouble is that this program does not enjoy suffi- ciently deep subsidies, it is frequently uneconomically structured, and it is sub- ject to veto by the local power structure. A part of this problem can be solved by the simple recognition of the Admin- istrators that public housing has failed and had better get right. There are con- structive and energetic people in HUD who would like to use public housing to meet this need. Inquiry should be made to ascertain what they figure the hang- ups are. Inevitably this will reveal that many public housing authorities, where they exist, are too circumscribed geopraphically to be economical. They will also reveal that a majority of small town and rural communities are just not in the program, and many of them are not likely to be. And there will inevitably arise the problem of costs which the poor cannot bear and the local community is unwilling to. There are promising evidences of a new approach in HAA, including the new Turnkey programs and such experiments as the northern Mississippi Tennessee Valley Housing Authority which operates in 10 counties and is establishing a pattern which may be adaptable in one form or another elsewhere. We are convinced that it is neither right nor constitutional for the Congress to permit state and local governments to deny their citizens Federal benefits. The Congress must find some means of stipulating that Federal housing and community facilities and renewal and other funds cannot be used by a state or community unless that state or community is actively engaged in meeting the housing needs of its low income citizens. Congress should assume the respon- sibility for requiring some equal justice in the use of funds. States should be compelled to provide facilitating legislation to make housing authorities flexible and responsive and responsible for meeting the needs of the population in a given area. And local governments should simply be shut off from access to Federal funds for any program, including highways, unless they are willing to take on the responsibility for meeting minimum housing needs. And, as a last resort, the Congress should insist that unless minimum needs are met on pollution, water, and housing that some agency be given the au- thority, the mandate, and the funds to move into a vacuum and do the job. We have been nourished with ideas along this line by the writings of Herbert Frank- lin of the Urban Coalition, and we recommend them to the Committee. We hope you will make detailed inquiry of those better informed on public housing for our edification as well as that of the community. We believe strongly that the needs of the poorest of the rural poor can only be met by public housing under whatever name. The important factors are (1) public responsibility, and (2) the scale of the subsidy. 1 Mrs. Sullivan never dealt adequately with the means for getting the benefits of her bank to the consumer without their being gobbled up en route. 2063 But we also believe that “the magic of ownership turns sand to gold” * and that subsidy for ownership should always be used where the cost to the publie is not too much greater than the cost of rental housing. The present public housing program cannot do the job. In 33 years (Y3 of a century) it has produced less than 33,000 units a year. Rural Housing and the Farmers Home Administration At this time, the future of rural housing and community facilities rests pri- marily with public housing and the Farmers Home Administration. From past experience, that ain’t much, but it’s all we got. We have already paid tribute to public housing as the best hope of the poorest of the poor in small towns and rural areas, if it can be resurrected and en- couraged to go forward with mew approaches and additional funds and clout. Public housing can also be a means of providing not just rental housing but ultimate home ownership. The Coalition believes very strongly that people should have a choice of alternatives, including a choice between ownership and rental, between multi-family units and individual homes. And we think the overwhelm- ing bias in small towns and rural areas, as well as in most of the upper income families in megalopolis, is in favor of individual homeownership. The function of FmHA then should be to carry out an adequate community facilities program and a program primarily of homeownership with whatever rental units are demanded by groups able to pay the rent. Recommendations for Improving Farmers Home Administration If FmHA is to make the necessary contribution to solving the rural housing problem a number of changes in the law and in appropriations are necessary. Among these are the following: 1. Farmers Home’s greatest need is for adequate administrative funds to carry out its programs. As indicated earlier, it requested a conservative $146 million for Fiscal 1970 and the President cut it back to $85 million. FmHA’s appropriations should be increased several-fold if it is to function properly. 2. With additional administrative funds, FmHA should be encouraged and probably would be quite willing to (a) institute a program of research into the depth and scope of housing needs in its area of service, including the figures on the location of need, the incomes of the families—in short, the data required to carry out an intelligent pro- gram and advise the Congress. This money should not be turned over to ERS, USDA’s research service, nor to the land grant colleges. What we need is action-oriented research related to people, not rural sociology or agri-business minded research.’ (b) establish a housing and community facilities staff in the field separate from the staff handling other programs. The agency needs a professional housing staff and recruiting of that staff should not be tied to the agricultural colleges. (¢) carry out programs of research in building itself. At present the Depart- ment of Agriculture has researched funds which are channeled everywhere except FmHA. HUD has fairly large amounts of research funds. FmHA doesn’t have a dime. If they want to go somewhere they have to bum a ride with the city cadillac or buy a crystal ball and guess what their own department is going to come up with next, if anything. (d) the more adequately funded agency should develop a specialized staff to deal with and promote co-op housing, self-help housing, and farm labor hous- ing . . . areas currently neglected primarily for reasons of poverty. 3. FmHA’s service areas should be expanded to include towns with a popu- lation of 25,000 and under. 4. FmHA legislation should be amended to include the equivalent of the Norwegian plan, i.e. the authority to make second trust loans of up to 40 or 50 percent of the value of a house with the balance payable at as low as 1 percent, depending on family income. At the same time, FmHA should he instructed that its regulations controlling the extension of credit should be not less generous than public housing, i.e. if a family would be required to pay a given monthly payment to a public housing authority and that or a lesser 1 Quote from STBO. 2 Does this Committee realize that the total national housing staff of FmHA—Ad- ministration and Research—-consists of 8 professionals and 9 secretaries? Three of the technicians have been there less than a year. Incredible! 2064 amount is adequate to pay off a loan, the family should be eligible without question. There is no point in giving FmHA the power and the funds to help poor families if they are going to throw the program out with their guide- lines as they tend to do now. After the strain of the long, hard years, FmHA needs a psychological laxative. It suffers from a retentive compulsion which is pathological. Major reform or not, FmHA has got to be moved from its present stance of telling a family, a non-person, that if they cannot afford a house, they should get off the earth. 5. FmHA’s farm labor housing program should be run by a separate section, and the law should be revised to permit the granting of the same subsidies as are available to public housing and permit FmHA to make grants and loans to labor unions and other nonprofit groups without requiring endorsement by the local association of agri-business employers as it does now. " FmHA may be the wrong agency to handle farm labor housing, and we suspect it is as long as it is subject to the jurisdiction of the Agriculture and Agri- culture Appropriations Sub-committees where there is a plain conflict of interest. If no man can serve two masters, heaven help the farm worker as long as his housing is subject to control by congressional agricultural committees. Contem- plate, if you can, the reaction to a proprosal that price control measures for agriculture be handled by the Committee on Education and Labor or that the Pentagon be made a Bureau of HEW. 1 ores Mr. Chairman, our specific recommendations are not exhaustive, but they should not only indicate the direction we think things should go, but they should be sufficient to alert the members of the Committee to the obstacles we face in changing the old line agencies or creating new ones like the Home Owners Mortgage Bank. Given the obstacles and the slowness with which we move and the slips twixt Congressional intent and the administration of programs, ‘we feel strongly that more is required. We do not believe if all of these changes were made they would, within any reasonable period of years, reach a lot of people out there who need and deserve help—those we call the “non-people’— because within existing programs and funding they are mot considered to be people and would in fact be more fortunate physically if they actually were non-people, i.e., migratory water fowl, cows, or pileated woodpeckers. Therefore we propose an emergency housing program for small towns and rural areas which we set forth here in broad outline, but with a deep sense of obligation to the non-people and the American community that something must be done, now, now, now. . We Propose an Emergency Rural Home Development Administration . Mr. Chairman, we propose that we take a page from ithe history book and apply it in modified form to the rural housing problem of those families and individuals who are below the existing FmHA levels and where a public housing authority does not exist which is prepared to use the resources available to meet the needs of low-income families. We propose the establishment of an emergency Rural Home Development Administration (RHDA) which will be given the responsibility for meeting the needs of any family or individual who is not immediately ‘eligible for housing from FmHA or public housing where it exists. The RHDA will be authorized and instructed by the Congress to provide minimum housing, sani- tation, and clean water (as well as desirable community facilities for day care and other programs) in any town of 25,000 or below, including rural areas, and to do so within five years. . } The RHDA will operate in close cooperation with public housing, Farmers Home and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The RHDA will be provided with direct appropriations to carry out the following program : 1. To do continuing research into the location and numbers of families not eligible for existing programs of housing. 2. To organize, recognize, supervise, and finance local housing development agencies which may operate in anything from a portion of a county to an entire state. These housing development agencies will be organized, operated, and controlled by those it serves, the old REA slogan, under appropriate regu- lations and with competent personnel. 3. The HDA’s will be financed administratively out of grant funds pro- vided by the RHDA in amounts equal to the five-year task. They will be au- 2065 thorized to plan to meet the housing needs of the eligible population and will be provided with the funds necessary to build housing developments, finance individual homes, finance water and sewer systems and community buildings (in conjunction with cities and FmHA projects where feasible). They will be authorized to build minimal housing of sound construction, including not less than a given floor footage for each member of a given family, with inside plumbing, clean water, and sanitation. They can purchase land in individual tracts or tracts for development as communities, including as much as three acres per family where sanitation regulations or the need for subsistence homesteads require that amount of land. They may utilize self-help, contractor- built, or pre-fabbed housing in that combination most likely to meet the needs of those eligible economically, providing minimum but attractive housing so that the communities developed may be modestly designed but not degrading to those who occupy them. 4. They may organize rental units or provide for homeownership or con- dominiums; they may extend a loan at 1 percent, or in the case of -homeown- ership or condominiums, they may extend a loan at 1 percent and provide grants for up to as large a percent as necessary to make the housing available. The grant funds shall be in the nature of non-amortizable, non-interest bearing second trusts which come into effect only when the house is sold or the. original interest bearing note is repaid. The interest rates and grants shall be deter- mined by the family income. No family shall be required to pay funds out for rental if the family budget does not contain enough funds to pay for adequate food, medical care, clothing, education, and other essentials over and above the rental payment. For economy reasons the subsidies shall be reviewed at four-year intervals and adjusted accordingly. 0 : 5. Stress shall be put on homeownership wherever possible, with adequate recognition of the need for rental housing particularly for such groups as the aging. The housing constructed shall not be in violation of the existing homing pattern or of a design which is. obnoxious to the recipients. tid 30 ou 6. It is assumed that in course of time, the operations of the HDC’s: will diminish as incomes improve, as FmHA’s programs are financed adequately so that they may meet more of the need, as public housing improves in operation . . as means are found for spinning housing off into existing programs. 7. We think this legislation should be accompanied by a new orientation of publie housing operating on an area basis in sparsely settled areas with extra subsidies for that purpose. It is assumed that Congress will continue to: in- crease administrative and loan funds available to Farmers Home Administra- tion. It is hoped that Congress will authorize the combination second trust program for Farmers Home to. pick up part of the burden. It is hoped that Congress will increase funds for existing FmHA and HUD water and sewer systems to decrease the cost of the new agency. Vy ) 8. But it should be clearly stipulated that the new program is not to: WAIT until these things are done, but to proceed as though at any specific time, it is the only agency functioning. : 9. We would also urge that low income housing of all kinds be funded so that it pays full taxes! We agree with Mr. Walsh that this and possibly “impact” payments should be made to counties to facilitate the reintegration of social groups. 10. Specific funds should be made available to the manpower training agencies, earmarked for small towns and rural areas, so that the housing program may go forward with manpower training and basic education, upgrad- ing the skills of eligible people and providing a manpower pool for construction simultaneously. We believe strongly that unless the funds are earmarked, they will not go into these areas. . . . Obviously, what the costs would be depends on the way the program is written, it depends on the extent to which some honest institutional competi- tion can be injected in the come-day, go-day operations of the other agencies. We have been discussing rural housing for some years, and we can anticipate one quick response: that we are proposing building housing in areas which are declining in population and that is wasteful. If we can provide children with the necessities of life and self respect for five or 10 years, we could care less whether the house is subsequently sold to a weekender or converted into a 1 But the Federal government should devise a means of enco ‘he taxation of modest homes as a major tax source. Reousaging Jiates 10 abandon 2066 silo. Our concern is with people. We think there have been enough comforting semantics about what to the rural poor is ‘pie in the sky’. We agree with Leon Keyserling, a former member of the Council of Economic Advisors, who said “I say to you that you can do little for the children of the poor unless you are willing to do something for their parents.” The context was such programs as Head Start and housing. Mr. Chairman, it has been urged upon me that neither the country nor the Congress is in the mood for any drastic innovations such as I have suggested, but that remains to be ascertained. I conclude with reference to an earlier experience along this line. In 1958 I made a study of the direct food distribution program of the De- partment of Agriculture, and the members of this committee could probably outline what I found. The program was poor and not improving. It was being used in Mississippi to feed the poor like mules through the winter, and then cut off to force them back into the fields at starvation wages in the spring. It was not reaching the most needy in many places. Subsequently I aided in the drafting of a bill to improve the program which was introduced by a young Senator by the name of Kennedy. We got the same flack then that I expect now: the program proposed was not big enough; it was too big; it was wrong-headed ; it threatened to invade state and local autonomy, ad nmausewm. But the most cruel contention of all was advanced by the then Chief of the AFL-CIO Social Security Department, who, brushing his locks back from a handsome face and settling himself back in his comfortable chair in his comfortable office, said that he would never agree to support a bill to improve the food program because “that would post- pone the day when we get an adequate cash assistance program.” Well, the food bill didn’t pass, but the furor over it helped to pass Lenore Sullivan’s food stamp bill ; the Senator who sponsored the bill later made improvement in the food program the subject of his first executive order as President; and in the course of time you and others have vastly improved the food program to the benefit of so many millions of people, both those who receive it and those who live under the promise of a better society filled with healthier people united and not divided by hatred. Yet the chances for “adequate” cash benefits have never been as good as they are today. . . . If the advice of my friend, the political strategist in the AFL-CIO, had been followed all along the line, the chances of a family assistance plan would be greatly lessened, not increased. It is not true that we must starve millions Yelone we leap forward to utopia. We muddle upward; we never soar to new eights. And so it is with the recommended emergency housing program. The proposal is designed to meet a need which should be met differently, which should long since have been met differently. But the only way I know to catalyze the various conflicting, greedy, sleepy, and apathetic groups and bureaus into action is to say that we are going to draw a line near the bottom of the income pyramid and say: Below that line we are going to meet the need by means of new institutions. Let the existing institutions take stock and struggle to maintain their domains by doing more of the job they should long since have completed. Senator Cook. Mr. Cochran, before you get started, you under- stand—I know the chairman does—they started on the floor this morning debating on what is commonly referred to as the equal- rights amendment to the Constitution of which T spent a great deal of time on and I have a great deal of interest in. If I leave you. it is because the conflicts that occur between committees and the floor of the Senate are something that one person cannot overcome because he just can’t be in two places at the same time. Mr. Cocaran. I understand that, Senator. We hope you can stay. If there is a possibility of your leaving, just let me give you one note before I even get into my statement. Recently in Alabama we just barely avoided having to pave 100 yards of road for eight very 2067 poor families before we could get Farmers Home Loans for the fami- lies and the nearest hard surface road was four and a half miles away. Farmers Home is beginning to take on some of the suburban characteristics of FHA and this is nonsense; it just makes the job harder. My name is Clay Cochran. I am the chairman of the board of the National Rural Housing Coalition. Qur sole interest is in pro- viding housing, including clean water and sewer facilities, to people in small towns and rural areas. We were only launched in February of this year but we hope we can stay around until we can raise the problem of bad housing in rural areas to a sufficiently high level in the public consciousness to compel corrective action. I am grateful for the opportunity to be here. We are very glad the committee is turning its attention particularly to housing and to the misery, disease and degradation which flow from their almost total neglect. I have great faith garnered over the years in the power of con- gressional committees to educate the American people and the Congress and to focus attention on the problems and solutions. If in addition to your really great achievements in the field of hunger you can reach down and give people in rural areas, particularly the poor, a hand on housing you will have established a record for dealing with human need which few have rivaled. I will not dwell in any detail on the depth and scope of the problem because the national authority on that subject, Dr. Rucker, appeared yesterday and poured a lot of facts into the record on which you can rely in future discussions. Suffice it to recall that contrary to general public opinion two-thirds of the bad housing in this country is not in the central cities but in small towns and rural areas and that there are 34,000 communities out there without modern water facilities and 44,000 communities do not have modern sanitation facilities. We have no figures on the number of commu- nities that lack the minimum facilities for community functions, for meetings or day care and other socially essential purposes. Last year at the first National Rural Housing Conference we indicated that there was a need for a total of new and rehabilitated housing units in the areas of our concern in the next ten years of 13.5 million of which 7 million or 700,000 a year must be subsidized more or less. These figures are already over a year old and very little has been done, so we gather that the total of subsidized units now has to be raised to 760,000 a year. Next year we will be in- creasing the total again because the machinery is still not there to Pegi to take care of this problem. The need is immense. The response 1s token. The primary blame for the neglect of the subject of rural hous- ing must be placed on several Presidents, the Congress, and on the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Except for Farmers Home Ad- ministration, the Department of Agriculture and its agencies, espe- cially its principal outreach agent, the Extension Service, have virtually abandoned the poor people of small towns and rural areas. As we dug deeper into this subject, we could not believe that the Department has produced as little and as meaningless material 42-778—T71—pt. 7 12 2068 as it has on rural housing and community facilities, so we wrote to the Secretary to ask if he could help us. I would like to submit for the committee files a copy of a letter and a response which is not from the Secretary but from one of his subordinates and an annotated bibliography which he sent along. The Cmamman. Without objection that will be accepted. (The material referred to follows:) AvausT 3, 1970. Hon. Crirrorp M. HARDIN, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. DEAR MR. SECRETARY: I would greatly appreciate your furnishing me with a list of the publications of the Department dealing with low income rural housing needs, in say the last five years. If this list could include publications by the joint Federal/state extension service, this would be helpful. ‘We have been working on the problem of housing for low income groups in small towns and rural areas for over three years now and have acquired a fair amount of knowledge of the research and literature in the field, but I find it difficult to believe that the Department has produced as little as we have uncovered. We need some expert assistance. Spry Sincerely, CLAY oc : RAN, Ewecutive Director. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, FEDERAL EXTENSION SERVICE, Washington, D.C., August.17, 1970. Me. CLAY L. COCHRAN, «3 :5is Executive Director, Rural Housing Alliance, Washington, D.C. DeAR Mr. CocHRAN: Your letter of August 3, 1970, addressed to Secretary Hardin was referred to me for reply. Mr. Robert Gilden our Agricultural Engineer prepared a list of publications dealing with low income rural housing in response to your inquiry. He has included publications on housing needs, as well as additional related informa- tion which you may wish to have for your reference file. I assume that you are familiar with House Document No. 91-292; “Second Annual Report on National Housing Needs.” Enclosed are lists of plans, bulletins, slide sets and miscellaneous publications that have been prepared through the Department and Extension Services. Also included is a copy of news items about housing publications and activities that was sent to housing specialists in the State Extension Services. Sincerely, | CHARLES BEER, Director, Division of Agricultural Science, Technology and Management. [Enclosure.] } : List oF PLANS, BULLETINS, SLIDE SETS, AND MISCELLANEOUS PUBLICATIONS ON RURAL HouUsING ' Rental and co-op housing in rural areas. PA 800. USDA 1967 Rural housing loans. PA 476. USDA 1968 ¥ He for seasonal farm workers: Designs and design suggestions. 1965. B Termination of the bracero program: Some effects on farm labor and migrant housing needs. 1965. AER 77 A house-framing system for low-cost construction. 1966. M 1020 Quality of rural and urban housing in the Appalachian Region. 1964. AER 52. Self-help housing for low-income rural families. 1967. PA 822 Building with adobe and stabilized earth blocks. 1968. L535 Fireplaces and chimneys. 1968. F1889 2069 Foundations for farm buildings. 1967. F1869 Making basements dry. 1966. G115 Roofing farm buildings. 1967. F2170 J Selection and use of wood products for home and farm building. 1967. AB311 Subterranean termites: Their prevention and control in buildings. 1969. G64 Wood decay in houses: How to prevent and control it. 1969. G73 Rural Housing in the Northeast Coastal Plain Area of South Carolina Agri- cultural Economic Report No. 163, ERS-USDA July 1969 Know Your Home Financing, B-1034, Texas Agricultural Extension Service Texas A and M University, College Station, Texas 77843, May 1965 Your House and Its Site, C 817, Extension Service, University of Missouri, Columbia 65201 September 1964 Remodeling Houses, Agricultural Engineering Leaflet No. 12, Clemson Univer- sity Extension Service, Clemson, South Carolina 1970 Proceedings of the Seminar on Mobile and Factory-Built Homes, Ingleside Motor Inn, Staunton, Virginia May 11-13, 1970 : Housing Slide Sets: Wiring For Your Home Foundations For Your Home A Good House For All Who Care Heating and Cooling Your Home : 1 Windstorm Resistant Construction. for Your Home Planning the Kitchen for Your Home Interior Building Materials for your Home Exterior Building Materials for Your Home Finding the Best Protected Part of Your Home Bathrooms for Your Home +. Clean-Up, Fix-Up, Paint-Up House Plans: Plan No. 7175 (M.P. No. 1059) : 3 bedrooms Plan No. 7176 (M.P. No. 1042) : 2 bedrooms Plan No. 7177 (M.P. No. 1173) : 2 bedrooms Plan No. 7178 (M.P. No. 1049) : 3 bedrooms Plan No. 7179 (M.P. No. 1034) : 2-3 bedrooms Plan No. 7180 (M.P. No. 1048) : 3 bedrooms Plan No. 7181 (M.P. No. 1038) : 5 bedrooms Plan No. 7182 (M.P. No. 1072) : 3 bedrooms Plan No. 7184 (M.P. No. 1157) : 4 bedrooms Plan No. 7185 (M.P. No. 1153) : 4 bedrooms Plan No. 7186: 5 bedrooms 1 Plan No. 7187: 2 bedrooms Plan No. 7188: 4 bedrooms Plan No. 7189: 2-4 bedrooms Plan No. 7190: 3 bedrooms Plan No. 7191: 4 bedrooms’ f= Cooperative Extension Service Work with Low Income Families in Low Rent Public Housing. ESC 548, Federal Extension Service, USDA August 1963 The Elderly and Their Housing. Bulletin 989, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York December 1963 Housing for the Elderly: A report of recommendations made to the National Capital Housing Authority for proposed apartment units for low income ‘elderly occupants. ARS-63-1, ARS, USDA December 1963 Family Housing for Migrant Agricultural Workers. Agricultural Research Service, USDA and Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health, ‘Education and Welfare, June 1967 Multi-Unit Retirement Housing for Rural Areas: A Guide to Design Considera- tions for Architects, Engineers and Builders. Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 297, ARS-USDA. August 1965 Housing for Migrant Farm Workers. Cornell Miscellaneous Bulletin 15, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York June 1953 Migrant Labor Housing Requirements for the Eastern Shore Counties of Vir- Finis MB-23, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, Virginia February Status of Rural Housing in the United States. Agricultural Economic Report No. 144, Economic Research Service, USDA, September 1968 2070 A National Program of Research for Rural Development and Family Living, Prepared by a joint task force of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the State universities and land grant colleges November 1968 Communities of Tomorrow: Housing. Farmers Home Administration, USDA April 1968 Community-Family-Consumer Research. A Report of a Critical Study Reprinted from Agricultural Science Review, Vol. 2 No. 4, Fall 1964 Published quarterly by Cooperative State Research Service HousIiNe LETTER NO. 134, DECEMBER 1968 Building a County Housing Program W. C. Warrick, EAE in North Carolina, reported to the Southern group of engineers working in housing on “Building a County Housing Program in Wayne County.” The approach that was used and the results of that approach would be of interest to you. Contact Woodley for a copy of his report. Using Housing Census Bertha Bryson, Specialist in Housing at Louisiana, also reported at the Southern Meeting on “Using the Housing Census to Develop County and State- wide Housing Programs.” For a copy of the information that Bertha used, you may wish to contact her at LSU, asking her for the information that she presented to the Southern Regional Plan Service. Kitchen and Laundry Improvement Program Jeanne Priester, Specialist in Housing at Auburn, has worked with the power suppliers in developing a program on kitchen and laundry improvement. For information on how this program runs, objectives, awards, contact Jeanne at Auburn. LETTER NO. 166, JANUARY 1966 Low Cost Housing Conference The American Society of Agricultural Engineering is sponsoring a confer- ence on low cost family housing. FES, as well as a number of other organiza- tions are co-sponsors. The purpose of the conference is for in-service education and study for those people who are working in the educational and research field concerned with housing the lower income half of the nation’s population. Dr. L. W. Neubauer of the University of California is program chairman. E. A. Olson of the University of Nebraska is in charge of local arrangements and Carlton Edwards, Rural Housing Specialist, Michigan State University, is the general chairman of the conference. This conference will be held at the Nebraska Center for Continuing Education and the dates are May 17-19. You will be hearing more about the program as it materializes. We would suggest that you start making your plans for attendance now. HUD in Ag. Housing A news release from HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Develop- ment) indicates that they have placed a $250,000 grant in the State of Cali- fornia. Some three-bedroom farm houses have been constructed in several of the counties in California at a cost of about $8 per square foot. From their news release it would appear that these three bedroom houses are about 800 square feet in area. HUD plans to conduct further research work with these houses and after they have been sufficiently tested and if they are satisfactory they expect to recommend the prototypes for conventional financing. Further details on this demonstration program may be obtained from the State of California, Department of Housing and Community Development, 1100 K St., Sacramento, California 95814. LETTER NO. 164, OCTOBER 1966 New Plans From Missouri Ralph Ricketts, EAE in Missouri and his co-workers have been busy develop- ing house plans to fit Missouri conditions with particular emphasis toward low cost houses. The house plans that have been developed are: Plan No. 20—710-C2, Two Bedroom, 1002 sq. ft. Plan No. 19—710-C8, Three Bedroom, 960 sq. ft. 2071 Plan No. 13—710-C2, Three Bedroom, 1173 sq. ft. Plan No. 26—710-C2, Three Bedroom, 1307 sq. ft. Plan No. 24—710-C2, Three Bedroom, 1344 sq. ft. Plan No. 22—710-C3, Three Bedroom, 1380 sq. ft. Plan No. 27—710-C3, Three Bedroom (5 bed. using basement) 1400 sq. ft. Plan No. 21—710-C2, Three Bedroom 1440 sq. ft. Plan No. 18—710-C3, Three Bedroom, 1640 sq. ft. Plan No. 17—710-C3, Three Bedroom, 1740 sq. ft. Plan No. 16—710-C2, Four Bedroom (2 floor) 864 sq. ft. Plan No. 23—710-C3, Four Bedroom, 1201 sq. ft. Plan No. 25—710-C3, Four Bedroom, 1307 sq. ft. Plan No. 14—710-C2, One Bedroom, 572 sq. ft. Plan No. 15—710-C2, Two Bedroom, 768 sq. ft. Ralph has these plans in printed form and I am sure if you desire a copy for your files, you can get one from him. LETTER NO. 165, DECEMBER 1966 Ricketts Rates Ralph Ricketts, EAE in Missouri, developed a series of house plans. We reported on them in our last newsletter. We have heard from FHA that they have made one hundred and twenty seven loans to build houses according to those new series of house plans. That is about 1 million dollars of home construction built according to the specifications set out in the plans. Ralph will maintain a critique sheet on each of the plans so that improvements can be made when plans are reprinted. Foundations Slide Set The Housing Committee of the Southern Region has just finished its first of a series of slide sets. This one is on “Foundations For Your Home” and was chaired by Jerry Newman, AERD, ARS. This is a set of 33 slides showing various types of foundations and the functions of each. The script is also included and the sets are available from the Division of Photography at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. at $5.50 per set. Summer Comfort For The Home Harold Stover, EAE at Kansas State, has authorized electrification leaflet No. 14 entitled “Summer Comfort For The Home.” This is an 8 page leaflet dealing with sun control, night air cooling, heat exchanging, evaporative cool- ing, mechanical refrigeration and includes a step by step process of arriving at the BTU’s that should be removed. For a copy, contact, Harold, Manhattan, Kansas. LETTER NO. 167, MAY 1967 New Three Bedroom House Plan 7180 which is a combination Florida and Virginia plan was released through ARS. This is a 1440 sq. ft. living area with a basement and carport. The EAE in charge of plan service at your local university has the intermedi- ake drawings. This plan has just been advertised by the Office of Information, USDA. Heating and Cooling Slide Set We have just put out the second slide set of a series on housing. This one is entitled “Heating and Cooling Your Home.” Cecil Wheary, EAE at VPI was the chairman of the committee that developed the set. There is an illustrated script that goes with the slide set. If you desire the illustrated script, contact me, Bob Gilden. The slide set and script is available from the Dm of Photography, Office of Information, USDA, Washington, D.C. for 6.50. Heating Systems for the Home Eric Wilson, EAE from Washington State University has authored a 17 page mimeo with the above title. A copy of this mimeo with the use of the above slide set should stand you in pretty good stead for a presentation on heating. Check directly with Eric at Prosser, Washington, or with the bulletin room at WSU, Pullman. 2072 Available Housing Publications Arlean Pattison, Housing Specialist at Washington State University has put together a list of available publications on housing. She titles it “Planning a Better House. n For a copy of this, contact Arlean, WSU, Pullman, Wash. 99163. Cancellation of National Housing Conferences After we had publicized the low cost housing conference originally scheduled for Lincoln, Nebraska, May 17 to 19, we got word that the conference had been cancelled. Apparently the committee still plans to hold the conference at some future date and we will be hearing more about their plans in the future. LETTER NO. 169, MAY 1967 Economy Housing Seminar The ASAE sponsored Economy Housing Seminar has been rescheduled for the Nebraska Center for Continuing Education, Lincoln, Nebraska, November 13-15, 1967. The program committee has established the program format and are presently in the process of securing speakers. Low Income Housing Study Bertha Bryson, Housing Specialist, Louisiana, has put together a brief report on how to gain information that could be used in planning an educa- tional program low income housing. For a copy of Bertha’s report, contact her at LSU, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Mississippi Housing Plans Kermit Ray, EAE, Mississippi State University has assembled an extremely well illustrated selection of house plans suitable for their State. For a copy of this, contact Kermit at MSU. MWPS House Plan Catalog John Pedersen, with the help of the housing committee of Midwest Plan Service, is putting together their house plan catalog. This catalog will include some cooperative plan exchange plans; Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas and Mis- souri plans; contemporary farm houses and four home improvement plans. John would appreciate getting your order for copies in early. Missouri's Low Cost Home Ralph Ricketts and Louise Woodruff, University of Missouri, have put to- gether a number of plans for low to medium cost homes. Ralph reports that these plans have been extremely successful in Missouri and that the Farmers Home Administration has been making use of practically all of the plans. For illustrative sheets on these house plans, contact Ralph or Louise. Moisture Control in The Home Conrad Gilbertson, EAE at North Dakota, now with ARS in Nebraska, is the author of Circular, AE-80 “Moisture Control in The Home.” This is a type of circular that lessens the number of letters you have to answer in the winter time. Contact North Dakota State University for a copy of this well illustrated circular. Income and Home Investment Carlton Edwards, EAE at Michigan State University, has put together a small report on the relationship between income and home investment. Carlton used 215-time-annual-income as the rule of thumb for housing investment. Of particular interest is the correlation of square feet of housing per annual income. These figures could be rather significant to housing education. For a copy of this, contact Carlton, East Lansing, Michigan. LETTER NO. 170, JUNE 1967 Housing Summer School The University of Maryland is offering a three hour credit course on housing. The course will be taught by Dr. Jane K. Shearer of the College of Home Economics. The course is designed primarily for Extension Agents and is broken into two major parts: (a) the external factors affecting housing and 2073 (b) housing and the individual: Additional information can be obtained from the College of Home Economics, Director of Summer School, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20740. jad LETTER NO. 171, OCTOBER 1967 Migrant Housing Michigan State University has 18 migrant housing plans available. These are printed on 81% x 11 sheets. They also have a bulletin at the printers on camp management. As for their availability, contact Bob Maddex, EAE at MSU. . . Family Housing for Migrant Workers Russ Parker and Dick Rule, architects with AERD-ARS are cooperative authors of a bulletin on Family Housing for Migrant Agricultural Workers. In this publication they show floor plans and elevations. If you desire a copy, contact Russ Parker at Beltsville, Maryland. Senior Citizens Check-Sheet Bernice Strawn, Home Management Specialist, Oregon State University, in cooperation with Herb Sinnard, Head of the Architectural Department, has prepared a check sheet on homes for senior citizens. This is a four page mimeo on things to look for to determine if the home is suitable for occupancy by senior citizens. Contact Bernice at OSU, Corvallis for a copy. House Quality Measuring Carleton Edwards, EAE and Annette Schaeffer, Home Management, at Michi- gan State University are co-authors of Report No. 8 from the Rural Manpower Center on “A Housing Quality Measuring Scale.” The scale was developed and field tested on 135 rural houses in Michigan. The authors developed a numerical system of scoring and then grouped the scoring system into a basic, adequate, comfortable and luxury dwelling. For availability of copies, contact Carleton Edwards, MSU, East Lansing, Michigan 48823. Housing Seminars Televised Washington State’s Extension Housing Seminars will be televised by a Seattle station. This is a series of 8 half hour programs. A special “viewer's kit” containing reference materials will be available for a $5 registration fee. Housing specialist Arlean Pattison will be one of the featured specialists in the program. Some Forest Service Publications The following are some Forest Service publications pertaining to housing that might be obtained from the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. They are as follows: ‘Wood Finishing: Cross Grain Cracking of Oil Base House Paints Discoloration of House Paint by Blue Stain Discoloration of House Paints by Water Soluble Extractives in Western Red Cedar and Redwood Finishing Exterior Plywood ‘Weathering of Wood Temperature Blistering of House Paints Painting Outside Wood Surfaces Mildew on House Paints Intercoat Peeling of House Paints Other publications available are: AIB 311—Selection and Use of Wood Products for Farm and Home Building FPL 47—Development of an Improved System of Wood Frame House Con- struction FPI 31—Guides to improve Frame Walls for Houses Technical Report No. 4—Low Profile Wood Floor Systems LETTER NO. 172, NOVEMBER 1967 Total Hlectric Model Farm House The 1967 Wisconsin Farm Progress Days keynoted the Total Electric Model Farm House. A four page brochure was put together on this, showing the floor plans and construction materials, utilities and equipment. This house 2074 looks like it was built from the plan Ted Brevick developed. For a copy of the brochure, contact Ted or Lynn Brooks at the University of Wisconsin. MWPS Catalogs House Plans Midwest Plan Service has put together a catalog of plans for family housing. This catalog shows USDA house plans, plus those for Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, and Wisconsin. For a copy of this catalog contact John Petersen, Midwest Plan Service, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50010. Economy Housing Seminar The ASAE sponsored Economy Housing Seminar will have been completed by the time this Newsletter is circulated. Proceedings of this Seminar will be published and I presume it will be for sale thru the ASAE headquarters. Fred Roth, EAE, at Iowa State University is the Chairman in charge of the proceedings and will be able to give you more infcrmation on their availability. LETTER NO. 173, FEBRUARY 1968 Cost Saving Technical Report #6 from the National Forest Products Association has to do with “Cost Saving with the Unicom Method.” In this report two houses are studied in the Washington, D.C. area using standard methods of con- struction and the Unicom Method. A substantial saving in the construction of each house was realized through the preplanning and predesign system. Copies of this are available from the Association, 1619 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., ‘Washington, D.C. 20036. 4—H Dormitory Max Falkner, EAE at Tennessee has designed a 4-H dormitory style cottage. This cottage has two wings of dormitories, 26’ x 32’ jutting from a central core which contains the bath facilities and assembly room. The approximate overall dimensions of this design is 32’ x 78’. This cottage should handle at least 32 people within the dormitory. With the possibility of double stacking bunks and utilizing the assembly room, sixty-six people could be comfortably housed. Contact Max if you desire a copy of this. Ask for the Clyde M. York 4-H Club Training Center Cottage. Migrant Housing in Michigan Dave Norman, former EAE at Michigan is the author of bulletin #586 en- titled “Suggestions for Migrant Housing in Michigan.” This bulletin discusses the housing needs, site requirements, camp layout, housing types and design essentials. It lists the migrant housing plans that have been developed at Michigan State University and the U.S.D.A. tenant housing and cabin plans. Copies are available at MSU, East Lansing, Michigan. New England Vacation Home Study The Department of Interior, Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, Washington, D.C. 20240, contracted for a “Northern New England Vacation Home Study, 1966.” This was conducted to develop measures of the extent that occupants of vacation homes participate in outdoor recreation and the amounts they spent in connection with their vacation homes. Contact the Bureau if you desire a copy of this study. Papers from the Economy Housing Seminar I suspect that Ed Hanson of the University of Illinois still has some papers left on his talk “Pre-Cast Concrete Panels for Low Cost Homes” and that Jerry Newman, ARS, Beltsville would still have some copies left of his talk on “Heating Systems for Low Income Families.” If you would like a copy of their papers, contact the respective authors. The proceedings from the Economy Housing Seminar should be available soon. LETTER NO. 175, MAY 1968 Low Cost Experimental Houses John W. Talbot, researcher at Washington State University, has been working on experimental low cost houses. Two of his bulletins that would be of interest are bulletin #27—“Low Profile Wood Floor Systems,” and Bulletin #307—*“Frameless Glazing Systems for Framed Wood Buildings and 2075 Wood Foundations for Economy Housing.” Copies of these bulletins are avail- able from the Technical Extension Service, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington. LETTER OF JULY 1969 Homesites—What You Should Consider Special Circular 111, above title, by N. H. Wooding and J. A. Macialek of Penn State; contains information relating to things that a potential home owner should consider when looking for a place to build a home or a summer cottage. Topics discussed include zoning ordinances, location of lot, topography, soil, drainage, water supply and sewage disposal. A convenient check list is included. Available from Henry at 204 Agricultural Engineering Bldg., Univer- sity Park, Pa. 16802. Housing Slides Still Popular The USDA Office of Information has sold 1,471 sets of color slides on vari- ous aspects of home building, prepared in cooperation with the Southern Regional Plan Exchange. Best sellers so far are “Heating and Cooling Your Home,” “Wiring Your Home,” and “A Good Kitchen for Your Home.” One out of eight of all USDA slide sets is on Housing and was prepared by the Southern Region Plan Service. Ag. engineers and home management special- ists received copies of the lecture guides for each of the sets as they became available. HUD Homeownership Training Program This project involves the cooperation of 1,000 families in Winston-Salem, N.C., the Extension Division of the N.C. State University at Raleigh, and the Winston-Salem Housing Authority, Urban Coalition and Community Action agencies. Under a jointly worked out plan, HUD has awarded a $250,000 contract to the University Extension for the staffing of a home ownership training program to train low-income families who are moved from rented shanties in the central city to private homes in outlying neighborhoods. HUD will also fund the building of 1,000 3-and-4-bedroom private houses by the city Housing Authority. LETTER OF MARCH 1970 Legislation The Housing Act of 1969 (Public Law 91-152, approved Dec. 24, 1969) amended Section 1010(a) of the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan De- velopment Act of 1966 to read: “. . . assure, to the extent feasible, in connec- tion with the construction, major rehabilitation, or maintenance of any housing assisted under this section that there is “no restraint by contract, building code, zoning ordinance, or practice against the employment of new or improved technologies, techniques, materials, and methods or of pre-assembled products which may reduce the cost or improve the quality of such construction, re- habilitation, and maintenance, and therefore stimulate expanded production of housing under this section, except where such restraint is necessary to insure safe and healthful working and living conditions.” The Senate Amend- ment had applied to all housing under Federal programs but the final law applies the restriction only to experimental housing programs, such as Opera- tion Breakthrough. Operation Breakthrough This is a program of the Department of Housing and Urban Development designed to utilize modern techniques of production, marketing and manage- ment to provide housing for all income levels through a partnership of labor, consumers, private enterprise, and local, State and Federal governments. Operation Breakthrough has two major components: (1) Aggregating the demand and need for housing, and identifying the land available for such housing, and (2) Supporting and encouraging the design, testing, evaluation, and prototype construction of innovative concepts that are now available in the industry to provide high volume production approaches to the supply of housing. Cooperative efforts of Federal, State and local governments will be directed to the problems of market aggregation, while private industry is to be solicited for its best ideas for producing acceptable low-cost housing in quantity. Local and State governmental bodies will undertake to develop an inven- 2076 tory of the housing need and demand; to identify the available land; to Te- move or release the restrictive effects of building, housing and zoning codes and other regulations; to locate sources of construction financing; and to encourage the construction industry to improve labor productivity and pro- duction methods. The Department (HUD) will give priority in allocation of operational and program funds to those areas and localities willing to under- take these activities. Contracts were just let to 22 firms to implement “Opera- tion Breakthrough.” Attic Fan Arrangement J. W. Simons and B. C. Haynes, Jr. of Georgia Experiment Station are authors of this report of cooperatively conducted research on attic fan ar- rangement and operation for optimum summer cooling in residences. The work is intended as a contribution to the Southern Regional Housing Projects (en- vironmental and economic factors related to improved rural family housing). The attic fan offers a less expensive means of summer cooling for the many people who cannot afford mechanical air conditioning. Results of various test conditions and costs, ete. are given in this Research Report #51. Contact either of the authors at the Ag. Engr. Dept. College Station, Athens, Ga. 30601 for a copy. Mr. Cocuran. This recent letter augments the information gath- ered by the National Council on Agriculture Life and Labor 2 years ago. NCALL directed a letter to all land-grant colleges asking them for information on their research and publications into community development and rural housing and asking for the names of pro- fessors who were particularly interested in the subjects. A handful sent back intelligible replies which showed some interest. One sent back a letter saying that one engineering professor was interested in house plans and that they had a pamphlet on selecting rugs for the farm home and other on more storage space for farm homes. That, incidentally, came from the most rural State in the United States, North Dakota. The outstanding letter we received stated that if they could un- derstand what we meant by our letter they would undertake to reply. We didn’t write back. The last agency in government likely to help low income rural people on housing is the Extension Service, Federal and state. A quick addition there. One of the major foundations has had a man circulating in the South for 6 months talking to officials of the land-grant colleges asking them what kind of ideas they could give his foundation for removing rural poverty, including housing, and he told me two days ago that not one of them had come up with an idea and that he was concerned they were simply incapable of thinking in those terms; they had been away from the poor people so long that they just could not get down to that level in their think- ing. It is a curious tribute to the metropolitan orientation of our so- ciety that these facts, particularly on housing, are not known to even literate, informed, interested people. As I indicate in my state- ment, even on the Hill here we have had trouble getting some offices to even believe the Bureau of the Census figures because they are so at variance with prevailing preconceptions. Obviously no individual or society is going to attempt to deal with a problem until it knows and acknowledges the problem is there, and in our society it must be documented and quantified. Even I did not have any idea—after being concerned about this for 80 2077 years—that the level of need was anywhere near as high as it was until Dr. Rucker began to dig into it a couple years ago. Why this problem exists in such magnitude is neither easy nor impossible to analyze. In the first place, this Nation is in trouble across the board on housing. The Secretary of HUD says that 80 percent of our people, urban or rural, cannot afford to buy a decent home. In a nation of homeowners, this is a startling figure and the explanation runs the whole gamut of the sources of the housing problems. 37 40 It starts with a deficiency of supply, brought about by high in- terest rates, skyrocketing land prices, outmoded zoning practices, outmoded production practices—all of these items are the direct or indirect result of public policy. Rather than raise taxes to finance a major war, we have played irresponsible games with monetary policy. The housing industry is particularly susceptible to crippling, has no built-in capacity for rolling with the punch when the costs of financing climb skyward. The crunch from the war and ill-advised fiscal policy, however, is just the culmination of long neglect, particularly in the low-income housing field. Skyrocketing land prices are a tribute to inflation, to the lack of a land policy, and the existence of a tax system which encourages land speculation and does nothing to inhibit it. The Cuamman. Mr. Cochran, at that point are you referring to Federal or local taxes which encourage land speculation ? Mr. Cocuran. Both. At the Federal level of course we encourage land speculation through the capital gains tax. You get special privi- lege in taxation if you make your living out of unearned increment. At the local level in a lot of communities it is just as bad. In northern Virginia the State has shifted from land taxes, particu- larly in the rural counties where the assessments are very low. In the northern Virginia hunt country where Mr. Chalk bought his place the taxes on land are very low and you can sink money out there and spend an enormous amount of money under the existing tax laws in building up the actual value. If you pay anything on it, it is certainly not until you die. So I think across the board the tax sys- tems are rigged to reward the nonuse of land and the purchase and holding of it for speculating purposes rather than the use of it. The CramrMAN. 1 know a lot of people have been puzzled by the seeming paradox that even at a time when farm profits—that is, farm returns—have been static or going down and the price of the land keeps going up. That really can’t be explained, can it, by any basis other than the way the tax structure is set? Mr. Cocuran. That is the primary source for it which also means that we cannot get young people into farming because the cost is prohibitive. The family farmers grow older and older and are being gobbled up. Zoning has made a dent in the housing supply. In a lot of areas, of course, there is a real problem—not always in the rural areas— and outmoded production practices should bear some part of the blame but a minor part. But there is more to this. The Federal Government has simply not acted responsibly on housing, particularly for low income people. It spends $9 billion a year subsidizing poor housing through social 2078 security and welfare payments, but when dealing with housing production it has not only been mighty parsimonious, but worse, it has let housing—human shelter—fall victim to every little vested interest which could afford a ball point pen or an expensive lobbyist. Until very recent years, the Congress did little for housing for low and moderate income people except emit some moving rhetoric and establish (1) an insurance program for moderate income people designed to take the risk but not the profit out of private loans, and (2) set up a public housing program. Other programs were either little more than demonstration programs like the Farm Security Administration’s farm labor camps or they were almost invariably related to the making of war. When we go to war we can even build housing if we can get it on the war agenda. I should say the Congress has done very little directly on hous- ing, that is to say, intentionally. But as a result of congressionally- blessed programs, we have ripped more housing out of the cities than we have replaced, particularly for low income groups we have bull- dozed down a lot of housing along our luxurious highways without any concern for replacing it; we have upended the cornucopia of our national affluence to provide highways and other roads which facilitated the migration of the more affluent out of the city into suburbia and contributed to the deterioration of our central cities; we have rewarded speculation in land through taxes. We urge this committee through its efforts to direct its attention to the desirability of discouraging speculation in land by levying a special tax on unearned increment and find ourselves in agreement with the “Supplementary Views on the Taxation of Land Values” which appeared in the report of the Douglas Commission. We would suggest further that the proceeds from this special tax be put into a low-income housing trust fund, half of it available to the Federal Government and half of it to State and local gov- ernments for approved housing projects, including land acquisition. The present capital gains tax puts a premium on land speculation over many other forms of investment and is totally antisocial in its ramifications. The CmammaN. Mr. Cochran, as you know there has been a lot of debate and discussion on Federal revenue sharing with the State governments. Is there some special reason why you would recom- mend this sharing in taxes on unearned increment as distinct from other taxes? Mr. Cocuran. Many of us have been dubious about revenue shar- ing for many reasons but I am not dubious at all about this kind of procedure because I think if the States want to share a Federal revenue they should help the Congress to enact some good social tax legislation with the understanding that they get a cut. This would be an enormously controversial measure as you well know but if the 50 States figured they could reap a few billion dollars out of it to help meet their social problems, maybe instead of join- ing the lobbyists against it they would go to the Congress and pro- mote such a law, securing money they need along with some Federal funds. Give the States some incentive to help provide revenue rather than knocking at the door with a cup in their hands asking for a handout from existing revenues. 2079 Also indirectly, Congress has subsidized concentration of our “huddled masses” —we used to ask Europe to send us the people—in our central cities through a most unwise welfare program which ties Federal benefits to either the capacity or the willingness of State and local governments to pay, creating vast inequities in pay- ments. The results should astonish no one. In a country which makes a fetish of the economic man, we know that higher wages will attract manpower; we know that higher profits, in the absence of monopoly restraints, will attract capital; but we have happily assumed for almost 40 years that Federal wel- fare payments delivered on an uneven basis would not influence the location of people. ; An NBC program a few years ago showed a poor woman with six kids; she was living miserably in Chicago on $300 per month. She could have raised those kids in relative comfort in Arkansas, but she could not get ADC in Arkansas, so she had to go live miserably in Chicago where she could get it. I am surprised that more people have not moved because of the inequities in the welfare. The Cuammax. Do you think this is the primary reason for the exodus of people out of rural areas into the cities? Is that one of the most significant factors in explaining that? Mr. Cocuran. No, it is only a part of the total picture. Tom Moore was discussing this last night. He has had a long experience in California, was at one time the Administrator of the California State Welfare Department. Would you like to comment on that? Mr. Moore. Senator, I don’t know whether you could call it a prime cause but there is no doubt it is a factor. When the public income is distributed as unevenly as it historically has been in the public assistance programs and other sources of income simply are not available, then it does become a part of the motivation for move- ment. We think it has probably been a greater motivation in the Middle Western and Eastern States than in the Far West because our experience in California showed that people who applied for welfare there had been residents of the State for a lengthy period of time before application, but we didn’t have some of the city and county supported programs that the middle western cities and eastern cities have. Also I think that the travel distances and other radical changes and life style perhaps restrain people from coming to California when they did move to other metropolitan areas. I think the main point that is made here is it is very valid. This kind of unequal dis- tribution of public benefits has got to be a consideration for families who have virtually no other source of income. The CmammanN. More favorable welfare benefits in the richer States certainly serves in a sense as a magnet to pull people out of the rural areas. Mr. Moore. Yes. Mr. Cocuran. It at least makes it possible for them to survive the misery of cities whereas during the great enclosure movement in the South their ability to survive is dubious. On the other hand, in rural areas we have dealt most generously with agribusiness. We have handed out enormous subsidies to large- 2080 scale operators under the guise of aiding the family farmer; we have subsidized farm operators, packers, processors, and the whole agri- business complex by exempting them, more or less totally, from wage and hour laws, unemployment compensation, part of social security, the right to organize and bargain collectively—you name it, and we have come belatedly if at all to making these benefits available to rural and small town people. No wonder they have sunk lower and lower and the cities have risen. These discriminatory laws which resulted in lagging develop- ment of incomes in these areas at the same time facilitated the greatest enclosure movement in the history of the world: The CrARMAN. You have used that phrase “enclosure movement.” ‘What do you mean by that, the enclosurement movement ? Mr. Cocuran. Historically western European capitalism got its manpower supply from the enclosure movement in which the great barons under the lure of the sale of commercial products begin to preempt the grazing and agricultural rights of the peasants. You will recall the Goldsmith, “Deserted Village.” In this country in the last 25 years, as a result of technology, the price support program which put emphasis on rewarding the total production with income rather than diverting money in support of the family forum of the various other devices for family income support programs or the other devices that could have been used, we have thrown all of the power of the Federal Government behind this tremendous burst of technology which has swept people off the land in such large numbers over the country. And as though that were not enough, we imported cheap labor out of Mexico at the rate of half a million a year to make sure the big operators had a cheap seasonable labor force while they mechanized. The Federal Government could not have planned an enclosure move- ment that would have been more devastating. This enclosure movement which is the basic push behind the out- migration of millions of rural people in the last 20 years was the result of deliberate congressional policy. This enclosure movement and the resulting out-migration has created a crisis in the city without curing the rural housing problem because rural areas have suffered from deficiencies in modern facili- ties and housing for so long that the out-migration did not make decent housing available. You could remove two-thirds of the popu- lation from Pat Gish’s four counties and it would not open up many decent buildings because so many are living in indecent homes now. Heaven only knows how many families have been expelled from rural homes through this enclosure movement and how many are still allowed to live in shacks for which the landlord no longer feels ony need for maintenance because the people are no longer useful to im. The victims of this enclosure movement, whether they moved to the cities or to the small towns or tried to settle out along a road somewhere, have been the tragic victims of an almost equally effec- tive exclosure movement based partly on rascism and partly on: their poverty. 2081 The poor or not so poor black who moved to the cities found poor housing, at very high prices, awaiting him; the poor white who moved there fared little better because in this country one’s passport to decent housing has to be stamped majority and affluent. If you are either. colored or poor, you are in trouble. There has been a lot more attention given to the problems of the cities because of the overt anger there and the justified uneasiness that someone is just about to burn down the penthouses or make them unuseable because the streets are either actually unsafe or reported to be. But the problems in the small towns and rural areas are no less real or tragic. In these areas there is very little public housing, and it is too expensive for many of the poor who frequently get no assistance except free food—and that recently—with which one cannot pay rent. And no other agency is available to provide housing or credit for housing except in token amounts. Even where a family can by some means. secure the funds with which to build a house, land is very frequently not available at all either because of racial preju- dice, bias against the nonafiluent, or because as in the Mississippi Delta under its new antipollution regulations land cannot be made available without the prior outlay of funds for construction of expensive water and sewer facilities, which is not forthcoming for one reason or another. When land is available, it is too often available at exorbitant prices. Within recent years, the public has finally become aware of what government officials, lenders, real estate people, some homeowners, and some home buyers or would-be home buyers have known a long time, and that is that the Federal Housing Administration has red circled most of the central cities; i.e., they will not insure loans in those areas. The result of this policy, which still exists sub rosa (where it always existed) was that a flow of credit into the central cities was a leaving them to deteriorate under the dual impact of credit privation and the accompanying evil of exorbitant charges for capital by those who ventured in after a quick buck. We are hopeful that despite his failure so far, Mr. Romney, whom I consider to be a sincere, concerned, and intelligent man, will be able to command his troops, sooner or later, to abandon this policy, but currently they apparently wink as they salute. But this red circling phenomena has not been restricted to the central cities where FHA as the appointed handmaiden of private investors has worked hand-in-hand with some less than creative forces, this red circling has been almost ubiquitous in small towns and rural areas since the memory of man runneth not to the con- trary. In other words, FHA never has functioned in small towns and gual areas except under exceptions to the rule, and it is still not oing so. To impute blame here in the normal moral sense is fruitless because Congress apparently never intended that FHA should be anything except a scow on which lenders, realtors, developers, surveyors, title finance companies, and the rest of the camp followers of the housing industry could ride when they could not get aboard the yacht oper- ated by banks, insurance companies, savings and loan, and other lenders, catering to the better quality—that is, more afluent—folk. 2082 Whatever the various Congresses may have intended, FHA has in fact worked hand-in-glove with private groups, operating only where they would operate, and sharing their prejudices. In other words, they were in “business”—that is, not exercising a public re- sponsibility. They were in business to take the risk out of private credit for certain kinds of people, not to serve the public or housing consumers except insofar as the interests of the public and consumer happened to be equated with the interests of the housing business complex. Frequently, all of the housing ingredients are present in rural areas, except credit, and this was to have been FHA’s con- tribution, but it has seen fit to play a passive role, and play the piano only where it was invited to do so. This did not include small towns and rural areas. Public housing has also been largely an urban or metropolitan program. Once a reactionary court had thumped the New Dealers over the head on federally constructed public housing, the Congress created a public housing system based on local authorities backed by generous Federal subsidy—not generous enough as we all know. Unfortunately, that subsidy was not available to the poor wherever they happened to be but only where the local power structure was sufficiently wise or enterprising or humane to undertake the con- struction of public housing. Public housing exists mostly in urban areas although there is a modestly encouraging trend in the other direction in recent years. Unfortunately, this modestly encouraging trend is apparently the result of an increasing fail-function role in the cities, as well as a new solicitude in rural areas, mostly for the elderly. The CrARMAN. What do you mean by that term “fail-function ?” Mr. Cocuraw. I was writing this statement mostly on the changes of percentages of public housing going into non-SMSA areas and it occurred to me if the cities had been moving in the direction of meet- ing the housing needs at anything like the pace they should have been that the figures should probably have been reversed. So what appears to be an increasingly happy situation actually means that the cities are falling even further behind and the rural areas are doing just a little bit better. For whatever reasons, and the Congress should have long since ascertained those reasons, the “red circling” of rural people has been as effective as in FHA’s programs. The main source of rural housing credit, as well as credit for rural community facilities, is the Farmers Home Administration. Except for farm homes (not many) the housing program of Farmers Home Administration is less than a decade old. For a quarter of a century Congress authorized and financed pub- lic housing and FHA (HUD) to meet some of the need in the cities, shutting its eyes to the fact that neither of these agencies really functioned in small towns and rural areas. Both agencies were de- pression babies, brought forth in that burst of social innovation which marked the end to our long preoccupation with the mythology of laissez-faire capitalism and our almost total devotion to the myth of the comprehensive capacities of private enterprise to meet all economic needs which, morally, were worth meeting. 2083 Although, under the grim pressure of need, we were able to reach an uneasy concensus on these new functions, our capacity for grasp- ing the reality of our economy was too limited to permit us to go a step further and recognize that they could function only in the cities, or perhaps there were enough realists—on the wrong side of the issue—who understood very well. Consciously and subconsciously, we have been led by the unseen hand of another facet of our mythology to assume for at least a hundred years that whatever aided the growth of our cities would redound to the benefit of all; moreover, we have assumed, very com- fortably, that there was some technological imperative (for which read “external economies of business”) which dictated that sooner or later, when we really became civilized as the result of ameliora- tive trends, that 90 percent or more of our people would live on 1 percent of the land happy, prosperous, cultured, and secure. The place for people who were in trouble in rural areas and small towns was obviously in bigger towns. Electricity, inside plumbing, paved streets, medical facilities, neon lights, the more gilded pleas- ures of the flesh, and lately, intolerable pollution came first to the cities and (except for pollution) exercised a magnetic attraction for those who either wanted to escape from rural areas or who had no real choice but to leave. For a wide variety of reasons, some real, some romantic, this was assumed to be good. Given such assumptions, which have run to the very core of our philosophy of social and economic development so strongly that they are in the nature of rationalized preconceptions almost religious in their sanctity, small wonder that the Congress should have moved easily with its constituency. The “farm bloc” which exercised power in the Congress, more or less, for a generation was actually a coalition of farmers and their suppliers and creditors (including a lot of so-called farmers who were corporations, doctors, lawyers and other absentee land- lords) who were struggling to increase or protect their share of the American economic pie. They were much more concerned with in- creasing prices, decreasing the number of farmers, and holding wages down than they were in improving the quality of rural life by such exotic devices as subsidized housing programs. The result of all these forces and preconceptions was that neither in the New Deal days nor subsequently in the benchmark Housin Act of 1949 was any effort a to tailor the program to I towns and rural areas, except for the modest farm housing program of Farmers Home Administration. The very promising farm labor housing program of the Farm Security Administration, which was a conscious recognition of the need at a wholly different level of social consciousness and responsibility, was destroyed by Agri-busi- ness in a drive to prevent the unionization of hired farmworkers and prevent the government from underpinning family farming by the development of cooperatives and other similar programs, including liberal credit. The CmamrMaN. Mr. Cochran, why do you single out the Farm Security Administration program as having had special merit? ‘What was the characteristic of that program? 42-778—T71—pt. 7—13 2084 Mz. Cocaran. It is the only legitimate effort that has been made in this country since the Homestead Act was passed to provide de- cent housing, medical care, and community facilities to farmworkers. The Farm Security “camps” had facilities for seasonal workers, the people who were moving, and they were modest. But there was sanitation, there were community and laundry facilities and a nice community center for meeting and to carry on day care services; there was a clinic and doctors there paid for by the Government to take care of their more obvious needs. There were also garden homes built so that if a family found a regular job at $30 a month he could move into one of these houses and become a permanent part of the community. They were demo- cratically governed, they had emergency relief funds available—the only place a farmworker could go to get any kind of emergency relief. a It was a'tremendously inspiring social program to meet the needs of several million Americans. And it was wiped out. Every farm labor housing program we have had since has been designed to meet the needs of the growers, more or less, but so poorly designed they have failed even the growers. Most people apparently assumed that if housing was needed in rural areas and small towns, FHA and public housing could func- tion there. Even at that time any examination of the facts would have revealed that the public housing program would have to function differently in rural areas because of the costs of adminis- tration, the level of welfare payments and the skimpiness of Fed- eral subsidy. By the same token, the facts would have revealed that a middle income housing program like FHA, created as the hand- maiden of private lending institutions, could not function in rural areas because of the paucity of private credit institutions there. We left our preconceptions undisturbed for a generation. It would be less than candid to pass on without saying that there were plenty of people who would have countered any moves for ef- fective programs with assertions that we were jeopardizing the so- ciety by subsidizing the undeserving poor at the expense of the thrifty and distorting technologically blessed patterns of growth by encouraging the surplus rural population to remain where they were. Be that as it may, it was another 25 years before the Congress discovered that Federal programs were not serving rural areas and approved a modest homeownership program to be administered by Farmers Home Administration. The program was to be financed out of direct appropriations, a tacit admission that the private credit institutions were not out there. This was amended later, after years of starvation by the appropriations committees, to enable Farmers Home Administration to make insured loans but again the machinery was provided for Farmers Home Administration to sell its paper at the top (in the cities) and lend the money in rural areas, another admission by the Congress that the FHA housing business complex did not function in small towns and rural areas. In a sense, Farmers Home Administration, that battered and ane- mic stepchild of the New Deal, was ideally designed to operate a more or less direct lending program in rural areas. It has about 1,700 field offices which are more or less accessible to rural people 2085 and therefore provide (given the money) the missing ingredient in rural housing, a source of credit at more or less reasonable rates. But, as indicated, using direct funds it was starved by a budget- conscious Congress worshipping at the feet of a balanced budget and increasingly concerned with “budgetary impact,” particularly after we became engaged in a major, undeclared war which we have tried to finance out of funds denied social agencies or extracted from the consumer by inflation. Even after insured lending was approved the agency had to struggle with a Rube Goldberg apparatus for raising the money, among other devices, begging labor unions and others to invest for the good of mankind instead of being able to secure funds rationally through the sale of guaranteed securities or some similar device. The Congress had refused to furnish government credit to rural areas and small towns. It now turned to insured loans but was very careful not to rouse the wrath of the privileged by invading the mortgage bankers field. Whatever was to be done was to be done only with the advice and consent not of the Congress but the vested interests who feared that any precedent set for serving the credit needs of rural areas might disturb their control of the rest of the country. Eventually, Farmers Home Administration has been enabled and compelled to move more and more in the direction of a security marketing agency but even currently the requirements are that they peddle each mortgage indi- vidually. They are still peddling them on a national market. The Cmamman. Mr. Cochran, you referred to the uneasiness about disturbing the Federal budget. The Farmers Home Administration does not really disrupt the budget. Haven’t these loans been repaid ? Mr. Cocuran. Yes; too well, we would say. But the uneasiness runs in two directions. Currently Farmers Home is underfinanced administratively but it also operates under a Bureau of the Budget ceiling on insured loans as an anti-inflationary device. First they were restricted because of the budgetary impact; now they are restricted because of anti-inflationary policies. The Caamman. The budgetary impact is always a temporary one, is it not, and the loans in the Farmers Home Administration are eventually repaid and repaid with interest. There is really no net loss to the Treasury, is there, from that program? Mr. Cocurax. Well, Senator, there is no net loss to the Treasury from the loans, but there is some cost for administration. The “budgetary impact” problem applies to administrative costs and to any direct loans. Oddly enough, insured private loans do not have a budgetary impact, that is they do not come out of public funds, but we find that when the FHA /HUD program insures loans it does so without any Bureau of the Budget (Presidential) restraints, but even though the Farmers Home insured loans have no different im- pact on the budget, the President imposes a ceiling. This is a double standard. As Sandburg once wrote, “Whether the stone bumps the jug or the jug bumps the stone, it’s bad for the jug.” The program to serve rural areas seems to be a jug and if we don’t bump it with budgetary impact logic we bump it as inflationary. The FHA/HUD system had been grafted onto a private credit system and generous levies had been imposed on the housing con- 2086 sumer to finance this system, but after Congress had discovered that the same system would not work in small towns and rural areas, the Congress has continued to starve Farmers Home for administrative funds, to hamper it in securing the essential credit funds, and to put its implicit blessing on the ceiling which the President—for which read the Bureau of the Budget—imposes on it each year in the name of fiscal policy designed to finance a war without taxes. The present backlog of applications is roughly equal to their total hous- ing loans last year and still rising. armers Home Administration administers some 20 different pro- grams—I think the actual total is 19. In 11 years the size of its program has increased something like 624 percent but its available manpower has increased only 77 percent. For fiscal 1971 Farmers Home Administration requested $146 million in administrative funds but the President cut that back to $85 million and the Congress more or less went along. There are other stringencies. Despite a backlog need of some $11 billion in community facilities in the Farmers Home Administration areas—a figure dug out by our good friend Senator Goodell this year—the funds available for last fiscal year in grants was only $46 million and the ceiling on direct loans is $64 million. So at that rate we are going to clean up the rural communities’ water and sewer needs in one century provided the needs do not increase. Aside from Farmers Home Administration’s inadequate resources for meeting its present service area needs, it is apparent that there is a serious gap in housing services. Farmers Home Administration is restricted to towns of 5,500 and below and FHA does little in towns of 25,000 and below. This leaves millions of people who are caught between Farmers Home Administration statutory limits on service and FHA’s functional limits. The year is 1970. Incredible. We were encouraged last year when Representative Wright Pat- man caused HUD and USDA to create a task force now known as the HUD-USDA Rural Housing Coordinating Group, but nothing much has come since. Even after they were brought into existence the President wiped out Farmers Home’s above-moderate-income program on the grounds that FHA would meet the need. That is cold nonsense, and the task force’s own report had indicated that it was but that didn’t influence the Bureau of the Budget. There is one more item I would like to take up before turning to some suggestions for remedial action and that is the curious philos- ophy of the Farmers Home Administration—to which Mrs. Gish made some reference—in making loans to low income families. All of us grew up having to memorize that food, clothing, and shelter were the necessities of life but when you look at Farmers Home you wonder whether the message got through. The history of that agency is that it was supposed to make loans only to families who could not get money from any other source. That meant it was supposed to make risky loans. The Congress told it to make risky loans for social purposes, which meant, of course, that it should have been anticipated that its losses would run rather high. It follows ipso facto that if the loans are risky there will be losses, and yet under the battering it has received from the vested interests in and out of the Congress for several decades the agency 2087 has been inordinately proud of a loan loss—Iless than 1 percent— so low as to be a demonstration that it was not carrying out its mandate. This low rate of loss has been maintained, in fact, by re- pudiating the spirit if not the word of the law. ; Why? The answer is easy to come by. The Congress authorizes and the Congress appropriates, but not infrequently it seems the left hand which authorizes and the right hand which appropriates do not belong to the same body. The agricultural appropriations subcom- mittees of both houses are the interpreters of the “spirit” of the credit laws governing Farmers Home Administration and the agency chiefs, through a long series of administrations, have leaned over backward to prove that they were sound bankers lest their agency be destroyed. That they in fact eroded Farmers Home Administra- tion’s social usefulness to save its bureaucratic life is obvious. Under more courageous leadership in the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture the agency might have stuck to its guns, but the late administrator of Farmers Home Administration, Howard Bertsch, asserted many times that he always got more gen- erous treatment from the ostensibly tight-fisted appropriations sub- committees than he was ever able to get out of the White House. Any Senator might recall, on another front, that the present Farmers Home Administration’s water and sewer program was turned down by the Bureau of the Budget, but the Aiken bill with 93 Senate cosponsors was enacted by the Congress. These illustra- tions tend to indicate the plight of Farmers Home Administration and throw some light on its curious procedures on housing. Whatever the reason, Farmers Home Administration in dealing with a low-income family on a housing loan constructs a budget for the family including everything except shelter, ascertains the family income and subtracts the family budget from that income. The residual, whatever is left over, is the amount which Farmers Home Administration considers to be the mortgage paying capacity of the family. Therefore, if a family has been paying $50 a month for a shack to some slumlord for years and wants to buy or build a house costing half that amount per month, Farmers Home Ad- ministration’s curious logic would result in denial of a loan on the grounds that the family has no rent paying capacity after the deduc- tion of its other needs from its income. I want to make it clear that Farmers Home Administration offi- cials justify this policy on the highest of moral grounds; that is, that they will not be party to “boxing a family in” on a mortgage at the expense of food, clothing, and medical care. They admit that they deny loans when the mortgage payment would be less than the family’s rent, because the slumlord may be willing to starve the kids in the family but not old Farmers Home. I have personally argued this with Farmers Home for about 4 years, and it is to their credit that they have the strength of their convictions. They improve neither their argument nor the policy. The real money, of course, is that this morality is a key device for assuring the repayment of the loan, guaranteeing continued ap- proval from critical congressional committees albeit in exchange for a penny ante program. No change will be made short of con- gressional action, if that is possible. 2088 Consider this specific example. In Putnam County, Fla., by use of VISTA workers and OEO funds, the Rural Housing Alliance built a demonstration house worth approximately $7,000 to $7,500 which we offered to sell for about $4,600 to a woman with a decent credit record who had five children of her own and two grandchil- dren to house. She had been living in an incredible shack, a fire Jed, cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and degrading to a og. At the minimum interest rate of 1 percent the cost of paying on the mortgage plus fire insurance came to less than $20 per month ($18.34). (Florida has a homestead exemption law, so taxes would not be a cost to her.) Farmers Home Administration rejected her application for a mortgage on the grounds of (1) that she owned a lot, the one on which her old shack stood, and (2) that they could not make the loan to someone who was “largely” (or “entirely” as one letter said—the letters varied) dependent on welfare. (About $1,200 of her income is from ADC, the other $600 from fruit picking.) These arguments were both subsequently abandoned under pres- sure from the Rural Housing Alliance in terms of Farmers Home Administration’s own guidelines but this poor woman did not get a loan because when all the chips were down and the regulations pe- rused and the files cluttered with appeals Farmers Home Administra- tion came down hard on the point that she could not in fact afford any kind of a house. RHA was told she should go to public housing instead. Inquiry revealed, unsurprisingly, that (1) there was no public housing unit available, and (2) if it were the cost would be $32 a month compared to $18 for the home RHA was prepared to sell her. The Cuamman. Mr. Cochran, in that connection what kind of a congressional action do you think might influence a more desirable FHA policy, Farmers Home Administration policy? Mr. Cocruran. Well, I can think of two or three things. In the first place, these loan programs originally had some backup and grant money so that if a Farmers Home supervisor were a man of goodwill and moved by human concern but uneasy about that dandy credit rating—with the Congress—that Farmers Home has, he could kind of salve his conscience on the one hand and show his hu- manitarianism by throwing a thousand dollars into the pot. This would have done some good; it would not have done any- thing for Mrs. Sylvester. In other words, the depth of the subsidy the Congress is willing to give will decrease the number of Mrs. Sylvesters. The second thing that can be done and which in part you are engaged in and to which Senator Cook made reference earlier is that somehow or another the Congress and the executive agencies have got to be caught up in a sweep of some kind of a new feeling of morality of need so that the agencies can get the consent of the Congress to follow the law which said they are to make risky loans. But if they ever got the impression by the Congress beginning to pour grant funds in and issue sharp criticism of the rigidity of the guidelines showing that there was a new level of alertness and con- cern in Congress, the Farmers Home Administration would respond. 2089 So a part of it is trying to get before the Congress and the rest of the American people the facts about how they are operating, get additional funds and additional authorities and then hopefully part of the enthusiasm will loosen up those inflexible rules. I think Farmers Home should be asked to explain to a congres- sional committee how they can justify telling a man, “You go on paying $50 a month to a slum landlord but we won’t lend you money to buy a house for $20,” because it is an absurd rule and maybe we should give the agency a half billion dollars and tell them that if they don’t lose it in the course of 20 years, Congress will eliminate the agency. Give them some incentive for making risky loans in- stead of a reverse incentive. We all have the desire to survive, and they have been surviving not so well but for a long time. y The significance of this illustration justifies the detail. Knowing that public housing is generally not available in small towns and rural areas we were attempting to ascertain how much subsidy would be required to get decent shelter for the rural poor through Farmers Home. Our assumption was that if the Congress would make available a deeper subsidy program including outright grants that Farmers Home Administration could combine one or both of these programs with its present authority and staff and reach deep into rural poverty. We were using Nancy Sylvester as an example. FmHA refused to respond. We have to develop a different climate of opinion where they will feel safe in being more adventurous; that is human. With limited manpower Farmers Home Administration takes care of the applications of the more literate, more prosperous people who come to it for loans. This limits the number of really poor who can get through the agency willy nilly. The tougher the pressure gets on rural housing, the more pressure they are under to produce. The easiest way to produce a lot of loans is to take the more literate, prosperous people who come in and know how to hustle the housing system and this leaves the most needy people waiting for another generation. But assuming the Congress could provide more money, it is ob- vious that under present guidelines Farmers Home Administration would not use grant money to reach much deeper into the poverty pile. I think they would use most of it to make their present loans more secure. As long as Farmers Home Administration insists that shelter is at the bottom of the list, there is going to have to be a drastic im- provement in rural incomes before that agency can have its guide- lines and the people can have housing. The CmatrmaN. In that connection what significance do you attach to family income improvement schemes as a means of breaking the housing shortage in rural areas? For example, the family assistance proposal is now attendant. Mr. CocuraN. First, let me make it clear that I am very much for family assistance programs. Going back to our earlier discus- sion here of eliminating the vast inequities among the systems, get- ting rid of a lot of the bureaucratic social work and that sort of thing. But in terms of housing we are constantly confronted by peo- ple who say, quit bugging us about housing subsidies and housing 2090 programs because the solution is to get $5400 a year for every family and let them buy their own house. This is just arrant nonsense. If I brought the same argument to this committee and to you as its chairman on housing, you would know that the level of family income would have to be very high before the food program should be eliminated. At least in this country if you could raise incomes to a high enough level X figure, the food is there in the grocery store to be bought; it has been produced; or we have a capacity for very quickly increasing the output of food. But the housing is not there. And at the rate we are building it now, it is not going to be there for a long time. So at this point if the family assistance plan passes and is put into effect, in a lot of areas in the South, the primary beneficiary will be the slumlord who knows what that family makes and he will raise the rent on that house when the first check comes in, so in effect it will be siphoned off in that way. You cannot meet the housing program of this country in this century by any of the multiromantic concepts; the housing has got to be built. Turning our attention to what we are going to do about rural housing and community facilities, the first thing I have referred to here is just getting the message across to the people in some way so we can stir the American public. There was hardly any hunger in America for a long time, you will recall, none that anybody who was anybody knew anything about. The same is true of the misery, shame, degradation, disease and ill health which are the progency of bad housing and lack of community facilities. Anyone who struggled with the problem of hunger in this Con- gress knows what happened for years when someone fished out ugly stories on hunger. The comfortable people had ready responses. The reports were exaggerated, isolated, about to be corrected, would cost too much to correct, involved an assault on States rights and local autonomy, and almost any other response which would delay and obfuscate. But when the facts were made clear and people knew, something was done. . . . Only when it was brought out in its enormous ghastly reality were you able to knock out these petty arguments and begin to get some action on hunger. The Cramman. You know, Mr. Cochran, that was the principal thrust behind the creation of this committee which was to gather in a scientific, systematic way the actual facts on hunger, and that is what we are now trying to do on the housing situation. Mr. CocarAN. In the area of hunger you still have resistance but you have resistance to a real problem and 5 years ago we didn’t have any real problem—not one people were willing to admit. To some extent programs to deal with the problems already exist. Some of them need only to be expanded. Some need to be reoriented. All of them need a tremendous increase in funds. But there will have to be more than this. There are a variety of ways in which all or part of the housing and community facilities’ problems in rural areas can be solved. I am referring to the recommendations I am going to make here, some of them would only touch one segment; others, if all were enacted, would result in wasteful duplication; some would play the 2091 happy role of creating a healthy institutional competition. In con- ne this problem we have tried to come up with a whole series of suggestions in the hope that if the climate is not right for one it may be for another. : } At this point we would like to submit for your subsequent con- sideration a provocative speech delivered by Albert Walsh, admin- istrator, Housing and Development Administration, New York City, at the recent NARHRO Housing Workshop in Chicago. In this statement Mr. Walsh yields to the frustrations all of us have in the housing field and calls for a one-stop agency that can handle all of these problems so that we can escape the toils of the conflicting bureaucratic rules, gappy laws, and dodging of respon- sibility. Under the one-stop program there would be one great big beautiful agency—and it would be beautiful if we could get it—to whom the Congress would delegate the responsibility of handling the housing needs of all of the people who require subsidized housing assistance in any form. A man goes in and when he comes out he comes out with an answer. There is a program for everybody and nobody is sent back to the gutter. We like this proposal very much. It is a product of knowledge and experience and a first rate mind. We want the proposal considered; we would like to see it pass in some form. All of us are going to have to take a look at the structure because I am not sure what Mr. Walsh has in mind. The Cuamrman. Mr. Cochran, could you supply a copy of that speech for the record? Mr. CocHrAN. Yes. The Cmamman. Without objection, that will be made a part of the hearing record. (The speech referred to follows:) STATEMENT OF ALBERT A. WALSH, ADMINISTRATOR, HOUSING AND DEVELOPMENT, A SINGLE, COMPREHENSIVE HOUSING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION Ladies and Gentlemen, there is no group of public officials more steadily under attack from their constituents than those of us involved with housing for low and moderate-income families. I daresay you've noticed that. Since the 1930s, when it was first confessed by government that decent housing for all is a public concern, people have been asking us why we don’t do more, why we don’t do it better, or why we have to do it in their neighborhood. Over the years we have responded to these pressures, and to our own con- victions by putting pressure in turn on our state and national legislative bodies. In response, they have enacted a long series of laws and amendments; each the creature of its time, reflecting the needs, economic pressures, and opinion climate of the year in which it was passed. The result, after some 40 years, is a housing “policy” which is a crazyquilt of laws, regulations, and bureaucratic habits that strikes a newcomer with amazement and consternation. We have only one goal—safe, decent, and even attractive and comfortable housing for all of our citizens, and most particularly for those who cannot provide it for themselves. But there are so many ways to get there, and so many roadblocks in the way, that the goal seems to get farther and farther away, the harder we struggle to reach it. But this bill alone won't do the trick; it plans the show and gets it on the road, but it doesn’t provide for performance. Nor does the current Ad- ministration bill, although I think, as I am sure many of you do, that it is pointed in the right direction. In its intent—to coordinate existing programs, eliminate discrepancies, and standardize regulations—it seeks to cope with the problems I was discussing earlier. But it has great weaknesses, as NAHRO pointed out in its testimony before Congress. NAHRO said, and I quote, 2092 Everyone here knows of the wild inconsistencies we must deal with each day, as we try to make the best choices among our housing options. Take for instance the income eligibility standards for the various programs. In public housing at the present time the local authority establishes its own limits and definitions, and these are approved by the Federal Government. The rent supplement program pegs the income level to that allowed for entry into public housing—but with a deduction from gross income of $300 for each child. In the 235 and 286 moderate income programs, income eligibility is usually 135 percent of public housing entry levels—with the $300 deduction for each child, plus an additional five percent deduction from gross income. The 221 (d) (3) rental program has its own income levels established by the Federal Government; but the 236 program can, under certain circumstances, use 90 percent of these limits as its eligibility limits. It’s enough to make your head spin. And I haven’t even mentioned state and local programs, with their own eligibility requirements. If the situation were only dizzying it would be bad enough. But it also doesn’t work. Hach of the programs established over the past 40 years is supposed to produce the same product—that is, a housing unit that is reason- ably priced, decent, and safe. Yet we have become so entangled in our own guidelines that the mechanisms of the program have become more important than the product. A family eligible for a certain apartment under one pro- gram is not eligible for the identical apartment in another project built under the same program. Or two identical apartments built under the same program have two different rents. Or a family that is making too much money to enter public housing is making too little to qualify for 236. Or, even more para- doxically, the family that is eligible to stay in public housing is making too much to qualify for 236! And yet, one of the express intents of 236 at its formulation was to give such families a place to go next. Moreover, our housing programs over the past 40 years have had the lament- able effect of aggravating existing patterns of racial and economic segregation. ‘While the Federal Housing Administration has been busy encouraging the development of middle-income housing in the suburbs, it has ignored the need for the same kind of housing in the center cities. Meantime, the vast majority of publicly assisted housing, which depends on local acceptance, has been frozen out of the suburbs and confined within the boundaries of the center city ghettoes. This was by no means the original intent of the Congress, but it’s what we have done. As a result, our center cities are losing the society’s backbone population— the young, the healthy, the white-collar, the upwardly mobile, the potential leaders. Taking their place more and more are the weaker population ele- ments—the poor, the minorities, the aged, the sick, the unemployed, and the socially deviant. To solve the housing needs of these families, we build low and moderate income housing—which then attracts even more of these fami- lies to the center city—which then needs more low-cost housing. Meanwhile the suburbs become more affluent and more protective of their racial and eco- nomic identity. The irony is that industry is moving more and more to the suburbs where it finds no labor force, because all the low-income families who might fill its jobs are crammed into the center city. The real solution to what we call our “urban” problems—the dwindling city tax base, segregation, underemployment—depend on the dispersal of our urban poor throughout metropolitan areas. Yet, to accomplish this means the construction of low and moderate-income housing outside our center cities, which we have so far avoided. And that’s not all. I don’t need to remind this group that the Federal pro- grams under which we all do the major part of our new construction are wickedly underfunded. In New York City, which admittedly has a very large program, we have estimated that for the current fiscal year we need $145 million for urban renewal (including $60 million for the Neighborhood De- velopment Program) and $50 million for 236 and rent supplements. This is in addition to needed new public housing annual contribution contracts. With the Administration’s emphasis on “budgetary restraint” and President Nixon’s veto last month of the HUD appropriation bill, it is obvious that funding will fall far short of these needs. And New York City is not alone in this plight. Each one of us has the land, the community commitment, and the contracts 2093 ready to go, but we won’t be able to build to our capacity—simply and solely because we don’t have the money. Finally, we don’t even have the same programs all the time. With constant changes in the economy, and with new laws and amendments every year, the housing administrator is in a situation like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where nobody could play because the wickets and balls kept wandering away. These severe problems—the multiplicity and confusion of existing programs, their limited application, and their constant revamping—have not gone un- noticed. The National Governors Conference, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and NAHRO are on record for a streamlined, coordinated approach to meeting the goal of our housing policy—safe, decent accommodations for those fami- lies who cannot afford market prices. Without such an approach, our need to produce at least six-million publicly-assisted units by 1978 cannot be met. These statements by the mayors, the governors, and housing officials have echoed in the halls of Congress, and we are beginning at last to see concern and interest in a comprehensive program to house all those families in need of new housing. There is now under consideration in Congress an admirable bill called the “Urban Growth and New Communities Bill.” It is designed to encourage a reasoned urban growth policy—an overall plan for not only the center cities but also their environs and open land. It provides for the crea- tion of new communities in both rural and urban areas: and, most important of all, it creates a system of loans with deferred interest that would finance land acquisition, site preparation, and the building of public facilities and commercial and industrial centers to make these areas self-sufficient. And it mandates further that these new towns contain housing options for families of all income groups. This bill, if passed, will be a long step forward. With a rational long-term approach to our sprawling cities, we will actually be able to think before we act—to abandon stopgap measures and move ahead according to a broadscale plan. It has weaknesses because it does not present bold approaches to meet the relevant housing needs of the 1970s. It does not address itself either to a cohesive program that will bring appropriate housing assistance to all those who cannot afford private housing or to a policy that will relate the housing needs and responsibilities of urban, suburban and rural areas (unquote). It seems to me that no attempt to patch up the current situation is going to work : the patient is too far gone. When a heart transplant is needed, you will get nowhere with bandaids. This was brought home to me in the course of a recent 701(b) study in which I took part, under the sponsorship of NAHRO. As many of you prob- ably know, almost two years ago a NAHRO panel undertook to examine how the provision of low and moderate income housing could truly be made an integral part of metropolitan planning as required in the Comprehensive Plan- ning Assistance Program. The panel focused on three areas: Dade County, Florida, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Twin City region, and the state of Con- necticut. Since the final report on the study is in preparation, it would be premature for me to discuss its findings here in detail; but I ean say that the three areas that we studied might as well have been three different coun- tries. Present housing laws that applied to one had little or no application to the others. It was this study, more than any other single factor, that convinced me that our country’s greatest housing need is for a single, simplified housing policy that would apply all across the country. Such a policy would offer housing for all low, moderate and middle-income families, whether located in cities, villages, or suburbs; would provide incentives for local communities to encourage the construction of such housing; and would guarantee the money necessary to finance the housing. IT have been thinking and talking about such a program for the last four or five months, and today I would like to offer a concrete proposal for the consideration of this Fifth National Housing Workshop. The key element in my proposal is to scrap all of our existing federally assisted housing programs and enact, in their place, a single, comprehensive program for all families who cannot afford safe and decent housing at market rents, with a variable subsidy based on the family’s need and ability to pay. 2094 This subsidy could be available for either multifamily housing—rental, co- operatives, and condominiums—or, in appropriate circumstances, single-family homes. The federal subsidy authorized under this program would not be limited to mortgage interest, or even to total debt service, but would cover the entire difference between net income received from a project and that required to pay its financing, management, taxes, and operating costs. Income eligibility would be determined by the local community based upon local housing and economic conditions. These income limits, approved by HUD, would constitute the only eligibility requirement for tenants. Local communities, with the approval of HUD, would also establish mini- mum rents and rent/income ratios consistent with current local conditions and with adequate living standards for families of various sizes. With certain ex- ceptions at the lowest end of the income scale, a family would pay a greater absolute amount of rent as its income increased, but under no circumstances would the family pay a rent greater than the economic rent for the unit. Never would any family be forced to move because of increased income; it would merely pay the economic rent and no longer receive a subsidy. Sponsorship and financing could be accomplished in a variety of ways. Local housing authorities, municipalities, states, regional organizations, non- profits, cooperatives, and limited dividend corporations would be eligible to be Sponsors. If the sponsor was a public agency or body, it could issue its own bonds, which would be paid off by the income received from rents less operating costs, plus a guaranteed federal contribution sufficient to cover deficits. This is essentially the present public housing formula, which has worked so wel" for more than thirty years. A private sponsor could obtain either a private market-rate mortgage, in- sured by HUD, or perhaps a development loan from the Federal Government. This also would be paid by tenants’ rents—Iless operating costs and taxes—and an annual federal deficit subsidy. Sufficient costs flow to pay debt service and all operating expenses would thus be guaranteed-—with the result that these mortgages would become even more attractive to private lenders than present FHA insured mortgages. Construction standards would be drastically simplified. The Federal Govern- ment would establish a single minimum—but not maximum—standard for the entire program, and would approve project costs in accordance with current regional cost indices. The result would be a universality of product that we have not yet attained, with amenities similar to those in other housing, so that the identification and stigma associated with subsidized housing in the past would gradually disappear. Let’s look at the advantages of this proposal. First, this one program can serve all income groups, from the poorest to those of middle income who cannot afford the rents being charged in the com- munity. Yet, the actual subsidy given to these families would be determined by their respective needs rather than by the vagaries of a particular pro- gram. From our experience with various limited rent subsidy programs, I am confident that the average cost, per family, would be well below the present public housing level. Second, this is a national program, the first all-out effort to house all of those in need of housing. Our present programs, with their income and popu- lation gaps, would be replaced by a single program, whose sole eligibility requirement would be economic need and the unavailability of reasonably priced housing in the community. Third, its basic simplicity should make it attractive to local sponsors, builders, and developers. Endless red tape, countless reviews, and pointless ad- ministrative requirements would give way to imaginative design and rapid production. There would at last be a real local inducement to achieve our national housing goals. Fourth, the program would be attractive to members of the middle class, who would no longer fall between the two stools of low rent and luxury housing. During a housing cost crisis such as the one we are now experiencing, they would be eligible for these units and receive a modest initial subsidy. Fifth, the complete absence of income limitations on continued occupancy would remove one of the most discouraging of all our current regulations— 2095 the one by which an energetic head of a household is rewarded for getting ahead by being evicted. The families could rather stay in their homes, improve them, and take pride in them, as all of us like to do. Sixth, since the units would not be limited to a small income range, the program would foster economic and racial integration. As the program de- veloped it would gradually bring about the deghettoization of our cities. All the housing built under the program should pay full real estate taxes. These would be absorbed into the Federal subsidy received by the low and moderate-income families; but when the families had gradually worked up to paying the economic rent, and were no longer subsidized, the taxes would then be passed on to them as usual. Furthermore, public service grants could be made to each community on the basis of the number of families it had residing in such federally assisted housing. For example, if the federal gov- ernment established a $100 grant per family, and the local community com- pleted a 300-unit project, the community would receive a $30,000 annual grant to compensate it for the additional public services it would be required to per- form as a result of this population growth. After a certain number of years this grant could be reduced, and eventually eliminated, as these families were integrated into the community. I am pleased to see that President Nixon’s Task Force on Urban Renewal has recognized the need of such an incentive grant. It recommends, and I quote, “special federal aid to help suburban communities meet the increased costs of education, public health, transportation, and other municipal services that result directly from expanding the supply of low and moderate-income housing in the community.” (unquote) In my opinion, such an incentive grant, and the payment of full local real estate taxes, are essential ingredients in any national housing plan. The re- sistance of already established middle-income communities to new low-rent housing has been violent and continuous, and I see no reason to expect it to change. Secretary Romney’s experience in Warren, Michigan, where he was nearly mobbed because the community merely suspected that such housing was planned there, is no isolated phenomenon. It would be an oversimplification, too, to ascribe this resistance entirely to racism. In Long Island recently, an all-black community united to keep out proposed new low-cost housing. It is not only a racial problem. It is a class problem. It is the resistance of the middle class against the entry of persons who, they believe, will cost the community money, cause its educational services to deteriorate, endanger its citizens, and lower its social tone. It is not possible to legislate changes in human nature. But it is possible to make social snobbery disadvantageous—or, to put it more positively, to make it profitable to be on the side of the angels. Furthermore, even those communities who are not prejudiced against the construction of low-cost housing have a right not to be penalized for it; and it is a fact that such new construction, with its demand for added services and the usual tax abatement, has hitherto constituted a financial drain. It may be objected that incentive grants and local real estate taxes are not justifiable national expenditures. I believe they are ours is a constantly migrating population, a federally-assisted project built in a Chicago suburb may well house families from Mississippi, New England, Iowa, or the Pacific northwest. And it is certainly a national goal to deghettoize our central cities, allowing our minority groups the freedom of movement that the rest of our citizens take for granted as a right. Admittedly, this program will not be cheap. If we assume a need of 600,000 units a year, at an average subsidy cost of approximately . . . a unit, we're talking about a mew subsidy authority of $600 million each year, approxi- mately what we now authorize for our publicly assisted housing programs. The incentive bloc grants of $100 a unit would add another $60 million. Thus, it’s a $660 million-a-year program of new subsidies, exclusive of urban renewal, model cities, and the other urban development programs. Ultimately, that’s an annual housing subsidy of between $5 and $6 billion. That's a lot of money, more than we've ever spent on housing before. Yet, when compared to the $30 billion a year we spend on the Vietnam war, or the $60 billion we will spend on a national highway system, the amount seems reasonable, and its results more meaningful. To guarantee results, we must be assured of a firm Congressional commit- 2096 ment. We will need a funding appropriation at the beginning to cover at least three years of the program, so that communities and sponsors will know how much is available and can plan accordingly. For once we must be funded ahead, so that this year’s high ideals will not founder on next year’s budget. ‘We have seen what happened to the glorious pronouncements of 1968. This, then, is the basic program that I propose: one which, if enacted, will give us, for the first time, a national program and a national commitment designed to meet the real housing needs of all of our low and moderate- income families within the foreseeable future. It is a program which is founded upon the concept of local autonomy, and differs chiefly in that respect from any plan yet proposed by the Adminis- tration. It has been my experience, and I think the experience of NAHRO, that no housing policy determined in Washington, no matter how liberal its terms, can accurately reflect the economic and social conditions in local communities all across our land. Ladies and gentlemen, as our country has grown from a tiny group of farms to a great industrial nation, we have learned to think big. Where neighbors used to gather to help a newcomer build his house and barn, we now speak of housing in broad general terms, using sweeping phrases like “metropolitan regional,” “urban renewal,” and “community development.” I think the time has come again to think small: think neighborhood, think family, think child. When we think in these terms, rather than in terms of massive housing developments, we begin to see more clearly what our job, as housing officials really is: not simply to build X thousands of units of low, moderate, and middle-income housing in various areas over the next Y number of years—but rather to provide the means for all Americans, of whatever income, to live in decent housing where they want to, to work near to where they live, to move to California—or to New York, or to Alaska— if they wish, and to be welcome in any community they enter. To do this, we must have a plan that guarantees them that freedom in every corner of our land. I have tried to present such a plan. Thank you. Mr. CocHrAN. Another recommendation we have is the enactment of a capital budget system for the Federal Government, a “Truth in Accounting Law.” Vested interests we shall always have with us, Mr. Chairman, but the power of a vested interest very frequently rests as much on the prevailing preconceptions (the mythology) of the community and the sanctity of the resulting procedures as it does on the ability of the vested interest to finance elections or influence members of the Congress. There is no ally—for those who are casually or actively opposed to programs designed to increase equality of op- portunity in this country—so powerful as our present Federal accounting system. Under this primitive system we equate the cost of a children’s hospital with a bomber, a loan for a house with the expenditure by the Pentagon of $28 million a year for public relations. There is a real economic difference between operating costs and capital formation costs. Every business in this country would be in bankruptcy court if it used the Federal accounting system. But most important for our discussion, the present accounting system makes it possible to kill off essential programs because of their “budgetary impact.” The distortions that arise from this are mad- dening. If FHA insures a loan by the Podunk Bank to John Doe and thereby obligates the Federal Government to pay off that loan if it becomes necessary, that has no “budgetary impact.” It is not an expenditure. But if the Federal Government borrows that same 2097 money from the Podunk Bank and lends it to the same family, that 1s an expenditure. The first action is blameless and wealth- creating and does not frighten the community or run into trouble with the Congress, but the second action blows our collective minds because it jeopardizes the Republic by increasing the national debt. This is in the nature of pure mythology; i.e., economic voodooism, but it is with us and it will stay with us until by shifting the budget system we take the wind out of the argument. Our third recommendation is that there be a congressional re- organization act to put the authorization and appropriations of funds for housing and community facilities in the hands of one committee in each house. At present, Banking and Currency au- thorizes, but subsequently one set of subcommittees acts on HUD funds and a totally different pair operates on Farmers Home Ad- ministration. Banking and Currency dictates the structure and function of HUD, but Farmers Home Administration is controlled in part by the Agricultural Committees and in part by Banking and Currency. More important, Farmers Home Administration’s housing program is inextricably tied to its other programs which are under the control of a committee whose principal interests are the agribusiness programs of the USDA. The Rural Housing pro- gram is an orphan child. If the Congress cannot reshuffle its functions along these or some similar lines, then we urge that there be created a Department of Rural Affairs into which the economic development part of the USDA’s research and Farmers Home’s housing and community facilities be placed under the control of a new committee structure in Congress. The Cmamman. Why would you suggest that approach, Mr. Cochran, rather than simply shifting the rural housing program into HUD? Mr. Cocuran. As a matter of fact, that was what Representative Patman started to do last year because he was so discouraged over the rural housing program. Banking and Currency would authorize good programs and appropriations committees would in effect negate them. He either introduced or started to introduce a bill to create an assistant secretaryship in HUD in an effort to move the program. I argued with him at the time it was unwise; I still think it is unwise. The HUD programs can’t operate in rural areas. Public housing could if we got some new impetus behind it and maybe some different sorts of structures out there. FHA cannot function in rural areas and to pretend that it can is just misleading ourselves. HUD is metropolitan minded, the people who are there think in metropolitan terms. Most of them grew up in cities, most of them assume that the things that have happened are going to continue. As one man out of OEO told me when we talked, he said: “I can- not think rural; keep that in mind. When you talk to me, remember I can’t think rural. You have to lead me by the hand or I am not hearing you.” So I think it would be very unfortunate to put the present pro- grams into HUD and I don’t see any advantage in it. The one thing that HUD does not have that Farmers Home has is 1700 offices out there where a man can come in and talk to a 2098 public servant who has public responsibility ; whereas, if it is moved, if the machinery is moved over into HUD and you lose that tie to the Federal people, this poor devil is out there trying to hustle the housing racket as he now is and he is not going to make it, it won’t work. The CmamrMan. I am inclined to agree with that but it does seem to be at variance with your friend Walsh that we have one big agency and we handle all of the housing needs of the Nation. I take it that my own feeling would be that the FHA with all its limitations has had some experience in the rural area and would have personnel that know how to talk to farm people and are familiar with the farm needs and know what is really needed and it would be a more lenient and imaginative policy on their part rather than a transfer into HUD. I take it that is your view. Mr. Cocuran. Well, whether it is Walsh’s suggestion for a uni- form agency; Leonor Sullivan’s suggestion for a quasi-Farmers Home with the staff, with—she never got the staff in her bill—or Pat Gish’s bill, the essential thing is that there be a Federal pres- ence out there as a source of credit, and this with as broad a pro- gram as possible. It could still be a one-stop agency and I don’t care what it is called, the most important thing is to maintain that Farmers Home structure which is a result of a reluctant admission that the rural areas and small towns can’t be handled the same way the great cities are. ‘We would also like to see the creation of some kind of a Federal homeowners mortgage bank. As I just said, Representative Sullivan has had legislation in on that; Wright Patman has had it. You have to have a central housing bank for moderate- and low-income people which would be the source of funds even for Farmers Home, and whatever agency that Congress set up to deal with this problem they could come to a central Federal mortgage bank which could have the personnel and the machinery to raise money economically and make it available instead of this present program we have of GNMA and FNMA and Farmers Home operating a different one. Instead of being able to borrow money cheap and being able to lend it to low-income people we resort to such things as this in- terest subsidy program. The costs of the interest subsidy program are staggering and I don’t believe that the taxpayers or the Congress is going to continue to underwrite a 235 program and 502 is very close to it. I don’t believe they are going to support it and I don’t think they ought to support subsidizing a 9 percent private interest rate down to 1 percent for people when the Federal Government can borrow that money and make it available a lot cheaper. This is a public program, a public subsidy for public welfare, and I don’t think we ought to put up with the staggering costs that are involved in setting up the private machinery to carry it out. Let the private sector take care of the great bulk of the Amsrican people which they claim they are qualified to serve. According to their own rules we will underwrite the risk and do a lot of things like that, but the private lending agencies have no right to come in under a mythology of a balanced budget and demand this price for solving this problem. 2099 Under present law, on first blush it appears that the most hopeful prospect for improving housing and facilities for the small town and rural poor is the public housing program. The trouble is that this program does not enjoy sufficiently deep subsidies; it is fre- quently uneconomically structured; and it is subject to veto by the local power structure. g he A part of this problem can be solved by the simple recognition by the Administrators that public housing has failed and had better get right. There are constructive and energetic people in HUD who would like to use public housing to meet this need. Inquiry should be made to ascertain what they figure the hangups are. I would hope this committee will get around to that. : Ask the people who believe in public housing to come in and advise you on what could and should be done to make it function better everywhere, including small towns and rural areas and get into things like the Area Housing Authority in Mississippi, the Tennessee Valley Housing Authority, because it is a very hopeful pattern. We are convinced that it is neither right nor constitutional for the Congress to permit State and local governments to deny their citizens Federal benefits. The Congress must find some means of stipulating that Federal housing and community facilities and re- newal and other funds cannot be used by a State or community unless that State or community is actively engaged in meeting the housing needs of its low-income citizens. Congress should assume the responsibility for requiring some equal justice in the use of funds. States should be compelled to provide facilitating legislation to make housing authorities flexible and responsive and responsible for meeting the needs of the popu- lation in a given area. And local governments should simply be shut off from access to Federal funds for any program, including highways, unless they are willing to take on the responsibility for meeting minimum housing needs. And, as a last resort, the Congress should insist that unless mini- mum needs are met on pollution, water, and housing, that some agency be given the authority, the mandate, and the funds to move into a vacuum and do the job. I make reference to Herb Franklin’s papers which I am sure the staff and the committee are familiar with. We believe strongly that the needs of the poorest of the rural poor can only be met by public housing under whatever name. The important factors are, (1) public responsibility, and (2) the scale of the subsidy. But we also believe that “the magic of ownership turns sand to gold” and that subsidy for ownership should always be used where the cost to the public is not too much greater than the cost of rental housing. The present public housing program cannot do the job. In 33 years La of a century) it has produced less than 33,000 units a year and we need almost 800,000 a year in rural areas and small towns. In the interest of time I will move on to our recommendations for improving the Farmers Home Administration. 42-778—T71—pt. T—14 2100 First, Farmers Home’s greatest need is for adequate adminis- trative funds to carry out its programs. Second, with additional administrative funds, Farmers Home Administration should be encouraged and probably would be quite willing to: (a) Institute a program of research into the depth and scope of housing needs in its area of service, including the figures on the location of need, the incomes of the families-—in short, the data required to carry out an intelligent program and advise the Con- gress. This money should not be turned over to ERS, USDA’s re- search service, nor to the land-grant colleges. What we need is action-oriented research related to people, not rural sociology or agribusiness-minded research. For heaven’s sake, let’s stop putting it into the hands of the rural sociologists or the extension service because we have enough insecticides. (b) Establish a housing and community facilities staff in the field separate from the staff handling other programs. The agency needs a professional housing staff and recruiting of that staff should not be tied to the agricultural colleges. (c) Carry out programs of research in building itself. At present the Department of Agriculture has research funds which are chan- neled everywhere except Farmers Home Administration. HUD has fairly large amounts of research funds. Farmers Home Ad- ministration doesn’t have a dime. If they want to go somewhere they have to bum a ride with the city cadillac or for a crystal ball and guess what their own department is going to come up with next, if anything. (d) The more adequately funded agency should develop a spe- cialized staff to deal with and promote co-op housing, self-hel housing, and farm labor housing—areas currently neglected pri- marily for reasons of poverty. I have a note here the total national housing staff consists of eight professionals and three of them have been there less than a year. It is unbelievable. Third, Farmers Home Administration’s service areas should be expanded to include towns with a population of 25,000 and under. Fourth, Farmers Home Administration legislation should be amended to include the equivalent of the Norwegian plan; that is, the authority to make second trust loans of up to 40 or 50 percent of the value of a house with the balance payable at as low as 1 per- cent, depending on family income. At the same time, Farmers Home Administration should be instructed that its regulations controlling the extension of credit should be not less generous than public housing; that is, if a family would be required to pay a given monthly payment to a public housing authority and that or a lesser amount is adequate to pay off a loan, the family should be eligible without question. There is no point in giving Farmers Home Ad- ministration the power and the funds to help poor families if they are going to throw the program out with their guidelines as they tend to do now. After the strain of the long-hard years Farmers Home Administration needs a psychological laxative. It suffers from a retentive compulsion which 1s pathological. 2101 That was designed to be funny, but in reading it it sounds tragic. The results are tragic in any case. : Major reform or not, Farmers Home Administration has got to be moved from its present stance of telling a family, a nonperson, that if they cannot afford a house, they should get off the earth. Fifth, Farmers Home Administration’s farm labor housing pro- gram should be run by a separate section, and the law should be revised to permit the granting of the same subsidies as are available to public housing and permit Farmers Home Administration to make grants and loans to labor unions and other nonprofit groups without requiring endorsement by the local association of agribusi- ness employers as it does now. They were authorized to give up 66 percent grants but the ap- propriations subcommittees said not to give more than 50 percent. It is a totally inadequate program. We do not believe if all of these changes were made they would, within any reasonable period of years, reach a lot of people out there—those we have been calling the nonpeople—because within existing programs and funding they are not considered to be people and would in fact be more fortunate physically if they were actually nonpeople; that is, migratory water fowl, cows, or pileated wood- peckers. We would like to propose an emergency housing program for small towns and rural areas which we set forth here in broad out- line, but with a deep sense of obligation to the nonpeople and the American community that something must be done and now. We propose that we take a page from the history book and apply it in modified form to the rural housing problem of those families and individuals who are below the existing Farmers Home Ad- ministration levels and where a public housing authority does not exist which is prepared to use the resources available to meet the needs of low-income families. We propose the establishment of an emergency Rural Home De- velopment Administration (RHDA) which will be given the re- sponsibility for meeting the needs of any family or individual who is not immediately eligible for housing from Farmers Home Ad- ministration or public housing where it exists. The RHDA will be authorized and instructed by the Congress to provide minimum housing, sanitation, and clean water—as well as desirable community facilities for day care and other programs—in any town of 25,000 or below, including rural areas, and to do so within 5 years. The RHDA. will operate in close cooperation with public housing, Farmers Home, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Notice I say cooperation, not control. The RHDA will be provided with direct appropriations to carry out the following program. 1. To do continuing research into the location and numbers of families not eligible for existing programs of housing. It is incredible with all the research we do in this country we know so little about where the rural housing need is. 2. To organize, recognize, supervise, and finance local housing development agencies which may operate in anything from a portion of a county to an entire State. These housing development agencies will be organized, operated, and controlled by those it serves, the 2102 old REA slogan, under appropriate regulations and with competent personnel. 3. The HDA’s will be financed administratively out of grant funds provided by the RHDA in amounts equal to the 5-year task. They will be authorized to plan to meet the housing needs of the eligible population and will be provided with the funds necessary to build housing developments, finance individual homes, finance water and sewer systems and community buildings—in conjunction with cities and Farmers Home Administration projects where feasible. They will be authorized to build minimal housing of sound con- struction, including not less than a given floor footage for each member of a given family, with inside plumbing, clean water, and sanitation. They can purchase land in individual tracts or tracts for development as communities, including as much as 38 acres per family where sanitation regulations or the need for subsistence homesteads require that amount of land. They may utilize self-help, contractor-built, or prefabbed housing in that combination most likely to meet the needs of those eligible economically. The CaamrmaN. Mr. Cochran, to what extent is this program you are describing similar to the structure of the rural electric co- operatives? Mr. CocurAN. Quite similar in some respects. That is why I said to take a page out of history. For 30 years the private power com- panies had said we cannot serve rural areas because farmers can’t afford electricity and our costs of construction are too high, so the Congress established REA and said, “Go serve them.” REA set up local co-ops and told them that they must meet the needs of every- body in their area and to get about it. Among other things the co-ops cut the cost of construction. I forget the figures now but the power companies in the twenties were spending $2,000 a mile because they didn’t care how much it cost, they were getting it back anyway. But the co-op did care and we begin to get a series of technological innovations based not on engineering skill but on expressed need translated into economies. The CraRMAN. And it is the same kind of structure that you are suggesting here for building low-cost housing in rural areas? Mr. Cocaran. We give them local responsibility in the dual sense, establish local institutions, provide them the money and tell them to get about the job. These local housing development authorities, I have omitted the term “cooperative” because legally it is a very cumbersome term, might cover a five-county area and try to meet the need. The RDA might use local cooperatives as one means of meeting the need— but it would and should use the type of housing required to meet the need. I still think these RDA’s could be controlled by the people they are serving, with the boards of directors elected demo- cratically, with enough supervision from the top to assure that the staffs are competent. They could organize rental units, they could organize cooperatives. Leave them free to solve this problem under just minimum guide- lines as quickly as possible under the control of the local people. They would have such authority as the Norwegian program. They 2103 could make a combination of grants and loans at low interest rates or use second trusts so that the people who got the grants were not getting bonanzas from the taxpayer but still getting a decent house. I assume that after an initial 5-year period the operations would diminish, some of the operations could be spun off to existing agencies such as Public Housing or transferred to some permanent agency such as Farmers Home for rent collection, but get somebody out there as a cocklebur under the tail of the existing agencies, as a demonstration of a publicly expressed desire that the existing agencies do more—a new agency out there with the responsibility for doing this whether the other agencies function or not. The last point on these agencies, urging reference back to Mrs. Gish’s testimony here this morning, is that these local agencies should use the manpower training funds and agencies as she has been doing in Kentucky so that we go forward with manpower train- ing and basic education, employment for stranded people, the up- grading of skills and the creation of a manpower pool for construc- tion, all simultaneously lowering the costs of housing and improving the manpower force at the same time. We have programs now, Senator, in which they put up a wall, the carpenters build it, they wire it, they paint it and then they tear it down. They take the old material and they do it all over again. This went on for at least 2 years in a county where two-thirds of the housing was uninhabitable. There was no imagination, there was nobody there except a frustrated project director, and doubt- less the people who participated who looked with disgust on building those walls up and tearing them down when they could have been constructing houses, and getting better training. The only missing ingredient was somebody there to provide a little credit. Obviously, we don’t have any figures on what this proposed pro- gram would cost. It would depend on how it was written, it would depend on the depth of the subsidy and definitely ought to depend on more precise data than we have of what is needed. One other point. We have been discussing rural housing for years with OEO people who were generally conscientious people, and we can anticipate one quick response: that we are proposing building housing in areas which are declining in population and that is wasteful. Our response is that if we can provide children with the necessities of life and self-respect for 5 or 10 years—we should not forget the older people who are there—we could care less whether the house is subsequently sold to a weekender or converted into a silo. Our concern is with people, and there are a lot of them out there. We think there has been enough comforting semantics about what to do with the rural poor. I agree with Leon Keyserling when he said to a group in Montana, “I say to you that you can do little for the children of the poor unless you are willing to do something for their parents.” He was talking about housing versus day care and other children “uplift” programs. You cannot take a child who is hungry and living in crowded, miserable conditions and put him in a day care center. You say you are going to do that for him because you don’t want to grapple with the problem of what his parents are up against. You cannot do 2104 much for the child unless you are willing to do something for his parents, and we agree. It has also been urged that the Congress and the country are not in any mood for any drastic innovations, but this we will have to see. Something drastic is going to have to be done or the situation is going to worsen. We are very grateful to you, Senator. The CuarMaN. Well, many thanks, Mr. Cochran, for an excellent statement and a very comprehensive analysis of the problem. I have directed most of the questions I had as you went along. Senator Dole, do you have additional questions? Senator Dore. I was trying to catch up. I scanned on page 48. I had another committee meeting. I was very interested in your statement and found it most en- lightening. I think it is a very worthwhile effort on your part. I have one question particularly; I think I asked this question on Monday in hopes that you might be able to respond and, if not, furnish information. Being from Kansas I recognize that we also have rural poor who very often receive little attention, but they are there. We have housing problems, of course, in States in the Midwest as well as other States in the Nation. Do you have any specific information on the State-by-State basis that might be available? Mr. CocuraN. The best source of that would be Dr. Rucker. I know he has produced data in some detail on the Dakotas. But at the moment, Senator Dole, there is a real problem and that is that most of the information we are using is based on the 1960 Census and in another year we ought to have better data. One of the points I was making on Farmers Home earlier is that Farmers Home Administration or somebody should have enough continuing responsibility and funds available for research so that it would only take a telephone call to get a mimeographed sheet down here showing county by county what the situation is in Kansas or any other State. There is a real paucity of usable data on the subject partly because the Census data is so old and partly because so little attention has been paid to it. Senator Dore. On page 8 you referred to the failure of the urban renewal program. What connection do you see between the urban failure and the rural neglect? Mr. CocuraN. Would you run that by me again? Senator Dore. On page 8 you mention the failure of urban re- newal programs and how we literally move people out. Is there any relationship between that failure and what we also find has been a pattern of rural neglect? Mr. CocHRrAN. Senator, there is a whole section of my statement running to the indirect effects of the various programs of the Con- gress on housing. The Congress sets out in good faith to promote urban renewal and finds that it has created what later became known as the “Negro Removal” program. That is in the unthinking process of trying to do one job without recognizing the social consequences. Ultimately Congress takes another look and says, “OK, urban re- newal we will subsidize but only if the recipient governments will 2105 take care of the people displaced.” There was a long, miserable gap in there when the urban renewal went forward but the housing program did not. Aside from ripping out homes for highways in rural areas, the situation in the rural areas is different. There has been neither renewal nor hardly anything else, except neglect. Senator Dore. You mentioned specifically the use of trailer homes in Bismarck, N.D. Do you see this as one solution—pre-fabricated homes and trailer homes? Is this one of the concepts that may have some hold out, some hope for rural America, or housing in rural America? Mr. Cocurax. Senator, there are so many things that are bracketed under that term pre-fab in the sense of industralized housing, par- tial pre-fabrication, etc., as to make it a vague concept. I am sure there is going to be more and more changes in housing construction but no dramatic breakthrough. It will help, of course. About a year and a half ago Ed Kaiser addressing himself to Mr. Romney over at Hot Springs, W. Va., told him he better not put all his eggs in that basket because at the absolute outer limits he could maybe save 10 percent on technological innovations but that would be less than the value of the 1-percent drop in interest rate. He could have added that doing something about the cost of the land would probably reduce the real cost to the family more dra- matically than you could reduce it through technology. One of the problems in Bismarck is that that is the most tightly held com- munity I was ever in. The land around there is held so tightly you don’t even get the usual sprawl along the highways. You cough up 5600 bucks for a building site or you get a trailer or you get out of town—way out. It is a well organized community. Now as far as trailers are concerned, for some people they are perfectly legitimate. A construction worker who moves frequently, whose family is not big enough that it troubles him may be happy with a $10,000 or $12,000 trailer and when he gets tired of it it is like a car—he unloads it and buys another. Certainly in disaster areas as temporary housing, trailers are legitimate. But we are not going to turn a trailer into the American dream. They are abominable things to live in, particularly where there are children. Senator Dore. That is my observation. Mz. Cocrran. You park one in a site the size of this room and there is a lack of privacy, there is crowding. I find that the reli- ance on trailers as a possible solution is just sick. Senator Dore. T have just one final question, I know the Chair- man has obligations. I share the view expressed about rural America and the desire for individual home ownership rather than public housing. Do you feel, apparently you do, that the goal should be ownership rather than rent? Is that a correct assumption? Mr. Cocurax. I think the poor place a higher value on ownership than the rich because the rich have other property—whether mod- erately or very rich, they have property and security in many forms but to a low-income person the house is the important thing. So the point we keep pleading for is this: Not everybody can be 2106 an owner, not everybody wants to be an owner, but in dealing with lower income people make the subsidies available for ownership a little deeper than the subsidies for rental so as to encourage owner- ship, so that if a person does want to own a home he can get just as much subsidy for ownership as he can on rental. It is easy to build in protective devices to avoid abuses. Under the Norwegian plan there is a second trust on the shelf; if the family sells the house the Government is the residual claimant of any unearned income. We don’t have to hand out titles to houses and let people do what they want to with them, but at least make the subsidy available as great as for rental housing plus a little incentive to get housing in the hands of the people who live in it, because I have no doubt in the world that most people not only get a psychological benefit out of something that is their own but they will take better care of it because it is their own—not everybody but the overwhelming majority of us react that way. Senator Dore. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The CmammaN. Just one final question, Mr. Cochran. You have had the experience for years with the whole range of social and economic problems, problems of hunger, problems of housing, health, education. Of all of those human needs, which one do you regard as at the top of the national agenda? Mr. Cocaran. Well, you have to feed people but of those in terms of their impact the total number of people who are being frustrated, handicapped, crippled—housing at this time affects more people than hunger. I don’t want to play down hunger, I have a weakness for feeding people first but not to the exclusion of these other things. There is not much sense in feeding a kid who is drinking dysentery- laden water and sleeping in the rain. The CuamrMan. Well, thank you very much for your testimony. That concludes our session for today. Mr. CocuarAN. Thank you. [From the Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald Journal, Oct. 8, 1970] Rurar UNITED STATES NEGLECTED, COCHRAN TELLS SENATE (By Peggy Simpson) WASHINGTON (AP).—Country folks don’t move to the big cities anymore to find bright lights and indoor plumbing, but because of the government’s deliberate neglect of rural America, the Senate has been told. Clay Cochran, chairman of the year-old National Rural Housing Coalition, said Wednesday the government still treats small towns and rural areas— home for 65 million Americans—as orphans in its aid program. The extent of the neglect and the damage already done is rarely recognized, he said. Testifying before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Cochran said the neglect of rural America stems from the myth that the height of civilization will be reached when 90 percent of the population lives on one percent of the land. Recent publicity given pollution and the accompanying problems is helping puncture this myth, he said, but still little notice is taken of rural America’s needs. “The American people, including the Congress, must be made aware of the widespread need: that two-thirds of the bad housing is there (in rural America) and that bad water and lack of sanitation destroy the health and lives of people,” he said. 2107 Cochran proposed establishment of an emergency Rural Home Development Administration to help families or individuals otherwise ineligible for housing from Farmers Home Administration or public housing programs. The proposed agency would provide minimum housing, sanitation and clean water, plus other community facilities such as day care centers, in any town of 25,000 population or smaller, he said. “Let the existing institutions take stock and struggle to maintain their domain by doing more of the job they should long since have completed,” he said. The Nixon administration has yet to make concrete proposals for upgrading rural America although there have been signs in recent months that such proposals are under study. Sources within the administration have reported the Extension Service, the educational network geared to land-grant universities, will play a vital part. Congress also has begun to move toward solving the problems of rural America. A part of the omnibus farm bill drafted by the Senate Agriculture Committee defined the problem and calls for progress reports by agencies starting Dec. 1. [From the Denver (Colo.) Post, Oct. 8, 1970] NEGLECT OF COUNTY AREAS DESCRIBED TO SENATE (By Peggy Simpson) ‘WASHINGTON (AP).—Country folks don’t move to the big cities anymore to find bright lights and indoor plumbing but because of the government's deliberate neglect of rural America, the Senate has been told. Clay Cochran, chairman of the year-old National Rural Housing Coalition, said Wednesday the government still treats small towns and rural areas— home for 65 million Americans—as orphans in its aid program. The extent of the neglect and the damage already done is rarely recognized, he said. Testifying before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Cochran said the neglect of rural America stems from the myth that the height of civilization will be reached when 90 percent of the population lives on 1 percent of the land. Recent publicity given pollution and the accompanying problems is helping puncture this myth, he said, but still little notice is taken of rural America’s needs. “The American people, including the Congress, must be made aware of the widespread need: that two-thirds of the bad housing is there (in rural America) and that bad water and lack of sanitation destroy the health and lives of people,” he said. Cochran proposed establishment of an emergency Rural Home Development Administration to help families or individuals otherwise ineligible for housing from Farmers Home Administration or public housing programs. The proposed agency would provide minimum housing, sanitation and clean water, plus other community facilities such as day care centers, in any town of 25,000 population or smaller, he said. “Let the existing institutions take stock and struggle to maintain their domain by doing more of the job they should long since have completed,” he said. The Nixon administration has yet to make concrete proposals for upgrading rural America although there have been signs in recent months that such proposals are under study. Sources within the administration have reported the Extension Service, the educational network geared to land-grant universities, will play a vital part. Congress also has begun to move toward solving the problem of rural America. A part of the omnibus farm bill drafted by the Senate Agriculture Committee defines the problem and calls for progress reports by agencies starting Dec. 1. President Nixon’s Task Force on Rural Development warned earlier that “our growing industry and our increasing population must spread out instead of continuing to pile people and industrial plants into compacted urban areas” if the United States is to be a healthy and happy nation. 2108 [From the Columbus Dispatch, Oct. 8, 1970] RURAL UNITED STATES NEGLECTED, PANEL TOLD WASHINGTON (AP).—Country folks don’t move to the big cities any more to find bright lights and indoor plumbing, but because of the government's deliberate neglect of rural America, the Senate has been told. Clay Cochran, chairman of the year-old National Rural Housing Coalition, said Wednesday the government still treats small towns and rural areas— home for 55 million Americans—as orphans in its aid program. The extent of the neglect and the damage already done is rarely recognized, he said. Testifying before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Cochran said the neglect of rural America stems from the myth that the height of civilization will be reached when 90 percent of the population lives on 1 percent of the land. Recent publicity given pollution and the accompanying problems is helping puncture this myth, he said, but still little notice is taken of rural America’s needs. “The American people, including the Congress, must be made aware of the widespread need: Two-thirds of the bad housing is there (in rural America) and that bad water and lack of sanitation destroy the health and lives of people,” he said. Cochran proposed establishment of an emergency Rural Home Development Administration to help families or individuals otherwise ineligible for housing from Farmers Home Administration or public housing programs. The proposed agency would provide minimum housing, sanitation and clean water, plus other community facilities such as day care centers, in any town of 25,000 population or smaller, he said. “Let the existing institutions take stock and struggle to maintain their domain by doing more of the job they should long since have completed,” he said. The Nixon administration has yet to make concrete proposals for upgrading rural America although there have been signs in recent months that such proposals are under study. Sources within the administration have reported the Extension Service, the educational network, geared to land-grant universities, will play a vital part. [From the New York (N.Y.) Times, Oct. 11, 1970] RURAL AREAS ARE TERMED OVERLOOKED IN HOUSING AID WASHINGTON, October 10 (AP).—Big-city slums get the headlines but two- thirds of the nation’s dilapidated housing is in small towns, the chairman of the National Rural Coalition said this week. Clay L. Cochran, chairman of the year-old coalition, proposed Wednesday an emergency rural housing program. Existing programs rarely touch rural housing needs, Mr. Cochran said, and even the relatively new Housing and Urban Development Department seems to be willing to wait until all country people move to the cities before helping them. [From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 11, 1970] U.S. Housing ProGraMS HELP FEW RURAL POOR (By William K. Wyant Jr.) WASHINGTON, August 10.—In the last 20 years Congress deliberately has fostered an out-migration of farm people in this country and has discriminated against poor rural people who remain, Congress was told this week. The American exodus from rural areas to larger towns and cities was de- scribed as “the greatest enclosure movement in the history of the world, not excluding the drive to collectivize Russian agriculture.” It was Clay L. Cochran, chairman of the National Rural Housing Coalition, who drew a parallel between the forces that have depopulated the American countryside and the enclosure process that gradually fenced off common lands in England and turned people city-ward. 2109 He testified Wednesday before the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, of which Senator George S. McGovern, (Dem.), South Dakota, is chairman. He delivered a withering indictment on the inadequacy of rural housing. The basic data on the need for housing in small towns and rural areas has already been documented for the committee by one of Cochran’s colleagues, George W. Rucker, research director of the Rural Housing Alliance. Rucker’s figures showed that more than half the nation’s low-income fami- lies—defined as those with less than $4800 a year for a family of four—live outside the nation’s metropolitan areas. These areas have two-thirds of the worst housing but have benefited from only one fifth of the impact of low- income housing programs. “We hope by research and education and persuasion to raise the problem of bad rural housing to a sufficiently high level in the public consciousness,” Cochran said, “that it will compel corrective action.” The fact that many Americans do not get enough to eat did not penetrate the public conscience for a long time, Cochran said. He said the destruction of lives and health caused by poor housing and sanitation in rural areas must be brought out in painstaking detail, as was done in the case of hunger. Cochran is a big, friendly man who smokes a corncob pipe. He was born in New Mexico, obtained a doctorate in economics at the University of North Carolina and taught at the University of Oklahoma. Before getting into rural housing, he worked for the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations. “We have happily assumed for almost 40 years,” he testified, “that federal welfare payments delivered on an uneven basis would not influence the location of people. “Why should a poor woman with six kids who is denied Aid to Dependent Children in Arkansas, or delivered a pittance, stay there and starve when her relatives tell her she can get $300 a month in Chicago? Even though she lives miserably on $300 a month in Chicago, racked by slum landlords, she can at least live—and she is there. “Indeed, it is surprising that the movement to the cities has not been even greater.” Rucker, a South Dakotan, has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Oklahoma and has a deep commitment to helping the disadvantaged and the unwashed. He enlisted in the rural housing cause after working for Group Research, Inc, an organization that keeps track of right-wing activity. Rucker told the McGovern panel that Budget Bureau figures show that nearly half the total federal subsidy for housing goes to families with incomes of $10,000 or more, while less than 10 percent goes to the lowest income people, where “housing misery and need is concentrated.” What Cochran, Rucker and other witnesses had to say added up to an in- dictment of Congress, the Department of Agriculture and laissez-faire attitudes that have fostered policies aimed at helping well-to-do farmers and “agri-busi- ness” while driving people off the land. The public housing program has been largely ineffective outside urban areas,” Cochran said, while the Farmers Home Administration in the Agri- culture Department is hamstrung by inadequate funding and stingy, cumber- some policies. It asked for $146,000,000 for fiscal 1970 but the Budget Bureau cut it back to $85,000,000. As things stand, Cochran said, the poorest and most needy persons in the small towns and countryside are considered not to be persons at all—in terms of existing housing programs—and would be better off if they were in fact non-persons. The poorest would be physically more fortunate, he said, if they were migratory water fowl, cows, or pileated woodpeckers. [From the Palm Beach Post, Oct. 9, 19701] REGULATIONS SAID To HURT WORKER WAsHINGTON.—Regulations for federal low-cost housing loans discriminate against farmworkers, a Palm Beach County American Friends Service Com- mittee (AFSC) official said yesterday. 2110 Jim Upchurch, housing director for the AFSC’s Lake Worth office, told the Select Committee on Human Nutrition and Human Needs that regulations have decreased approved building sites to a perilously low level in rural South Florida. The Farmers Home Administration (FHA) has initiated a statewide regu- lation preventing loans on lots of less than one acre where public water and sewer facilities are not available. Upchurch said since rural South Florida is not served by such facilities the number of available building sites has been reduced to only a few acres in Palm Beach County’s rural area. “How does one explain to a poor family living in a shanty with only a latrine that they have to live another 20 years in the same miserable condi- tion because the government is afraid they will pollute the earth with a septic tank? Upchurch asked the committee chaired by Sen. George McGovern (D-North Dakota). Upchurch who worked for two years in Mexico with farmworkers, said he is convinced Mexican workers were better off than farmworkers in Florida because government regulations in Mexico don’t prohibit farmworkers from at least building shanties. “When the American farmworker tries to help himself he is faced with a maze of local, state and federal regulations. He is forced into the hands of rural slumlords,” Upchurch said. He said the FHA still thinks “in terms of protecting lenders and using the old credit bureau approach which has been successful in housing the white middle income population” neglecting to see the farmworker need. The AFSC contacted 107 builders in Palm Beach County—S85 percent of whom wouldn’t utilize the type of FHA financing most available to farm- workers—and was “totally rebuffed” in its attempts to help. One section of FHA regulations requires applicants have at least a $4,700 annual income, two years steady employment and an income tax return form from the pevious year. Such requirements ‘automatically prevent” farmworkers from benefits under the law because of their migratory hit-and-miss employment activities, Upchurch said. Upchurch asked the committee to consider: Providing adequate funding for a sewer program to develop rural systems. Redefining rural areas to include towns with up to 25,000 population so more areas can fall under the umbrella of rural loans. Permitting FHA loans in urban areas where it can be shown rural areas are unfit for construction because of septic tank regulations. Hiring additional FHA investigators and staff members to investigate and administer the program more adequately in South Florida. Establishing six regional, non-profit Rural Housing Development Cor- porations with revolving land development funds of at least $2 million to assist farmworkers in cutting red tape while obtaining loans. Upchurch’s testimony was part of a panel from the national AFSC Com- mittee. [From the New York (N.Y.) Times, Oct. 6, 1970] SENATE PANEL HEARS RURAL HousING PLEA WasHINGTON, October 5 (AP).—Federal housing programs are being ignored in some parts of the South and rural slums are being perpetuated to drive out blacks who might exercise new voting muscle, a Mississippi civil rights leader charged today. The leader, Aaron Henry, president of the Mississippi branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, testified before the Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that in effect some local officials had veto power over certain Federal programs. “One result is that the nation’s nonmetropolitan counties, which contain more than half the nation’s poor and two-thirds of its bad housing, have gotten only one-fifth of the nation’s public housing,” Mr. Henry said. “Another result is that where there is public housing it is frequently regarded as the local power structure’s equivalent of concentration camps for the poor.” 2111 The committee, which has held several weeks of hearings on environmental health problems, is now focusing on the crisis in rural housing. [From the Louisville (Ky.) Courier Journal, Oct. 8, 1970] ErrorT To HELP EAST KENTUCKY HOUSING CALLED INEFFECTUAL (By James S. Tunnell) WASHINGTON—Mrs. Tom Gish yesterday told of a housing problem in Eastern Kentucky and of a confused, splintered and ineffectual government action to solve it. Mrs. Gish told the Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that the chronic housing problem in parts of Kentucky has progressed not a whit, despite a decade of governmental programs and funding. Mrs. Gish, of Whitesburg, Ky., is a director of Eastern Kentucky Housing Development Corp., a nonprofit agency that receives funds from the federal office of Economic Opportunity. Her testimony yesterday was part of a campaign by the Senate committee to focus national attention on what its chairman calls the American “housing scandal.” The committee, chaired by South Dakota’s Democratic Sen. George Me- Govern, last year achieved impact with similar hearings on hunger in America. Mrs. Gish’s testimony buttressed points that previous witnesses have made: A large percentage of the rural population is shockingly housed; federal pro- grams to cure the ailment are hamstrung by bureaucratic jealousy and inertia. In the four Kentucky counties served by Eastern Kentucky Housing Develop- ment Corp.—Leslie, Knott, Letcher and Perry—Mrs. Gish said more than half the housing is substandard. ‘She gave examples: of 70-year-old women carrying water into their houses from hillside springs; of an 82-year-old man and his wife who lived for 10 years in a shelter made of poplar poles; of an 87-year-old woman who had to live in a chicken coop for nearly a year because her dilapidated house had been razed by vandals. Her own agency, she said, has “been working on housing problems for three years, but at the rate things are moving we now see at least 25 more years of work necessary to do away with the substandard housing that exists today.” And she said, by that time, much of today’s marginal housing won't be fit for habitation. Sen. McGovern and Kentucky’s junior Senator, Republican Marlow W. Cook, who is on the select committee, asked several sympathetic questions. But after Mrs. Gish’s testimony Cook said he had to go to the Senate floor, and McGovern sat on alone. In contrast to the hunger hearings a year ago, there was almost no attend- ance at the hearing; also no television and only a handful of newspapermen. Mrs. Gish blamed over-rigid federal bureaucracy for much of the continued housing blight—despite a plethora of federal programs. “YT wish I could point to huge successes, but the fact is that these and most other programs were not written for areas like Eastern Kentucky,” she said. One program, under the Federal Housing Administration code, could not be applied to Kentucky because of requirements for public water and sewer service, lot size, and the like, she said. The Farmers Home Administration, charged with meeting the housing needs of rural areas, fails, Mrs. Gish said, because of “rigidly conservative adminis- tration.” She said the farms home program also suffers from “restrictive legislation, a staff totally inadequate . . . and an apparent reluctance to accept innovative building techniques.” The public housing programs of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mrs. Gish said, are underfinanced and incredibly snarled in red tape. Letcher County, for instance, with 22,590 people, has only 40 low-rent public housing units although 60 more are being planned, she noted. “It took six years to get that first 40 units and is taking six more to get the next 60,” she said. 2112 The Appalachian Regional Commission points to the seemingly impressive figure of 6,145 housing units built in the 13-state Appalachian region, Miss Gish said, but that works out to “less than two houses per county per year built . . . by Appalachian funds. So that isn’t the answer.” Mrs. Gish offered the committee no specific solutions, but said she wished it well “as it turns its attention to the problems of housing those whom it has so recently helped to obtain food.” [From the American Banker, Oct. 8, 1970] NEw AGENCY URGED FOR RURAL EMERGENCY HoUSING FOR ProPLE Nor COVERED BY CURRENT PROGRAMS WasHINGTON.—Congress was asked Wednesday to set up a new agency to provide emergency housing for rural people who cannot be helped through public housing or by the Farmers Home Administration. The proposed Rural Home Development Administration would fill the gap left by FHA and public housing in rural areas and in towns of 25,000 or less. As envisioned by Clay L. Cochran, chairman of the National Rural Housing Coalition, the RHDA would “provide minimum housing, sanitation and clear water, as well as desirable community facilities for day-care and other pro- grams,” and “do so within five years.” Mr. Cochran made the proposal in testimony before the Senate Select Com- mittee on Nutrition and Human Needs. The special committee, headed by Sen. George McGovern, D., 8.D., had been concerned mainly with hunger before it started housing hearings this week. Aaron Henry, a Clarksdale, Miss., druggist who is president of the Mississippi conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peo- ple, told the committee he is “compelled to chide you a bit for tardiness” in “beginning to take a look at the relationship between housing and health.” According to Mr. Henry, “increasing the food available to a family that lives in decaying, tumbled-down shacks located in the midst of contaminated drain- age ditches and the pollution of an inadequate outhouse ends up by providing a better diet to the parasites that infest people forced to live like that and to the bacteria that those conditions spawn—not to the people themselves.” The NRHC is the political action affiliate of the Rural Housing Alliance, an educational and technical assistance group which Mr. Cochran heads as exec- utive director. The coalition, Mr. Cochran told the Senate committee, hopes “to raise the problem of bad rural housing to a sufficiently high level in the public consciousness that it will compel corrective action.” The new agency proposed by Mr. Cochran would organize and finance hous- ing development agencies which would “operate in anything from a portion of a county to an entire state.” These HDAs would build housing developments, finance individual homes, make loans for rental housing projects, and finance water and sewer systems. They would make grants and loans in amounts determined by the income of the family receiving them. Loan interest rates would be as low as 19% ; grants would be “non-amortizable, non-interest bearing second trusts which come into effect only when the house is sold or the original interest-bearing note is repaid.” The RHDA also would “do continuing research into the location and the numbers of families not eligible for existing programs of housing.” According to Mr. Cochran’s proposal, the new agency would work closely with existing agencies. Hopefully, he said, its operations would diminish “as incomes improve, as FHA’s programs are financed adequately so that they may meet more of the need, as public housing improves in operation.” Mr. Cochran made an alternative proposal to the select committee that Congress set up “in some form” a “one-stop” agency to handle “the housing needs of all of the people who require public assistance in any form.” He also proposed that “local governments should simply be shut off from access of Federal funds for any program, including highways, unless they are willing to take on the responsibility for meeting minimum housing needs.” Mr. Cochran made suggestions for improving FHA programs. “At this time,” he said, “the future of rural housing and community facilities rests primarily 2113 with public housing and the Farmers Home Administration. From past experi- ence, that ain’t much, but it’s all we got.” The FHA’s “greatest need,” according to Mr. Cochran, is “adequate adminis- trative funds.” Its budget for this purpose, cut to $85 million by the Nixon Administration from the $146 million the agency asked for the current fiscal year, should receive a ‘‘several-fold” increase. The agency, Mr. Cochran said, needs a separate housing staff in the field and a specialized staff to deal with and promote cooperative, self-help, and farm labor housing. It needs to do research into the “depth and scope” of housing needs. The FHA should be given “the authority to make second trust loans of up to 40 or 509% of the value of a house with the balance payable at as low as 19%, depending on family income.” Its service area, Mr. Cochran said, should be expanded to include towns of 25,000 and under. The current cutoff is 5,500 population. Also, FHA regulations “should not be less generous than public housing, i.e., if a family would be required to pay a given monthly payment to a public hous- ing authority and that or a lesser amount is adequate to pay off a loan, the family should be eligible without question.” The FHA, according to Mr. Cochran, “may be the wrong agency to handle farm labor housing, and we suspect it is as long as it is subject to the juris- diction of the Agriculture and Agriculture appropriations subcommittees where there is a plain conflict of interest.” Mr. Cochran had charged earlier in his testimony that the FHA housing program “is inextricably tied to its other programs which are under the con- trol of a committee whose principal interests are the agri-business programs of the USDA. (The U.S. Department of Agriculture.) The rural housing program is an orphan child.” He proposed that housing programs be placed under single House and Senate committees. “If the Congress cannot reshuffle its functions along these or some similar lines, then we urge that there be created a Department of Rural Affairs into which the economic development part of the USDA’s research and Farmers Home’s housing and community facilities be placed under the control of a new committee structure in Congress.” The housing coalition chairman also called for the establishment of a Federal home owners’ mortgage bank: “an institution to which low income people and groups working with them could go for housing credit on terms as low as are available from any other agency.” He also proposed setting up a federal capital budget in lieu of the present system which, Mr. Cochran said, “makes it possible to kill off essential pro- grams because of their budgetary impact. Under this primative system we equate the cost of a children’s hospital with a bomber, a loan for a house with the expenditure by the Pentagon of $28 million a year for public relations.” Mr. Cochran described the FHA as more effective in meeting rural housing needs than the Federal Housing Administration or public housing, neither of which, he said, have done much in rural areas. But the FHA was created, according to Mr. Cochran, “to make risky loans for social purposes.” Yet, “under the battering it has received from the vested interests in and out of Congress for several decades, the agency has been inordinately proud of a loan loss (less than 19%) so low as to be a demonstration that it was not carrying out its mandate.” [From the Courier-Times, Oct. 8, 1970] GOVERNMENT NEGLECTING RURAL AMERICA, SENATE Tord (By Peggy Simpson) WASHINGTON (AP).—Country folks don’t move to the big cities anymore to find bright lights and indoor plumbing, but because of the government's deliberate neglect of rural America, the Senate has been told. Clay Cochran, chairman of the year-old National Rural Housing Coalition, said Wednesday the government still treats small towns and rural areas— home for 65 million Americans—as orphans in its aid program. The extent of the neglect and the damage already done is rarely recognized, he said. 2114 Testifying before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Cochran said the neglect of rural America stems from the myth that the height of civilization will be reached when 90 percent of the population lives on one percent of the land. Recent publicity given pollution and the accompanying problems is helping puncture this myth, he said, but still little notice is taken of rural America’s needs. “The American people, including the Congress, must be made aware of the widespread need: that two-thirds of the bad housing is there (in rural America) and that bad water and lack of sanitation destroy the health and lives of people,” he said. Cochran proposed establishment of an emergency Rural Home Development Administration to help families or individuals otherwise ineligible for housing from Farmers Home Administration or public housing programs. The proposed agency would provide minimum housing, sanitation and clean water, plus other community facilities such as day care centers, in any town of 25,000 population or smaller, he said. “Let the existing institutions take stock and struggle to maintain their domain by doing more of the job they should long since have completed,” he said. The Nixon administration has yet to make concrete proposals for upgrad- ing rural America although there have been signs in recent months that such proposals are under study. Congress also has begun to move toward solving the problems of rural America. A part of the omnibus farm bill drafted by the Senate Agriculture Committee defines the problem and calls for progress reports by agencies starting Dec. 1. President Nixon’s Task Force on Rural Development warned earlier that “our growing industry and our increasing population must spread out instead of continuing to pile people and industrial plants into compacted urban areas” if the United States is to be a healthy and happy nation. (Whereupon, at 12:08 p.m., the select committee adjourned.) Oo NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS—1970 HEARINGS BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE NINETY-FIRST CONGRESS SECOND SESSION ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS PART 8—REVIEW OF THE NATIONAL SCHOOL LUNCH ACT WASHINGTON, D.C., OCTOBER 13, 1970 & Printed for the use of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 42-778 0 ‘WASHINGTON : 1971 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Washington, D.C. 20402 - Price 70 cents SELECT COMMITTEE ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS GEORGE McGOVERN, South Dakota, Chairman ALLEN J. ELLENDER, Louisiana HERMAN E. TALMADGE, Georgia RALPH W. YARBOROUGH, Texas PHILIP A. HART, Michigan WALTER F. MONDALE, Minnesota EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts CLAIBORNE PELL, Rhode Island JACOB K. JAVITS, New York CHARLES H. PERCY, Illinois PETER H. DOMINICK, Colorado MARLOW W. COOK, Kentucky ROBERT DOLE, Kansas HENRY BELLMON, Oklahoma KENNETH SCHLOSSBERG, Staff Director CLARENCE V. MCKEE, Professional Staff Member for the Minority (II) CONTENTS Opening statement by the chairman_ ___________________________i___L CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WITNESSES Tuespay, OcToBER 13, 1970 Hart, Hon. Philip A., a U.S. Senator from the State of Michigan________ Leonard, Rodney, director, Children’s Foundation_____________________ Martin, Josephine, chief consultant, food service program, State depart- ment; of education, Aflanta, Ga. . ci. ia abn hii tis om osm hmm mime Neumark, Philip and Daniel Hays Lowenstein, attorneys, California Rural Legal Assistance, Modesto, Calif... o.oo oo common Hurley, Mrs. Kay, community representative, South Boston, Mass.; Gary Delgado, community organizer, Children’s Foundation, Little Rock, Ark.; Glenn D. Fuqua and Peter Thoms, Rhode Island Legal Services. Statements: Delgado; iGarye - oi. cc 50 db al Hors his 5 ain = a ah mh SEES i Heh Hart, Hon. Philip A. cc ioaihs an oi mm mins bmi no SE shi Hurley, Kay, Gary Delgado, Glenn D. Fuqua, and Peter Thoms____ Leonard, Rodney. oo oo a il cern ena—— Martin, JOSEPIING., ... isp nas min Bo mel oS hate os wi En MeGovern, Hon. George... .. ov ouwisiss baw mish ek ns Sido d Di Neumark, Philip and Daniel Hays Lowenstein____________________ Communications to— Mrs. Lydia Aston, from L. G. Derthick, Jr., March 31, 1970________ Hon Past C. Camilletti, from Claire Mailloux, R.N. M. Ed., March NOT. hE TR ere re ie SLED Sars Sm Hon. Paul C. Camilletti, from Robert L. Nolan, March 30, 1970____ Hon. Paul Camilletti, from Larry N. Starcher, April 3, 1970. _______ Gary Delgado, from George McGovern, September 16, 1970________ Ralph W. Eaton, from Glenn D. Fuqua, September 8, 1970_________ Glenn D. Fuqua, from Barbara Bode, September 9, 1970___________ Glenn D. Fuqua, from Ralph W. Eaton, September 15, 1970_______ Glenn D. Fuqua, from John Hough, September 1, 1970____________ Glenn D. Fuqua, from John Hough, September 10, 1970___________ Hon. Clifford Hardin, from Gary Delgado, September 10, 1970______ Hon. Clifford M. Hardin, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture, from Hon. Jacob K. Javits, August 5, 1970. ______________._____._ John Hough, from Glenn D. Fuqua, August 28, 1970______________ John Hough, from Glenn D. Fuqua, September 8, 1970____________ Hon. Clifford M. Hardin, Secretary of Agriculture, from Glenn D. Fuqua, September 23,:1970....ccncinin acne rhbo nnn nnn mas Hon. Jacob K. Javits, from Richard Lyng, Assistant Secretary, De- partment of Agriculture, August 20, 1970_______________________ Jonathan Kleinbard, from Herbert D. Rorex, September 8, 1970____ Richard Lyng, from Gary Delgado, September 21, 1970____________ Senator George McGovern, from Lydia S. Aston, October 21, 1970.__ Hon. Seorge cGovern, from Hon. Edward M. Kennedy, October 12, Dr. Robert L. Nolan, from Herbert Rorex, April 13, 1970__________ Herbert Rorex, from Jonathan Kleinbard, September 1, 1970_______ Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, from Bert C. Corona, October 9, 1970... ... ive wi mri eS me min Bmw nine 2272 2271 2272 2238 2256 2260 Iv Miscellaneous articles, publications, ete., entitled: “Adults Seek More Help for Lunches,” from the Arkansas Gazette, Page OCLODET 1070. - eo ii mit mii ms ER i mm Se Ger Je 2 2246 “At Least a Two-Week Wait on Lunch Guidelines Expected, Officials Told,” from the Arkansas Gazette, September 28, 1970__________ 2244 CNI Special Report—Community Nutrition Institute.__.__________ 2262 CNI Weekly Report Community Nutrition Institute. _..__.________ 2179 “Eighty Residents Demand Free Lunches—They Charge Non-paying Children Get Different Treatment,” from the Arkansas Democrat, September 20, 1970... .... ovo a Sh i ine te Bs 5 me im ot 2243 Income Poverty Guidelines for Determining Eligibility for Free and Reduced Price Tanehes. - ...c...c. iin netaotns studi ou 2235 Memorandum: To Superintendents Operating School Lunch Programs, from Ruth Powell L. .. 0 i ll oR du wns 2236 “North Little Rock: Lunches Withheld, Suit Contends,” from the Arkansas Gazette, October 8, 1970____ _________.__________.___ 2245 “Senate Panel Told of Abuses in School Lunch Program, from the Washington Post, October 14, 1970____________________________ 2267 “S. 4104—The School Breakfast Act of 1970,” from the Congres- sional Record, July 21, 1970... 0. i oon leiden ienaan.d 2207 “Schools Can Use Lunch Plan,” from the Arkansas Democrat, September 18,1970... Lu... iia ann i ad aa al 2242 “Shorter Residents Organize—Group Applies for Free School Lunches,” from the Arkansas Democrat, August 31, 1970_________ 2239 “Stealing From Children,” from the Public Information Center News, Oetober 070. tl. ae Seth adas ba Sh Ca Sy deh an 2183 “School Lunches: Welfare Rights Groups Seek Freer Policy; Officials Refuse, Cite Costs,” from the North Little Rock Times, September BE NOD ee ri a EE is 2266 Telegram to Gary Delgado, from Gerald Cassidy... ________________ 2239 “Tempers Flare in New Protest at NLR Office,” from the Arkansas Democrat, September 18, 1970... ieee anmaas lanai L 2242 The White House Press Conference ______________________________ 2212 “Welfare Workers, Recipients, and State at Odds,” from the Daily Athenaeum, Marchi 26, 1970... oo. oiowo epg Lo 2273 Why Child Nutrition Programs Fail, by Rodney E. Leonard._______ 2119 THE NATIONAL SCHOOL LUNCH ACT TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1970 U.S. SENATE, SELECT COMMITTEE ON Nutrition AND Human NEebs, Washington, D.C. The select committee met at 10:10 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 1202, New Senate Office Building, Senator George M. McGovern (chairman of the select committee) presiding. Present: Senators McGovern, Hart, Javits, Percy, and Pell. Staff members present: Kenneth Schlossberg, staff director and Gerald S. J. Cassidy, general counsel. OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. GEORGE McGOVERN, CHAIRMAN OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS Senator McGovern. The Committee will be in order. This week is National School Lunch Week. I can think of no more appropriate time to review the implementation of the recently enacted reform measures of the National School Lunch Act. Our hearings today will allow for this kind of review. Congress clearly established that the right to a free or a reduced price school lunch is one that every needy child in this Nation possesses. Not since the passage of the original School Lunch Act in 1946 has a piece of child nutrition related legislation promised such a heavy impact in the fight to eliminate hunger and malnutrition from the classroom in America. But the time has come to guarantee deliverance of the intent of that promise. Accordingly, I am particularly concerned that we identify the eligible children, then, and that we proceed to make adequate provision of the funds that it will take to feed those children. The administration has estimated that there are 6.6 million eligible children, but the House Committee on Education and Labor estimates that a conservative estimate is 8.9 million children. That means that under the new law 70 percent more children will be promised the right to a free or reduced price lunch. What must we do to guarantee that right? The increase we are talking about will require a 230 percent in- crease in funds, while so far for fiscal 1971 we are appropriating only a 56 percent increase. It seems to me that a supplemental appropria- tion will be urgently needed, and I think we must make it clear to those school districts across the country that we intend to supply this funding so that they can now get on with carrying out the intent of Congress to feed all needy children. (2115) 2116 Senator Hart of Michigan, who has suggested this hearing today during National School Lunch Week is a member of this committee. He has a statement he would like to make. Senator Hart? STATEMENT OF HON. PHILIP A. HART, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF MICHIGAN Senator Hart. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Clearly you have served us all well in bringing us together during the school lunch week to take a fresh look at where we are and where we will be heading. Under your leadership as chairman of this committee, public attention was focused on the need, the case was documented, good new legislation was passed, and funding was sharply stepped up. But we are a long distance yet from achieving the objective of putting a school lunch before every youngster that needs one. Congressman Perkins, on September 21, put the facts in the Congressional Record, and clearly, based on the questionnaire, the summary of which is contained in his statement, we can achieve our goal only with more adequate funding. According to Congressman Perkins’ figures, additional funds in the amount of $310 million will be required this fiscal year. Let’s use Michigan as an example. When we expanded and ex- tended the school lunch program in 1962, only one out of five Michigan schoolchildren was in a school that served a lunch program. In Detroit, the figure was less than one out of 10. Today, the Michigan Department of Education reports that business is “boom- ing,” to use their expression. Indications early in the school year are that they are adding 150 elementary schools. However, there are 3,700 elementary and secondary schools in Michigan, and of these about one-third, or 1,100, are still without any food service. How much money will be needed in Michigan to get a lunch to every needy child? Well, between $20 million and $27 million, de- pending on what Detroit does. They are going to run out of money in March if additional funds are not made available before them. Aside from additional funds, Mr. Chairman, the people in Michigan say that some schools in needy areas will need some relief in “brick and mortar” for food service. I suggest we explore the possibility that under extreme need and stringent safeguards, some money be made available for construction for food services. Our State officials recommended consideration of removing the matching factor for equipment in these same needy areas, which are typically the ones with the poor children. We have come a good part of the way in the school lunch program, and in the next few months I would urge that our committee concentrate on finishing this par- ticular job. Let us make sure that we do get the additional money in supple- mental appropriations. Let’s clear up any remaining barriers in the way of putting food on the table. The President’s goal is our goal: At least one good meal daily for every needy school child in the Nation by Thanksgiving. That is a goal we had better reach. I don’t think the people of America will consider expenditures for feeding hungry children either wasteful or inflationary. 2117 We have to get on with the job of insuring that no child’s life is limited because malnutrition dulls his brain or slows his development. If we get to the goal, we will have something to celebrate on Thanksgiving. : Senator McGovern. Thank you very much, Senator Hart. I think your suggestions are well taken. ; Our first witness this morning is a man eminently qualified to testify before this committee on the subject of school lunch needs of the Nation, Mr. Rodney Leonard, and I wish, Mr. Leonard, you would come forward now, and we will be glad to hear your testimony. STATEMENT OF MR. RODNEY LEONARD, DIRECTOR, CHILDREN’S FOUNDATION Mr. Leonarp. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. z My name is Rodney Leonard and I am a consultant on child nutrition programs to the Children’s Foundation, and also editor of the Community Nutrition Institute weekly report, which is a news- letter on programs, activities, and people in the child nutrition field. I have served as Administrator of Consumer and Marketing Service and Assistant Secretary of Marketing and Consumer Affairs in the USDA. In these positions I was responsible for the operation of the school lunch and child nutrition programs, among others. My comments here are based on this experience and on my con- tinuing involvement in the effort to utilize the child nutrition pro- grams as a delivery system to eliminate the lack of food as a cause of malnutrition. All evidence accumulating today indicates strongly that, instead of having passed through the worst part of the war on hunger, we are approaching a crisis of greater dimension than anyone can imagine. I choose these words carefully, because I am concerned. My con- clusion is based on these observations: 1. The school lunch program is not reaching enough children; 2. The school lunch program is not reaching enough children whose parents are poor; 3. The children who are being reached are not receiving ade- quate nutrition necessarily; and 4. Except for the steadfast support of a few individuals and this committee’s resolute stance, concern over malnutrition and hunger is dissolving in public apathy. I know of no other way to describe these conditions than as a crisis, particularly when they exist after: ; 1. Four years of public attention, with multiple exposure in all media; ; 2. Four years of congressional action to legislate new pro- grams, and, most recently, to modernize the National School Lunch Act. 3. Four years when every appropriation request submitted by the administration has been fulfilled by the Congress. And what has been the impact? Here are some facts developed by comparing a survey of school lunch performance for the 1969-70 school year. I am submitting a copy of each for the record. (The material referred to follows:) 2119 WHY CHILD NUTRITION PROGRAMS FAIL By Rodney E. Leonard FOREWORD This pamphlet was produced by Rodney E. Leonard under a grant from The Children's Foundation. From 1967 to 1969, Mr. Leonard was Administrator of Consumer and Marketing Services in the United States Department of Agriculture. Prior to that, he held other posts in the Department, served as assistant to the Governor of Minnesota, and worked as a newspaper reporter. While the views expressed in this paper are Mr. Leonard's, all of us share responsibility for the appalling situation outlined here. Charles U. Daly President The Children's Foundation Washington, D.C. December 3, 1969 2120 The United States is faced with an embarrassing situation: an over-abundance of food and a large segment of the population that goes hungry or is malnourished. Two major efforts exist to cope with this problem. One consists of the family food assistance programs, such as food stamps and commodity distribution, designed to help low income families obtain more food. As others have shown, family food assistance programs are an inadequate response to the conditions of poverty in which 25 million or more Americans live today. ! The other major effort consists of child nutrition programs, principally school lunch. This paper examines the failure of that effort. From the beginning, the legislation establishing these programs took note of those children whose parents are poor. When Congress wrote the National School Lunch Act of 1946 specific provision was made for these children in language which says lunches will be pro- vided free or at reduced prices, without discrimination, to all children "who are determined by local school authorities to be unable to pay the full price."? Report of the President's Commission on Income Maintenance, November 1969. See also, Hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Hunger and Malnutrition, 90th Congress, 2d session; Hunger, U.S.A., and Still Hungry in America, et. al. 25ce Appendix I for a brief description of the legislation of all child nutrition programs. 2121 Taking ''note' apparently was not enough. For all the pious words, the fnabilicy of the school lunch program to respond to national needs recognized 24 years ago is graphically illustrated by an analysis of state efforts to provide free and reduced price lunches. (See Table A.) In 1967, several womens' organizations made a study of the school lunch program. Their Daily rend” was the first compre- hensive analysis of the inadequacies in this national program. It helped to galvanize congressional action, but the response still has been far short of the need. Their Daily Bread showed that two out of three children did not participate in the National School Lunch program. Now the ratio is three out of five. The first survey found the greater the need of the child from a poor neighborhood, the less the community was able to meet it. This doleful judgment still prevails. Today, there are 52 million children under 18 years of age in public and private schools of whom 20 million are served a school 5 lunch on an average day. About ten million attend schools with no facilities to feed children, and almost nine out of ten of these are children in elementary schools. ® 3pata taken from reports filed by states with the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition & Human Needs. “heir Daily Bread, A Study of the National School Lunch Program. Committee on School Lunch Participation, New York, 1967. 5 Food & Nutrition Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, based on unpublished study by Agriculture Research Service. 61pid. School tunch Breakfast Guideline Policy TABLE A 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 No. ESEA z No. |No.Plans School Year % % |No. AFDC| % |Children| % % Free School {Approved No.Plans| 1968 - 69 ADA ADP 2:1 F/RP 431fChildren | 4:6] FY67 4:8 ADP }10:1{Breakfast{pistrits} 6/30/69 Rejected] Alabama 787,714 | 510,628! 64! 101,536 {12.0} 327,500{ 31 | 244,311}41.6 39,415} 5.0 46 119 117 0 Alaska 46,437 | 24,668! 53 "8,120 {17.0 8,187] 99 6,974111.6 633f 1.4 100 29 19 0 Arizona 311,477 } 165,602; 53 30,855} 9.9} 62,264] 50 46,633166.2 33,987 {11.0 76 296 117 0 Arkansas 414,173 § 280,506¢ 68 80,482 19.0f 202,135] 40 | 149,658}53.8 5,047} 1.3 83 395 385 0 California p, 186,433 } 827,000! 38 75,743 | 3.5§ 472,876 16 | 396,632}19.1 6,000 § 0.3 21 1,109 660 75 Colorado 498,129 | 222,647; 44 13,973 | 2.0 60,026 | 23 45,989§30.3 5,172 ¢ 1.0 6.0 181 181 0 Connecticut 460,041) 191,344 42 7,548 | 1.63 45,085) 17 39,361f19.1 18,705§ 4.1 96 177 188 0 Delaware 108,261} 58,464§ 54 2,548} 2.4f 12,628) 20 10,982}23.2 132f 0.1 30 48 48 0 D. C. 130,605] 36,469; 28 20,542 f15.7¢ 30,320) 68 22,896§89.7 8,6654% 6.7 100 - - - Florida 1,270,412} 774,369: 60 81,227 | 6.03 243,894 33 | 145,719}55.8 5,052§ 0.5 43 67 72 0 Georgia 1,014,144} 790,003 76 § 158,563 [15.0f 357,359) 44 f 243,261}65.3 7,572 0.5 58 193 181 17 ‘Hawaii 159,819) 128,004} 80 7,324 | 4.6f 18,423] 40 12,460} 58.6 284% 0.2 76 1 1 0 Idaho 252,369{ 78,735} 31 2,652 | 1.0; 24,031} 11 14,902} 17.7 - - - 117 all 0 Illinois $,392,786| 600,000¢ 25 33,933 | 1.4 290,423} 11} 254,140} 13.4] 3,982¢ 0.2 7.0 1,279 1,175 few Indiana },124,711| 622,01455.3 | 20,665 | 1.8f 127,923} 16 | 88,233}23.5 31,2124 2.0 81 339 all 0 Iowa 625,474) 344,020; 55 11,785 | 1.9§ 118,709 99 85,16! 13.8] i 3,339f 0.5§ 15.3 461 470 0 Kansas 391,266] 253,215} 65 17,305 | 4.47 75,287{ 23 49,671 3.8] 405f 0.1 36 335 380 5 Kentucky 638,818] 477,161} 74 94,000 | 14) 263,414} 35[ 196,46 47.8) 194,930¢ 30 21 195 190 0 1. ADA: Average Daily Attendance 3. In the case of columns 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11, 4, F/RP: Free and Reduced Price Lunches Daily 2. ADP: Average Daily Participation percentages were figured by the simple division indicated. Cale School Lunch Breakfast Guideline Policy 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 0. ESEA % No. | No.Plans % % |No. AFDC| % [Children | % % Free School | Approved [No.Plans ADA ADP |2:1 F/RP 4:1| Children|4:6 | FY67 4:8 ADP [10:1 BreakfastfiDistrits| 6/30/69 [Rejected] Louisiana 913,598 | 696,748] 76 90,933] 9.9] 294,483 | 31 205,962(44.2 13,037 | 1.4 81 70 70 0 Maine 175,000f 96,311} 55 15,023 8] 35,931| 41 22,456(66.9 1,120] 0.7 - 297 297 0 Maryland 729,995 293,158] 40 15,5321{ 2.1{ 93,802 16f 81,246(19.1 3,454 1 0.5 88 24 23 0 Massachusetts 685,175] 445,364] 65 48,881 7] 105,057 | 46 77,492163.1 1,927 | 0.2 86 351 558 0 Michigan [1,339,829 | 554,528] 41 27,589 2{ 231,004| 11 167,661}16.4 3,989 0.3 62 650 532 0 Minnesota 773,871} 457,550] 59 18,500 | 2.4| 135,658{13.6 102,145{18.1 2,016 | 0.3] 25 1,244 1,244 0 Mississippi 540,000 380,573 70 79,311 114.7] 320,750| 25 256,196|31.0, 6,435] 1.2 100 149 130 50% Missouri L,017,412} 523,787 51 41,396 4) 196,430} 21 144,612 28.6 1,314| 0.1 78 729 all 0 Montana 161,559 57,310{ 35 5,497 | 3.4] 24,602} 22 16,978|32.4 815] 0.5 100 730 220 0 Nebraska 266,313§ 142,783] 54 10,037 | 3.8} 60,088 [16.7] 37,346126.9 517 0.2 37 -1,571 395 0 Nevada 113,468) 19,424) 17 1,725 1.5 5,718 | 30 4,688(36.8 485] 0.6 22 17. 13 0 New Hampshire 139,135} 71,165{ 51 N.A. [N.A.| 12,434 IN.A, 8,385|N.A. 900| 1.0 16 173 all 0 New Jersey 1,266,524 § 248,00219.5 25,327 2; 126,334 21 108,767{23.3 4,782 0.4 97 573 321 13 New Mexico no datja suppligd New York 160,000 §,413,000¢ 45 | 417,500 | 13} 489,281} 85 405,584| 103 4,800] 0.2 98 747 974 0 North Carolina | 984,946} 776,198} 78 | 155,893| 15} 456,019| 34 334,527} 46.6 10,640{ 1.0| 79 157 157 0 North Dakota 130,046{ 89,097] 68 N.A.| - 39,332) - 26,325 - 290] 0.2 8.3 474 354 0 Ohio 1,511,727) 779,635] 52 56,601 3.7| 257,320{ 23 194,251}29.] 36,549) 2.4 100 640 all 9 €clc School Lunch Breakfast Guideline Policy 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 No. ESEA % No. No. plane) % % |No. AFDC{ % | Children| 7% % Free School {Approved No.Plans ADA ADP 2:1} F/RP 4:1| Children} 4:6] FY67 4:8 ADP |10:1|Breakfast Pistrics 6/30/69 Rejected Oklahoma 391,471) 257,000 [65.5 39,227 10} 135,770] 29 101,346|38.7 4,970{ 1.3 65 694 740 0 Oregon 430,401} 191,486) 44 8,033 | 1.5{ 44,075} 18 33,832)23.7 646 | 0.1 71 356 {all but 2 Pennsylvania 2,125,071§ 830,961} 39{ 58,558 | 2.0] 334,387} 17] 255,396{22.9 3,640] 0.2 80 699 547 0 Rhode Island 107,840) 41,577) 38} 6,484 6} 24,2914 26 18,883]34.3 41,577 | 38 72 39 32 0 South Carolina | 603,387 458,865 "a 142,248 23} 278,491) 51 208,329/68.3| 5,250} 0.9 81 93 92 0 South Dakota no dafa suppligd Tennessee 678,509 § 529,546 | 78{ 72,299 13} 314,191§ 29; 222,95932.4 11,654 1.7 82 150 145 3 Texas 2,395,000} 967,112 | 40§ 122,000 5} 617,085 19} 403,275(30.3 92,558 | 3.8 80 1,244 1,106 0 Utah 251,361} 162,220} 65f 15,866 | 6.3] 21,478{ 74 15,395} 103 325) 0.1 3.2 40 40 0 Vermont 85,461} 40,598 | 47} 4,200 {10.3} 14,723 8.6) 8,945 (47.2 753 0.8 24 235 248 0 Virginia 1,018,000 N.A. {| 41F¥ 64,630 | 6.3} 256,421§ 25{ 179,409 {35.5 nl 47,111) 4.6 47 134 132 0 Washington 753,460} 777,076 | 37{ 15,350 2{ 67,200} 23} 49,358}31.1 1,822 } 0.2 13.6 326 224 16 West Virginia 320,628 § 181,724 | 56} 35,600 11] 141,566 § 25 109,083132.6 51,905 | 16 95 55 55 0 Wisconsin 721,329 § 351,095 | 49! 10,739 15} 112,011 9.6{ 78,593}13.6 1,859} 2.6 47 459 431 0 Wyoming 80,362} 35,922 44 2,065 |2.0 9,273 22 6,585§31.4 744 4 0.9 100 161 110 0 *Estimated ¥Cic 2125 There are about eight million hildien’ whose families cannot afford the cost of a school meal. Three million receive a lunch free or at reduced cost. Of the remaining five million who are denied reasonable access to the lunch program, three million could be served immediately because they attend schools where the program now is operated. The remaining two million attend schools where food service is not now available. While the Congress, both in the National School Lunch Act of 1946 and the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, paid lip service to a moral responsibility for child nutrition, the legislation and the form of its administration are predicated on economic interests. Congress passed on the legal responsibility for child nutrition to the states and local school districts. The Executive Branch recognizes that the power center in food rests closer to the economic interests of those who can afford to produce, market, process or consume rather than with those who cannot. As a result, the administrative structure of the child nu- trition programs is a means primarily of distributing inadequate resources in such a manner as to minimize the possibility of fraud in the programs and, therefore, public censure, rather than to respond to human need. As will be shown in later sections, the needs of the food industry often dictate how the dollars are spent. Estimates vary. The Council on Hunger and Malnutrition places the figure at 8.4 million, while other analysts estimate the number at 8.6 million. The USDA puts the figure at 6.7 million. The President's Commission on Income Maintenance estimates that two out of five persons in poverty are 18 years or under. This figure in- cludes about 8 million school age children. 2126 At the state and local levels, where legal authority presumably rests, the child nutrition programs are in incoherent shambles. One example of the gross mis-administration of the program by the states is the apparent diversion of millions of dollars appropriated to supply free and reduced price lunches for needy children. Under Section 25 of the Agricultural Appropriations Act of 1968, engineered by Representative Carl Perkins, an additional $45 million was author- ized for this purpose. But most states apparently are using these funds to hold down the prices of regular school lunches--in effect, benefiting the middle-class youngsters and diluting a special effort to provide an adequate diet for the poor. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), $32.6 million of the Perkins monies were used to provide free lunches over and above the existing program for free lunches and helped to raise the number of children receiving them to just over three million. This represents an increase of only about 400,000 above the figure for the 1967-68 fiscal year. Perkins funds were intended to boost the number of free and reduced price lunches closer to four million on the average day, or at least a million more children than in the previous school year. Questionnaires® sent to the state school lunch directors in the summer of 1969 by the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs (the McGovern Committee) show that almost $27.7 million were spent for free lunches through state administered programs during the period 1968-69. These funds were utilized at a rate which for 8 All except two states, New Mexico and South Dakota, filed re- ports with the McGovern Committee, which were unpublished at the time this paper was written. 2127 at least the last three months of the school year could have pro- vided over a million additional free lunches a day. An analysis of the data indicates that an estimated 54 per cent of this money was diverted to other school lunch purposes, and did not find its way to children who need a free or reduced price lunch. A third of the states were able to translate fully the Perkins money into additional free or reduced price lunches for needy children. Eight states spent the additional funds with no measure- able results. (See Table B.) Clearly, states and local school districts substituted Perkins money to pay for lunches which before had been provided free or at reduced prices from other federal sources or from state and local funds. In some southern states, where funds under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) had been cut off to encourage faster school desegregation, the Perkins money was used to make up the difference where ESEA funds had been earmarked for school feeding. [In the 1966-67 school year, more than $30 million of ESEA funds were used for school tunches.]2 Local school districts, in the absence of strong state and federal supervision, will rationalize the use of the Perkins funds to meet rising program costs, contrary to congressional intent and executive instruction. It is revealing that the spokesmen for state school lunch directors advocated this position before the Appropriation Committees two years ago. Statistical Report, Fiscal Year 1967, Title I/Year ITI, Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. U.S. Department of Health, Educa- tion & Welfare. 42-778 O - 71 - pt, 8 -- 2 PERKINS FUND USED FOR FREE [REDUCED PRICE LUNCHES 7 TABLE B Possible No. Actual No. of Lunches Additional No. of Lunches Served Served Converted Percent Funds Amount Spent Daily* Daily Daily Diverted Alabama $2,551,917 73,000 12, 000 61, 000 83.6 | Alaska 16,527 100 District of Columbia 26, 022 100 Arizona 361, 221 9, 000 10, 000+ -0- -0- Arkansas 538, 469 26, 900 30, 000+ -0- -0~ California 1,672,721 83, 700 6, 800 76, 900 91.8 Colorado . 238,106 7, 900 3,700 4, 200 53 Connecticut 147, 822 7,400 7,100 300+ Not Sigmificant Delaware 12, 462 100 Florida 2,014, 441 57, 600 600 57,000 98 Georgia 2,132,141 71, 000 34, 000 37, 000 52 Hawaii 73,975 2,100 5,000 -0- -0- Illinois 942, 657 37,700 14,900 22, 800 60.5 prey 372,972 18, 600 10, 700 7, 900 42.5 Iowa 250, 259 12,500 8,100 4, 400 35 *Assumes 25 cents per day per lunch State Reimbursement 8¢IC PERKINS FUND Page Two [Possible No. Actual No of Lunches Additional No. of Lunches Served Served Converted Percent Funds Amount Spent Daily Daily Daily Diverted Kansas $150, 760 5,025 8, 000 =-0- =-0- Kentucky 900, 000 31,000 -0- 31, 000 100 Louisiana 461,191 18, 400 20, 000 -0- 3 ~0- Maine 175, 000 7,000 7,200 -0- -0- Maryland 329,761 16,500 12, 300 4,200 25 Massachusetts 665, 279 33, 260 33,800% -0- -0- Michigan 714, 261 23,800 -700 23, 800 100 Minnesota 529,851 21,200 17, 600 3, 600 17 Mississippi 822, 032 27, 400 33, 000 -0- -0- Missouri 693, 276 23,100 16, 350 6, 750 29 Montana -0- -0- =0- =O Nebraska 202,071 6, 700 6, 400 300 Not Sigificant Nevada Not Sigificant | New Hampshire Data Inadequ=# New Jersey Bias 475 16, 300 21, 300 -0~ -0- New Mexico No Data i 6C1¢C PERKINS FUND Page Three Possible No, Actual No. of Lunches Additional No. of Lunches Served Served Converted Percent Funds Amount Spent Daily Daily Daily Diverted North Carolina $2, 203, 907 100 New York 1,516,451 75, 800 0-40, 000 0-35, 000 45-100 North Dakota 125, 389 8, 360 4, 980 3, 380 40 Ohio 641,575 18, 350 18, 350% -0- -0- Oklahoma 792,912 26, 400 21, 600 4, 800 18 Oregon 158, 300 6, 300 5,100 1,200 19 Pennsylvania 371, 237 14, 800 -0- 14, 800 100 ’ Rhode Island 101, 004 3, 360 1,860 1,500 45 South Carolina 1,112,379 31, 800 18, 300 13,500 42 Tennessee 1,615,000 46, 000 11, 200 34, 800 75.6 Texas 2,312,902 92,500 13,500 79, 000 86 Utah 264, 997 8, 300 -0- 8, 300 100 Vermont 53,825 2,700 2,700 -0- -0- Virginia No Data Available Washington 212, 845 8,500 8, 600 -0- -0- West Virginia 401, 606 11, 400 11, 400 =-0- -0- 0€12 PERKINS FUND Page Four Possible No. | Actual No. of Lunches Additional No. of Lunches Served Served Converted Percent Funds Amount Spex Daily 2/ Daily Daily Diverted Wisconsin $258, 387 8,500 4,000 4,500 53 Wyoming 41,924 1,400 1, 400 -0- -0- South Dakota No Data 27,691,035 (1,006,155 460, 225 545, 930 54.3 1/ Data taken from reports submitted to U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs (McGovern committee). 2/ See Appendix II for formula used to develop analysis. 1€1C 2132 While the Perkins funds provided some increase in the number of free and reduced price lunches during the 1968-69 school year, most of the more densely populated states provided free and reduced price lunches to fewer than four per cent of the children attending school. More than 15 per cent should be eligible nationally. Only New York comes close with 13 per cent. The less urban states, other than those in the southeastern region, show no better performance. Most do not exceed five per cent. The southeastern states, excluding Virginia, provide at least nine per cent of school children with free or reduced price lunches. Many exceed 15 per cent, with South Carolina topping the list with 23 per cent, L° The present gap in reaching children most in need of good nutrition can be seen clearly by comparing the number of free or reduced price lunches to the number of children in families on welfare. This comparison in no way implies that all free or re- duced price lunches go to these children, or that they are the only ones who need such assistance. Only five states and the District of Columbia provided free or reduced price lunches at a rate equal to more than half the number of children in families on welfare. Alaska tops the list at 99 per cent. Two states, Wisconsin and Iowa, did not exceed ten per cent, 107he need is greater in this region than elsewhere. The response of South Carolina, when viewed in relation to the number of children in families on welfare, is only slightly better than Massachusetts, although the latter state provides only seven per cent of its lunches free or at reduced prices. 2133 and Illinois, Michigan and Idaho had 11 per cent rates. The rest, for the most part, huddled together at rates of between 20 and 40 per Sa Another measure of the overall performance by states is the com- parison of the number of free lunches served on a daily basis with the number of children cited by states under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as needing special assistance. Only three states--New York, Alaska and Utah--claimed to serve more free lunches than the number of Title I children. Of the others, only the District of Columbia exceeded 70 per cent, and the rest of the States ranged from 13 per cent in Illinois to 68 per cent in South Carolina. Urban states, as a rule, did much worse than their less urban neighbors. The urban states, for example, generally provided free lunches to an equivalent of no more than 30 per cent of the Title I children. The less urban states, however, are generally above 30 per cent. The extent of the child nutrition gap is best illustrated by another comparative statistic. More than seven out of ten states did not provide free lunches to the equivalent of half of the children used to justify the amount of Title I money the states receive. 1? The situation regarding free and reduced price lunches--and the Perkins monies in particular--is only the most glaring example of how the needy child is short-changed. The school breakfast program, which began its fourth season in 1969, is another. Urapie A, page 3. L2paple A, page 3. Of the 48 states responding to the question- naire, 46 provided sufficient data to make this analysis, and 35 were below the 50 per cent mark. 2134 Authorized by the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the school breakfast program served an average of 300,000 children each day. In 36 states, participation in the breakfast program was less than 1.5 per cent of the children attending school, 13 In 24 states, participation was less than half of one per cent. In only four states did participation exceed 10 per cent of students in daily attend- ance. | Two of the four states are in Appalachia--Kentucky, where 30 per cent of the school children were served breakfast, and West Virginia, where 16 per cent of the students ate breakfast at school. The third is Arizona, where 11 per cent of students used the program. The fourth is Rhode Island, where 38 per cent of the school children were served breakfast, even though only eight per cent of the schools equipped to serve meals are in the program. If states representing three geographical regions with such diverse social and economic characteristics can achieve a level of performance in the breakfast program distinctly superior to other states, obviously the program can work on a national rather than a state or regional basis. It is worth noting that in all four states which appear to be moving the program along, the percentage of schools which serve breakfasts is less than the percentage of students who eat them. A reasonable conclusion is that the program is being offered in schools where the need is great and where the response more than justifies the program. Lrable A, page 3. 2135 One argument in defense of the state performance with the breakfast program is a claim that Congress is stingy. Last year $3.5 million was appropriated for breakfasts, hardly a magnificent sum. Yet, with freedom to direct the $45 million Perkins fund, the states choose to put only $2 million more into breakfasts. Since each state receives a proportionate share of breakfast funds, and each state had the same degree of choice with the Perkins money, the variable factor appears to be the degree of state and local concern. The other major new child nutrition program is the Vanik Program, or Section 13 of the National School Lunch Act, enacted in May 1968. It authorized for the first time federal support for meal service-- breakfast and/or lunch--in children's activities outside the school. But the tardiness of the Congress in allowing child feeding to follow "the child appears to be carrying over into the administration of this program. While the Congress appropriated $10 million for the Vanik Program in fiscal year 1969, the USDA's records show that only $3.4 million was spent. In hearings in March 1969 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, the Department requested $20 million for fiscal year 1970. The $10 million increase was needed because "From reports we have of the interest expressed in the program, (we) feel there is a great need. "14 gearing, Department of Agriculture Appropriations for 1970, Part 5, House of Representatives, Ninety-First Congress, First session. 2136 Shortly after this statement, the USDA revised its budget, and, in April, proposed cutting $10 million from this program. However, the Department recommended increasing funds to "insure the avail- ability of milk to summer camps, child care centers and schools that do not have food service programs.’ This shifting of fiscal gears has all the hallmarks of paring a budget to fit both the dictates of the Bureau of the Budget and the dairy interests. It helps to understand priorities when a program to provide a complete meal for children is slashed in favor of one which provides only milk. Even a brief review of actual experience in the states indicates the Vanik program did not start late, as some claim.1® It just did not start. Nearly two out of five states did not reply to the McGovern Committee's request for data on this aspect of the child nutrition program. Many of these states are prohibited from adminis- tering programs outside the school system. Of those states which did report on the Vanik program, the records show that of more than $2.9 million allocated by the Department, over $750,000 was returned unspent. While there are no data available, the fact the USDA spent less than $1 million to establish non-school feeding projects in states where it administers the program directly suggest the states may simply reflect the Department's own lack of enthusiasm. L51pid. 16gee Table A, page 3. 2137 There are now only 15 projects under the Vanik Program in California, 50 in New York, 5 in New Jersey and 53 in Illinois. However, rather than make the effort to strengthen the program, the decision apparently was made to use its state of anemia as an excuse to reduce the proposed budget by the $10 million. When one turns from the special programs to the school lunch program as a whole, the situation is equally abysmal. Among states considered urban--those with a population density significantly above average--the majority do not provide any lunch service in even half of their elementary schools. New Jersey and Pennsylvania, for example, maintain lunch programs in only one-third of their elemen- tary schools. Where lunch service is available, participation by elementary school students in urban states rarely is greater than 50 per cent. Of 13 urban states and the District of Columbia, only three report participation higher than 50 per cent, and only two as high as 65 per cent. Among the less densely populated states, by contrast, the number of elementary schools serving lunch rarely drops below 50 per cent. Most range between 60 and 80 per cent, with the higher percentages more common. Participation in these, programs also is the reverse of the experience in urban states. Most less densely populated states report participation rates exceeding 60 per cent, and several serve lunches to 80 to 90 per cent of elementary students. In secondary schools, availability of food service is uniformly better in all states. Few drop below the 80 per cent level. 2138 However, the programs in the more densely populated states rarely serve more than 40 per cent of students in attendance on a given day, while the less urban states report half or more of the secondary students are participating. When the data for all school children are analyzed, program de- ficiencies are even more depressing. Urban states are distinguished for their poor performance--New Jersey, for example, serves less than 20 per cent of its school children. The less urban states appear to be better; most reach 50 per cent or more and several attain a rate above 70 per cent. 1? In the 57 cities with more than 250,000 population the school lunch program is even more pointedly not doing an adequate job. The situation underscores the absence of a national program, and emphasizes the lack of state programs. (See Table C.) With an average daily attendance reported in fiscal 1969 at nearly seven million children in schools of the 57 largest cities, only 2.2 million eat lunch in school, or slightly over a third of those attending on an average school day. About one in six children attend schools where food service is not available. While the 57 largest cities account for about 13 per cent of all school children, they account for only eight per cent of average daily participation. While 10 per cent of the nation's school children are without food service, nearly 16 per cent of the children in the 57 largest cities suffer this indignity. Proportionally more children from low income homes attend these schools. 175ee Table A, page 3. TABLE C * SCHOOL CHILDREN IN URBAN CITIES (1968-69) With Food Service ‘Without Food Service 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 [Percent Percent Percent {ADA of IADA(8)/ No. of ADP(3)/{} No. of (6) City flow-incomejADA (6) CITY ADA |Schools{ ADA ADP ADP(2) Schoolsy ADA | ADA Schools low-income Akron, Ohiot 58, 024 44 40, 620 {22,992 56.8 26 17,404 30 8, 811 50.6 Chicago p72, 461 307 [405,749 }82,127 20 239 166, 712 29 50, 720 30. 4 Cincinnati, ond 78,558 : 96 77,378 |37,038 47.8 4 1,180 604 Cleveland 2 141, 682 77 81,557 |40, 220 49.2 102 60,125 43 35, 791 58.7 Columbus, Ohio? 91,619 67 46,693 | 31,797 68 101 44,926 49 14, 654 33 Dayton, Ohio? 58, 380 23 23,361 | 13,892 59.8 66 35,019 60 14, 729 43 Detroit 92, 097 164 } 200,896 | 60, 020 29.8 149 91, 201 31 53,414 58.6 Indianapolis! 93,764 1 66,680 | 35,557 53 54 27,084 29 19,587 72 Milwaukee 120,154 132 }104,143 | 38,102 36.6 24 16,011 13 2,111 13 Minneapolis 69, 361 40 39,316 {19,697 50 55 30, 045 43 4,638 15 Omaha 53, 258 4 47, 389 | 26, 864 56.8 22 5,869 11 390 St. Louis? 82,578 134 50,670 {12,538 24.17 21 7,566 9 115 *Urban Lunch Study, School Lunch Division, Consumer and Marketing Service, April 1969. 6€1¢ With Food Service Without Food Service 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 [Percent Percent Percent JADA of |ADA(8)/ [No. of ADP(3) No. of (6) City flow-income|A DA (6) CITY ADA |Schoolsf ADA ADP ADP(2) Schools{ ADA {ADA Schools low-incom€ St. Paul, Minn. 39, 825 49 30,578} 17,937 58.6 32 9, 247 22 Toledo? 61, 475 25 21, 546 8,465 39.8 I 49 39, 929 65 12,609 32 Dallas 147,650) 172 147,650 f 56,187 39.7 | Houston 232, 959 228 232,959 } 23,124 9.9 Wichita? 64,817 39 35,720 } 27,759 79.8 74 29,097 § 44.8 7,297 25 Los Angeles 3 553, 863 489 510,978 [182,714 35.8 72 42, 885 7.8 17,751 41.8 Salt Lake City? 34, 211 19 21,388) 13,651 63.8 26 12, 623 37 2,177 17 Baltimore 176,700 § 111 117,643 | 26, 440 22.4 99 59,057 § 33.5 17,555 29.6 Boston? 80, 491 74 41,579 } 20,053 48. 3 172 38,912 § 48.4 4,802 12 Buffalo 68, 203 39 36,000 | 13,500 38 58 32,203 § 47.2 20, 200 62.17 Dist. of Columbia 132,468 § 167 126,914 | 33,652 25 17 5,554 4 Jersey City - 36,463 8 11,781 2,510 21 27 24, 682 68 15, 472 62.6 Newark 60, 465 58 47,425 }18,846 40 20 13, 040 23 3, 745 20 0v1C With Food Service Without Food Service 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Percent Percent [Percent [ADA of ADA(8)/ No. of ADP(3)/ || No. of (6) City |low-income ADA (6) CITY ADA | School§y ADA ADP IADP(2) Schooly ADA JADA Schools low-income New York 968,000] 921 935, 000 | 373, 000 38.5 37 33,000 0.3 Philadelphia? 2817, 297 143 138,577 | 12,586 9.1 127 148,702 52 (116)NA (91% of Schools Pittsburgh 74,882| 29 | 35,489 | 9,520 27 85 | 39,396 53 17,346 23 Rochester 41,000 18, 200 4,600 25.3 41 22, 800 56 11,870 52 All Urban 6,912,185 (6, 741 , 828, 922|2, 265,084] 38.8 1,883 083,263 | 15.7 [325,592 30 1. All Non-NSLP Lunch Program 2. Both NSLP and Non-NSLP 3. Mostly Non-NSLP 4. Lists only NSLP School 1712 2142 Individual cities vary, but cities in the Northeast and Midwest-- which account for 90 per cent of all urban schools and 94 per cent of all ghetto schools without food service--are the most inadequate. Baltimore: Boston: Buffalo: Jersey City: Chicago: Food service is denied to nearly 60,000 children, or nearly 34 per cent of the school population. Where lunches are served, only one in five children participate. Over 40,000 children, or one out of two, attend school where food service is not available. Of those who can get lunch, only half do. Almost half--32,000--of the children attend schools without lunch service and two out of three are stu- dents from lower income areas of the city. Only one of three of those who have lunch service make use of it, Of the city's 35 schools, 27 do not provide food service. Nearly 25,000 children, or 68 per cent of the children attending school, are denied lunch. Two out of three of those children live in low income neighborhoods. Some 400,000 of the 572,000 children in school have access to food service, but only 82,000 receive meals on the average day. Over 50,000 children attend 42 ghetto schools where food service is not available. 2143 Detroit: Over 292,000 are enrolled in the school system, but 91,000 attend schools--including 58,000 from 70 ghetto schools--where they are denied food services. Of the 200,000 in schools with food service, only 60,000 are served lunch on the average day. Of the large cities in the Northeast, six operate school systems where nearly half or more of the children are denied food service. The most unenviable record among states is undoubtedly the large city performance in Ohio. Of the state's six large cities, two deny food service to 60 per cent or more of the children in school, two exclude between 40 to 50 per cent and one withholds food service from 30 per cent of the children in attendance. As the state-by-state and city-by-city discrepancies must indicate, one key to this chaotic situation is in the administration of the program by the states and the individuals at the state level who bear that responsibility. Child feeding programs are assigned to state educational agencies, and are run by individuals who, by and large, tend to be concerned with their status in an educational hierarchy. !8 Many sense the lack of a 181, 1957, E. Allen Bateman, former Commission of Public Instruction for the State of Utah, said, "As an uninvited guest at the educational banquet, school food service has successfully run the gamut of neglect, of scorn, of fear, of anger, and has now entered the approved portals which entitle it to a chair at the education board." The message appar- ently hasn't filtered through to most state school lunch personnel. In the fall of 1969, a director from a large state said, referring to the USDA role in child nutrition, "I think the (school lunch) program would do much better if it were in education rather than agriculture." A director of a midwestern state's program said in a recent inter- view, referring to his lack of professional educational credentials, "You know, around here we are looked upon as sort of a second class citizen." 42-778 O - 71 - pt. 8 -- 3 2144 background in education puts them at a disadvantage. If their attitude is a reflection of the professional educator's view of child nutrition, then the right "union card" is more important than program goals, whether it is to provide nutrition or educational nourishment. This sensitivity among school food service directors cannot be ignored, particularly when they occupy the key position in the child nutrition program complex. By legislative design, administrative practice, bureaucratic intent and program structure, they can make the decision which determines which children are fed. The state director, particularly with more federal funds arriving in the form of block grants, can spend or withhold program money as he or she determines. There is no national model which all the states follow. At least eight states operate the school lunch program without legislative authority, and rely on general authority of the state to accept or reject cash or other forms of federal largess. Of the states which consider the nutritional health of children important enough to specify their concern in legislation, many simply authorize school boards to establish lunch programs. Others spell out in more detail how the program shall be operated. Less than a dozen appropriate state funds to finance lunches. Most sppEchiate only the minimal amount necessary to administer the programs. In current practice, this is just enough to maintain the records to file claims to obtain federal assistance. Few states operate with more than an accounting staff. Even the best, those with regional program supervisors, do little more than maintain watch over the technical aspects of food preparation. In other words, no one is evaluating need or monitoring inequities--intentional or 2145 otherwise--in the programs. The federal government, if it recognizes the problem, has done little about it. The USDA, until 1968, held only regional meetings with state directors during the summer months. These dealt primarily with procedure: how to fill out the forms which good program account- ing required. In the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, school lunch has about the same status as school maintenance. When the amount of ESEA funds going to school food service became too large to ignore, the Office of Education sent out a memorandum in 1968 telling the states to cut back on food service use of the monies. Thus, there is every reason, except one, to concede that the state school lunch director is trapped, unable to apply the potential power of his position to improving child nutrition programs in his state. That one exception is the very significant difference which vigorous leadership has made in certain states. Again, the difference shows up in the Southeast. Under every standard of program accomplish- ment, these states--excluding Virginia--are grouped at the head of the list. They do significantly better in percentage of schools offering food service; of students in school who participate in the program, whether elementary or secondary schools; of students attending school who receive free or reduced price lunches; of free or reduced price lunches served in comparison to the number of children from welfare families, The performance of the Southeastern states has been questioned. For example,''These are states with a more rural population and fewer urban areas." Yet, among the eight cities in the Southeast with more 2146 than 250,000 population, practically all children have access to food service, and more than 55 per cent of those attending school on a given : day are served pune. 1? The average for the other urban areas is about one-third. For example,'The number of children from families on welfare is not a fair comparison particularly since the Southeast operates to keep welfare services from the people while Northern urban states try to make the welfare program reach those who need it." The real question, however, is if New York can serve free lunches to the equivalent of 85 per cent of the children from welfare families, why does Michigan serve only 11 per cent, or California only 16 per cent? If Mississippi can serve 25 per cent, why does Iowa reach less than 10 per cent? If Kentucky serves better than 35 per cent, why does Minnesota do less than 14 per cent? If Tennessee reaches 29 per cent, why does Texas do no better than 19 per cent? Part of the answer is money. The Southeastern states have been willing to finance lunch programs with a considerable amount of ESEA funds, as pointed out earlier. In fiscal 1969, an estimated $30 million in ESEA money went for school food service, with two-thirds of it spent in the Southeast. In addition, because the Perkins money is allocated under a formula which gives proportionately more to states with greater low income population, the Southeast has benefited more. 195 ban Lunch Study, School Lunch Division, Consumer and Marketing Service, USDA, April 1969. 2147 But money is only part of the answer. Attitude is another. An educational system willing to use ESEA funds for child feeding is implicitly giving more status to nutrition than a state which does not. In addition, state directors in the Southeast, by creating a regional approach to child nutrition, have developed a system to pro- vide alternative solutions to problems and to give status to them- selves on an area basis. These directors have created a peer group, not limited by state boundaries, and they meet at least once, and usually several times a year. The meetings are workshops where states share common problems and benefit from a broad range of experiences in the attempts made to solve them. More importantly, over a period of time, the regional conferences have helped state directors to focus on their basic function: planning the delivery of services to the child. In many other states, the director and staff, when they are not updating reports, tend to perform as nutritional specialists. But the nutritional function should be placed elsewhere, preferably closer to the actual delivery of food service in the community. 20 State directors should be concerned primarily with the delivery system since no one else performs that task. 207m Atlanta, for example, six specialists, described as food service coordinators, were brought into the city school system in 1964. All children now have access to food service. Daily partici- pation has increased from 46 per cent to over 70 per cent in the 1968-69 school year--a figure exceeded among the large cities only by Honolulu. The number of free lunches served daily has grown from 5,500 to more than 15,000. If each city had achieved the same rate of growth, let alone the same ratio of participation, the child feeding problem in the United States would be significantly different today than it is. 2148 As a result of the lack of direction most directors give the program, few states have the capability to assist large urban areas even where the effort is wanted. Where the state director recog- nizes the problem, there is not enough staff, nor is there an adequate body of research on which to develop an urban child nutrition project. But many state directors appear to be unable to recognize the problem faced by the cities. Cities which wrestle with a host of urban problems, thus, will not find help at a state agency which dogmatically insists that the school food service program, as it presently is being operated, will provide them with the best solution. It has failed to solve their problem for the past 24 years. The majority of state directors will say they like to "think of the school food service program as being used and thought of as another classroom. . BL and few see any place 'in our educational food service program" for other means of delivering food. In a much more direct fashion, the director of food service programs in an Eastern urban state maintains, "Schools under efficient management can give the best service at lowest cost." He believes, "The cafeteria is a laboratory where the student puts into practice the nutritional facts he has learned in the classroom. "22 Other than the fact that nutrition education is noticeable to most children and their parents only by its total absence from school, the tragedy of this position is that it makes the form of food 2lgeiect Committee, op. cit. 224p3d. 2149 delivery more important than the act of delivery. It implies that hungry children will be morally stronger knowing that food is being denied until the means of delivery can serve an "educational purpose." Nutrition education cannot begin in the absence of food. Ob- viously, no person given the choice between feeding a hungry child or denying bin food will choose the latter. The issue, however, is seldom presented in these terms. If the state director seems to perform with a lack of purpose, it may only be a reflection of the machinations of the federal civil service, the bureaucratic structure which operates public programs. The federal bureaucracy is an engine of continuity. Because of this fact, it is more responsive to its own internal dynamics and to institutions with occupants of a more continuing nature--such as the congressional committees--than it is to the Presidency. The Food and Nutrition Service, the latest structure within USDA for administering the child nutrition programs at the federal level, demonstrates these two characteristics and the negative impact they have on performance, just as its predecessors, did. This negative impact includes: 1) The program forms and procedures which the agency uses are more important to providing the Appropriation Committees with a mechanical accounting than to informing the Congress whether the health and well-being of children are being protected. This situation is not altogether surprising. The Congress has restrained its official interest in social programs generally to 2150 authorizing machinery to deal with them and directs its continuing interest to a review of how the money is spent. Rarely does the Congress balance the social books. The report of the hearings before the House Appropriations Sub- committee’? on the agency's funding requests for fiscal 1970 is a realistic example. The report contains repeated references to how much money was spent for food assistance, the way it was spent, the measures taken to insure it was spent without fraud and the willing- ness of the committee to appropriate it. No question was raised to determine if the funds were adequate, or whether the programs were reaching all the individuals who needed help, or how many individuals were in need of assistance. The Congress is expected to protect the citizen from misuse or waste of his tax dollar, but that is the procedure of governing and not the end purpose of government. Yet, so long as the Congress asks questions of the administrative agencies related only to this limited purpose, then the administrative agencies will respond only to those questions. Thus, the information gathering channels of the child feeding programs are designed primarily for bookkeeping purposes and less for program development, more for managing dollars than services. Reports show only how many lunches are served each day. A school district, a state or the federal government can only estimate the number of 23pearings, Department of Agriculture Appropriations for 1970, Part 5. House of Representatives, Ninety-first Congress, First Session. 2151 children who participate. Similarly, all the administrative levels only can estimate the number of children who need free or reduced price lunches. The data available only record how many lunches were submitted by states on claims to the federal government for reimbursement, and does not tell how many need a free lunch. 2) Program resources are not fully subject to agency control. Political decisions which always enter into consideration of how federal funds are going to be used do not reflect the program's mission in all cases. For example, more than ten per cent of the federal resources devoted to child nutrition are in the form of commodities purchased with Section 32 funds. 2% Section 32 authorizes the Secretary of Agriculture to spend up to 30 per cent of U.S. customs receipts on farm commodities and authorizes their use by, among others, needy individuals and schools. The decision to purchase these commodities is made initially by specialists in the commodity divisions of Consumer and Marketing Service (C&MS) of USDA. These specialists prepare official allocation proposals, called "dockets," recommending that Section 32 funds available under the budget be spent to purchase various categories of commodities. The dockets reflect a bureaucratic decision. The actual policy decision on each docket proposal is made by the Commodity Credit Corporation which rejects the recommendation of the specialists only on occasion. 24gee Table D, page 42. 2152 The needs of the child nutrition program rarely enter into the docket considerations. Where they do, it usually is to reassure those making the purchase decision that the child feeding outlets can use the food products which may be purchased. Significantly, when the food assistance programs were trans- ferred in 1969 from C&MS to the new Food and Nutrition Service, authority over Section 32 was kept in the commodity division of C&MS. Obviously, in the struggle to establish priorities, the human nutrition advocates failed to convince the Secretary that the person in need of food should be given equal recognition to producing groups and processing industries. 3) Program management is weak and program direction is un- aggressive at the agency level. a) In describing how the program operates, the agency told its House Appropriations Subcommittee in 1969 that '"We provide national criteria which are then applied by the state school people. . . . We lay down the general rules and . . . . Under those general criteria each individual situation is reviewed by the state agency and we in turn consult with them and review their operation. 2? As one Congressman observed, it is really a situation where the states themselves set up the criteria. The consequences of this concept of program direction can be seen in the spectacular failure of the agency to insure the translation of the Perkins fund into 23 hearings, Department of Agriculture Appropriations for 1970, Part 5. House of Representatives, 91st Congress, lst Session. 2153 additional free and reduced price tonehes, 20 b) Program management suffers from a lack of clear ad- ministrative policy. For example, there is no official definition of a reduced price lunch. For accounting purposes, any lunch served at a price ten cents below the prevailing level in the school district can be considered a reduced price lunch. However, every school in the district must follow the same pricing policy. This is an administrative convenience and not a policy. It permits a 25 cent lunch in one district to be considered as reduced in price even though an adjacent district charges no more than 25 cents for any lunch served. In the latter situation, a reduced price meal has to be 15 cents. An example of the problems caused by such vague administrative policy arose in 1969 in Baltimore. A citizen action group offered to underwrite the cost of lunches in several low-income schools. Mothers of the children, however, wanted to pay something for the meals, if only a nickel. But a nickel is far below the administrative definition of a reduced price lunch in Baltimore. The school admin- istration refused to allow reduced price lunch programs because it could not afford to extend the program to all schools and, thus, could not allow it to be used in a limited number of schools. Obviously, if the standard for a reduced price lunch were set at a low level and applied throughout the school food service program, anything at or below that level would qualify for federal assistance, 265ce Table B, page 9. 2154 the program would operate more efficiently. Another Rambles of vague program policy is the definition of nutritional standards for meals served under the program. The Type A lunch--a meal which provides a third to a half of the daily nutri- tional needs of the child--is defined by regulation in terms of food groups rather than nutritional aintaps, 2 This technique is effective for schools or school districts without staff nutritionists. However, it is inflexible and discourages schools with nutritionists or food companies from experimenting with menu patterns which do not meet present Type A standards, but may be more acceptable to children and just as nutritious. ¢) The agency has inadequate procedures for maintaining budgetary control. Other than the block grant concepts under the Perkins fund program, the money for child nutrition programs is apportioned among the states through a multiple budget allocation procedure. Each program--breakfast, lunch, Section 11, Vanik, etc.--has its own budget account and each state receives its proportionate share. This "multiple allocation" procedure has certain advantages, the principal one being that it assures the funds intended for specific purposes will not be diverted to other programs. The technique also inevitably reduces the capacity of the agency to obtain maximum service from available dollars. And, it provides no means whatever to detect when programs operating under a block grant begin to drift from their 275ee Appendix I. 2155 intended purpose. It also is inadequate because it will not stretch to meet the different needs of the different states. While an urban state may need a greater proportion of its funds for equipment and facilities, another may need more in free lunches. Another may put greater emphasis on breakfast or on food service outside the school. Under these circumstances, a mad rush begins to develop toward the end of each fiscal year as each state, unable to use certain categories of funds, informs the USDA of its intent to return funds from some of the individual program accounts. At the same time, the states either volunteer or are asked how much more they need or could use in other program categories, and the funds which are returned are then re- allocated to the states by the USDA. This frantic juggling means either the loss of services where money is not spent, or poorly performed services because money is spent with inadequate planning and foresight. The block grant approach, originating in the child nutrition programs with the Perkins fund monies, is an invitation to public disenchantment in the absence of more sophisticated administrative procedures than those now existing for multiple allocations. The diversions reported earlier in the Perkins funds are not the only example of the problem of sending out federal resources accompanied by nothing more than good intentions. The experience with federal guidelines for free and reduced price lunches parallels the fate of funds to finance them. The guidelines resulted from pleas from state school lunch directors who said, in effect, "we want you to tell us to feed the needy children because then we can tell local school boards we must 2156 because the federal government requires us to." The guidelines were published in October 1968 and required each school district to file a plan with the state by the start of the 1969-70 school year. The plan must describe the standards the district will use to certify a child as eligible for a free lunch. It also must describe who is to do the certifying, and how parents will be informed that free lunches are available. Judging from the results of the McGovern Committee fusstioniaire,’ fewer than a dozen states have made a serious effort to review the district plans. Others have been willing to accept district plans which provide no specific information that local community groups could use to encourage greater participation in the school feeding program. Even more discouraging, no state is capable at this time of providing specific assurances that the guidelines are being followed in local school districts. No state has adequate staffing to conduct field audits. The federal agency's monitoring effort is even more haphazard. It sends regional staff to review district plans on file in the state offices. Hence, no one can describe the current status of the effort to establish guidelines for free and reduced price lunches in every school district because no one at the federal or state level knows. Yet, the guideline enforcement policy calls for the withdrawal of all federal funds for child feeding where the guidelines are not being carried out. Under the circumstances, the only conclusion is that 285ee Table A, page 3. 2157 this effort to apply innovative program direction through the imposition of the guidelines is meaningless. 4) The agency is unable to plan major programs of social dimension, or to sustain an environment for creative and innovative program management. Structurally, the agency is geared to reporting data which are relevant to an economic budget and to provide the kind of program supervision which insures each dollar is being spent properly from an accounting sense. There is no policy and planning section where program strengths and weaknesses can be analyzed in relation to public needs for program services. Where many other federal agencies have recognized the need to separate the administrative line function from the planning staff operation, the food assistance programs largely have been devoid of this essential dicotomy. The administrative structure in the food and nutrition programs is the same today as it was when the decade began, a time when all food assistance programs were operated by fewer than 300 persons. Today, the agency has experienced a nearly seven-fold increase in personnel, and the child nutrition programs alone employ more people than all programs did in 1961. The agency, however, operates on a highly personal basis, much as it did when decisions on all aspects of program activities down to the regional level were made by fewer than a dozen persons. Consumer and Marketing Services has always geared its admin- istrative data gathering to produce information on finances, a logical response to a program which is expected by the Congress or 2158 the Executive to dispose of a minimum of cash and a maximum of commodities. Criticism and the inevitable crisis within the agency which follows is expected to result from fraud or other instances of the misuse of the federal dollar. The expansion of the program from 1961 on signaled a basic change. It was the beginning of new priorities, or the shift, however slow and muted, from a program to distribute the excesses of a very productive agriculture to the distribution of public services--in this case, food or nutrition. The crisis to be anti- cipated thereafter would come from failure to deliver services, more than the failure to dispose of federal resources honestly. It was a crisis arising from public clamour. But, without the separa- tion of planning and administrative functions, with the same highly personal structure, and without a strong impetus from the Congress or the Executive, the agency still is unable to respond to the change. After the Administration's efforts to bring the Department of Defense under civilian control in the late 1960's, program planning and budgeting (PPB)--the technique used for this purpose--was imposed on civilian agencies. As originally conceived, PPB was to provide the top policy officials in each Department and, through them, the Bureau of the Budget and the President with a clear set of alternatives in the allocation of federal resources among competing national goals. No one apparently questioned whether national priorities can be created merely by churning together a sufficiently large volume of data, or whether the value judgments used in selecting that data should reflect priorities which respond to national problems. PPB 2159 is a mechanical device for measuring performance, and is only as good as the information going into it. The information fed into the federal system is barely sufficient to give the appearance of producing a rational annual budget. It is incredibly bad informa- tion for monitoring the delivery of services today, or for antici- pating and planning services the public will need five years hence. To make PPB, oF one other planning system, a functional instrument to use in managing the delivery of child nutrition programs, the government must be willing to spend the money to obtain the information the system needs. Further, the data which are gathered for planning and monitoring should be determined by human values rather than accounting procedures and surplus disposal problems. Short of forcing the program to be measured by larger standards, the federal response in child nutrition will continue in the pattern reflected by the appropriations and expenditures under’ school lunch and child nutrition activities, summarized as follows: 1. Child feeding and nutrition goals are given secondary roles to the demands of the food industry; 2. The Executive and the Congress are in general agreement on funding levels; arguments occur over how far and how fast to go with new programs; 3. Growth in program resources is a measure of public pressure and not any recognizeable plan. Federal resources are provided as cash grants or as commodities. Since the inclusion of commodities indicates a value judgment already has been made in the use of funds to purchase them, the best indicator of federal priorities for child feeding is Section 4, the authority 42-778 O - 71 - pt, 8 -- 4 2160 in the school lunch act which provides the largest single source of cash to states and school districts. (See Table D.) The Section 4 appropriation in 1946 was $51.3 million, which represented about half of the cost of food purchased for the lunch program, or 4.5 cents per lunch. The appropriations in 1947 rose to $54.8 million, and the next year fell by a million dollars--a situation which might reflect a budgetary reaction to the first post- war recession. The appropriations jumped to $58.8 million in 1949 and for the next three years were pegged at $64.6 million. Thus, for the Truman years, no apparent pattern is discernable other than a budget officer's finesse properly labeled as the ''pegging concept." The pegging concept became the hallmark of the Eisenhower budgets, with a $67 million figure used for three years, an $83.6 million figure for two, and a $93.6 million for three. Under the Kennedy and Johnson budgets, Section 4 funds in- creased each year by small increments, reflecting a policy to peg cash grants at a level of 4.5 cents per meal served in the program, and to raise cash funds as participation increased. It is a more sophisticated approach, but it is largely meaningless when the food cost of a lunch averages 36 cents today as compared to 9 cents in 1946. Other than for minor adjustments, the Congress has accepted the figures for child feeding proposed by the Administration. Any comparison of the budget proposal and the final Congressional action on appropriations will demonstrate that on those items where Congress has the last word the difference is minimal. TABLE D ~ FEDERAL RESOURCES FOR CHILD NUTRITION* (Millions) 1946 | 1947 | 1948 | 1949 | 1950 1951 | 1952| 1953| 1954) 1955) 1956 1957 | 1958 | 1959 Section 4 51.3 | 54.8 | 53.8 | 58.8 | 64.6| 64.6 | 64.6| 65.9) 67.0) 67.0] 67.0 83.6 | 83.6] 93.6 Section 6 14.0 | 14.5 | 14.5] 17.3] 17.3 | 17.3] 16.0 15.0} 15.0% 15.0) 15.0} 15.0} 49.7 Section 32 5.8 2.3 119.3 | 21.6 | 36.2] 15.2 | 13.0] 51.7) 94.2] 26.9 65.3 112.5 | 61.8 | 44.4 Section 416 2.0) 19.6 3.6 43.4} 34.6] 19.5} 14.2] 22.4 Section 11 Breakfast Equipment Vanik Perkins Total 57.1 |81.1 [87.6 | 94.9 }120.4 116.7 198.5 [133.6 [176.2 §152.3 }181.9 {230.6 §174.6 {210.1 *U. S. Department of Agriculture 191¢ 1960f 1961) 1962 | 1963 | 1964f 1965f 1966] 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970% Section 4 93.6} 93.6] 98.6 }108.6 {120.6} 130.0) 138.6] 147.4 |154.9 [162.0 f68.0 Section 6 58.4] 59.7| 69.4 | 59.4] 59.3) 59.3] 59.3} 59.3] 59.3] 64.3 | 64.3 Section 32 | 28.6) 58.6) 29.1 | 29.3 | 43.7§173.2| 49.4] 50.9 {100.1 | 79.3 | 90. 4%x% _ Section 416] 42.3) 13.0) 83.9 | 91.7 | 92.0) 39.7) 67.4} 79.5 120.3 | 144.8 |146. 8%* Section 11 Enact-{ 2.0} 2.0] 5.0] 10.0 | 24.8 Breakfast = 2.0] 3.5] 3.5]10.0 Equipment : 0.8 0.8 0.8 | 10.0 Vanik "10.0 | 10.0 Perkins 44.0 | 89.0 Total 222.9 1224.9 [281.0 {289.0 B15.6 J402.2 [316.7 PBa1.9 |443.9]518.7 |633.3 *House Appropriation **USDA Estimates 913g 2163 The uncontrollable budget items primarily are Section 32 and Section 416, both dealing with commodities. These are determined by crop or animal production conditions, or by the miscalculation of some food processor's general manager. Even this is somewhat misleading since the budget proposals will contain target expenditure figures for these items, and the target figure usually is very close to the actual expenditure figure. Sharp differences between the Executive budget and the con- gressional appropriation will be found on new programs, an experience in child nutrition which did not occur until the 1960's. In 1962, the Congress enacted Section 11 at the request of the Administration to provide more cash grants for free lunches to schools with enroll- ments of children from poverty-level families. But the Appropriation Committees could not be convinced to fund this section until 1966. Funding of the Child Nutrition Act, which even the Administration proposed at nominal levels, was cut by the Appropriation Committees in 1967 and 1968. The difference in relation to the total amount of federal resources allocated to child feeding is measureable only in fractions. The significance of the differences, however, is in the "go slow" attitude of the Appropriations Committees, a position they defend with the argument that the agency needed more experience before more funds should be authorized. While the Appropriation Committees tell the Administration to go slow on Section 11 or on the school breakfast and other child nutrition programs, there is no similar record of caution on funds to purchase 2164 meat when cattle prices fall or to buy frozen orange concentrate when a surplus in the citrus crop exists. The budget pattern for expenditures of Section 32 and Section 416 under the child feeding programs is incoherent unless it is viewed in relation to production conditions, at least until 1968. For example, Section 32 expenditures in 1953 were $51.7 million compared to $13 million in 1952. Spending jumped again in 1954 to $94 million and then dropped back to $27 million in 1955. The variations are understandable only because beef prices dropped significantly in 1954-55. The same situation was repeated in 1965 when Section 32 expenditures rose to $173 million from the previous year's level of $43.6 million and then fell again in 1966 to $49.4 million. School children in 1965 were again called to eat their way through excessive supplies of hamburgers and beef roasts. The conventional approach to budgeting for child feeding began to change in 1968 and 1969, when the public and its champions were bringing home to Washington the message that there were millions of hungry and malnourished Americans. For example, Section 32 and Section 416 expenditures were at near record levels for both years, with no particular commodity surplus to explain why. In 1969, $44 million was provided from Section 32 by the Congress to strengthen the school lunch program. Neither the Administration nor the Appropriation Committees, however, originally had proposed the increase. The funds to provide more free meals, breakfasts, and food service equipment were added through adroit legislative 2165 engineering of Representative Carl Perkins, Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. In addition, underscoring the casual attitude to these very real problems, appropriations to fund child feeding programs for the 1969-70 school year were not approved by the Congress until mid-November and had not been signed by the President and thus released to the states even as Thanksgiving week began. This has not been an uncommon experience for the school lunch program in the past decade. If the states appear indifferent to the existence of hunger among children, the attitude may be a reflection of that at the highest levels of government. It is difficult to predict what future changes will occur. On the basis of the record, it is obvious that states and local school officials have a valid complaint that federal assistance is inadequate and unpredictable, and any kind of planning is difficult and unnecessarily complicated. And it is obvious that millions of American children still are hungry every day. 2166 APPENDIX I FEDERAL PROGRAMS FOR CHILD NUTRITION 1. School Lunch Program The National School Lunch Act of 1946 (amended in 1962 and 1968) provides grants to states through the Department of Agriculture for "... the stablishment, maintenance, operation, and expansion of non- profit school-lunch programs.'" Schools are required to serve lunches free or at a reduced price to students whom local school authorities consider unable to pay full cost. The USDA has set the general crite- ria for need to include family income (including welfare grants), family size, and the number of school children in the family, among others. More specifically, free or reduced price lunches should be given to children from public assistance families, such as Aid for Dependent Children; those who receive food stamps or commodities; or do not get welfare assistance but have a comparable income. USDA regulations encourage simplified application forms and flexibility in granting free or reduced price lunches to those in temporary financial distress. School districts must prepare and publish a statement of the criteria to be used for free and reduced price lunches. It must specify the officials who determine the child's eligibility and the procedural steps in their decision. The school must have a system which allows appeals in individual cases. Names of children who receive free or reduced price lunches "will 2167 not be published, posted, or announced in any manner to other children" nor can students be required to use a separate lunchroom, lunchtime, serving line, entrance, or medium of exchange. They cannot be re- quired to work for their meal, according to regulation. The Act specifies that cash payments will be made to schools which serve Type A lunches or those designed to furnish between one-third and one-half of the children's daily nutritional needs. Regulations specify this as: one-half pint of fluid whole milk served as a bever- age; two ounces of lean meat, poultry, fish or cheese, or one-half cup of cooked dry beans or peas, or four tablespoons of peanut butter; a three-fourth cup serving of two or more fruits and/or vegetables; one slice of whole grain or enriched bread, or a serving of dornbtesd; biscuits, rolls, muffins, etc., made of whole grain or enriched meal or flour; two teaspoons of butter or fortified margarine. The Type A lunch may also be served without milk. A Type C lunch is one-half pint of fluid whole milk. Section 4 of the National School Lunch Act authorizes funds for reimbursement of the cost of food to the schools. The maximum allowed administratively is 9 cents, but the maximum which the USDA budgets and the Congress appropriates is 4.5 cents. Where a school agrees to serve free or reduced price lunches to all needy children, the state agency administering the funds may reimburse the schools for all lunches served at a maximum rate of twenty cents; or a school may elect to continue the regular nine cent maximum and, in addition, be reimbursed at a maximum rate of twenty-five cents for all free or re- duced price lunches served, or a total allowable maximum of 34 cents 2168 for free or reduced price lunches. Section 11, added to the Act in 1962, authorizes more cash grants to schools ",.. drawing attendance from areas in which poor economic conditions exist.' Schools receiving these funds are re- imbursed at either a maximum rate of twenty cents from Section 11 funds if all needy children in the school receive free or reduced price lunches, or 25 cents for each free or reduced price lunch served. The average cost of a school lunch in the 1969-70 school year is estimated at about 60 cents, with food costs taking 36 to 38 cents. The present Act puts the burden for labor, equipment and other costs, including the portion of food costs not paid by federal grants, on states and local school districts. 2. The Breakfast Program The Child Nutrition Act of 1966 authorizes a pilot school break- fast administered by the USDA, Participating schools are reimbursed at a maximum rate of fifteen cents for each meal served. Free or at a reduced price meals are provided to children whom local school authorities consider unable to pay the full price. The administrative criteria includes family income (including welfare grants), size, and the number of school children in the family. Where a school serves all or nearly all the students free breakfasts but cannot adequately finance the program, the Department of Agriculture will assume up to 80 percent of all meal costs, including purchase, preparation and serving the food. 2169 Each breakfast by regulation must contain at least: one-half pint of fluid whole milk; one-half cup of fruit or full strength fruit or vegetable juice; a slice of bread or its equivalent in cornbread, biscuits, flour, or three-fourths cup serving of whole grain, enriched, or fortified sbkonis and, as often as possible, protein-rich foods such as eggs, meat, fish, poultry, cheese, or peanut butter. 3. Surplus Commodities In addition to cash grants, the USDA also provides food com- modities to schools--an average of about 12 cents worth per meal currently--under these major authorities: *Section 416 of the Agricultural Act of 1949, which allows price supported commodities--wheat (flour), rice, butter, beans, cheese, dry milk, corn (meal)--to be distributed to schools; *Section 32 of Public Law 74-320, which authorizes the Secre- tary of Agriculture to spend up to 30 percent of U. S. customs receipts. Funds can be used for several purposes, primarily the purchase of farm commodities which are not price supported, in- cluding meat, poultry, eggs, fruits and vegetables, among others, and distribute them to needy individuals and to schools. *Section 6 of the National School Lunch Act authorizes the Secretary to spend an amount as determined by the Congress to purchase food commodities specifically for school lunch purposes. At present, the Section 6 appropriation is $69 million; *Section 210 of the Agricultural Act of 1956 allows commodities 2170 for state correctional institutions for minors, Public Law 75-165 for non-profit summer camps for children, and Public Law 86-756 for use in home economics courses in elementary and secondary schools. 4, Nonfood Assistance Section 5 of the National School Lunch Act authorizes grants ",..storing, pre- for nonfood assistance, i.e., equipment used in paring, or serving food for school children." Additional funds can be given to schools '",..drawing attendance from areas in which poor economic conditions exist" for equipment to store, prepare, transport and serve food. At least 25 percent of equipment costs must be paid by state or local authorities. 5. Section 13, The Vanik Program Public Law 90-302, passed on May 8, 1968, technically as Section 13 of the National School Lunch Act, authorizes funds for food service grants to public and private non-profit child case institutions serving areas where "poor economic conditions exist'' or 'where there are high concentrations of working mothers." These include day care centers, settlement houses, recreational centers and day care centers for handi- capped children. The program applies to public and private institu- tions and to special summer programs with food services similar to those available under the national school lunch or school breakfast programs during the school year. In cases of severe need, the federal grant may cover a maximum of 80 percent of the operating costs. Funds for nonfood are also authorized. The federal government will pay up 2171 to 75 percent of the cost to rent or purchase equipment, not including land or buildings. One or more of the following meals can be served: breakfast, lunch, supper and between meal snacks. Breakfast and lunch require- ments are the same as school meals, The supplemental--snack--food must include a serving of milk or full strength fruit or vegetable juice and a serving of whole grain or enriched bread, rolls or cereal. Protein-rich foods--peanut butter, cheese--should be served as often as possible. Maximum rates of reimbursement are thirty cents for lunches. Meals are served free or at a reduced price to those whom local pro- gram directors say are unable to pay the full cost. 6. Section 25, The Perkins Bill The Perkins Bill, or Section 25 of the Agricultural Appropriations Act of 1967, authorized $45 million from Section 32 for food service for needy children. The amount was in addition to the regular appro- priation items requested by the administration and initially provided by the Appropriation Committees. The fund is called the Perkins fund because the Kentucky congressman introduced and brought through the House a bill to authorize the Secretary of Agriculture to use $100 million of Section 32 money. The Appropriation Committees agreed to add $45 million as a compromise which the Congress accepted. 7. ESEA Title I Funds Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 provides financial assistance to schools serving areas with con- centrations of low-income families. The program is designed for 2172 educationally deprived children. The maximum grant to a local educational agency is determined by multiplying 50 percent of the average state or national per pupil expenditure, whichever is greater, by the total number of students ages five to seventeen: a. whose families earn less than $2,000 per year; b. whose families earn more than $2,000 per year but who re- ceive Aid to Families with Dependent Children; ce. who live in institutions for neglected or delinquent children, other than those in which a state agency is directly responsible for providing free public education; and d. who live in foster homes supported by public funds. If there is any money remaining after maximum grants have been allocated to eligible schools, the maximum family income for eligible children becomes $3,000 per year. For the school to receive any money, the total number of students eligible for Title I funds must exceed ten. In its application for funds the school must describe specific broiects for educationally deprived children residing in areas with high concentrations of low-income families. Projects should help educationally deprived children who require the greatest assistance, but no children should be excluded from the project if they are not from low-income families. educationally deprived children" are those needing special educational assistance to attain a scholastic level appropriate for their age. The term includes those handicapped (mentally retarded, impaired in hearing, vision, speech, or other health problems, and seriously disturbed emotionally) or whose special 2173 needs arise from "poverty, neglect, delinquency, or cultural or ' The money may linguistic isolation from the community at large.’ be used to construct facilities necessary to the success of the pro- ject. Title I money may be used for feeding programs, and over $30 million was used in school feeding in fiscal 1969. 8. The Migrant Program Public Law 89-750, enacted in 1966--an amendment to Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act--allocates separate funds for the education of children from migrant families. Children who move at least once during the school year are eligible if their parents work in agriculture or a related occupation (e.g., canning). About 200,000 children in forty-five states participate. Special spring and summer programs are conducted in northern states during the peak of migrant labor activity there, with extended day in- struction in the southern states in the regular school year. Of the $45 million spent on the program in fiscal year 1969, about $3.1 million was used for lunches and snacks. 9. Project Head Start Project Head Start, delegated to HEW's Office of Child Develop- ment, has two programs for pre-school children from low-income fami- lies. One is a year-round program for children between three and five years of age. The other is a smaller program during the summer for children entering elementary school in the fall. Feeding programs in projects differ, but most have at least a hot lunch and a morning or afternoon snack. Commodities from the USDA are to be utilized 2174 extensively. Breakfasts are to be provided for those who don't get them at home, although Head Start, which involves the parents as much as possible, encourages family breakfasts. OEO pays up to 80 percent of the total costs, or an even greater percentage in very poor communities. The eligibility requirement is a family income below the poverty level (e.g., the Social Security Administration's $3,400 for a family of four.) 2175 APPENDIX ITI BASIS FOR CALCULATIONS ON PERKINS FUND - TABLE B 20 School days/month 180 School days/year 9 Months in school year September October November December - 180(9) January - 100(5) May - 20(1) - 160(8) February - 80(4) = 140(7) March - 60(3) - 120(6) April - 40(2) A. To determine number of F/RP lunches possible on average daily basis. 1. 2. Multiply amount spent by 4 (25¢ payment/lunch). Divide by number of days listed opposite month given as starting time for Perkins program. B. To determine number of lunches (average daily basis) converted by state. 216 Multiply November average daily F/RP lunch figure by 9. (November is the last month unaffected in all states by Perkins program, and is generally a typical month). Multiply Ap above by the number in parenthesis after the month listed as starting time for Perkins program. Add B] and Bp above, and divide by 9. If B3 is larger than the average daily number of free or reduced price lunches served by the state, the difference is assumed to be the number of lunches converted on the average daily basis for the year. Multiply B4 by the number of months the Perkins program was not in operation in the state, and divide the total by the number of months the program was in operation. Add the figures for Bs and B4 to obtain a number which approximates the average daily number of lunches converted during the period of operation of the Perkins program. Cc. To determine percent of Perkins funds diverted by state. 1. Divide Bg by Aa. 42-778 O - 71 - pt, 8 -- 5 2176 ON; WEEKLY REPORT Community Nutrition Jnstitute ISSUE NUMBER 3 School Lunch Research in Full Swi Five research projects, three funded fully or in part by the Office of Economic Opportunity, are the sum total of federal research efforts into child feeding problems. A sixth project is under consideration and is closely related to the objectives of the five active projects. They are: 1. A New Jersey School Feeding Project, fund- ed by OEO, and operated by the state education agency. Eight priority objectives are listed; im- proved participation, broader coverage of schools, simplified certification and payment collection, recruiting personnel, reorganizing program ad- ministration, focusing more funds on needy children and designing model contracts for region- al programs. 2. A Feeding Effectiveness Program, operated in conjunction with the New Jersey project by the Department of Food Science at Rutgers University. The project is jointly funded by OEO, USDA and the State of New Jersey. The project, more nutritionally sophisti- cated than any of the others, has four objectives; developing systems for schools without food service facilities, expanding the use of donated commodities, defining the commercial potential of school feeding as a market for engineered foods, and developing techniques to improve man- agement in the school feeding programs. 3. School Lunch Programs in North Carolina, financed by OEO and operated by the N.C. State University. This study is designed to improve the school food service program as a delivery system for nutrition, and is based on the fact that the state has practically all schools partici- pating in the program. The basic thrust of the (Continued on page 5) WASHINGTON, D.C. OCTOBER 7, 1970 School Lunch Hearings October 13 The Select Senate Comm ittee on Nutrition and Human Needs will hold hearings Tuesday, October 13 on the school lunch program. Witnes- ses tentatively include state and local officials, and representatives of local organizations sup- porting efforts to improve child nutrition programs, according to Sen. George McGovern, chairman of the committee. The hearings will likely be the last effort of the Senate this session of the Congress to assess the status of child feeding programs, and will set the stage for program action in the new Congress which will convene in January. CNI Weekly Report will publish a special re- port on the hearings, in addition to the regular report. * kk k Xk USDA Funding Bill Stalled; No Action Until November ? Congressional action on appropriations for school lunch -- and all USDA programs -- re - mains stalled by the deadlock between the Congress and the Administration over a new farm bill. A conference committee has been negotiat- ing for more than a month to settle Senate and House differences. Agreement on most farm program issues has been achieved except on price support and acreage control features for cotton, wheat and feed grains. Congress wants more cotton acreage put under price support and a minimum price support floor for grains. The Ad- ministration opposes these measures because of their cost. Sen. Ellender, head of he Senate conferees, (Continued on page 4) 2177 CNI WEEKLY REPORT School Lunch: How It Did Last Year Carl Perkins, chairman of the House com- mittee on education and labor, prepared an analy- sis of the school lunch program for the 1969-70 school year which was printed in the Sept. 22 Con- gressional Record. CNI Weekly Report carried a brief account of the Perkins study in the last issue. Since the data is the most recent review of program per- formance, CNI is publishing the data tables for its readers. PAGE 2 OCTOBER 7, 1970 Study Indicates School Lunches Underfinanced The Office of Education recently published a low key, but scathing report highly critical of Title I, ESEA programs. The study is of interest to school food service personnel, for several reasons. Most importantly, the number of education- ally deprived children is authoritatively defined for the first time at 16. 8 million children. Of this number, 54 percent are considered to be economically deprived. (Continued on page 3) NATIONAL SCHOOL LUNCH SURVEY FOR FISCAL YEAR 1970-71—PT. 1 total Si number Total school gible fo Child Child Hd At what level In ance in Total part hildren ren re school (ele- schools i tion in receiving free receiving en- based on Family in of family in- mentary and ~~ 1969-70in Childrento Percentage ISLP for or reduced tirely free poverty stand- should Sandi which NSL| whom not that No. 3is peak month price Jones | n lunch in peak ards for school for a family child Jui Questions year 1963-70 was available availab of No. 1 1969-70 peak month year 1970-71 for free lui 1 2 3 3A 4 5 6 7A 78 8 723,332 578,496 162, 530 112, 240 310,123 $4,200 $3, 000 58,434 2 , 8! 11, 361 8,970 15, 000 , 900 5, 500 304, 800 2 47,223 46, 080 73,100 , 300 3,800 399, 111 5, 384 75, 384 54,612 , 000 3,000 , 262, 5! 196, 000 883,690 800, 000 , 600 3,600 473,223 ¥ 25,251 385,743 67, 000 , 820 2,820 475,957 2] 29,597 @ 45, 000 , 160 4,200 130, 3 @ 65, 000 0 oN 3,000 105, 3 27, 000 21, 100, 4 1,114,343 I 253,161 105, 062 309, 780 3,800 1,085, 187,438 0 350, 000 & 3,720- 178, ¢ 10, 500 6, 12, 000 , 4,000 154,123 9,755 9,755 15,814 , 600 3,600 922, 848 30 197,461 182, 349 259, 000 , 432 & 1,015,907 2% 713,969 484, 350 107,434 , 600 A 597, 9 36,820 22,092 90, , 540 3,000 404, 335 23 31, 524 7) 43,248 , 000 3,000 40, 5 220,000 2 350, , 750 2,800 933,617 130,079 186, 000 , 000 169, 2; 20,192 . 50, 000 , 650 3 768, 274 58, 521 97,373 , 600 J 4 75,801 55, 196 171,138 800 3,8 1,530, 404 3 559,738 90,612 64,561 260, 000 , 200 4,000 763,570 , 034 3 14, 000 58, 000 , 200 3,120 522,133 ¢ 406, 635 133,230 66, 549 150, 000 , 000 2,000 894, 576, 050 67,731 52,169 , 796 , 240 3,800 109,216 1 60,675 7,511 2 18, 000 , 500 4,000 268,813 I 183,721 21,821 R , 600 6,000 44, 850 I 21,468 , 000 7) 10, , 330 0 142,654 1i 71, 361 6, 455 7) 19, 351 , 600 4, 703,940 4 3 829 130, 000 , 000 4,760 252,258 65, 500 , 000 3,800 3,037,750 2 600, 000 , 000 4,000 1,029, 581 574,000 , 000 3,000 132,313 1 9 , 540 2 1,830, 846 2 136, 1 3 3,6 41,40 2, 100,000 3,71 3,000 3 2 , 1,831,370 2 775, 000 4,00 re) hode | 154, 254 30 74, 000 $3,000 $4, 000 South Carolina 605, 61 603,900 Q 206, 648 000 3,000 South Dakota. 184, 401 85, 000 25, 000 500 3,600 825,612 728, 565 1 228, 000 , 800 3,000 432.1 2,319,709 500, 000 720 0 281275 262, 550 30,646 800 3,7 112,943 81, 424 28 15, 000 , 720 4,000 967,253 925, 316 250, 000 , 500 3,500 758,733 714,398 150, 000 , 492 3,492 380, 361 318,076 1 270, 000 , 000 2,000 822,122 , 361 1 , 000 , 130 3,000 71,79% 64,225 17 2,000 , 040 2,500 21,231 24,471 , 766 10 3,813 2,600 72,299 423,169 249,130 5 ), 000 3,800 3,800 46,6516%0 35,079,385 10,558,746 ©) 19,727,461 5,214, 507 4,662,109 S85008 ee ee 1 Figure not furnished by State of education. of 1968-69 ¢ No between free and reduced rica lunches. fares juseried in in place. hore not jartisipuie in school lunch program. o reside : {a an 1. % ; — * Percentage. Note: See remarks for 9A, 9B, and 10. 2178 CNI WEEKLY REPORT PAGE 3 OCTOBER 7, 1970 . NATIONAL SCHOOL LUNCH SURVEY FOR FISCAL YEAR 1970-71—PT. 2 Amount of Federal Number of school funds used insec.4 Required level of Cost of such a level Amount of Federal Additional funds attendance units support in fiscal year reimbursment to in each State for funds used to assist required to reach ail ithout facilities or Children attending ending June 30, hold maximum fiscal year Jnding in cost of free and needy children in central kitchens such schools 1969 prices at 20 cents June 30, 197! reduced price fiscal year 1970 . 1A us 12 131 1“ 154 158 3 282 , 029, 2 15, 683, 522 , 986, 890 , 755,270 101 16, 570 wa ¥ 3 $5000 i 8 ® 23, 000 310 60,630 1,408,712 12 3,884 1,027, 552 1,355, 000 7 596 3,015,717 20 10,178,805 2,777, 081 5,600, 000 2,000 600, 000 6, 364, 000 20 72,000, 000 5, 000, 000 57, 000, 000 122 17,268 1,696, 845 20 7, 000, 000 1,034,905 4,000, 000 us 133,271 1,482, 306 40 21,600, 000 544, 805 1,620, 000 1 103 446,180 20 3,000, 000 132,203 182,203 13 6,500 260, 564 8 700, 000 1,129, 468 700, 000 3 6,200 6,547,725 20 21, 000, 000 8,339,517 13, 820, 004 1 31 7,343,741 2 26, 400, 000 7,207,578 17,992,422 0 0 974,976 5 1, 200, 000 238, 000 700, 000 2,310 Ll i a & Ls 5,000 008 32 "330,123 3,849,615 2 2.90. QR 1,318, 067 152 58, 563 2,674, 466 30 32,095, 852 1,187,513 3,000, 622 121, 706 1,931,593 20 10, 000, 000 578, 967 600, 000 193 45, 000 4,860, 000 25 20, 000, 000 4,500, 000 7, 000, 000 100 30, 000 6,533, 444 55 7, 250, 000 2,903, 683 1,746,317 25 18,000 786, 142 0 6,908, 400 717, 044 2,343, 000 23 2,408 2,158,975 30 16, 163, 105 2,032,121 2, 855, 542 1,305 554,713 3,807, 31 29, 681, 435 803,697 10,643, 383 1,33 604,138 3,861,887 20 40,000, 000 2,287,583 23,400, 000 7 66,937 3,313,976 10 9, 000, 000 1,039, 500 1,092,000 15 2,355 4,59; 4 25 17,500, 000 4,003,176 10, 500, 000 60 62,000 4,164,863 12 11,400, 000 1,928, 356 472,785 498 51,696 473, 25 2,552,108 316, 207 200, 009 1,125 46,426 1,158,533 2 8 300, 000 690, 252 330,698 131 69, 150 140, 839 30 975, 000 66,931 44, 500 188 58, 100 517, 20 2,078, 866 169, 928 483,775 1,185 663, 269 2,067,211 20 10, 500, 000 1,398,193 5, 850, 000 85 18, 1,196, 25 6, 065, 895 , 232,762 516, 088 470 180,000 10,582,379 20 54,000, 000 17, 555, 895 10, 500, 000 6 1,400 8,048, 25 28,203,075 7,291,624 15,139, 544 153 15, 469 749,511 12 1,650, 000 252,016 63, 000 3 227,500 6,149,970 20 31,000, 000 2,748,955 6,095,313 34 8, 000 2,302, 25 13,167,262 2,609, 507 3,220, 302 261 40, 863 1,488, 25 13.816, 386 538,434 2,841,877 1,000 445,775 1,463,897 25 9,600, 2,820,688 4,500,000 41 68,407 282,972 20 3, 000, 000 8, 52 1, 400, 000 0 R 5,027,711 25 20, 500, 000 5,280, 330 6,000, 000 LS 689, 15 2,670, 000 266, 849 65, 500 14 1,926 4,871, 23 16, 725, 000 4,381,343 12,481, 537 257 @ 8,315,314 Q 2 5,148,135 30,625, 000 38 1 1,410,758 3,942, 737,488 80, 000 218 31,519 289, 20 1,395,745 205,533 189,372 3 4,898,489 0 33,000, 000 4,573,162 18, 000, 000 2 44,335 2,069, 821 20 10, 800, 000 1,003; 355 3,000, 000 99 52,485 1,945,216 12 6, 048, 000 2,233,067 8, 000, 000 4g 153; 282 2,607,160 20 12,600, 000 517 2,655,483 151 13,571 215,822 20 850,000 rr 30, 000 8 2,766 159,355 27 30, 395 64,050 12 2,041 4,449,84 30 1,572,038 3,088, 960, 17,003 6, 191,012 156, 405, 503 © 697,978, 185 127, 865,932 310, 407, 984 1Does not participate In national school lunch. (Continued from page 2) children as being economically deprived. This Free Lunches for 9.1 or 6.6 Million? figure is based on a $6,000 a year family income as being too low in many cases to provide ade- This means that the probable universe of quately for family needs. eligible children for free and reduced price lunches will be a minimum 9.1 million, or substantially USDA Budget May Need Stretching greater than the number used by the USDA to - develop its budget estimates for child feeding The use of the 14.2 million figure must programs. have sent shock waves through the budgeting of- fices in USDA. While Agriculture administers The USDA is budgeting for a participation the program nationally, school officials operate level no higher than 6.6 million children for it at state and school district levels. These of- special assistance in the school lunch program, ficials will be doing the count of how many based on the USDA estimate of daily attendance of children need free or reduced price lunches, 7.2 million children, of whom 10 percent will be which means that the USDA budget likely will be absent. stretched toward the 14.2 million participation level. Of particular interest is the fact that the Office of Education considers 14.2 million (Continued on page 4) 2179 CNI WEEKLY REPORT CNI WEEKLY REPORT Rodney E. Leonard, Editor Leslie J. Schmidt, Associate Editor Published by the COMMUNITY NUTRITION INSTITUTE 520 Colorado Bldg., Washington, D.C. 20005 (202) 347-4234 L (Continued on page 3) The Perkins study, reported in the last CNI report, underscored the likelihood that the num- ber of children eligible for free or reduced price lunches will be far more than current budget data indicates. The study, based on reports from state school food service directors, projected a par- ticipation level of 8.9 million children. This figure, using income criteria from last school year, was considered to be too conservative by Congressman Perkins. He estimated the number of eligible children to be over 10 million, or twice the number receiving free or reduced price lunches in the peak month during 1969-70. (CNI misread the Congressman's words and reported the esti- mated eligible universe at 18 million.) * %k % %x ¥ (Continued from page 1) said recently: ''Unless they change their minds there will be no farm bill." Until this argument is settled, no action on funding will be taken by the appropriation committees, both of whom have ‘passed bills to finance farm and food programs. Because of this deadlock, appropriations may not be acted upon until after the November elections. Congress has now decided to recess in mid-October and return to complete its legis- lative duties after Nov. 3. Even if the farm bill were compromised this week to everyone's satisfaction, the prospects for final action soon on appropriations are not bright. In past years, the conferences on funding questions often have taken several weeks, So long as the conferees know they can return in November to settle differences, they will be under no pressure to get the appropriation bill enacted. This is little solace for school lunch person- _ nel, many of whom at the state and local level are PAGE 4 OCTOBER 7, 1970 confused by the apparent program drift at the fed- eral level. Sources on the appropriation committees in- dicate that should no action be taken on funding be- fore the election recess, the Congress will extend the continuing resolution which authorizes the USDA to spend program dollars. The current resolution which had authorized the USDA to spend through to Oct. 15 for programs included in the 1971 budget, was extended yester- day to authorize expenditures through January 1971. An extension of the continuing resolution will allow the USDA to continue to reimburse states and schools for the special milk program. Committee sources point out that funding for the school lunch and child feeding programs would also continue, but at a rate equivalent to the funding level for 1970-71, rather than 1969-70. * ok % k kx School Lunch Week: Emphasis on Hunger National School Lunch week, Oct. 11-17, .will have a different emphasis this year in many communities than in 1969. The National Council of Churches is leading a coalition of organizations and groups to encour- age local communities to make school lunch week in 1970 a period of commitment to eliminate hunger in the classroom. The campaign is being organized by the Council's committee on domestic hunger, and is being supported by the United States Catholic Con- ference, the Southern Leadership Conference, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and the Children's Foundation, among others. The committee on domestic hunger is dir- ected by Hulbert James, formerly associate dir- ector of the NWRO in Washington, D.C. "We're saying this week should not be used for the same old business-as-usual programs. We ought to have programs that are dedicated to the principle that we will feed every needy child in our community," James said. He has been traveling across the country, speaking to community organizations, organizing workshops with the goal of building "the broadest possible coalition'' to ensure that the school lunch program serves every needy child. 2180 CNI WEEKLY REPORT (Continued from page 1) study will be to develop cost reducing techniques in program operations, to find ways to improve nutrition in the child and to test how education of the child during meals can improve nutritional awareness. 4. The National School Food Service and Nu- trition Education Finance Project, financed by USDA and operated by the Florida State Univer- sity. It will be a major baseline data source for school food service, even though its primary goal is to develop a stable financing pattern for school food service. The Florida study, now completed except for the final report, has five objectives: To describe school food service as it is today; to estimate school food service needs -- public and private -- through to 1980; to describe outstand- ing food service systems; to analyze existing sys- tems, identifying strong and weak points; and to produce alternative financial models. 5. The District of Columbia Food Service Project, financed by OEO and operated by the PAGE 5 OCTOBER 7, 1970 D.C. Board of Education through the school food _ service division. The project combines both a planning and implementation phase, with heavy emphasis on community participation in the planning of a food service program for D.C. schools. 6. The Evaluation of Lunch and Breakfast programs in the State of Washington. The proj- ect is under consideration at OEO, and would be operated by the Washington State University. The study would place primary emphasis on the nutritional aspects of child feeding programs, and would measure ethnic and socio-economic variables as they affect the nutritional status of school children. ARS Researching Nutritional Questions Other research projects in nutrition which have a bearing on child feeding are being carried out by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, but these projects are conventional searches for answers to the nutrition experts questions. One is a University of California at Berkeley study to develop a satisfactory way to measure the nu- Accolades continue to arrive at the CNI office along with a trickle of checks to pay for subscriptions to the CNI Weekly Report. Here are a few quotes: Carl D. Perkins, chairman, House Edu- cation and Labor Committee: "Your CNI Weekly Report is an excellent idea, and will fill a need in the child feeding and community nutrition program area which has been going unmet for too long. The program expansion... has not been accompanied by sufficient exchange of cur- rent information and data among the various groups which are most directly concerned with these programs." George McGovern, chairman, Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs: 'I want to congratylate you for doing an excellent job in providing a most useful public service... I am well aware of the urgent need of such a publication..." : Dr. Jean Mayer, chairman, White House Con- ference on Food, Nutrition and Health: "It is extremely useful. I gave my copy to the Boston Globe... send me a few additional copies." Paul A. Lachance, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Nutritional Physiology, Rutgers University: "...I can only say that the CNI Weekly Report is a definitely relevant document... it is con- MORE COMMENT FROM READERS ON CNI REPORTS cise, to the point and in plain English... please continue the effort." Food Manufacturer: "It is our opinion that such reporting is of great value in being able to keep up with the current government attitude on nu- trition without putting in a full week's effort to- ward sorting out and reading alone. We cer- tainly want to encourage you to keep up this sort of information and sincerely want to wish you great success in your undertaking." Equipment manufacturer: "This is outstanding! We would like to have you include us in a full time subscription." State Directors, School Food Service: "The CNI Weekly Report is tremendous... a most needed communications media." "Congratulations! The first issues... have been greater than even I expected! Thanks al- ways for your leadership and concern." City Directors, Food Services: "... found it full of information in which I am intensely interested... it will be most mean- ingful in my work... and will help us in dealing with our basic problems..." "...I have for the first time the feeling that I am up to date on USDA happenings in regard to school food service... We desparately need the promptness and accuracy that this type publication can provide, " 2181 CNI WEEKLY REPORT PAGE 6 OCTOBER 7, 1970 tritional status of individuals. The most promis- ing technique under study with the $66, 580 grant is a hair root model, based on evidence that protein deficiencies change the character of human hair before any other physical damage is notice- able. While such studies are needed for health purposes, they are rooted essentially in the poli- tics of production -- i.e,, if people who need more food can be found, then bigger markets can be developed for agriculture. Politics of Distribution Being Studied The dynamic character of the new breed of research projects is that they are the first to deal with the politics of distribution -- i.e., if enough food can be produced to feed every per- son, and people are still malnourished, then the real problem is how to deliver food to every per- son. The Florida project, for example, likely is a transitional study. It will be a definitive as- sessment of a school food service program con- structed in the old concept of production politics. It will serve up a budget makers delight (particu- larly for the new PPBS apostles) of projections of needs for the next decade, with alternative choices and alternative costs. It also will mark the end of nearly four years of often abrasive analysis of what is wrong at the federal level. The New Jersey project, while it sets goals related to bringing more schools and needy child- ren into the state system, will probably result in a redesigned state administrative structure bet- ter equipped to handle management problems in a program which is galloping to giant size. Solution Sought to Delivery Problems The Rutgers study is an effort to venture in- to the explosive area of engineering foods specifi- cally for child feeding programs as a means of solving increasingly complex delivery problems. The suspicion and hostility which food service personnel in child feeding direct toward the sub- ject accounts for the delicate phrasing used in of- fical accounts of the project. The fact remains that the Rutgers project can have the most decisive and positive impact on child feeding since the invention of peanut but- ter. The politics of distribution -- or the solving of the war on hunger -- is based on developing the technology for delivery nutrition, not food groups. The Washington, D.C. project essentially is geared to demonstrate that child feeding is a com- munity function, and that the political problems of community acceptance, if they can be overcome through participation in planning, will help resolve other problems in participation and nutrition education. Cost Savings and Nutrition Education Studied The North Carolina project has a more in- termediate goal, which is to identify cost saving techniques in current program operations. It should develop useful management techniques adaptable to most state school food service oper- ations. The Washington state proposal ventures in- to the murkiest area of all, nutrition education. It is a subject much like the weather: Everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. Whether the answers will be found in studying ethnic and socio-economic influences is anyone's guess -- a reasonably valid criteria for research, judging from the hair root test. * Kk kk who PEOPLE re EVENTS Dr. Nathan Smith appointed Special Assist- ant for Nutrition:Programs to HEW Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs Dr. Roger O. Egeberg. Dr. Smith will coordinate nutrition programs within HEW. He was Profes- sor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center. He has been active for several years in nutrition related research activities. Edward J. Hekman, Administrator, Food and Nutrition Service, USDA, was recently awarded a management improvement certificate by the President of the United States. The award was given to Mr. Hekman "for excellence in improvement of government operations." Mrs. Patricia Stevenson, director, Office for Nutrition and Health Services, Office of Edu- cation, HEW, has been awarded a Horace Mann Lectureship in Public Education Policy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She will be studying for her doctorate in teacher train- ing and humanistic education during a year's leave of absence. Daniel G. Wisotzkey named Supervisor, School Food Services, Colorado Department of Education, He replaces Pohle H. Wolfe formerly Consultant for School Food Services. 2182 Mr. Leonarp. I want to emphasize that the latter data was de- veloped by the House Committee on Education and Labor, under Rep- resentative Carl Perkins, and the earlier data by this committee, under Senator McGovern. It is indicative of some of the problems in child feeding that the data base for analysis has to be developed by the legis- lative rather than the executive branch. Now, the data show that of the 46.7 million children in public schools, the number who participate in the school lunch program increased from 18.3 million to about 19 million last year. The number of children receiving a free or reduced price lunch increased from 2.4 million to about 4.5 million. The reason I say “about” in referring to the 1969-70 data is that the Perkins study records the participation in the program for the peak month, and not the average daily statistics as recorded in the McGovern data. The figures I use for comparison purposes are converted to an average daily basis. The difference in absolute growth rates contains some surprising information. For one thing, the program, overall, is not expanding as might be expected from the weight of more Federal dollars alone. It also indicates that a substantial number of children have been paying for lunches when they should have been receiving them free or at minimal cost. And it suggests that schools in general are not moving with any special vigor to reach the children of the poor who are most in need of adequate food and better nutrition. A look at the performance of some States underscores these obser- vations. In Illinois, for example, the program grew by about 124,000 more children, but about 164,000 more children are being served free or reduced price lunches on an average day. In Michigan, while the number of children receiving free or re- duced price lunches has increased by some 63,000, the total number of students participating, on the average, has increased by only some 5,000. Massachusetts, on the other hand, has a more conventional pattern. Free or reduced price lunch participation increased nearly 27,000 while the number of students being served lunch rose 110,000 on the average. The Perkins data also shows that the number of students attending schools which do not provide type A lunches has not changed greatly since 1968-69. Some 10.5 million children do not have access to the national school lunch program today, which is about the same figure as in the McGovern data. The new dimension provided by the Perkins study is that more than 6 million of these 10.5 million children attend school where no food service is available. The Perkins study also clearly demonstrates that the school chil- dren who should receive a lunch free or at a token cost—which is estimated at 6.6 million by the Administration for 1970-71—have been seriously underestimated. Other studies support this conclusion. State school food service directors reported for the Perkins study that 8.9 million children should receive a free or reduced price lunch, using eligibility standards which were in effect last school year. Mr. Perkins, noting that most States were using an income standard 2183 which is lower than the new income guidelines policy announced by Secretary Hardin in August, estimated that over 10 million chil- dren would be eligible for special assistance in the current school ear. Even these figures may be conservative, however. The Office of Education recently published Education of the Disadvantaged, an analysis of title I, ESEA activities which, in addition to saying the program has not been particularly successful, estimated that the num- ber of economically disadvantaged children in public schools is 14.2 million. The real significance of this number is that the same officials who made these calculations also will determine which children, in addi- tion to those who automatically qualify as eligible under the new legislation, will receive free or reduced price lunches. The meaning is clear, and I think the implication of these figures is tragic. The program for the school year now underway is based on a budget which does not provide for from 4 to 8 million children who need special assistance to gain access to the school lunch pro- gram. With funding at the present level now provided in the appropriation bill which has passed the Senate, the Federal Govern- ment will fall short of meeting its real obligations to the States and log! school districts by as much as $100 million, and probably $200 million. The danger is that States and local officials will be guided in their program administration by budgeting policy and not by nutrition philosophy—in other words, program growth will be determined by available dollars rather than by student need. The situation is underscored by another, and more subtle, trend which the Perkins data hints at, and which field reports coming into the children’s foundation this summer and fall describe more spe- cifically. It is that children, and their families, who are eligible for special assistance are being systematically denied a service to which they are legally entitled. The information has been summarized in an article in the Public Information Center News, and I would like to submit a copy of that for the record of this hearing. (The article referred to follows:) [Reprinted from Public Information Center News, October 1970] STEALING FROM CHILDREN (By Steven d’ Arazien) Public officials are breaking the law and, as a result, more than 4 million needy American school children go hungry every day. At issue is the National School Lunch Program and the manner in which it is administered in school districts across the nation. A Marrowbone Creek, West Virginia mother wrote The Children’s Founda- tion, a private organization attempting to eliminate inequities in the program, “They have made the children that couldn't pay for their lunch set and watch the other kids eat . . . Last year, when they had to let the children eat, what they got wasn’t fit for a dog and not enough. I was in the kitchen one day and the meat they was cooking had big long hairs on it.” The problem, at best, is caused by officials who just do not care, at worst, by those who do not believe that poor children should receive what they are entitled to under the law. The law is clear. In 1946, Congress enacted the National School Lunch Act to “safeguard the health and well-being of the nation’s children.” Since then, other 2184 measures have been passed to insure that poor children are not excluded. As recently as last spring, Congress amended the Act to say that every needy child attending schools receiving federal lunch money “shall receive” a lunch free or at a reduced price. Still, only about 24 million of the nation’s 52 million children under 18 par- ticipate in the program. Of the 9.1 million from poverty-level or below families, only 5 million receive lunches free or at reduced prices. Of these latter, many are subjected to degrading treatment long outlawed by Congress. The National School Lunch Program is operated at the federal level by the U. 8. Department of Agriculture (USDA). An indication of USDA’s concern about feeding children may be seen in the fact that it took the Department nearly four months to write regulations to implement the new legislation passed in the spring. In each state, the program is run by the Education Department through a program director. Each school district also has a school food service director. In many schools the principal runs the program. It is a step-child of the educa- tional system, despite the opinion of such leading child psychologists as Bruno Bettelheim that hungry children tend to be anti-social and have difficulty learning. “How one is being fed and how one eats have a larger impact on the person- ality than any other human experience,” Bettelheim says, while school officials continue to ignore or violate the law with impunity. The situation is as bad in the North as the South. The program has always benefited the children of middle class families, where the federal subsidies for free and reduced price lunches are used to hold down the cost of the meal to affluent youngsters. Hot lunches often are provided in newer schools in middle class areas, while inner-city schools are by-passed. In general, ghetto schools are older and lack adequate serving facilities. Officials, either through lack of concern or imagination, are unwilling to experiment with technological innovations that could bring hot lunches to hungry, needy children. The latest statistics available paint a gloomy picture: In Hartford, Connecticut, only a twentieth of the children receive free or reduced price lunches. Only four out of 25 elementary schools provide lunch. Yet, 13 per cent of the city’s families are on welfare. In Lincoln, Nebraska, only 814 free lunches were served last year out of the 14,253 meals prepared daily. There are no reduced price lunches. Yet, there are 6,000 families living at or below the federal poverty guideline of $3,600 a year for a family of four. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 5,302 families earned under $2,000 a year, but only 360 elementary school children received free or reduced price meals. In Albuquerque, New Mexico. only half the children from poor families are served free or reduced price lunches. In Manchester, New Hampshire, only 13 of 28 schools have lunch programs. Cities in Ohio are among the worst in the nation. In Akron, 26 per cent of the elementary schools have a lunch program. Only four per cent of the children living in low-income areas receive free or reduced price meals. In Cincinnati, only 30 per cent of the poor children are able to participate. Less than a third of Cleveland’s schools have lunch programs and only 7.9 per cent of the children in poverty areas get school lunches. In Columbus, half the schools have lunches and only 12.6 per cent of the poor receive food. In Dayton, less than a third of the schools serve lunch. The federal program is often discriminatory. A Greenville, South Carolina mother reports that some of her children receive free or reduced price lunches while others do not. The reason? The children attend different schools. In outright violation of the law, some school districts set quotas for the num- ber of children permitted to receive free or reduced price lunches. For example, Abingdon, Virginia, has a 10 per cent limit on free lunches. In Hardeeville, South Carolina, poor children receive the lunches on alternating weeks, a not unique practice. In Georgetown, Texas, where there are 1,000 pupils, approximately 100 free and reduced price lunches are expected to be distributed this year, despite the fact that over 30 per cent of the country’s families are poverty level. In the urbane college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 200 children of families receiving Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) payments are refused free lunches. School officials there labelled the children “free-loaders.” 2185 The situation in Mississippi may best be summed up by this letter from Tylerstown: “I am a poverty family. We does not have no employment. We have 7 in the family and we have 4 children to attend school. The lunch cost 30¢ per month from Welfare and we are not able to pay this amount. We would like free lunch if possible.” Where free or reduced price lunches are provided children, flagrant abuses of the law are reported. The most common is discrimination. Anti-hunger workers estimate that 75 per cent of the children receiving free or reduced price meals are stigmatized by school practices. Dr. Bettelheim said, “Eating and being fed are intimately connected with our deepest feelings. They are the most basic interactions between human beings, on which rest all later evaluations of our- self, of the world, and of our relationship to it.” Imagine the scars left on children who are subjected to the following situations: In Des Moines, Iowa, those receiving free or reduced price lunches have a black star on their food card. In Raleigh, North Carolina, officials use either red tags or verbal identifica- tion in the lunch lines to brand poor children. In Gary, Indiana, children to receive free lunches are segregated in the line. In Indianapolis, Indiana, separate lunch periods or lines are used, depending on the school. In Alliance, Nebraska, poor children line up in front of the principal’s office once a week to get their food cards. The other children have no doubt why their schoolmates are there. A lady from Caldwell, Idaho, explains, “My girl said she'd rather do without lunch than be made a fool of in front of the children like she was.” That reaction is typical. Children are proud. They'd rather starve than seem to be beggars. These practices are illegal. The law says: “Avoid overt identification to their peers of children receiving such meals” and “protect the anonymity of the chil- dren.” It specifically outlaws each of the above practices. Another form of abuse is that of child labor. In about half the schools, admin- istrators induce children to work for their “free” or reduced price lunches. In many cases, parents who hear of the school lunch program ask the principal about it. The principal then asks the parent, “Wouldn't your child like to work for his lunch?” Not many parents say no to this kind of coercion. In Chatham, Virginia, where children help pick the tobacco crop, wages are withheld to pay for free and reduced price lunches. Chatham, incidentally, uses Title I money, earmarked by Congress to improve directly the educational pro- gram for disadvantaged children, to pay for a planetarium for adult education classes and for an astronomy-navigation teacher. In Topeka, Kansas, children in special education classes, usually the poorest and most needy, miss classes so they can work for their meals. An even more dramatic case was reported in Troup County, Georgia, where children earn lunch by guarding the garbage cans so other hungry youngsters won't steal the scraps. Needless to say, the law forbids requiring children to work for their meals. Adding fraud to injury, many schools where children are asked to work claim federal reimbursement for the meals served these youngsters as “free” lunches. Eligibility standards are a major obstacle to participation. The law reads “Meals . . . shall be served without cost or at a reduced price to children who are determined by local schools and service institutions to be unable to pay the full cost of the meal.” : A mother writes from Denmark, South Carolina, “The situation in our com- munity is that most of our children does not have money for food at school or any place. Some parents doesn’t even earn enough to properly provide for them even in their homes. They are hungry and unable to cope with constantly rising prices on foods and other necessary items. But food is what we are concerned about. Income is too low to provide the proper food.” For reasons as yet unex- plained, these children apparently are too wealthy to qualify for the program. The inequities are easily seen in the way the criteria vary from community to community. In Georgetown, Texas, a family of five earning $191 a month must pay full price for each child’s lunch. In Albuquerque, New Mexico. a family of four must earn $111 a month or less before lunches for the children are reduced to half price. In Williamsburg, South Carolina, a family must make less than $1,800 a year to qualify for free school lunches. In Salina, Kansas, the same family would have to make $2,800 or less—still only $234 a month to feed, house and care for four persons. 2186 These practices may be stopped in 1971 when the schools are required by law to follow a national income eligibility standard based on a minimum $3,720 yearly income for a family of four. However, as past experience demonstrates, school officials rarely obey the letter of the law when it comes to feeding chil- dren, and the government has never cracked down on violators. Officials are often insulting. When one Chicano parent in Caldwell, Idaho, asked that his child receive a free lunch, the principal retorted, “The Spanish should work for their lunch.” Another parent reported, “When we asked for lunch free the principal asked all kinds of questions such as, did we have a car, a T.V., do we raise a garden, do we own our own house or pay rent.” In Muskogee, Oklahoma, a parent was told, “Welfare recipients are allotted money for food, therefore they are not eligible for a second handout.” It is in Muskogee, where children are allowed to charge their lunches, that poor children who cannot pay their bills are told they will not be promoted. Such practices have also been reported in parts of Alabama, Idaho and elsewhere. The problem is that school officials regard free and reduced price lunches as charity for which parents are expected to beg and children grovel. An application form in Eden, North Carolina, begins with this statement: “There is no such thing as a free lunch! Some one must pay for every lunch served.” (Emphasis in original.) The questions that follow are more complicated and detailed than those for a Diner's or American Express card. The names of two character witnesses are required. The law: “Discourage the use of long and detailed formal application forms. Simple statements of family income, family size plus hardship reasons should be acceptable without forms involving long-winded and irrelevant questions.” How do school administrators rationalize their practices? The response of one superintendent is typical. When it was pointed out that schools in Lincoln, Nebraska, were breaking the law in the administration of the lunch program, Superintendent John Prasch replied, “We're not smart enough to figure out how to obey that law.” Other administrators have alibis nearly as absurd. In Greenville, South Carolina, poor children were observed chewing on their shirt collars while their more affluent schoolmates ate. Questioned about this quaint custom, officials said that if the youngsters don’t go to the lunchroom, they would be left unsuper- vised. Nothing was said about food. Then there is the case of a South Carolina man who was notified by the Department of Public Welfare that his ADC check was being increased from $27.20 to $38.12 a month because his wife had returned home. His food stamps, however, would cost $34 a month, the state said. Still, his two schoolage young- sters are ineligible for free lunches. He wrote: “Dear Sirs: This is to notify you that I is disable and my wife is disable. And we have 2 children to support. My wife have been in the rest home and they sent her back to me. My doctor pronounce me disable to work and the Welfare only gives us $38.12 for all of us. I am enclosing this letter so you can see for yourself. I feel that I am unjustified. That is why I am writing to you. Hoping to hear from you soon. P.S. I have 2 school age children. My wife is paralized and can’t do for them and I need help.” His cry for help raises essentially the same question about American justice as a 10-year old boy from Boise, Idaho. He was attending a recent community organization meeting where anti-hunger workers explained children’s right to lunch under the law. The boy, who is required to work for his lunch at a Boise elementary school, raised his hand. Why, he wanted to know, if his father was in jail for breaking the law, weren't the men in prison who broke these laws? Mr. Leoxarp. The local practices which are used by school officials to keep down the number of children receiving special assistance boggles the mind. Some communities set up a quota system in which a limit is placed on the number of free or reduced price lunches, regardless of need. Others use various devices—publishing names of eligible families in newspapers, announcing over the loudspeaker the names of the children who get free lunches, segregating the children who receive 2187 free lunches, serving free lunches on different colored plates—all of which are designed to intimidate children. : Some use the school lunch program as a disciplinary tool, with- holding or threatening to withhold food to control behavior. Chil- dren had wages withheld for farmwork in order to pay for lunches, and others had to miss class in order to work for meals. Other communities use application forms which, although clearly illegal, are long, complicated and request personal information which is unrelated to the need for better nutrition. The article details these conditions, and the files at the children’s foundation contain hundreds of letters describing the agony of indi- viduals who ask only for what the law says they should have. What all this really says is that indifference, apathy, prejudice, and discrimination continue to be dominant influences in a program which many children may use to judge the worth of their society and their country. Inadequate local support by public officials, combined with in- adequate funding and program direction from the Federal level, practically assure the school lunch program will not achieve the goals which the Congress has set. Obviously, the support is not available within the program to fulfill the promise made by the White House last Christmas that all needy children would be reached with a school lunch by Thanksgiving. The dimension of the problem is greater than the difficulty of reaching all children, poor or not, with food service when they are in school. Even if we could achieve this objective tomorrow, there is serious question that the problem of child malnutrition—or hunger— would be solved. Two years ago the USDA analyzed the nutritional content of the lunches served in the schools participating in the program. The survey results are shocking. Over a third of the lunches did not meet the type A nutritional requirements—which raises a question of whether the Federal Government was being defrauded—and even a larger number of lunches were deficit in the nutrients (protein, ascorbic acid, calcium) which are essential to the health of children, particularly. In addition, there is growing evidence that the food we consume today is not what we expect it to be nutritionally. A chemical analysis of the food served in the lunch program, for example, is likely to show that it has less nutritional value than the “paper” value assigned to it by nutritionists. This situation is due partly to the development of processed foods which have “hollow” calories—that is, calories which do not carry other essential nutrients. But it also is due to the fact that we do not know what happens to the nutritional value of foods under new methods of production, or the effect which different techniques of processing and handling have on nutritional quality. What I am suggesting is that we have recognized a national problem—hunger and malnutrition—exists for which a national pro- gram structure has yet to be established as a way to respond to it. The present program is essentially a series of local responses to local conditions—which explains the consistency of it’s inconsistent standards and procedures. The program at the Federal level wears 2188 the blinders of production politics—that is, it is essentially an instrument to increase the consumption of whatever is produced under the farm programs. How else do you explain these conditions: Development of a program budget is unrelated to the needs of local schools and communities. Planning at the community and State level for child feeding is - nonexistent. No one has any idea of the needs in this program area 5 years hence, other than educated guesses. The data on which the Congress could base the funding decisions it already has made only now has become available; and only because the chairman of a House committee was concerned enough to gather, analyze, and publish it. The USDA has yet to provide the Congress with similar data. No public agency is developing a data base of the food preferences of children, even though the objective of the child feeding program is to deliver food in a nutritious form appealing to the child which the child will consume. Menus are designed today on the basis of what people think children like to eat, or should eat. No research program has been structured to analyze and report at intervals on the nutritional quality of the food American citizens consume, even though the technology of producing, processing, and serving is being revolutionized. These are not the type of activities which the executive or legis- lative branches would engage themselves in if they were concerned with the politics of production. None is relevant to a production orientation, nor can they be understood by individuals who follow a production philosophy. All are relevant to the politics of distribu- tion, however, and that is the nature of the problem we are finally récognizing. Or, I should say that some of us—this committee, in particular— are recognizing. And that is the real tragedy. Just when we are beginning to understand the true dimension of the problem, the Congress and the country have begun to find hunger boring. And that to me is the greatest crisis of all. The effectiveness of a democratic system in a modern, complex youd will be conditioned by the quality of the administration of its laws. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be happy to respond to any questions. Senator McGovern. Thank you very much, Mr. Leonard, for a very outstanding statement, and I must say it is one that is rather disheartening to me as a member of this committee. The Congress of the United States, years ago, really committed itself to the pledge that every needy child in this country should receive a free or reduced price meal, and to make sure that there was no mistaking the intent of Congress, as you know, we reaffirmed that pledge in even stronger language a year ago. We made some definite effort to put in the words “shall receive” so that there was no mistaking the intent of the Congress, that we wanted every needy child in this country that was in school to Ie ii a free or reduced price meal, and we said they should e fed. It is a very clear instruction. 2189 Now, the President backed that up with his promise at the end of last year that by the time Thanksgiving rolled around this year we would have accomplished that goal. To a great extent, that bold pledge on the part of the President, which led me to put out a public statement praising him, and saying I thought progress on the hunger front was the most outstanding single achievement of the administration its first year of office. But as I understand it, what you are telling us is that there are at least 9 million needy children in school who ought to be receiving these free or reduced price lunches, and that as we approach Thanks- giving this year we are reaching only about half of those youngsters. Is that substantially what you said today ? Mr. Leonarp. Yes, sir, that is exactly right. i I might add that probably the number is larger than 9 million. We don’t know, however, and I think that this is basically the problem we are dealing with. We have never been able to define, in numbers, the need that we use in generalized statements to say what we intend to do. Senator McGovern. I find that a very painful gap between not only the instructions of the Congress, but the pledge that the Presi- dent made in a very specific manner. It seems to me that this is the kind of yawning chasm between what we say we are going to do and our actual performance that causes people all over the country to wonder about the good faith of the Government. They wonder whether the Congress can actually carry out its in- tentions and whether administration officials from the President on down are really serious when they make these pledges. I think we either ought not to make pledges of that kind, or we ought to carry them out. What do you feel is the significance of the very modest gains that you do refer to in total participation? Isn’t the figure that you give at great variance with that given by the Department of Agriculture? As T interpret these figures, there have been some 2 million in- creased numbers of children who receive these lunches. In other words, are we really making very much progress at all in terms of reaching categories of children that are truly needy children who ought to be participating in this program? Aren’t we really just making up for some of our past sins, rather than expanding the program to new children ? ; Mr. LreoNarp. I think the numbers contain several interesting points. Some of them I tried to point out in my statement. For example, the budget this year is based on a total participation level of about 24 million children. Yet, the Perkins study indicate that we are going to have to increase participation level in the pro- gram from about 19 million to 24 million, that is a 5 million increase. That is about a 25-percent increase in 1 year’s time. The history of the past 10 years indicates that program has been growing by less than a million a year. The differences between 1968-69 and 1969-70 indicates a real growth in the program of about 700,000. I frankly am afraid that on the basis of performance the program capabilities are such that they could not make this large increase. 2190 The variance between the additional number of children receiving free lunches and the total number of children added to the program indicates also that children who have been paying now are being converted over to a free or reduced price status. ¢ 5 "The program is not even reaching additional children. This con- cerns me because when you begin to look at the reports coming in, as we have, from individual schools, the problems of individual families in obtaining the services for their children indicate a reluctance, a gap, at the Ln level to reach out and bring the additional children who need nutrition into the program. We need to know a lot more about the program than we do. We need a lot more information. We need the kind of data gathering that this committee did and that Congressman Perkins did. : We need it done each year. We need it at the beginning of the school year, and we need it checked at the end of the school year. One of the problems is that unless you begin student participation in September, the chances of increasing student participation through the year become harder. If the program is started good and strong at the beginning of the school year, participation will start out strong and will continue strong. Senator McGovern. Mr. Leonard, one of the things that I find deeply frustrating is that every place I go around the country, if I make a statement that this country is rich enough then so that there ought not to be one single hungry child, everybody applauds. I have never found anything other than a favorable response to that. It is hard for me to believe that this is anything other than the view of most Americans. They don’t want hunger to exist in this country. You state in your testimony that hunger is becoming a boring sub- ject to many people. I think that probably is true. I have noticed it has been difficult to sustain public interest in the work of this com- mittee, even though the problem is very large, and yet there is this general acceptance across the country, or at least I find it that way and I think other members of the committee have, that the American public are ready to respond to leadership to put an end to hunger in this country. i : What do you think can be done to revitalize this interest, where it needs to be revitalized, at the Government level ? What is missing in really closing this gap between the promises we make on hunger and our performance ? . ; Mr. Leo~arp. I think there needs tobe very basic reforms both in the executive and in Congress, too. Congress has just now finished up a farm program for 3 years. ; : I think to the public, the public that saw the reports, the feeling is that: “well, Congress has now acted on the food problems in the United States, and therefore we can rest easier. We know that what- ever difficulties there are in the food and nutrition area are being taken care of.” But in reality Congress has not faced the real problems in food and nutrition, because the only thing that the committees took care of this time was the question of what kind of programs will we have to control production, to assure the United States that there will be an adequate amount of food ? 2191 But the problem we are dealing with in the lunch program, the problem we are dealing with in the family feeding programs, the problems we are really dealing with, when we talk about nutrition and hollow calories, and all the “snap, crackle, pop” fuss about cereals is a question of distribution. : We know how to deal with the politics of production. We are so expert at it that we become bored when we talk about anything else. But Congress has to begin dealing with the politics of distribution. Production is part of the whole distribution sequence, but until we begin to consider seriously the problems of the farmers, the handlers, the processors, the distributors, the retailers and the consumers, we never really are going to be able to deal successfully with the kind of conditions we have in the school lunch program. This is really a distribution program. It is a means of distributing nutrition to groups. The retail segment we have now is a system for distributing food to families. Congress has to determine policies relating to distribution, the executive has to administer a program that deals with distribution. My experience in the executive branch has been that we also tend to deal with the politics and policies, and we don’t deal as well as we should with the administration and operation of the programs. I think the executive has to get back more to the function of carry- ing out and administering programs. Senator McGovern. Senator Hart, do you have questions? Senator Harr. Mr. Leonard, that is fine. We should have this com- plete understanding of the sequence from production to distribution, but what in heaven’s name do you do with a school official who decides that the way to maintain discipline in classrooms is to put the kid on bread and water? You are saying here that the local practices used by school officials to keep down the number of children receiving assistance boggles the mind. Some use the school lunch program, you said, as a disciplinary measure, withholding food to control behavior. Unless you have a community sense of outrage at a thing like that, Washington is not going to be able to deal with it. Mr. Lroxarp. No, Congress can’t supervise the operations of pro- grams in 70,000 schools, but I think the executive branch, with more insistence from Congress, could go to the educational system itself and say that nutrition is important to the education process. Most professional educators today consider the school lunch pro- gram as part of the business side of school. In some schools they use the school lunch program to pay for the cost of financing athletic programs. In some others, they use them partly to pay for the cost of janitor services. They have to put up with it, but that does not mean they are really going to do anything about making food service work. It is a problem of attitudes. Senator Hart. You mean that there are considerable numbers of school personnel who feel that a hungry child is a desirable thing in the classroom, or that it is a matter of indifference, or that it is just a burden they should not be forced to assume, when we give them the food, to make sure the child gets it? 42-778—71—pt. 8—6 2192 Mr. Leonard. Many of them consider it to be a burden. They are indifferent to it. We do not have today either then in the Office of Education or in the Department of Agriculture a real program of nutrition educa- tion. There is nothing that we can point to and say, “here is a cur- riculum that will allow you to use the school lunch program as a way to demonstrate to children that society cares about them in their school.” To me the lunch program is an integral part of our education pro- gram in the United States, but we don’t treat it that way. The child comes into society for the first time in an institutional way through the schools. He learns about society and its institutions first in school, because it is the first institution he comes into. The thing he learns in school is that society, instead of being a giving mechanism as well as taking, is that it takes, and works hard to make sure they don’t get anything. So you could be using the lunch program as a way of telling the child the society cares about him. The way we use it now is to tell him society does not care about him. But we have no mechanism. There is no policy, no program, no curriculum in this area at all. Senator Harr. I don’t understand, and I must ask you to clarify your statement on page 9 that over one-third of the lunches did not meet the type A nutritional requirements, which raises the question of whether the Federal Government was being defrauded. What fraud do you think has occurred ? Mr. Leoxarp. The school lunch program operates on the basis that the schools that serve the type A lunch will be reimbursed for that lunch. The regular reimbursement is about 4 and a half to 5 cents per lunch. The special assistance reimbursement through section 11 and section 32 now has been authorized up to 30 cents. I doubt if there is any legal remedy to this, but it does raise the question that if you are requiring to serve a type A lunch and do not, then you are receiving money under false circumstances. Senator Harr. It is a fraud on the Government, but an even worse hurt to the child. Mr. Leonarp. Much worse. That is the really serious problem. Senator Hart. Yes. As the chairman said, he does not find anybody booing and hissing him when he says we should have no hungry children. But we still find we are programed in a fashion that leaves many, many hungry children, and I share with him the feeling that if there is any broad support across this country for any proposition, it is that we do subscribe to the concept that we feed the hungry; at least we do when they are children who are not responsible for their plight and who, as children have no means to reverse the society’s pattern which produces this tragic situation for them. Now, I suggested this before, and I raise the matter again, espe- cially in light of your theory that the Congress and the country find hunger a boring subject now: “Would it be possible to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation to discover communist agents at work in our country devoted to the proposition that the children of this country shall not be fed? If we can find an enemy, then maybe we will feed the children. 2193 Isn’t that sort of the way we act too often? We get to the moon largely because the Russians might have gotten there first? Mr. Lreonarp. We always seem to want to have to operate by the devil theory. We need to find the devil. Senator Hart. Do you suggest the possibility Mr. Leo~xarp. I personally don’t subscribe to that theory. Senator Harr. You don’t subscribe to it, but you acknowledge we react that way, and if you have to adopt the wrong philosophy to get the children fed, where is the devil? Mr. Leoxarp. The devil is our own ignorance, our failure to realize that change makes it necessary for us to change our ways of dealing with the problem. We say in the country that we produce enough food to feed all Americans and 50 or 60 million people overseas, we accept that as being an automatic solution to the problem of hunger, but it cannot be done simply by assuring that farmers are producing enough to feed themselves and 35 other people. An awfully lot of distribution hardware that is needed after the food leaves the farm gate. Senator McGovern. Senator Percy ? Senator Percy. I think that you put our finger on something that might be considered a scandal, and probably what we are doing is indicting the Congress of the United States. Maybe the public is bored because they heard a great deal about the subject. The need was clearly demonstrated. No reasonable person could say that this nation does not have the resources to feed people, and that it is not in the national interest to have malnourishment eradicated, particularly among children. The public may have assumed that once the case was proven that we did something about it. They just assume that reasonable people possessed with the facts and having the authority to act, would do something about it. But you take the status now. We passed a bill in the Senate for $1.7 billion, a few hundred million dollars less than we would have liked, but $1.7 billion. This is the fourth month of the fiscal year 1971. Where is the bill ? It is not reflected in increased food going out then to the poor. It is in conference still, and we are going on recess now, and for another month nothing is going to be done. But the system has not worked in that respect and it also has failed to work in other respects. We are going to go on recess, and because of this, we are not going to be given a chance to vote on the SST. We are not going to vote on it, because Senators and Congress- men are up for re-election. They don’t want to be put on the record on this issue and, because they don’t want to vote on the issue, under the continuing resolution, we will continue to spend $25 million a month for the SST. While we continue, we don’t have money for food stamps. I simply say we have a responsibility to make this system work better. All the framework is there to make it work, but lethargy is setting in, and we have been unable to properly respond. 2194 I think this committee has put its finger ona question of national priorities. The evidence and the hearings clearly reveal the maladjust- ment in our priorities. I think your testimony this morning has helped us a great deal. I would like to ask one question with respect to how many school boards there are that contract out their school lunch programs to food management companies, and how successful has this procedure been ? Mr. Leoxarp. I don’t know whether anybody knows the actual number. The amount of contracting is relatively small. The State of New Jersey has done the most of any State that T am familiar with. The volume is increasing, mainly because of the efforts of some of the larger urban areas, Detroit, for example, trying to meet the pressure, respond to public pressure. Cities have contracted with food management firms to do this. I don’t think it is entirely fair to judge their performance under these conditions, because what they are trying to do is to respond to a crisis situation with sack lunches and other kinds of food services which, if you had your choice, you would prefer not to utilize. I think that the food management approach is one of the key answers to the problems in the urban areas, particularly the urban areas, especially in cities with large numbers of schools that were built then prior to the time school lunch programs were inaugurated. They lack the physical space and the facilities to serve food. If they served food, it has to be served in classrooms, and teachers don’t like to serve food in classrooms. Senator Percy. Would it be a more efficient way of monitoring the nutritional content of the lunches ? Mr. Lroxarp. If you are serving out of a central commissary, it would be easier to monitor. Senator Percy. Has there been enough experience to determine whether it is a lower cost, more efficient way of doing things? Mr. Leoxarp. The technique is what is important there. You are reducing your labor costs, you are cutting out some of the equipment costs. The advantage that the food management company has is the management experience and expertise, which is sadly lacking in the program now. I am not sure that you can say you know that the private sector is going to be any more efficient. It is just that they have the whip of competition, plus the experience. So at this point I would say that given the two approaches the food management company probably would come in at a lower cost. Senator Percy. Thank you. Senator McGovern. I want just to underscore what Senator Percy has said. I did not mean to imply for one minute that the Congress can escape its responsibilities and the pledges that have been made to put an end to hunger in the United States. We bear as heavy a burden of that responsibility as the administration does. I continue to be appalled that the House of Representatives has let more than a year go by without any action on the food stamp reform bill. Now, it is true that the appropriations to fund the existing un- reformed food stamp program have gone to conference, but they 2195 did—they have not enacted on the fundamental reform of our food stamp program. We were led to believe that if we just waited until the House Agriculture Committee took action on the farm bill that then they would keep faith with us on the food stamp reform bill. ) What they did was to pass a lousy farm bill and do nothing on the food stamps reform. So I share Senator Percy’s impatience and disgust with the lack of action here in the Congress, but I do think this is a two-way matter, and we have not had the kind of pressure and continued leadership from the administration that was needed, either. In any event, the gap between what we said we were going to do more than a year ago and what was actually accomplished I think is a great disappointment to all the members of this committee. Frankly, it indicates the need for continuing surveillance by all of us if we are going to get on top of this problem of hunger. Senator Percy. Probably if we had a joint committee on hunger and malnutrition and got a few House Members deeply concerned, as concerned as we have become about this problem, we might have overcome the problem of inaction. It is just too bad, I suppose, that we did not make this a joint com- mittee. Senator Harr. Mr. Chairman, all of that is fine, and I agree with it, but who is supposed—we have got schools using this program and now you come in and tell us all this litany of horrors. Who is supposed to have eliminated these things you are talking about, the local practices used by school officials to keep down the number of children getting a lunch ? Some communities set up a quota system. Others use devices publishing names of eligible families in newspapers, announcing over the loudspeaker the names of the children who get free lunches. These are lunches that are out there. They segregate the children who receive free lunches, serving free lunches on different colored plates to intimidate children. Who is supposed to do something about that ? Some use school lunch programs as a disciplinary program: “Be good or we won’t feed you.” Some children had wages withheld from farm work. The others had to miss class to work for meals. Other communities use application forms which, though clearly illegal, are long and complicated and request personal information which is unrelated to the need for nutrition. This is what is going on now. Who is supposed to ride herd on it? Myr. Leonarp. This is the job of the administrators of the program. This is the job of the executive branch. This is the job of the Depart- ment of Agriculture. It is the job of the Office of Fducation. Senator Harr. That was my understanding. What is their ex- planation for the sequence of events that you describe ? Is it that they don’t have the local personnel, or the local school boards are too tough for them, or do they regard this as a burden we should not have imposed on them ? Mr. Lroxarp. In some cases they are not aware of it. My experience is the higher you get in the bureaucratic structure, the less you now 2196 know about the programs you are responsible for. Very often they simply are ignorant of these problems. Secondly, the Department of Agriculture is an old line agency, the same as the Office of Education. Both are extremely reluctant to try to improve programs by bringing pressure from above and local government. They believe that whatever local government does is what the local people want, and therefore it is not our job to interfere with it. Senator Harr. How can we express to them our complete disagree- ment with that concept and their responsibility? How can we tell them that we don’t believe that we have authorized a program that will permit service to the poor child on a different colored plate from the child from a home of some affluence? Senator Percy. Senator Hart, maybe I could make a suggestion. If Mr. Leonard would give us the names of any schools he knows showing this form of discrimination, this committee would refer those names to the Department of Agriculture and demand action. I think that would be the simplest way to do it. We have made a general statement. Senator Harr. It is a tragic thing to think you have to assemble a select committee of the Senate to persuade the Department of Agriculture that different plates don’t go. Mr. Leonarp. I think we have—I would like to address myself to that question. Senator McGovern. You will have to be brief, because we have a rolleall pending here. Mr. Leovarp. All right. I think the only effective way we can do that is maintain the kind of surveillance system, a system parallel to the administrative structure which reports back to all interested parties as to what is going on in that system, so that not only the administrator of the program realizes what here is going on for the first time, but also Congress and other interested groups in the execu- tive branch. Secondly, I think the only sure way you are ever going to do that is to do as is being done in some communities—as was done in Detroit— to take the school board to court and say, “This is illegal and it has bo’ stop, and if it is not stopped, there is going to be legal action taken. That is the only way you root some of that out. Senator McGovern. Members of the committee, we have a rollcall pending now. I think we will ask Miss Martin, who is our next witness, to hold until we return. This is an amendment offered by Senator Ervin of North Carolina which is pending at the present time. So we will recess for about 8 or 10 minutes. Ra the select committee recessed subject to call of the chair. Senator McGovern. The committee will be in order, and our next witness is Miss Josephine Martin, who is the chief consultant to the school food service program, State department of education, Atlanta, Ga. 2197 STATEMENT OF MISS JOSEPHINE MARTIN, CHIEF CONSULTANT, FOOD SERVICE PROGRAM, STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, ATLANTA, GA. Miss Martin. Thank you, Senator McGovern. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am Josephine Martin, administrator of school food services for the Georgia Department of Education in Atlanta. ay Lunch for every child from a low-income family by Thanksgiving 1970, is a goal made more reasonable by the passage of Public Law 91-248, the adjustments to the National School Lunch Act, a goal difficult to achieve, however, in light of lateness of regulations, un- certainty of appropriations, and restrictions on reimbursements rates. I wish to thank you, Senator McGovern, and the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, for your role and in- fluence in the enactment of Public Law 91-248. We in Georgia take pride in the fact that Senator Herman Talmadge, Georgia’s distinguished junior Senator, introduced the original Senate bill 25-48 in the Senate, and we subscribe whole- heartedly to his point of view that education is a key to breaking the poverty cycle; that meeting a child’s nutrition needs at school is a necessary part of their educational opportunity. I feel that it is very appropriate that during National School Lunch Week when the theme is “School Lunch Means Effective Education,” that we have an opportunity to talk with you about the operation of the school lunch program. As only one of the 50 State school food service directors, I have some real concerns about the operation in the future of the national school lunch program. What kind of leadership is needed to motivate school districts to provide comprehensive child nutrition and nutri- tion education programs for all children? How can the service and education aspects be coordinated at Federal, State, and local levels to avoid dilution of efforts through fragmentation. How can we be instrumental in helping USDA perceive the urgency 24 rogwiaiions and procedures which are timely, succinct, and reason- able? How can we communicate to the Congress and the President the need for adequate available funding if we collectively are to meet school day nutrition needs of children? How can we utilize the resources of and cooperate with community groups to achieve program purposes? We stand inside the open door of the 1970’s. We have in hand Public Law 19-248 and the recommendations of the White House Conference on Nutrition and 1 month’s experience under the new amendments. We see the needs and the problems facing us in long-range devel- opment, but most of all State directors of facing some immediate problems which have surfaced since passage of the amendments, and which must be dealt with expeditiously if we reach the Thanksgiving Day goal. There are six immediate concerns. One, providing information to school districts regarding free and reduced price lunch requirements. 2198 Two, directions regarding funds available for implementing Public Law 91-248. Three, restrictions by regulation limiting amount of funds paid per lunch. Four, inadequate nonfood assistance funds. Five, need for financial assistance for child nutrition program to coordinators. Six, need for positive direction to coordinate nutrition services and nutrition education to provide necessary repetition and avoid un- necessary and undesirable overlap. These are some long-range needs with implications for immediate action. One, we need a national commitment to child nutrition educa- tion programs. Two, we need a comprehensive master plan for child nutrition and education programs in accordance with the recommendations of the White House Conference on Nutrition, and a timetable for imple- menting the recommendations. We need a comprehensive child nutrition act combining the exist- ing act and amendments and filling in the gaps necessary for a com- plete program. We need a national structure for planning, developing, coordinat- ing, and evaluating child nutrition programs. Because of the immediacy of the first six concerns identified and their relationship to operational problems, I should like to discuss these. To implement the free and reduced price provisions of Public Law 91-248 in Georgia, we are holding a series of 23 meetings throughout the State during the first 15 days of October with superintendents and principals and food service directors. A kit of materials has been supplied each school system and re- sponse to the provisions and information given to these people has been positive. Since Georgia ranked first by USDA statistics in per- centage of pupils participating in national school systems lunch pro- grams in the 1969-70 year, you would assume that Georgia school administrators believe in nutrition as an integral part of education. As further evidence of their belief about school nutrition, it is worth noting that school systems have budgeted approximately $2 million each year from title I funds for free Tunches. During 1969-70 school year, 22 percent of the 146 million lunches were free or reduced. So there is a positive environment for free and reduced lunches for children. However, school administrators have valid concerns which are being advised in these meetings. One concern is: Are any funds being provided schools and districts to help implement the policies ? Another concern is, are funds available to assist school districts in providing a child nutrition program coordinator. Implementing the policies will require additional funds and addi- tional staff at the system and school level. Although the provisions of funds for child nutrition programs coordinator would require an amendment to the act, I would recommend the importance of such a position to the implementation of the new amendments, especially the provisions for free and reduced price lunches, nutrition education, training, experimental programs, and developing annual plans of operation. 2199 The time is right for program planning, direction, and coordina- tion. Unless help is provided and standards established child nutri- tion program effectiveness will continue to vary from school to school, depending on the interest of the principal. Ji The original bill 25-48 contained a provision for nutrition spe- cialists. If Federal funds provided even one-half of cost for one coordinator for each 20 schools with State and local systems provid- ing the other half, the annual cost would be less than $20 million, and the results would be phenomenal. As an example, South Carolina has a coordinator in every county, and you will recall that South Carolina has constantly ranked in the top five States in the Nation for effective school food service pro- rams. ? Another concern of school administrators regarding implementa- tion of the secretary’s income scale for free and reduced lunches is, will there be sufficient funds to finance the same scale? The answer given is assurance that congressional action which provided the mandate has also provided assurance of funding. The question posed by local administrators magnifies the State level concern for assurance and positive direction from USDA that funds will be available to implement Public Law 91-248. At this moment, States are far from being assured on the basis of congressional action and administrative goal setting of the Thanksgiving goal. Some confidence was felt regarding funds. Tentative planning figure from USDA based on Senate reports indicated that Georgia could provide reasonable rates to schools. The first letters of credit oad on the House version did not contain the increased section 32 unds. Even more distressing, we are now advised that the letters of credit for September through October 15 will be based on the level of funds available for the same period in 1969, which will mean a 30 to 40 percent lesser amount than anticipated under the 1971 Senate report. tates find themselves in a dilemma, on one hand being told to implement the law and on the other hand having money available at the 1969 level. Schools cannot provide free lunches that cost 45 to 50 cents to produce when the reimbursement is less than 20 cents per meal. To really compound the problem in Georgia, when we were notified of the tentative amounts, a 36-cent rate was established for free lunches, and title I applications were adjusted by systems to allow title I funds to pay only the differences between the amount to be paid by USDA funds and State funds and the total lunch cost. Now the title I funds are reduced, and we are advised that Septem- ber—October letters of credit will be held to the 1969 level. What position should a State take? How can planning be effective? Congressman Carl Perkins summed it up succinctly in the remarks of September 21, 1970, to the Education and Labor Committee. These are a summary of his remarks. While the House and Senate reports have carefully provided for spending at a level to implement Public Law 91-248, there is nothing in the administration of the pro- gram either in guidelines or in recommendations which advises states 2200 of the position, and I quote, “It seems to me that States and districts should be advised of congressional intent to fund at the level of Public Law 91-248.” : We cannot allow congressional intent to be thwarted by failure of the USDA to administer programs according to the wishes of Con- ress. 2 It is my understanding that the problem arises from the interpreta- tion of the provisions of the continuing resolution as to the level of funding that can be authorized. Some States are bound by State authority to the same rate pro- mulgated in 1969 for the same level of expenditures. School districts cannot feed children without an assurance of funds. I do not pretend to know the inner workings of the Department of Agriculture or Congress or the Bureau of the Budget. However, I am very much aware of three things. One, that the appropriations bill is pending. Two, that the States have limited information and assurance pertaining to funds by 1970-71, and three, that the States are in a precarious position and need direction and assurance. As States try to implement the new amendments, the funding prob- lem is compounded. The national income poverty guidelines will make more children eligible for free and reduced lunches and one Georgia district estimates a 25-percent increase in eligible children. Another one estimates 3,500 to 5,000 children not presently eating will be eligible under the new guidelines. This last school district is already serving 80 percent of the pupils, and last year served 17 percent free and reduced. We have just completed a preliminary incomplete study of Septem- ber reports in Georgia, and these reports indicate that 15 percent of the meals served in September were free and 8 percent reduced. This compares to 24 percent of all lunches served in May, 1970 being free or reduced. The September decline in free and reduced lunches identifies a problem which can only be solved by providing lunches to all chil- dren. With the amount of paperwork, applications, reviews, notifica- tions, certifications, whatever you call it, involved in establishing eligibility there is a lag in getting lunches to needy pupils. Although we speak with assurance to local school administrators regarding financing the national income scale, there is imbedded in ys fhe feeling, why don’t we have an appropriation or assurance of unds ? Should we tell schools to withhold implementation until funds are assured ? Will we be faced with another embarrassing situation as we have had with the special milk program, when the appropriation was provided and we had no instructions about the use of the special milk money Children are hungry, the laws, the intent, the appropriation are there. Their needs to be a means to get us out of the dilemma with which we are faced. The funding predicament vividly demonstrates the need for implementing the advanced funding provisions of Public Law 91-248. Another immediate concern for regulation has its rules in regula- tions 210.11 which contains several roadblocks which will make them 2201 virtually impossible for States to administer child nutrition programs in such a way that all needy children will be reached this year. The most notable road block is 210.11. (a) of the regulation, which requires States to pay 12 cents from general cash for food assistance funds for all meals in a school before permitting States to pay above 30 cents from special assistance funds for free or even reduced price lunches. Aus This particular regulation will seriously impair the ability of at least one State in the Nation in its use of State funds for school lunches. The requirement will result in section 4 or general cash for foods assistance funds being diluted. Tt will force States to pay a higher rate for nonneeded lunches, and dilute the States ability to assist the maximum number of needy pupils. The regulations need to be changed to permit the States to pay up to 60 cents where justified, from the funds that are available. Increased participation, conversion from a la carte to type A, reorganized schools because of integration, place a heavy burden on schools with existing facilities. There is an urgent need for release of nonfood assistance funds. Congressman Perkins recent survey of the States indicated 17,000 schools with no food service facilities. Funding of nonfood assistance at the level of authorizations in Public Law 91-248 is a prerequisite to achieving the goal of serving all children. The final immediate concern is the need for coordination and direc- tion of all the components of nutrition programs. The national focus on nutrition and hunger has created a new interest in nutrition educa- tion by governmental agencies and the private sector, with resulting fragmentation. i If nutrition education is to be effective in breaking the poverty cycle and improving food habits, coordination is essential. The initiation of a Federal master plan, cooperatively developed, child centered, and education oriented should establish the framework coordinated programs. School food service directors have espoused the need for nutrition since 1946. As a matter of fact, congressional records for 1945 and 1946 bear out the need for nutrition education efforts with the school lunch program. Nutrition teaching will be more effective when correlated with school food service programs. Immediate concerns are which are obstacles in the task of imple- menting Public Law 91-248 must not over shadow the long range needs, because we must begin now to plan for the comprehensive child nutrition and nutrition education programs. Preliminary reports of the national school food service finance project conducted at Florida State University propose several models for a universal food service and nutrition program. The report also reflects dramatically the need for dynamic leader- ship at the State and national level in planning and programing child nutrition services in accordance with the predetermined goal and commitments. 2202 Many educators believe that a low-cost lunch for needy children should be an intermediate step in a goal for a universal lunch pro- ram. g A few days ago the superintendent of schools in West Virginia announced a new low-cost, with 15 cents being the top price, lunch program for paying children and free lunches to needy children. Dr. R. L. Johns of the University of Florida advocated 20 years ago that children should pay no more than the cost of food with operating costs being paid from public funds. The Nation is interested in child nutrition. The time is now for eliminating the roadblocks and developing a viable master plan for the decade. Educational specifications must be written, necessary laws must be passed, cost projects made and funds appropriated. Although the major part of my remarks dealt with immediate problems confront- ing the State directors, there is the urgent need for comprehensive planning and action. Thank you for permitting me to testify today. I wish to express appreciation to you and to the members of this committee again for your influence in the progress that has been made in the expansion of the child nutrition program. Thank you very much. Senator McGovern. Thank you for your statement, Miss Martin. We appreciate your presenting it to this committee. I was curious as you were reading your statement as to whether the Department of Agriculture has indicated to the States that you are authorized to spend at the funding level in the Senate-passed appropriations bills. Has there been any communications to that effect ? Miss Martin. No, sir. Senator McGovern. If the State programs are not scaled to meet the full need, is this due to a hesitancy on the part of State officials to employ a budget that commits them to a usage of funds that they feel are not clearly forthcoming? Is that the nub of the problem ? Miss Martin. This is part of the problem. Some States are limited by State authority to living within the amount of money the letters of credit. Some of us are being very bold and, believing that we are going to get the money, we have promulgated the rates of reimburse- ment in accordance with the new regulations. Senator McGovern. There came to my attention the other day the kind of application form that is used in some of the school districts for students that are applying for free or reduced price lunches. I am not going to read the whole form, but here are a few of the questions that are directed to the parents for determining the child’s eligibility. First, does the family own a car, if so, what make and model ? Secondly, what is your monthly house rent ? Third, have you paid for your school books and other school fees? Also, a request is included for reliable references, who could be contacted concerning the family’s financial status, their character, work and so forth, and then the parent was asked to complete a para- graph that opens this way, our reasons for making application for free lunches are, and then the parent is asked to submit a statement 2203 in some detail as to the reasons why they are requesting free or reduced price lunches. Ch As a person who has been one of the more successful administrators in these school lunch programs, what is your reaction to application form of that kind ? ; Miss Martin. My reaction is that the questions are completely irrelevant. I also believe that some of the irrelevancy will be—well, that the irrelevant questions will be eliminated on the application which will be a part of the new policy statement to be completed by local school systems. j The new USDA regulations are explicit in the information to be included on the application. The Department of Agriculture has also provided a prototype kit to States with a sample application. The USDA prototype kit came in one day last week, but in Georgia, for example, we have developed a kit with this much information to local school systems about writing their new policy statement and preparing attachments to go with the policy statement. We have included in this kit a sample application, and in this series of meetings we are advising school administrators that the irrelevant questions cannot stay on the application here. So it seems to me that positive direction and leadership from the State departments of education to local school districts; it seems to me also that assurance to local school administrators that funds will be available to meet the needs of all eligible children will help to eliminate some of these questions. In all fairness, and I am very much opposed to the irrelevant ques- tions, but we must face the fact that the school food service programs have never been adequately funded, and that the local school admin- istrator has had to make a very difficult decision of deciding which of the children are applying for the lunches were the neediest: and in my judgment the majority of the principals or the majority of the applications asking that type of question were written with sincerity, but unfortunately, they were the wrong kinds of questions to be included. But I do believe, or at least for the school administrators in Georgia—and we have had some unfortunate applications, also, which I hope we won’t have a repeat of—that the school administra- tors were trying very diligently to identify the children who were the neediest and to make the best use of resources. Now if we have the funds available and can assure the local school administrators that the funds will be available, and that it is really not up to them to pass judgment on the information that is contained on the application, that they will accept this information and provide lunches for the children. The policy statement will also provide for a hearing procedure in the event that the families are not satisfied with the decision. Tt will provide for a challenge procedure in the event that the school admin- istrators suspect fraud on the part of the applicant. But in the meantime, while the application is being appealed or challenged, the child will be receiving lunches. Senator McGovern. Thank you very much, Miss Martin. Senator Javits, do you have questions? Senator Javrrs. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 2204 Miss Martin, IT don’t know whether you were here when Mr. Leonard testified about the way in which local practices are being used to keep down the number of children who are entitled to lunches. He used the phrase, “to keep down the number of children receiving special assistance boggles the mind,” referring to a local practice used by school officials. Have you had any such experiences? 3 Miss Martin. To my knowledge, we have not had any such experi- ences in the State. We have had some experiences reported, but upon investigation we have been told that these were not being—were not actually—that the school was not actually guilty of the accusations. Senator Javits, again, it seems to me that the local school adminis- trators have been burdened with—well, I don’t know that I really want to say “burdened”——local school administrators have had the responsibility of providing lunches to children, but they have not had sufficient funds. There has been fragmentation of effort, and I don’t think there has been a real national commitment on the part of all education officials that school lunch is an integral part of the total educational program. Unfortunately, I fear that because of this lack of national commit- ment that school lunch is a part of the total program, some local administrators have, unfortunately, perceived this as a burden. But I would quickly add that this comes from the other States, that our State board of education in the early 1950’s established school food service as a priority in school building programs, and consequently facilities were provided in all schools in Georgia. Senator Javrrs. Based upon what you have just said, regarding lunches being an integral part of the education process, could you give us any view on school breakfasts? I have offered a bill on school breakfasts—S. 4104—and I would appreciate very much your views how that would fit in. Miss Martin. Breakfast is one of the most important, if not the most important meal of the day, and many children come to school without breakfast, because there is no food at home or no one to prepare the food. In the 100 breakfast programs that we have operating in Georgia we have testimony after testimony from principals and teachers that breakfast makes a decided difference in the performance of children in the classroom, that, as a matter of fact, some teachers have said that after children have had breakfast at school and they have had the privilege of teaching children with breakfast, that they would, if they had to choose—and this is very difficult for one who really believes in school lunches, you know to repeat, even—if they had to choose between breakfast and lunch that possibly they would have to take breakfast, because they can see such a difference. Of course, in my judgment, it should not be one or the other, but if a child needs breakfast, then breakfast should be provided and all children who are in school during the lunch hour should have lunch at school. Senator Javits. To what extent is breakfast made available now in the schools that you supervise ? Miss Marrin. We have approximately 100 schools in Georgia with breakfast programs. 2205 Senator Javrrs. Out of how many ¢ i Miss Martin. Out of 1,850 schools. We have met resistance in the initiation of school breakfast programs. Senator Javits. On the whole, would you favor a Federal program for breakfasts? Miss Martin. Yes, sir. I think that one of the problems for the breakfast program—one of the reasons for resistance is that we are limited to paying 15 cents per breakfast, and most of the children who are having breakfast at school come from low-income homes, and do not have funds to pay for any part of the breakfast program. Therefore, the school has to have some additional revenue from other sources in order to finance a breakfast program. Or either the school lunch program must absorb the operating costs of the break- fast program. In my judgment, if we had some Federal assistance with labor costs, and the school administrators were assured that this would not create an additional financial burden on the school lunch program, that we would have many more breakfast programs. Senator Javrrs. I thank you very much. The bill that I have intro- duced does make that provision, and we will do our best with it. I am very glad to have your opinion. I join you, our chairman, and other members who have expressed very strong feelings on this matter before I came, but limiting our- selves to protest and dismay over the tie-up of funds in congressional imbroglio does not do the children and the school district any good. I have a report here from Buffalo, N.Y., saying that as of Novem- ber 20 they are going to run out of money, and don’t know where to turn. They are now serving 21,000 free lunches every day. Therefore it is very, very serious. I would also like to reiterate how appalling it is to believe that after the great interest given by the Nation to the problem of hunger and malnutrition, that apparently now—unless a major effort is made to the contrary—apathy has obliterated the problem. Senator McGovern took up this battle, and I think it is one of the most noble fights that has ever been waged in this country. Yet, now we face a condition of apathy. I join you in the feeling that teaching education and personal hygiene are just as critical to the child as learning the three R’s. I can only assure you, Miss Martin, that you are one of those unsung heroes with which, thank the Lord, our country is abundantly blessed, and we will do our best to earn your esteem for what we accomplish in the school lunch and breakfast programs, as well as in the whole area of hunger and malnutrition. While the country may temporarily forget this problem, I am sure we will find another way, another opening, at another time in which to awaken them anew and obtain results. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. (The document referred to follows:) AvueusTt 5, 1970. Hon. Crirrorp M. HARDIN, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. DEAR Mr. SECRETARY: Thank you for sending me copies of the proposed School Lunch Regulations. 2206 As the ranking Republican member of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, I commend the Department for taking the unprecedented action of distributing the proposed regulations for comment on such a widespread basis in such a relatively short period of time. I have a few comments and suggestions which I trust will have your consid- eration. I believe that they would significantly improve the implementation of P.L. 91-248 as intended by Congress as well as hasten the fulfillment of the President’s objective of providing every needy child with a free or reduced price lunch by the end of this year. My comments and suggestions are offered with the intent of eliminating any doubts or ambiguities which might arise in the inter- pretation of the regulations at the local level which might weaken or abrogate their effect. In all instances, interpretation at the local level should result in greater access to the program by needy children. Although the proposed regulations (§245.1) state the Congressional intent that the Secretary prescribe income poverty guidelines the exact guideline fig- ure to be used is not stated in the regulations. I believe that the clarity of the regulations would be improved if the exact figure established ($3720 for a family of 2) were included in the regulations or, if not, then I hope that the poverty guideline will be made available and provided to everyone receiving or requesting the regulations. This would allow everyone interested in the School Lunch Program to have the specific income guidelines readily available. Furthermore, I hope that the standards which the Secretary will prescribe will embrace all needy children in states such as New York where the cost of living generally is higher than in other states. It is important that the regula- tions be flexible enough to allow families whose income is above the set guide- line in high cost of living states but yet is low enough in those states to qualify them for state and Federal welfare programs, to have their children receive free or reduced price lunches. I trust, also, that there will be no ambiguity such as to allow school authorities to exclude needy children who are eligible under the prescribed guideline. Regarding eligibility standards, (§ 245.3), I trust that this provision will be used only to assure that all needy children receive free or reduced price lunches and will not be interpreted by local school authorities—either because of bias or parochialism—to create conditions of eligibility that will exclude needy chil- dren whose families’ income is within the Federal poverty threshold as set by the Secretary. I believe that the regulations should not leave room for doubt in this critically important area and that they should be interpreted as being enabling and not exclusionary. This can best be achieved by the affidavit being the basis of a determination of eligibility. Also, The New York State Department of Education, having reviewed the proposed regulations, has submitted comments. The following suggestions are based upon these comments : 1. That the apportionment formula (§210.4d) not be interpreted so as to prejudice negatively those states which have high costs of living and which have exhibited good past performance in providing free and reduced price lunches. For example, under the old formula, New York State received last year 14% of the national allocation of funding for special assistance and under the proposed regulations formula could receive only as little as 5%. In view of New York's past performance (providing over 68 million free lunches per year in New York City alone), I would hope that some provisions can be made so that if there are unused funds from other states that such funds would be given to states such as New York, which have exhibited fine performance in the past, so that their allocation of funds for special assistance would not be so severely restricted; and 2. That reports referred to in (§210.14g) allow for the unique time consid- erations of large districts such as New York City where monthly reporting would create major problems to school authorities; and that provisions should be made for such states and districts to have a reasonable time period based upon the particular circumstances such as the size of the school lunch operation. The foregoing suggestions will be further explained when The New York State Department of Education submits its own comments on the proposed regulations directly to your Department within the next few days. I would appreciate your giving New York State’s comments every consideration and will await your response to my suggestions. Sincerely, Jacor K. JAVITS. 2207 DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY, Washington, D.C., August 20, 1970. Hon. Jaco K. Javits, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. DEAR SENATOR JAviTs : Thank you for your letter of August 5 and your com- ments on our proposed school lunch regulations. We also appreciate your commendation on our issuance of the regulations as proposed. With schools opening in early September, we made the decision with full knowledge that it would leave State educational agencies and local school officials only a brief time to be informed of the details of the new regulations and to take the necessary State and local actions to place them into effect. Yet, we felt that course of action to be in the public interest. The broad representa- tive response we have received and the depth, variety and thoughtfulness of the comments, have been most gratifying. Any regulations, of course, can best be evaluated under operating experience. We believe it is essential that schools know the details of the regulations prior to the opening of school so they may plan to meet their increased obligations as rapidly as possible. We intend to make a continuing evaluation of operations during the first year of the new regulations and we will be urging others to undertake their own evaluation and report their findings for our benefit. As you know, the Secretary has made his determination with respect to the income poverty guidelines. They were published in the Federal Register on August 7 and copies were mailed to all the concerned individuals and agencies to whom the proposed regulations were sent. Use of the guidelines is not manda- tory until January 1, 1971, but many States have indicated they would prefer to use them (or a more liberal standard) from the beginning of the school year. Your comments and those of the New York State Department of Education on the proposed regulations are being given thorough consideration along with all the other comments and suggestions received. Thank you for taking the time to make your observation and comments. Sincerely, RicHArRD Lyng, Assistant Secretary. [From the Congressional Record, July 21, 1970] S. 4104—THE ScHOOL BREAKFAST Act oF 1970 Mg. Javirs. Mr. President, for myself and Senators McGovERN, BROOKE, GoopeLL, HART, Horrings, KENNEDY, PELL, Scott, and SCHWEIKER, I introduce a bill entitled “The School Breakfast Act of 1970.” This bill would expand the school breakfast program by : First, establishing the same national eligibility standards for free and reduced price breakfast as the Congress recently enacted for the school lunch program in H.R. 515—all children at poverty level would receive free or reduced-cost break- fasts. In addition, the bill also would require that free or reduced-price break- fast be served to children from families eligible for financial assistance under Federal or State welfare programs ; Second, making the program permanent—it is due to expire at the end of fiscal year 1971 unless the authority is extended ; Third, directing all schools having a school lunch program to participate in the breakfast program after July 1, 1972, unless the Secretary determines that such participation is not possible or is not necessary to meet the nutritional needs of children in the school ; Fourth, increasing the authorization in fiscal 1971 from the current $25 million to $100 million, and to $200 million in fiscal year 1972, and such as amounts as necessary for each succeeding fiscal year. Such an increase would provide a funding authorization to feed approximately 2.2 million children by fiscal year 1971 and 4 million by the end of fiscal year 1972—at present only approximately 450,000 children are receiving breakfasts and there are at least 6 million needy children in the United States; Fifth, empowering the Government to pay the full cost of breakfast programs in the neediest schools; Sixth, directing the Secretary of Agriculture, after consultation with the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, to utilize fortified and enriched 42-778—T71—pt. 8——T7 2208 foods in the breakfast program where necessary to meet known nutritional defi- ciencies of children. Seventh, requiring schools to report to State education agencies each month the average number of recipients of free and reduced-cost breakfasts during the immediately preceding month as well as provide twice a year estimates of the number of children eligible for free or reduced-cost breakfasts; and require State education agencies to report to the Secretary of Agriculture each month the average number of children who received free and reduced-cost breakfasts during the immediately preceding month in the State as well as require a state- wide estimate twice a year of the number of children eligible for free or reduced- cost breakfasts—same reporting as in recently enacted school lunch bill, H.R. 515. Iighth, directing the Secretary of Agriculture, in consultation with the Sec- retary of Health, Education, and Welfare and Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, to conduct nutrition education programs utilizing mass media and audiovisual systems. The President recently signed into law Public Law 91-248 which greatly ex- pands the school lunch program and requires that all needy children shall receive free or reduced-price lunches. This law will go a long way toward ful- filling the President’s commitment to feed 6.6 million needy children free or reduced-price meals by the end of this year. However, I believe that we must not stop with expansion of the lunch program alone; we must continue with significant expansion of our school breakfast pro- gram, as well. A lunch alone is not sufficient for the poor child who in many instances has no breakfast at home and must go from dinner in the evening until lunch at school before he has a nourishing meal. This 18-hour timespan is unsatisfactory, even for an adult. We must not tell the hungry child he must wait until lunch. He cannot learn, cannot be responsive, and is often apathetic when he is hungry. Also, he may often be disruptive in the classroom and classified as a “problem child” when the only problem is an empty stomach. Therefore, I believe it is essential that both breakfast and lunch be provided to needy children. Preliminary findings of studies currently being conducted at the Tulane University Medical School in New Orleans suggest that feeding both breakfast and lunch to children provides benefits and yields responsiveness in the classroom to a significantly higher degree than does either meal along. It is my belief that just providing one meal to the needy child serves only as a “holding action” and only sustains him without any significant gains and im- provements. We cannot hope to correct any problems of nutritional deficiencies in children as pointed out so vividly in the National Nutrition Survey by pro- viding only a lunch—that is, only five meals a week instead of a possible and necessary 10. We must do all that we can to see that needy children get what is necessary to better their nutritional status and thereby improve their capability as students and future citizens. We are only deluding ourselves if we continu- ously provide funds for education when malnutrition remains a constant impedi- ment to the successful use of those funds for improving the education of poor children. We must concurrently provide funds and programs to eliminate the crippling and devastating problem of hunger and malnutrition. This bill will go a long way toward meeting that objective so that our most precious resource— our children—will be guaranteed at least a firm nutritional foundation on which to make of themselves whatever their ambition, character, and vision will allow. Mr. President, I feel that expansion of the school breakfast program is the next essential step in the fight against hunger in America which has seen so many advances during the past year. I see the distinguished Senator from South Dakota (Mr. McGovERN) in the Chamber. As chairman of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, on which I serve as the ranking minority member, he is to be commended for his many outstanding efforts to eliminate hunger from our Nation and I am pleased that he is a cosponsor of this bill. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have the bill printed in the RECorD and I hope very much that it will have early sympathetic consideration by the Senate. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. FANNIN). The bill will be received and appro- priately referred; and, without objection, the bill will be printed in the RECORD. The bill (8S. 4104) to amend the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 to strengthen and improve the school breakfast program for children carried out under such act, and for other purposes, introduced by Mr. Javits (for himself and other Sena- 2209 tors), was received, read twice by its title, referred to the Committee on Agri- culture and Forestry, and ordered to be printed in the REcorD, as follows: S, 4104 “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That this Act may be cited as the “School Breakfast Act of 1970.” “SCHOOL BREAKFAST PROGRAM AMENDMENTS “Sec. 2. Section 4 of the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 is amended to read as follows : “SCHOOL BREAKFAST PROGRAM AUTHORIZATIONS “‘Sec. 4. (a) There are hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1971, $100,000,000 ; for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1972, $200,000,000 ; and such sums as may be necessary in each succeeding fiscal year to enable schools to initiate, maintain, or expand nonprofit breakfast programs for school children. “ ‘APPORTIONMENT TO STATES “¢(b) The Secretary shall apportion the funds appropriated pursuant to this section for any fiscal year in accordance with the apportionment formula con- tained in section 11 of the National School Lunch Act, as amended. “ ‘STATE DISBURSEMENT TO SCHOOLS “‘(e) Funds apportioned and paid to any State for the purpose of this section shall be disbursed by the State educational agency to schools selected by it to assist such schools in financing all or part of the operating costs of the school breakfast program in such schools, including the cost of obtaining, preparing, and serving food. The amounts of funds that each school shall from time to time receive shall be based on the need of the school for assistance in meeting the requirements of subsection (d) concerning the service of breakfasts to children unable to pay the full cost of such breakfasts. In selecting schools for partici- pation in the program, the State educational agency shall give first consideration to those schools with high numbers of children from low-income families and to those schools to which a substantial proportion of the children enrolled must travel long distances daily. “ ‘NUTRITIONAL AND OTHER PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS “‘(d) Breakfasts served by schools participating in the school breakfast program under this section shall consist of a combination of foods and shall meet minimum nutritional requirements prescribed by the Secretary, after consulta- tion with the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, on the basis of tested nutritional research. Such breakfasts shall also include such enriched and fortified foods as the Secretary determines, after consultation with the Sec- retary of Health, Education, and Welfare, appropriate to meet known nutri- tional deficiencies of the children receiving such breakfasts, without regard to whether such foods are in surplus supply. Such breakfasts shall be served with- out cost or at a reduced cost only to children who are determined by local school authorities to be unable to pay the full costs of the breakfast. Such determina- tion shall be made by local school authorities in accordance with a publicly announced policy and plan applied equitably on the basis of criteria which, as a minimum, shall include the level of family income, including welfare grants, the number in the family unit, and the number of children in the family unit attending school or service institutions; but by January 1, 1971, any child who is a member of a household which either (1) has an annual income not above the applicable family size income level set forth in the income poverty guide- lines, or (2) is eligible for financial assistance under a Federal or State public welfare assistance program shall be served meals free or at a reduced cost. The income poverty guidelines to be used for any fiscal year shall be those prescribed by the Secretary as of July 1 of such year. In providing meals free or at reduced cost to needy children, first priority shall be given to providing free meals to the neediest children. Determination with respect to the annual income of any household shall be made solely on the basis of an affidavit executed in such form as the Secretary may prescribe by an adult member of such household. 2210 “ ‘NONPROFIT PRIVATE SCHOOLS ‘“‘(e) The withholding of funds for and disbursement to nonprofit private schools will be effected in accordance with section 10 of the National School Lunch Act, as amended, exclusive of the matching provisions thereof. ‘‘ ‘BREAKFAST PROGRAM PARTICIPATION “4(f) After July 1, 1972, any school participating in the school lunch program under the National School Lunch Act shall be required to participate in the school breakfast program provided for under this Act unless the Secretary determines that the participation of such school in the school breakfast program is not possible or is not necessary in order to meet the nutritional needs of the children attending such school. ‘ ‘REPORTS “‘(g) (1) Each school participating in the school breakfast program under this Act shall report each month to its State educational agency the average number of children in the school who received free breakfasts and the average number of children who received reduced price breakfasts during the immedi- ately preceding month. Each participating school shall provide an estimate, as of October 1 and March 1 of each year, of the number of children who are eligi- ble for a free or reduced price breakfast. “¢(2) The State educational agency of each State shall report to the Secre- tary each month the average number of children in the State who received free breakfasts and the average number of children in the State who received re- duced price breakfasts during the immediately preceding month. Each State educational agency shall provide an estimate as of October 1 and March 1 of each year, of the number of children who are eligible for a free or reduced price breakfast. “NUTRITION EDUCATION PROGRAMS “Sec. 3. The Secretary of Agriculture, in consultation with the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and the Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, shall conduct programs of nutrition education by mass media and audio visual systems. There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the conduct of such program $2,500,000 for the year ending June 80, 1971, and such amounts as may be necessary for each succeeding fiscal year.” Senator McGovern. Senator Percy. Senator Percy. Miss Martin, could you describe the operation of a free breakfast program of a school that has one in your State? Miss MARTIN. Yes, sir. The school breakfast programs in Georgia are operated in schools that have school lunch programs, and the school breakfast program is operated as an extension of the school lunch program. The same personnel operate the breakfast programs. They gene- rally come in 1 hour earlier, or part of the personnel comes into the school about an hour earlier than they would normally come in to prepare the school lunch. The menu for the school breakfast program ranges all the way from a quick-type breakfast with cereal, milk, fruit juice, to the strictly Southern breakfast, you know, with fruit and biscuits and eggs and bacon and milk. So we have the full gamut. Most of the schools have menus that are a combination—— Senator Percy. No grits? Miss Martin. Oh, yes. I am sorry. We always have grits. That is sort of an unspoken item on the school menu. I am really kidding, but many of the schools do serve grits. They have a full breakfast, and I have visited some schools, and would love to have each one of you go to a school breakfast program with me, because there is nothing more exciting than going into a school and seeing the 2211 sleepy eyed little children coming in without breakfast, observing them have their food and literally some of them licking their plates to get the last bit of egg or grits or cereal or what have you, and seeing them come awake as if they suddenly had a shot of a magic food, because their eyes open up and they are bright, they go into their classrooms full of energy—alert, and ready for learning. Senator Percy. Do you see a noticeable difference in their receptiv- ity for learning? ] Miss Martin. Of course; I have not actually had the experience of going into the classroom and teaching the children who had had breakfast, but I have talked with many principals and teachers, and they tell me that there is a noticeable increase in receptivity to learn- ing; yes, sir. Senator Percy. It is just an accident of birth that a child happens to be in a school district that has this type program, isn’t it; a sort of a happenstance? Miss MagrTIN. Yes, sir. Senator Percy. Do you feel, looking at our national priorities and where we put our resources, that in your judgment and your own personal experience this would be one of the highest priority pro- grams, to have adequate school lunch and breakfast programs where it is needed ? Miss MarTIN. Yes, sir. I believe that child nutrition should be one of the highest priority items. Senator Percy. Do you think that you could convince a rock-ribbed conservative that this is an investment in the future citizens of the country, and that we cannot afford not to make the investment—— Miss Martin. I would surely try to prove this to a conservative. I would like to have the opportunity. Senator Percy. Were you heartened when the President made his announcement that by Thanksgiving we would have a hot lunch pro- gram for every needy child in America? Miss Martin. I was heartened and excited, because I felt this was the most direct positive commitment that we have had from a Presi- dent of the United States, setting a specific time to achieve a goal, and this is what we need to do. We must set some time to achieve goals and work toward those. If we say every child could have school lunch, and everybody buys this and believes this, but to say every child should have a school lunch, every needy child should have a school lunch by Thanksgiving day, Lg is something very positive and gives us something to work toward. Senator Percy. I thought it was an act of statesmanship by our chairman to be so laudatory of the President when he made this announcement, and I think it proves the bipartisan nature of our approach to this nonpartisan subject. The President requested a doubling of the school lunch funds, a request of 211 million dollars, and that $211 million request is lan- guishing in the conference committee. The committee has promised that action will be forthcoming, but that does not help the children that have started programs at the beginning of this school year, and it will not then help them until such time as it is approved, signed into law and then implemented, which takes many months. I apolo- 2212 gize to you for the fact that the progress, although the President has said that we are going to have a program and although he has asked for the money and put it in the official budget, that somehow the Congress can’t move fast enough to respond to the needs of our children. ; The present Administration is committed to the task of ending hunger and malnutrition in America. The Administration feels that the fact that hunger and malnutrition should exist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable. But the accomplishments of the Administration must be measured in terms of just more than rhetoric. On May 14, 1970 the President approved Public Law 91-248 which had the full support and backing of the Administration. This is undoubtedly the most enlightened piece of legislation on child feed- ing since the passage of the National School Lunch Act in 1946. For the first time it adds real teeth to the requirement that needy children be fed free or at reduced price. The budget request for all child feeding programs has increased dramatically during the current Ad- ministration. During the 1969 fiscal year the total amount of funds available for all child feeding programs was $622,458,000. During 1970 this figure was increased to $718,606,000. And for the current fiscal year the Administration is supporting a budget request of $936,214,000. The best way to determine accomplishments would be in the num- ber of children that we are reaching under the National School Lunch Program. During 1969 we reached 20.1 million children. In 1970 this was increased to 20.9 million children. And for the current fiscal year we are estimating that 25 million children will be served under the program. What is more important, the total lunches served free or at reduced cost during 1969 amounted to 15.1 percent of all children participating in the program. During the 1970 fiscal year free and reduced price lunches increased to 20.5 percent, and during the current fiscal year we expect to serve over 25 percent of all lunches free or at reduced price. By Thanksgiving the Administration hopes to be serving all needy children in schools which have a lunch program. The Administration has asked for a substantial increase—$10,261,000 in 1969; $15 million in 1970; and $16,110,000 in 1971—for equipment funds to help those schools and service institutions which cannot take advantage of the various programs simply because they are too poor to finance the cost of the necessary equipment. I just wonder what in heaven’s name is more important than that priority, and I take it from your testimony you agree fully that this should be a matter of highest priority. I hope it will be on the con- science of every member of Congress that has delayed this program when they go home for a recess tomorrow. (The transcript of the White House press conference follows :) THE WHITE HOUSE, PRESS CONFERENCE OF RON ZIEGLER, PRESS SECRETARY. TO THE PRESIDENT; DR. JEAN MAYER, SPECIAL CONSULTANT TO THE PRESIDENT; KEb- WARD J. HEKMAN, ADMINISTRATOR, F00oD AND NUTRITION SERVICE AND JOHN PRICE, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY TO THE URBAN AFFAIRS COUNCIL Mr. ZiecLER. Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, President Nixon appointed Dr. Jean Mayer, Special Consultant to head up the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health on June 11. ; 2213 The White House Conference was held here in Washington on December 2, 3 and 4, and Dr. Mayer met with the President this morning to present him with the report of the White House Conference. As the President has said, he is very interested in following up on the White House Conference, both in the short term and long term, by action. Dr. Jean Mayer is here this morning to discuss some of these actions with you. Also present is Mr. Ed Hekman, Administrator, Food and Nutrition Service, of the Department of Agriculture. He has been working very closely with Dr. Mayer. The President made clear this morning that he wanted Mr. Price of the Urban Affairs Council to continue to stay in close touch with Dr. Mayer as a part of the follow-up to the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health. Dr. Mayer? Dr. MAYER. I think those of you in the Conference also met my deputy, Jim Grant, who did all the work, who is hiding by the door. The purpose of this morning’s meeting, is first of all, to report to you that I gave the President the report in three large volumes of the White House Con- ference. You have my letter of transmittal. It describes the White House Con- ference, its composition, its work, its recommendations. I would like to call your attention particularly to the last two paragraphs. The first of the last two is, I think, an expression of what a great many, as far as I can see, most participants of the White House Conference feel as having been really one of the milestones of the meeting, the fact that so many people wlio were so different in so many ways got together and had compassionate dis- cussions, did agree on a number of issues and did agree on programs which ought to remove hunger and malnutrition from our country. All of the people who went to the Conference, I think, reported change, and I received hundreds of letters since the Hunger Conference of people telling me to what extent they had been changed in their viewpoint by the Conference. The last paragraph is one which tells the President something he knows, by which I think we will be emphasizing, namely, that I don’t think there has been ever a White House Conference in history which was as free, as non-partisan, as unencumbered by administrative fetters as the White House Conference. The President gave me a big responsibility for the White House Conference. There. was no attempt to inject any schedule, any particular individuals, any strain in the Conference. The Conference was a free gathering of as broad a cross section of Americans-as I think has ever taken place in Washington. We get now to the more important part of this meeting, which has to do with the follow-up. First of all, the immediate follow-up of the Conference: You will all remember that the Conference expressed a great sense of urgency about the problem of hunger and malnutrition in the United States, and that, as a matter of fact, six members of the Conference came to see the President to be the interpreters of the Conference with the President on that sense of urgency. I am very glad to be able to say that so much has happened since the Confer- ence in addition to some of the important measures that had taken place before. I have no hesitation in saying that this Administration, this year, has done a great deal more to solve the problem of hunger and malnutrition than any past Administration, or any group of Administrations in the past. With the passage of the Administration’s bill on food stamps, I think the bulk of the work that really needed to be done will have been done. I may add that six members of the Conference who came to see the President have asked me to tell the President, and I have, that they were extraordinarily pleased by the steps that had been taken and considered them very, very important. Let’s go together briefly over those steps which are in the second piece of paper that you have been given. The first two items are extraordinarily important and new as regards the School Lunch Program. They, as you know, when this year of 1969 started, we had the situation where in effect only one-third of the children of the nation who are under the poverty guideline were in fact served by school lunches. One of the main reasons advanced for their not having any school lunches was that they found themselves in old schools, particularly in the urban core, in which there were no school lunches, no cafeterias, and therefore no possibility of serving them a decent lunch. 2214 The fact that all of us travel in airplanes can be served a perfectly good lunch at 600 miles an hour, five miles up, was by technology, which is obviously fami- liar to caterers, was something which could not be brought to bear to solve the problem of school lunches for poor children. You will see from items 1 and 2 that the measures which have been taken by the Department of Agriculture are going to bring free and reduced priced lunches to the 6.6 million needy children in the nation’s schools, three times as many as last year. And that, furthermore, this will be accomplished by Thanksgiving of 1970 with the plans and the execution going full speed as of now. This is being done in two ways: First, by a massive technical assistance to schools which need equipment, which has already increasing participation by a very large number, and perhaps more inevitably, the fact that the Department of Agriculture is now going to work fairly massively with caterers and people who can distribute school lunches, so that school lunch programs will go on in all areas where they hadn't had them. The necessary guarantee, both from the point of view of nutrition, and from the point of view of administration, are built into the regulations, which will require having the same sort of competent dietitians for school lunch managers for those catering lunches, as has been true in the past. You have seen in last week’s release that the price of food stamps has been massively decreased while at the same time, the amount of food stamps that a family can get has been enormously increased from $70 to $106. The Department of Agriculture is proceeding extremely fast in the development of this plan. You understand what it means. It means that a family can now get $106 worth of food stamps for $22, and can get $26, roughly $26.50 worth of food stamps per week for $5. The new schedule is arousing great enthusiasm, and I was talking yesterday to Assistant Secretary Lyng who tells me that the people in the field are working very hard so that in several states the program will be implemented as of the first of January, and that all indications are that the participation in the Food Stamp Program is going to be increased considerably from 16 percent so far to an enormous percentage. Furthermore, OEO has been instructed to help those families which cannot meet the small amount of money which will still be necessary until such time as the Administration’s Food Stamp Act or bill is passed, so that we will make sure that no one starves because they can’t buy the food stamps. Another important new step is that the Department of Agriculture is now using Section 32 for local administration of food programs. This means a very much easier participation for all the countries which did not have food assistance programs. There are 290 countries which at present do not have food assistance programs. All of them will have a food assistance pro- gram by the 30th of June, and it is expected that the near totality of them will have the Food Stamp Program, because the new Food Stamp Program is extraor- dinarily desirable from the standpoint of counties and counties which were reluctant to have it have signified that they are now interested under the new conditions. There is an effort to increase the outreach to make sure that everybody under- stands the new program and will take advantage of it. A massive effort is going to be made to, in particular, penetrate the Spanish-speaking population, both our Mexican-American fellow citizens, and our Puerto Rican-American fellow citizens, so that they will understand where, how and so on they can take advan- tage of the new program. An effort will be made through OEO to involve churches and other voluntary organizations to help in the certifying and in the transportation of people and commodities, if need be. The 3,000 investees present at the White House Conference, incidentally, will be recruited. The Secretary of Agriculture is writing to them asking them to see how things are in their county, in their area, and suggest improvements on how to operate better programs. Finally, our recommendations also acted on at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which is completing, as you know, a number of surveys that they had underway and at present, there is very active consideration of an overall program for the surveillance of the state of nutrition of the American population by HEW. 2215 Q. Dr. Mayer, I would like to ask you a question as to whether this statement of numbered items is in any way responsive to the things that the White House Conference asked for. To begin with, you say the joint statement of the Conference, in your letter to the President, was presented for a vote to the Conference as a whole, not for the specific approval of all points, but for a general expression. Whose understanding is it that it was not for a specific approval of all points? Dr. MAYER. It was a very general understanding. I made the point myself before the vote was taken. I pointed out in particular, to give one example, that a very large part of the Conference, including the Health Task Force, was very much opposed for the time being to free school lunches for children who did not need to have them free, that everybody wanted free school lunches for the needy immediately, which is, in effect, what we are getting, but the $7 billion or so that will be required for school lunches for children who could afford to pay was not any immediate priority. I pointed out there were a number of examples of that. So people were not interested at the end of the afternoon in a point by point discussion and that what people were interested in was the general order of priorities. Q. If IT may ask you two specific points: Your first one, my understanding is that this point number 1 is the School Lunch Program that was presented by the Administration at the beginning of the year. According to the Perkins Committee and the Senate Select Committee, there were not anywhere near enough monies in this plan to feed all the poor children free meals. That is why Congressman Perkins has got a bill for an additional $100 million which is currently blocked in the Senate and opposed by the Administration. This doesn’t cover pre-schoolers either. Are you saying that the Administration’s original proposal, which you list here as number 1, will provide free meals to all poor school children? Dr. MAYER, I am saying exactly what the release is saying, that the Depart- ment of Agriculture has explored how much the plan as it is now is going to cost and they are going to do it. Q. So the Perkins bill is not needed? Dr. MAYER. I take it the Administration Food School Lunch bill, which is a bill proposed by Senator Javits—there are a number of bills which no doubt will make the situation easier—but for the time being, the Department of Agri- culture can do what it is saying it can do with the funds that have been ear- marked for it. Q. How much of this can you enumerate came out of the White House Con- ference and how much was already in the pipeline? Dr. MAYER. Practically all of the steps that are listed here are steps which have been taken in the last two weeks. I think I am right, Mr. Hekman, Mr. Olsen, in saying the Department of Agriculture has had a number of high level meetings since the Conference, looking at the various problems which are raised and they are responding to them and what you see now is a direct response to the needs as expressed by the Conference. Q. Doctor, on Item 7, all 290 counties should soon have some type of food assistance program: How do you intend to enforce that in counties that are resisting, that don’t want a federal food assistance program? Dr. MAYER. At present, there is no authority to impose any program on coun- ties. On the other hand, our information is that by the end of the year, essen- tially all counties will be covered and that essentially all counties will be cov- ered by the Food Stamp Program. One of the attractions that you may have noticed is that in effect, the Federal Government is taking over cost of administration, which had been a big bone of contention before in terms of installing new programs in counties which did not have the money. Q. At the Conference, Dr. Mayer, the announcement was specifically that there would be food stamp programs in all the counties that are now in service. I see now that this point number 7 hedges that and says, “Where you can't get stamp programs in you will try to get commodity programs in.” ‘Which is it? Dr. MAYER. I will make a small bet, that by the 30th of June all of those counties will have food stamp programs. Q. On your recommendations, Dr. Mayer, this letter of transmittal is rather broad. Even if the President had all the time in the world to read through the entire 800 or however many pages of the final report, which he has, he still 2216 would need some further guidance from experts as to which of these thousands of recommendations should have priority. Have you made any specific statement of priorities to him? Dr. MAYER. We have talked about various priorities, and I would like to have John Price, who is the Secretary of the Urban Affairs Council, tell you some- thing about the mechanics by which this is going to be handled. Mr. Prick. Originally, the first document I saw of the Conference was the pre. liminary report which looked a bit like the Staten Island Directory. There are three volumes that look as though we have covered at least two other boroughs of New York. It is a massive amount of detail and analysis and proposals. What the President just instructed us to do, and I have called Secretary Hardin to tell him this, is to take the three volumes of the Conference report and to staff out, doing exactly what you are suggesting we do, a list of priorities and breaking them out by questions of what we can do immediately by adminis- tration, what might require additional legislation and so forth, and then to present these proposals to the Food and Nutrition Subcommittee of the Urban Affairs Council. That subcommittee is chaired by Secretary Hardin of Agriculture, and the other members are the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of HEW. This is the same group that originated and proposed to the President the Adminis- tration food package, which was sent up by him in early May. This subcommittee, the Secretary has told me, will meet soon. We will try and do this as immediately as we can. Q. Dr. Mayer, you said in your opening statement that with the passage of the Food Stamp Bill, together with these other administrative acts, the Admin- istration’s Food Stamp Bill, that is, the bulk of the work needing to be done, will have been done. Can we interpret that as meaning that the Administration’s commitment to end hunger in this country will have been achieved with those steps? Dr. MAYER. I think it can be interpreted as saying that an enormous advance will have been made in the problem of eliminating hunger and malnutrition, and that we will have social armamentarium to cope with it. One of the reasons why we need a close surveillance of the state of nutrition of the American population is that it doesn’t matter how well an overall pro- gram is conceived ; there are always areas where the program does not reach, where the program does not work, and a money tree both by Health, Education and Welfare, and by interested citizens is essential if we want to avoid gaps. But I think that we will be a long, long way from where we were in the begin- ning of 1969. Q. Dr. Mayer, when this program is put into effect, and assuming that sur- veillance shows that it has been carried out, does this represent the fulfillment of the President’s committee, or do you have further goals? Dr. MAYER. I think the President made a general commitment to end hunger and malnutrition. I think that he is not going to be satisfied with simply the administrative or seeing a legislative measure taken. He wants to see that they actually work. But I think we have a great many social problems, protection of the environ- ment, we have delivery of medical care and so on. They have to go by group. And I would say that, as a nutritionist, that after this is done, then I think that the overall national approach of the program probably will have done what it can, and that if there are still things that don’t work, they have to be reached through a different method. Q. Dr. Mayer, I would like to go back to Mr. Cox’s second question. I am not sure I understood your answer. Maybe a way to clarify it is: “Extra funds are contained in the fiscal 1970 budget.” Could you give for us what funds were available for the $3.4 million, what was not extra funds, and whether this phrase “extra funds” means funds in addition to what previously: Dr. MAYER. Let me ask Mr. Hekman, Administrator of the Food and Nutri- tion Service, to give you that. He seems to have pages and pages of numbers. Mr. HExkMAN. I interpret your question as relating principally to the child feeding programs. Is that right? Q. Point number 1. Mr. HEKMAN : I don’t have a copy of that. I am sorry. Fiscal 69 there was $42 million available for this program to feed needy school children; in fiscal 70, the figure is more than twice that, $105,800,000. Q. $42 million was for 3.4 million children? 2217 Mr. HEKMAN. We reached about that many last year, yes with that amount of money. Q. 107.8 is going to reach? Mr. HERMAN. 105. , Q. This was in the 1970 budget long before the Conference opened. Mr. HEKMAN. $105 million, yes. Q. The simple mathematics that the people in Congress used is 40 cents a meal, 180 school days, seven million poor children. That multiples out to $360 million. How is $105 million going to provide free meals for seven million poor children? Mr. HEkMAN. I think we have to realize that there were certainly planned to be an import of local and state funds in this. All you have to do is look at what is being done against this 29,000 to 30,000 school children figure, that is in the report, as it relates to the city of Baltimore. There are federal funds there, but there is also state and local funds. Q. The state, local, matches federal funds for free feeding of needy school children? Is that what you are saying? Mr. HEKMAN. I don’t say that it matches. Q. How much are they going to put up against this $105 million? Mr. HERMAN. I couldn't answer that. Q. Will you accept this figure of $350 million approximately to feed the seven million needy school children at free or reduced rates? If that is so, are you saying that the state and local authorities are going to put up the other $200 million? Mr. HERMAN. I stated to the Senate that the amount of money that was in the bill, which is the $105,800,000, at that time, it appeared to us that this would reach the six million to 6.6 million. In other words, it would get the job done with the import. Dr. MAYER. Mr. Hekman, I am just wondering. We are in the 1970 budget now, so that the reason why it doesn’t add up is because the program is starting in January, and it only has to carry until June. As of June, obviously, more money is going to be required to fulfill your calculations. I think this is perhaps where the problem was. There is matching state money, as you know, in all the school lunch programs, but in some cases, there is local money as well. Many communities also put in some money. But the point is we are not talking about a whole fiscal year. We are talking about the period between now and the end of June. QQ. What is your analyzed estimate ? Mr. HEkMAN. I will stay with what I said to the Senate committee, which was that if we got $105,800,000, that at that time, it looked like we would have suffi- cient funds to reach the figure that we are talking about. Q. Do you regard that as an analyzed figure? Mr. HERMAN. We are very happy with the fact that this program is accelerat- ing and we seem to be reaching children at a faster rate and presently, we have our men in the field in all the states checking the figures to find out and to come up with an answer to the question that you have just raised. Q. When you were speaking to the Senate committee, were you talking in terms of a full school year or in terms of a half school year, January to June? Mr. HERMAN. I was talking to June 30. Q. Do you have an estimate of your Fiscal 1971 costs or requests, sir? Mr. HEKMAN. I don’t. Q. You are talking until June 30 from when? Mr. HEEMAN. From the date I testified. I will stay with what I said to the Senate Committee. Q. When was that? Mr. HEKMAN. October of this year. Q. What about pre-schoolers, Dr. Mayer? Obviously, there are several million others and I think you referred to it at the conference as needing some programs. Is that covered in this $105 million? Mr. HEKMAN. No, it is not. The non-school feeding program went up from $8,750,000 in 1969 to a figure of $15 million in the 1970 budget. Q. Dr. Mayer, can you say when your conference report will be made public? Dr. MAYER. It is purely a mechanical problem now. The report is finished and Mr. Grant is now going to get a few hundred mimeographed copies for the press only, while arrangements have been made to have the report published. Q. Dr. Mayer, what happens to you now? 2218 Dr. MAYER. What happens to me? Q. Will you continue—-— Dr. MAYER. I go back to Harvard to give my courses and I continue to work with John Price and the President whenever he needs me. Q. Your staff will be disbanded now ? Dr. MAYER. Some of it is probably going to continue to work on some of these issues, but essentially, the staff of the conference is disbanded. The conference is over. Q. Do you continue as Special Consultant to the President? Dr. MAYER. I continue to consult with the President on anything he wants me to consult on. I think my title was one which went with the Chairman of the conference. Q. Dr. Mayer, could I clarify a point? You say by Thanksgiving 1970 you hope to have nearly all of the school children receiving free or reduced priced lunches. Do you accept the figure put out here? Dr. MAYER. I am not, with due respect, terribly concerned at this point with the minutia of the figures. What the Department of Agriculture is doing right now is really trying to reach all children, preferably the end of June, and cal- culate how much money it is going to cost. I think what is being said here is that the 6.6 million needy children will get a free school lunch program by Thanksgiving, 1970, and that it will cost what it costs. Q. Small technical question: The letter of transmittal is embargoed for Thursday morning. Dr. Mayer's statement is, on its face, not embargoed. Is that meant that way? Mr. ZieeLER. What is your question ? Q. The letter of transmittal is embargoed for Thursday morning. Mr. ZieeLER. Therefore, both documents are for immediate release. Thanks for calling it to our attention. Q. Where can I get a copy of the report? Dr. MaYER. Why don’t you give us your name and address and as soon as we have a copy, we will give it to you. Q. Dr. Mayer, I wonder if you could clarify one thing. Mr. Hekman said he said in October $105.8 million for school lunches. So point one is not something we didn’t know before. Aside from point two, the catering department— Dr. MAYER. Let me answer this. Point two is the key to the whole thing, because until lunches could be delivered to kids who don’t have cafeterias and don’t have kitchens, there was no way of reaching them. Therefore, whatever plans were made would just not have worked at the speed at which they are going to work. If the only answer to feed kids would have been for each school system to build central kitchens, to get trucks, to deliver the meals, first of all, it wouldn't have happened in a great many cities that feel they have other priorities, which, I regret to say, is the case of my city, Boston. Secondly, it would have taken years. With point two, it means that the kids will in fact be fed by the end of the year or at least by the beginning of the next school year and that puts the whole question into an entirely different area. The Press. Thank you. Senator McGovern. Thank you very much. We have now another roll call pending, unfortunately, for our other witnesses. I am wondering if the witnesses who have not yet been heard could come back at 1:30 if the committee were to reconvene at that time, and also if that would be agreeable with the members of the committee. Is there any witness here who is scheduled to testify who cannot come back for a hearing to be reconvenved at 1:30? All right, let us recess then until 1:30 p.m. (Whereupon, at 12:08 p.m. the committee recessed, to reconvene at 1:30 p.m.) AFTER RECESS (The select committee reconvened at 1:50 p.m., the Hon. George McGovern, Chairman, presiding.) 2219 Senator McGovern. The committee will be in order. Our first witnesses this afternoon are Mr. Neumark and Mr. Lowenstein of the California Rural Legal Assistance Program, Modesto, Calif. STATEMENTS OF PHILIP NEUMARK AND DANIEL HAYS LOWEN- STEIN, ATTORNEYS, CALIFORNIA RURAL LEGAL ASSISTANCE, MODESTO, CALIFORNIA Senator McGovern. The committee heard from Mr. Neumark in a field visit to Modesto last spring, so it is a special privilege to wel- come you again to the committee this afternoon. Mr. Neumark. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mz. Lowenstein. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. After the testimony this morning, which described the problems and the work to be done, I am glad to bring the committee news of one small corner of the country where excellent progress has been made and where I think the work of the Congress and this committee is bearing excellent fruit. I am Daniel Lowenstein, and I am accompanied by Philip Neu- mark. We are California attorneys, practicing in the Modesto office of California Rural Legal Assistance, a nonprofit OEQ-funded law firm providing free legal services to indigent people in rural California. We have had occasion to closely scrutinize the school-lunch pro- gram in Modesto in connection with representation of the plaintiffs in Federal court litigation entitled Shaw v. Modesto School Board. When this committee held hearings in Modesto earlier this year you thoroughly explored the background and outcome of that litigation. To recapitulate briefly, the lawsuit alleged that only a small per- centage, fewer than one out of nine of the needy schoolchildren in Modesto, were receiving the hot lunches they needed and were en- titled to under the National School Lunch Program. On February 19, 1970, after a 9-day trial, U.S. District Judge Thomas J. McBride ruled that under the National School Lunch Act every needy child has a right to a free lunch or a lunch at a price he can afford. The main issue in the Modesto school-lunch case was the eligibility standard for free and reduced-price lunches. Under the old school- lunch legislation, school districts in California and across the country received little guidance in establishing standards. And, as a result, the program was operated in an uneven, and sometimes arbitrary and restrictive manner. The 1970 school-lunch amendments, developed in this committee and enacted into law, resolved the eligibility problem by assuring uniform and adequate standards. As you learned during your hearings in Modesto, the Modesto school-lunch controversy did not come to an end when Judge McBride announced his decision. The school board recognized the need for an expanded lunch program. But it felt that the level of Federal and State assistance available at that time was too low for Modesto to be able to comply with Judge MecBride’s ruling on eligibility. Accord- ingly, the school board reluctantly withdrew from the program altogether. Many so-called experts, observing these developments in Modesto, predicted that any effort by Congress to enforce uniform and ade- 2220 quate free-lunch standards would drive school boards across the country out of the lunch program. In fact, however, the Modesto experience shows that school boards will willingly participate in a program that will feed every needy child, so long as Congress pro- vides the necessary funds. ! : We are happy to inform you that after the hearings this committee held in Modesto and shortly after the 1970 school-lunch amendments were passed, the Modesto School Board re-entered the lunch pro- gram. This action was taken because the board was assured by State school-lunch officials that the Federal Government would provide the needed funds. As a result, this year Modesto is operating an excellent school-lunch program. At last count, 1,897 children were receiving free or reduced- cost lunches. This figure contrasts with about 180 in 1968-69 and about 400 last year. The school board’s commitment to the program is evidenced by its appropriation of $18,000 in local funds, an increase of more than 250 percent from last year. But in these times of inflationary and other financial pressures on school districts throughout the United States, Congress must recognize that the districts are unwilling to increase without limit their funding of school lunches. The Modesto board, for example, has stated that if there are not sufficient Federal funds to make the local appropriation of $18,000 suffice for the entire school year, the district will again withdraw from the program. We were informed last week by Dr. Bert C. Corona, Superintendent of the Modesto schools, that current pro- jections indicate that the $18,000 local appropriation will be sufficient, provided that Federal and state reimbursements remain at least at their current levels. A bulletin issued in August to California school districts by the State Department of Education states that the current level of reim- bursement is effective only “until further notice.” The State cannot maintain its level of reimbursements for the remainder of the school year unless Congress appropriates adequate funds. As this committee knows, our office has had sharp conflict with Dr. Corona, the Modesto school superintendent, in the past. But we strongly endorse the telegram Dr. Corona has sent to this committee in connection with today’s hearing, and in particular the following statement : The criteria of eligibility adopted has guaranteed an adequate noon meal for a vast number of needy children in our community. The continuing financial participation by the State and Federal Government is absolutely essential to the maintaining of the National School Lunch Program in the Modesto City Schools. Mr. Cassipy. When we held hearings last spring in Modesto, there was obviously bad feeling between the low-income citizens and their elected school-board members. Can we conclude this situation has improved ? Mr. LoweNstEIN. Yes, Mr. Cassidy. And I think that is a very important point, because when the Congress passes a good school- lunch program and imposes heavy requirements but does not provide the money for the school districts to effectuate such a program, then, of course, there is a great deal of pressure put on the school board. They may want to spend money for school lunches, but they have 2221 other important and legitimate demands on their funds. And these are times when it is difficult for a school board to get more taxes out of our communities. So I think that if Congress will provide the necessary funds, it will make it much more possible to have harmonious relations be- tween low-income people and our school officials. And I think if we are to live in a democracy, if low-income people are to have faith in their school system and in their local officials, it is important that Congress provide the funds so that Congress does not create the sharp conflicts such as we had in Modesto. Modesto and other school districts in California are now beginning to reach the students who need this program. The State of Cali- fornia, which this year is spending $6 million on school lunches, is doing its part. If Congress is to make good on President Nixon's promise that by Thanksgiving, only 44 days from today, every schoolchild in this country will be able to eat a hot and nutritious lunch in school, then Congress must appropriate the necessary funds. While adequate appropriations are the most urgent requirement, Congress also has a supervisory responsibility in connection with the school-lunch and other food programs. For more than two decades the U.S. Department of Agriculture has followed a policy of benign neglect toward hungry schoolchildren. Congress took a major step toward rectifying this situation by enacting the 1970 school-lunch amendments. This could not have been accomplished without the work of this Select Committee during the past several years. We look forward to your continued work in the coming years in performing a watchdog function to make sure the purposes and pro- visions of the 1970 amendments are fully carried out. With adequate appropriations and continuing Congressional oversight, we can assure that the tragedy of the last 24 years will not be repeated. Thank you for inviting us to testify. If you have any questions, we will answer them to the best of our ability. Mr. Cassioy. Mr. Neumark, now that so much headway is being made in the school-lunch program in Modesto, has the problem of hunger been mitigated? Or is there still further progress needed ? Mr. Neomarg. The problem of hunger clearly still exists. A state of emergency was declared last fall. And the reason for that declaration of a state of emergency is that 50 percent of the people in the county were starving. The Department of Agriculture refused to provide surplus food, and it was only through the intervention of the Federal Court in San Francisco that the people of Modesto had something to eat on Christmas. Unemployment last year in Stanislaus County was 20 percent. It is 30 percent this year. Stanislaus County is typical of the Valley. Modesto is first. Stockton is second. And Fresno is third. Unemploy- ment in the Valley ranges between 15 and 30 percent, and these are people who don’t have enough money. Most of these people, roughly between 60 and 70 percent, receive less than the State says you need for survival. The State of California sets a survival level and then gives them far less. These people cannot afford food stamps. There is no way they can eat. 2222 Mr. Cassy. Is there a food-stamp program ? Mr. Neumark. There is; but 80 to 90 percent of the people are excluded from it. The USDA sets the price level so high that people can’t afford it. When USDA lowered the prices of food stamps last January, participation went up from 10 percent to somewhere around 29 percent. But that still means 70 percent of the people are excluded from the food-stamp program. All the USDA has to do is lower the price of food stamps. But they refuse to do it. And they refuse to provide an alternative. They say you can have food stamps. But they set the price so high that people can’t afford them. Then they set a regulation that says if you have food stamps, you can’t get commodities. The USDA says there isn’t a problem there. Mr. ScurosssErG. Why can’t the people get food stamps? Mr. Nevmark. The price of food stamps is based on your income. There is a scale. And the price of food stamps is more than is left in their budget after they pay for the rent. If they don’t pay the rent, they are going to be evicted. If they don’t pay for the gas and elec- tricity, that will be cut off. So the only place they can cut is in the food budget. They don’t have enough left to purchase the food stamps. Mz. ScurossseErg. How long has the food-stamp program been in operation? Mr. Neumark. For 3 years in Stanislaus County. The board of supervisors is a very conservative body by anybody’s definition, and they have petitioned the USDA to liberalize the food-stamp program. They realize we are going to have another hunger crisis, and they want to avoid it. They keep asking USDA to lower the price. I might add that there is a provision in the Food Stamp Act that says in the time of emergency that the county can receive both commodities and food stamps, which would be at least a temporary solution. USDA has taken the position that, “Well, a hunger disaster doesn’t Zly constitute that kind of emergency.” They want to see an act of God. If you have a hurricane and then people starve, then you can get commodities. But if people are just starving, even if they are the same number of people, they cannot get the commodities. It is interesting to note that there is enough surplus in the Cali- fornia warehouses to feed every poor person in the State for a full year. The food is sitting there, and they won’t release it. Mr. Cassy. Do you think that an expanded school breakfast program would be of help in Modesto? Mr. LowenstEIN. I definitely do. In the course of the food crisis that Mr. Neumark was referring to—and, of course, we were involved in some litigation that arose out of that—we talked to a lot of people about what kind of food they were able to serve to their children. And, of course, we talked to them about breakfast time, and I think the results were startling. We found that many, many of our clients don’t provide any break- fast at all for their children, not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t. 2223 It is interesting, during the recent controversy over the nutritional value of breakfast cereals, I noted some of those that were defending the cereal industry pointed out that in estimating the nutritional value of breakfast cereal, you have to take into account that people eat cereal with milk and sugar. And you have to add those into the nutritional value. What I found out to my surprise last December was that when our clients give cereal to their children in the morning, the children eat that cereal with water, because they can’t afford the milk. And they can’t afford the sugar. And aside from the obvious nutritional loss, I don’t think that when children are forced to eat that kind of breakfast that they are going to grow up believing in the importance of a good breakfast, because it is just not very pleasant. I think a breakfast program is very important. There is a break- fast program in one of the small school districts in our county, the Denair School District. And it seems to be quite successful. I know our clients outside of that district know of that program and they want it for Modesto, and they haven’t been able to get it yet. We have read Senator Javits’ school breakfast bill referred to this morning. I personally feel it is an excellent bill, and I really hope that congress will pass it as soon as possible. Senator McGovern. Mr. Lowenstein, I am sorry about the rollcall. We have been plagued with interruptions all day here today. But I had a chance to read your statement earlier this morning, and I am very much encouraged at the progress that has been made since we were in Modesto. Someone has furnished for the committee a news item from one of the newspapers in Cairo, Nebr., which is a report on the local school board meeting that was held on last Friday—a week ago Fri- day. And one of the items in the public press reads as follows: On motion by Peterson, seconded by Rowelson, free lunches were approved for the families of Mrs. Salier, John Field, Mrs. Sauder, and Melvin Fredrickson. Does anything like that ever happen, to your knowledge, either with reference to the proceedings of the Modesto school board or other schools in your area where the names of families are published that are receiving special assistance of this kind ? Mr. LowenstEIN. I think that since the regulations of the Depart- ment of Agriculture were promulgated to make that kind of thing unlawful, I think that in our area the record of the school board has been fairly good. I don’t think that that type of practice exists. Senator McGovern. This is only a week old, this particular news item. Mr. LowensTEIN. I know. I saw that one from Nebraska. And the fact that that kind of thinking is going on today—and we all know the regulations of the Department of Agriculture have been in exist- ence over 2 years now. And the fact that that practice goes on today indicates what we indicated in our statement, the importance of Congress watching over this field and making sure that that kind of abuse is at least kept to a minimum. Senator McGovern. I am not really looking for any special praise here for this committee. But since I did miss your response to the questions that were raised by the staff, is it your feeling that the kind of field hearings we conducted out there are helpful in terms 43-778 1=pt. Go 2224 of the triggering of constructive response in a community that, at least at the time we arrived there, seemed to be very divided and angry on this problem ? Mr. Neumark. Yes, I would like to answer that. I think the hear- ings were important for two reasons. I think to a certain extent the low-income people had lost faith in the institutions. And for a U.S. Senator to come to Modesto to show concern about the problem indicated to them that someone somewhere cared. They had tried the courts. They had one in the courts. But they saw that that wasn’t an answer. I think after your visit to Modesto, people again had some hope. And TI think, also, although it took some period of time—I think also the school board recognized that people in Washington were going to fund the program. I think it is very important to emphasize if that money is cut off in Modesto—and there is some chance of that, according to the State director—we are going to be back where we were last year, except it is going to be a worse situation, because now there are 2,000 chil- dren, as opposed to the 400 receiving lunches last year, who will be cut off. And I think there will be confrontation in the community. Last year people were arrested over school lunches. And, for- tunately, there wasn’t any violence. But if this money is cut off, I think Congress should recognize that they would, in a real way, be encouraging violence in many areas. The record in California, I think, is fairly good now. But consider what will happen in Los Angeles. You know thousands and thousands of children won’t receive lunches anymore. I think it is the responsibility of the Congress to make sure—the State has put up about as much as they are going to put up. And that is $6 million. And if Congress doesn’t put the money up, the programs are going to be cut off. It is that simple. Senator McGovern. Thank you very much, Mr. Neumark and Mr. Lowenstein, for your testimony. Mr. LowenstEIN. Thank you, sir. (Letter from Modesto city schools follows:) MODESTO CITY SCHOOLS, Modesto, Cal., October 9, 1970. SELECT COMMITTEE ON NUTRITION AND HUMAN NEEDS, Old Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. GENTLEMEN : The reinstatement of the National School Lunch Program in the Modesto City Schools can be directly attributed to the increased level of support both on the part of the United States Congress and the California State Legis- lature. The criterion of eligibility adopted has guaranteed an adequate noon meal for a vast number of needy children in our community. The continued financial participation by the state and federal governments is absolutely essential to the maintenance of the National School Lunch Program in the Modesto City Schools. Any significant deviation away from the current level of participation will leave no alternative to our school district but to termi- nate and withdraw from the program. We strongly urge that a guaranteed, reliable, and adequate plan of funding be established as a primary means of maintaining what has now developed into a very fine partnership project. Respectfully, BERT C. CORONA, Superintendent. 2225 Senator MoGoverx. I would like to call the panel of witnesses that represents our final group of witnesses today—Mrs. Hurley, Mr. Delgado, Mr. Fuqua, and Mr. Thoms. PANEL: STATEMENTS OF MRS. KAY HURLEY, COMMUNITY REP- RESENTATIVE, SOUTH BOSTON, MASS.; GARY DELGADO, COM- MUNITY ORGANIZER, CHILDREN’S FOUNDATION, LITTLE ROCK, ARK.; GLENN D. FUQUA; AND PETER THOMS, RHODE ISLAND LEGAL SERVICES Senator McGovern. I wonder, in the interest of accommodating the Senate legislative schedule, if we could have an indication from the witnesses whether you each have separate statements? Mrs. Huriey. Separate statements. Senator McGovern. Wherever possible, in order to avoid the prob- lem of the rollcall, if you could summarize the highlights of your statements so we could get at the questioning as quickly as possible, I think it would expedite our proceedings. Who is the first witness? We will start with Mr. Fuqua. Mr. Fuqua. Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee: My name is Glenn D. Fuqua. My position is director of the Depart- ment of Social Services in Rockingham County. N.C. I appear before you today on behalf of the poor schoolchildren and their parents in my county—poor schoolchildren who are also poor hungry schoolchildren. Karlier today you cited from one of the school systems in our county the policies regarding getting a free or reduced-price lunch. I will not go into that form at this time, other than to state that it makes a mockery of the national school lunch program. It has come to our attention that the people working in public welfare, as I am, and members of my staff, that frequently school officials do not feed poor children because they lack a basic concern for these children. I believe Senator Hart this morning raised the question of why don’t school superintendents feed these children. I think it is fre- quently the case because they are problem children, poor children. They lack the wherewithal to participate in these school programs that other children participate in. School officials have frequently stated that welfare departments should pay the schools for lunches provided children on public assistance. This is not possible in North Carolina at this time, be- cause the State legislature has not appropriated funds for such a purpose. In fact, North Carolina is presently meeting only 86 percent of the need requirements for AFDC families. How can we expect wel- fare mothers to pay for their children’s lunches when they are receiving only a pittance for food now ? I am willing to explore any possibility to feed poor children, go to any lengths, take any steps that will insure a meal for a child. There has been some suggestion locally to explore the feasibility of using food stamps to pay for school lunches. 2226 Is this possible? Perhaps someone in HEW or the USDA could examine this possibility. Why do school officials throughout the country refuse or reluctantly feed poor children? Most of them that I have had contact with inevitably say that we must operate school systems at a break-even financial point. None feel that Federal and State governments pro- vide enough financial assistance to the local units. I sometimes would question this. I believe that some schools refuse to feed poor children because they lack a basic concern for the welfare of these children. It does not require a Ph. D. in education to realize the commonsense statement that poor children must first have the wherewithal to participate in a school’s academic curriculum. A child cannot learn if he is hungry, lacks clothing, or is in need of medical and dental care. The school superintendents in our county seem to have no particu- lar difficulty in getting Federal and State funds for fancy new educa- tional programs and equipment. There is always publicity in the news media when these grants are awarded. How can poor children take advantage of these programs if they are hungry and sick? There are voluminous studies correlating education and income. We all agree, I am sure, that the study of this relationship between earnings and education show that the more highly educated the man, the greater his earnings. Everybody complains about the high cost of welfare. If we can’t keep the poor children in school, where they hopefully will receive a meaningful education, then how can we expect welfare costs to decrease or human life to be enriched ? I think it is apparent that a great many State and local officials flaunt the intent of the national school lunch program, because there is inadequate supervision of the Federal funds allocated to the States and localities for school-lunch programs. I am not optimistic that the new law, Public Law 41-298, scheduled for nationwide implementation in January 1971, will solve the prob- lem. I think the committee and Congress must make it plain to the States and localities that poor children will be fed now and that restrictive and punitive measures on a local level will no longer be tolerated. Senator McGovern. Thank you very much, Mr. Fuqua, for your testimony. I think what we will do is proceed with each witness and hold the questions until each person has testified. Mrs. Hurley, would you like to testify next? We have a letter from Senator Kennedy, who was unable to be with us today, especially welcoming you to the committee and re- viewing some of the problems in Massachusetts. 1 od like to ask that that letter be made a part of the hearing record. (The letter of October 12, 1970, follows:) 2227 U. S. SENATE, Washington, D.C., October 12, 1970 Hon. GEORGE MCGOVERN, Chairman, Select Committee on Nutrition, and Human Needs, U. S. Senate, Washington, D. C. DEAR MR. CHAIRMAN : I regret that I am not able to be present for today’s hear- ings concerning the School Lunch Program. However, I want to be certain that the members of the committee and all witnesses who are testifying today are fully aware of the useful and important contributions that have been made in the health and welfare areas in Massachusetts by Mrs. Kay Hurley. In our state, she is one of the most vigorous supporters of efforts to establish and improve living conditions for citizens who traditionally are forced to live under unfavor- able circumstances. You may recall that Mrs. Hurley came to Washington last year as a witness before this same committee. At that time her testimony was also on the subject of the School Lunch Program. She provided insights into that whole issue that have served me well in understanding the principle aspects of that problem. For that reason, I think it can be expected that her testimony today will bring vitally needed information about ways to improve upon the delivery of lunches to school children in the commonwealth. Out of a total of approximately 3,225 schools in the commonwealth of Massa- chusetts, less than half participate in the school Lunch Program. Moreover, in those schools where youngsters were fortunate enough to receive the benefits of a lunch program, the overwhelming majority of them were found to be in fami- lies who are not effected by inadequate incomes. Yet, youngsters from low income families have been consistently denied the opportunity to receive free or reduced priced lunches because of failures to design creative systems for the delivery of food to them. In addition to these statistics, I am aware that other factors clearly justify the need to improve on the way we now provide nutritional care for our school children. I am certain that Mrs. Hurley will agree with me when I say that despite the reasons that cause low income youngsters to go without proper meals, there is simply no excuse for us to do that any longer. Mr. Chairman, I wish to welcome Mrs. Hurley to Washington and to the com- mittee and I look forward to reviewing her testimony and I am certain that what she has to say can be helpful to each of us on this committee. Sincerely, EpwArp M. KENNEDY. Mrs. HorLey. My name is Kay Hurley. IT am from South Boston, Mass. And I am here representing the people of Massachusetts. I am also a welfare recipient and the mother of two children not receiving school lunches. And I do not expect them to be receiving free lunches by Thanksgiving, as President Nixon has promised. One reason for not receiving lunches is that the schools they go to do not have lunch programs. The other side of it is schools that have lunch programs—and I will talk about that later. The schools in the inner-city, poor areas, are old schools and have been there for years. The middle-income schools in the suburbs have the facilities and can then give the school lunches. Nonetheless, in Boston, most of the junior high schools and high schools and some of the elementary schools have school-lunch facili- ties. There are 28,585 ADC children in the city of Boston, and the average number of free school lunches given out right now every day is 667. That tells you where Boston is at as far as giving out those free school lunches. In East Boston, when the East Boston welfare-rights group went to the school committee and tried to get free lunches, they were told that there was no such thing on the books as a free lunch pro- gram. 2228 In Jamaica Plains and Roxbury when the people requested free- lunch programs, they were told their kids would have to work in the cafeteria. The kids picked to work there are “A” students, who then have to miss two periods of work in order to work in the cafeteria. And after working there a few months they are no longer “A” students, which is one way to keep the kids from getting into better schools. There have been reports of worms in the food. One of my neighbors has eight children—13 children—and eight of them go to schools which have school-lunch programs. And she has to pay 30 cents per meal and 10 cents for dessert. That comes out to $17 per week. You are not including that much money in the budget for food alone. And that school refuses to give school lunches. ~ One thing decent that has happened in Massachusetts—and I am not willing to wait for it, nor are thousands of others—is that a bill was passed which requires all schools to have lunches available by September 1972. Even when this bill goes into effect in 1973, that doesn’t mean that those schools are going to give out those lunches. That doesn’t mean that when people put in a request for those free lunches that they will get them. As far as T am concerned, T have heard people today saying, “What can we do?” I have demonstrated in welfare offices and have been arrested for it. And I have known I would be arrested, even though I felt I had a just cause. As far as I am concerned, school officials all across the country are breaking the law, and they should be arrested. Unless some laws are passed to have them arrested, maybe the people in the local com- munities could make citizen arrests on school! committee members who are refusing to give out these lunches. That is all IT have to say. Senator McGovery. Thank you very much, Mrs. Hurley. Mz. Delgado, could we hear from you next? Mr. Drercavo. I am Gary Delgado, from the Children’s Foundation, Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now. My involvement with the school luneh program in Arkansas began with an interview with Miss Ruth Powell, State school lunch director. The meeting was arranged by Mr. Jay Lipner, a VISTA attorney, who had several months of extensive experience with the Arkansas school lunch program. At the time the meeting was arranged, school districts had already been advised by memorandum from Miss Powell of the income poverty guidelines prescribed by the Secretary of Agriculture. (See appendix A.') This communication indicated that although the guidelines were not mandatory until January 1, 1971, school districts may wish to adopt them for use at the beginning of the school year. The purpose of arranging this meeting was to suggest to Miss Powell that school districts be provided a more definite method of imple- menting the amendments to the national school lunch law, specifically in respect to the adoption of the January guidelines. 1 Apps. A, B, C, D, and E, appear on pp. 2235, 2237 and 2239. 2229 To this end, Mr. Lipner and myself offered for Miss Powell’s con- sideration a free-lunch self-certification application, which imple- mented the amendments. The form was prepared by Mr. Jay Lipner, Mr. Wade Rathke, head organizer for ACORN, and myself, for use by the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now, a statewide organization of low-income people, affiliated with the National Welfare Rights Organization. Miss Powell not only approved the form, she sent out a memoran- dum to every school district in the State approving the form and urging the school districts to adopt the January income poverty guideline immediately. (See appendix B.) On Monday, August 31, 1970, 42 members of the Shorter College Gardens Community Organization, an affiliate of the Arkansas Com- munity Organizations for Reform Now, handed in ACORN school- lunch forms to North Little Rock School Superintendent George Miller. The group requested that the district not use title I money, but national school lunch funds for the school-lunch program. Miller treated the all-black group with scorn and disrespect, con- stantly berating their efforts to get lunches for their children and referring to them at every opportunity he had to address them as “you people.” When he was handed the forms, his reply was, “Why don’t you people use our forms? We have forms of our own.” The school district had yet to distribute “their” forms and did not do so until October 7, 1970, in direct violation of section 245.5(a), Federal regulations. I quoted section 245.6(b) of the regulations, which entitles every child to a free or reduced-price lunch after their parent had so certified, until such time that the school district could prove with a fair hearing that the child was in fact not entitled to a free lunch. Miller responded by saying that he didn’t care “what the law said.” (See enclosed newspaper clippings.) T offered Mr. Miller and Mr. Crownover, his assistant, copies of the USDA regulations issued August 31, 1970. Neither of them were interested. The second incident with the North Little Rock School District occurred on Friday, September 18, 1970, when members of the Silver City Courts Welfare Rights Organization charged that their children were discriminated against in the school-lunch program in the North Little Rock school system. Mrs. Nina Aldridge of Silver City Courts is a prime example of the district’s negligence. At the time of the meeting only one of her four children in school was receiving a free lunch. This is a direct violation of title 7, section 245.8(a), Code of Federal Regulations. Mrs. Aldridge is a welfare recipient. In the same income level, Mrs. Sue Kirsey, who also lives in Silver City Courts and whose children attend the same school, had not as of September 18 even received an application for the lunches. School Supt. George Miller denied that the Federal Government would pay for expenditures from September to January, stating: I've dealt with the Government a long time, and they’ve gone back and paid for what’s been done. He admitted that he had not distributed the forms or guidelines or information on fair hearings, stating: 2230 I have found out this about human nature. If you distribute a form to everyone, then everyone is needy. This is a direct violation of section 245.6(b), which requires the school district to distribute information concerning school-lunch eligibility standards and appeals procedures, in addition to school- lunch forms, in the beginning of every school year. In a State like Arkansas, with 50 percent of the population below the poverty level, many poor people are losing an important necessity for their children because of the attitude of school officials like George Miller. The third confrontation—and I can use no other word—with the North Little Rock School District occurred when I accompanied 30 members of the Eastgate Terrace and Hemlock Courts Community Organizations, both affiliates of ACORN, to the North Little Rock school administration’s office. Miller walked out on the groups, told me to shut up when I again cited the law. And both he and his assistant invited me to “step outside and settle.” Mr. Lipner and Mr. Rathke succeeded in quoting the regulations to Superintendent Miller. But Miller left to call the police for our “intrusion” into his office. Miller and Crownover pointedly and repeatedly denied that the laws were in effect, despite the fact that Mr. Lipner, Mr. Rathke, and I, along with community spokesmen, quoted the regulations as being effective upon publication in the Federal Register. Publication took place on September 4, 1970. To this day there are children in North Little Rock who go without a Donen every school day because Miller refused to acknowledge the aw. An excellent example of the frequent recalcitrance of local school districts to provide free school lunches to eligible low-income chil- dren is the dispute between ACORN and the North Little Rock school district concerning when the new regulations become effective. As you know, everything in the new regulations is in effect as of publication in the Federal Register—September 4, 1970—except for the prinimemndacerse guidelines, which are optional, until January 1, 1971. In all meetings between ACORN and the North Little Rock school officials, they have individually and in unison stated in private and to the press that the new regulations, in whole or in part, do not go into effect until January 1, 1971. They have persisted to this line despite constant rebuttal, including direct reference to the Fed- eral Register and a telegram from Mr. Gerald Cassidy, special som] of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. In the Little Rock school district, about 80 members of the Granite Mountain, Highland Courts, and East End Welfare Rights Organi- zations, affiliates of ACORN, met with Little Rock school officials. Spokesmen for the groups—Mrs. Rose Washington, chairman, East End WRO; Mrs. Barbara Hampton, chairman, Granite Mountain WRO; and Mrs. Rosetta Lewis, cochairman, Highland Courts WRO —charged discrimination in the administration of the school-lunch program. The groups cited examples of two mothers present that had four children in school, who were receiving free lunches, and two who were not. 2231 The assistant school superintendent responded that there were no violations that he knew of and that the money for school lunches was not there. He did, nevertheless, agree to process the ACORN school-lunch forms. On Monday, September 28, 1970, Miss Ruth Powell, State school lunch director, in a press statement, stated that USDA was still working on the guidelines, despite the fact that the guidelines were already published in the Federal Register on September 4, 1970. Superintendent Miller categorically refused to adopt the expanded program until the school district has supplemental funds. After Miss Powell’s letter to school districts in which she urged the school officials to use the new guidelines, she stated to the press that she “could not blame school boards for not adopting the revised program without the new guidelines.” And they had already been published September 4. The school-lunch program has become an issue of some magnitude in Pine Bluff and Texarkana, Ark., where community groups are finding that school officials stop spending title I funds for lunches and start giving all eligible children lunches through National School Lunch Act funds. The groups are organized by ACORN, with tech- nical assistance provided from the Food Research and Action Council, New York City, and the Children’s Foundation, Wash- ington, D.C. But the reluctance of school officials to comply with the law is not confined to Arkansas, or even to the South. ACORN, FRAC, and the children’s foundation has received letters from low-income people all over the country. The poor implementation by the State and local officials is further aggravated by lack of direction from Federal agencies and indifference of Federal officials. When community groups first became interested in school-lunch programs, I wrote a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Hardin re- questing that USDA spell out more clearly the reimbursement rates to local schools. The letter was written September 10, 1970. I have vet to receive a reply. At one point, when Miller denied the law was in effect, I advised local reporters to call Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Richard Lyng to verify that there was, in fact, a Federal Code of Regulations and that it was, in fact, in effect. The printed response was a master- piece of “hedging.” Lyng feigned ignorance that the reimbursement rates were 100 percent up to 60 cents per lunch stating “I don’t think we pay that much—I’m not sure.”—despite the fact that in section 910.11 (d) of the regulations, which Lyng signed, it states: The total reimbursement for general cash, for food-assistance funds, and special cash assistance shall not exceed 60 cents (12 cents from general cash for food assistance and 48 cents for special cash assistance) for each type A lunch served free or at a reduced price to children meeting the school’s approved eligi- bility standards for such lunches. T have written two letters to USDA, with absolutely no response. USDA has not sent any explanation of their regulations, no state- ment of “principle changes in school-lunch law.” no backup on the regulations, and provided little direction to State school-lunch directors. 2232 USDA has issued regulations to school districts that require them to distribute policies in September that they are not required to formulate until the end of October. They have written a provision for self-certification, but none for forms other than those provided, or not provided, by disinterested school officials. USDA has setup “paper” appeals procedures. They have claimed that they want to delay hearings on the regulations until later so that the program could be implemented to feed poor children. But they have not assisted in feeding children. USDA has not elaborated on the following points, which need to be cleared up for local officials: (1) The appeals procedure: If school districts don’t provide lunches, the poor people are forced to appeal, thus: (2) lessening the effect of having the “burden of proof” on the school officials; and (6) having the poor person appeal to the same people that turned them down initially. (2) The income poverty guidelines: The fact that they are the floor, not the ceiling, for providing free lunches. As a matter of fact, there was an editorial written in the Arkansas Democrat which indicated that the USDA poverty guidelines were too high. ir ibution of forms: Forms may not have been distributed by local officials, and USDA has yet to approve any form for nation- wide distribution. This still leaves the power in the community over whether that community will or will not company with the law at the complete whim of local officials. (4) Make any differentiation in income guidelines over free or reduced-price lunches. (5) Reimbursement rates: The fact that School districts may be reimbursed up to 100 percent up to 60 cents per lunch. USDA has left an inexcusable communication gap between all concerned. School officials are stalling and children are going hungry. Thank you very much. I would also like to submit to the committee copies of the memo- randums from Miss Powell, a copy of the ACORN school-lunch self-certification form, the letters from Senator McGovern and Mr. Cassidy, and the newspaper clipping indicating all the statements that the superintendent of schools made, such that he didn’t care what the law said. Thank you. Senator McGovern. All right, that material will be made part of the hearing record. (The documents follow :) STATEMENT OF GARY DELGADO, FIELD REPRESENTATIVE, THE CHILDREN’S FOUNDA- TION, ORGANIZER, ARKANSAS COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS FOR REFORM Now My involvement with the School Lunch program in Arkansas began with an interview with Miss Ruth Powell, State School Lunch Director. The meeting was arranged by Mr. Jay Lipner, a VISTA attorney, who had several months of extensive experience with the Arkansas School Lunch program. At the time the meeting was arranged, school districts had already been advised by memorandum from Miss Powell of the income poverty guidelines prescribed by the Secretary of Agriculture (see Appendix A). This communication indicated that although the guidelines were not mandatory until January 1, 1971, school districts may wish to adopt them for use at the beginning of the school year. The purpose of 2233 arranging this meeting was to suggest to Miss Powell that school districts be provided a more definite method of implementing the Amendments to the National School Lunch Law, specifically in respect to the adoption of the Janu- ary guidelines. To this end, Mr. Lipner and myself offered for Miss Powell's consideration, a free lunch self-certification application, which implemented the Amendments. The form was prepared by Mr. Jay Lipner, Mr. Wade Rathke (head organizer for ACORN), and myself, for use by the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a statewide organization of low income people, affiliated with the National Welfare Rights Organization. Miss Powell not only approved the form, she sent out a memorandum to every school district in the state, approving the form and urging the school districts to adopt the January income poverty guideline (see Appendix B) immediately. On Monday, August 31, 1970, forty-two members of the Shorter College Gar- dens Community Organization (an affiliate of the Arkansas Community Organi- zations for Reform Now) handed in ACORN School Lunch Forms to North Little Rock School Superintendent George Miller. The group requested that the district not use Title I money, but National School Lunch funds for the school lunch program. Miller treated the all black group with scorn and disrespect, constantly berating their efforts to get lunches for their children and referring to them at every opportunity he had to address them as ‘“you people.” When he was handed the forms, his reply was, “Why don’t you people use our forms; we have forms of our own.” The school district had yet to distribute “their” forms, and did not do so until October 7, 1970, in direct violation of Section 245.5(a), Federal Regulations. I quoted Section 245.6(b) of the regulations which entitles every child to a free or reduced price lunch after their parent had so certified, until such time that the school district could prove with a fair hearing that the child was in fact not entitled to a free lunch. Miller responded by saying that he “didn’t care what the law said.” (see enclosed newspaper clippings.) I offered Mr. Miller and Mr. Crownover, his assistant, copies of the USDA regulations issued August 31, 1970. Neither of them were interested. The second incident with the North Little Rock School District occurred on Friday, September 18, 1970, when members of the Silver City Courts Welfare Rights Organization charged that their children were discriminated against in the school lunch program in the North Little Rock school system. Mrs. Nina Aldridge of Silver City Courts is a prime example of the district's negligence. At the time of the meeting only one of her four children in school was receiving a free lunch. This is a direct violation of Title 7. Section 245.3(a), Code of Federal Regulations. Mrs. Aldridge also charged that the child that was receiv- ing a free iunch was forced to use special tokens to purchase the lunch. This is in direct violation of Title 7, Section 245.8, Code of Federal Regulations. Mrs. Aldridge is a welfare recipient. In the same income level, Mrs. Sue Kirsey, who also lives in Silver City Courts and whose children attend the same school, had not (as of Sept. 18) even received an application for the lunches. School Superintendent George Miller denied that the federal government would pay for expenditures from September to January stating, “I've dealt with the government a long time and they've never gone back and paid for what's been done.” He admitted that he had not distributed the forms or guidelines, or information on fair hearings, stating, “I have found out this about human nature, if you dis- tribute a form to everyone, then everyone is needy.” This is a direct violation of Section 245.6 (b), which requires the school district to distribute information concerning school lunch eligibility standards and appeals procedures, in addition to school lunch forms, in the beginning of every school year. In a state like Arkansas, with 50% of the population below the poverty level, many poor people are loosing an important necessity for their children because of the attitude of school officials such as George Miller. The third confrontation (and I can use no other word) with the North Little Rock school district occurred when I accompanied thirty members of the East- gate Terrace and Hemlock Courts Community Organizations (both affiliates of ACORN) to the North Little Rock School Administration’s office. Miller walked out on the groups, told me to shut up when I again cited the law, and both he and his assistant invited me to “step outside and settle.” Mr. Lipner and Mr. Rathke succeeded in quoting the regulations to Supt. Miller. but Miller left to call the police for our “intrusion” into his office. Miller and Crownover point- edly and repeatedly denied that the laws were in effect, despite the fact that Mr. Lipner, Mr. Rathke and I, along with community spokesmen, quoted the 2234 regulations as being effective upon publication in the Federal Register. Publica- tion took place on September 4, 1970. To this day there are children in North Little Rock who go without a lunch every school day because Miller refused to acknowledge the law. An excellent example of the frequent recalcitrance of local school districts to provide free school lunches to eligible low income children is the dispute between ACORN and the North Little Rock school district concerning when the new regulations become effective. As you know, everything in the new regulations is in effect, as of publication in the Federal Register, September 4, 1970, except for the minimum income guidelines which are optional, until January 1, 1971. In all meetings between ACORN and the North Little Rock school officials, they have individually and in unison stated in private and to the press that the new regulations, in whole or in part, do not go into effect until January 1, 1971. They have persisted to this line despite constant rebuttal, including direct refer- ence to the Federal Register, and a telegram from Mr. Gerald Cassidy, Special Counsel of Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. In the Little Rock School District, about eighty members of the Granite Mountain, Highland Courts, and East End Welfare Rights Organizations (affi- liates of ACORN) met with Little Rock school officials. Spokesmen for the groups, Mrs. Rose Washington, Chairman East End WRO, Mrs. Barbara Hampton, Chairman Granite Mountain WRO, and Mrs. Rosetta Lewis, Co- Chairman Highland Courts WRO, charged discrimination in the administration of the school lunch program. The groups cited examples of two mothers present that had four children in school, two who were receiving free lunches and two who were not. The Assistant School Superintendent responded that there were no violations that he knew of, and that the money for school lunches was not there. He did, nevertheless, agree to process the ACORN school lunch forms. On Monday, September 28, 1970, Miss Ruth Powell, State School Lunch Direc- tor, in a press statement, stated that USDA was still working on the guidelines, despite the fact that the guidelines were already published in the Federal Reg- ister, September 4, 1970. Superintendent Miller catagorically refused to adopt the expanded program until the school district has supplemental funds. After Miss Powell's letter to school districts in which she urged the school officials to use the new guidelines, she stated to the press that “she could not blame school boards for not adopting the revised program without the new guidelines.” The school lunch program has become an issue of some magnitude in Pine Bluff and Texarkana, Arkansas where community groups are demanding that school officials stop spending Title I funds for lunches and start giving all eli- gible children lunches through National School Lunch Act funds. The groups are organized by ACORN with technical assistance provided from the Food Research and Action Council (FRAC), N.Y., N.Y. and The Children’s Founda- tion, Washington, D.C. But the reluctance of school officials to comply with the law is not confined to Arkansas, or even to the South. ACORN, FRAC, and The Children’s Foundation has received letters from low income people all over the country. The poor implementation by the state and local officials is further aggravated by lack of direction from federal agencies and indifference of federal officials. ‘When community groups first became interested in school lunch programs, I wrote a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Hardin requesting that USDA spell out more clearly the reimbursement rates to local schools. The letter was written September 10, 1970; T have yet to receive a reply. At one point when Miller denied the law was in effect, I advised local reporters to call Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Richard Lyng to verify that there was, in fact, a Federal Code of Regulations, and that it was, in fact, in effect. The printed response was a masterpiece of “hedging.” Lyng feigned ignorance that the reimbursement rates were 100% up to 60¢ per lunch. Despite the fact that in Section 210.11(d) of the Regulations Lyng signed, it states that, “the total reimbursement for general cash—for food assistance funds and special cash assistance shall not exceed 60 cents (12 cents from general cash—for food assistance and 48 cents for special cash assistance) for each Type A lunch served free or at a reduced price to children meeting the school’s approved eligi- bility standards for such lunches.” I have written two letters to USDA with absolutely no response (see Appendix C). USDA has not sent any explanation of their regulations, no statement of 2235 “principle changes in school lunch law,” no back-up on the regulations, and has provided little direction to State School Lunch Directors. USDA has issued regulations to school districts that require them to dis- tribute policies in September that they are mot required to formulate until the end of October. They have written a provision for self-certification, but none for forms other than those provided (or not provided) by disinterested school officials. USDA has set up ‘‘paper” appeals procedures; they have claimed that they want to delay hearings on the regulations until later so that the program could be implemented to feed poor children. But they have not assisted in feed- ing children. USDA has not elaborated on the following points which need to be cleared up for local officials : 1. The appeals procedure—if school districts don’t provide lunches, the poor people are forced to appeal, thus (a) lessening the effect of having the “burden of proof” on the school officials, and (b) baving the poor person appeal to the same people that turned them down initially. 2. The income poverty guidelines—the fact that they are the floor, and not the ceiling, for providing free lunches. 3. Distribution of forms—that forms may not have been distributed by local officials, and that USDA has yet to approve any form for nationwide dis- tribution. This still leaves the power in the community over whether that community will or will not comply with the law at the complete whim of local officials. 4. Make any differentiation in income guidelines over free or reduced price lunches 5. Reimbursement rates—the fact that the district can be reimbursed up to 100% or 60¢ per lunch. ] USDA has left an inexcusable communication gap between all concerned; school officials are stalling and children are going hungry. APPENDIX A DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, Little Rock, Ark., August 11, 1970. To: Superintendents Operating School Lunch Programs From: Ruth Powell, Director School Food Services Topic: Income Poverty Guidelines for Determining Eligibility for Free and Reduced Price Lunches As you no doubt know, amendments made to the National School Lunch Act require that schools nation-wide use a family size income level for determining eligibility for free or reduced price lunches. The amendments require that you report to us by October 1, the number of children in your school district who are eligible for free or reduced price lunches along with the number receiving free or reduced price lunches. For this reason, we thought that you would need this information prior to the opening of school. You will note that the law does not require that this family size income level be used prior to January 1, 1971. Since most administrators like to begin the school year with the regulations which they expect to use throughout the school year, it is strongly recommended that this family size income level be used when school opens. This also insures lunch throughout the school year for all children. We cannot tell you at this time what the rate of reimbursement will be for the next school year, however all indications are that we will be able to pay a higher rate than that paid during the last school year. This information will be rushed to you as soon as it is available. The appropriation has passed both houses and is in conference. We are most anxious to have the information on funds for next year before school starts since operating on a continuing resolu- tion would be particularly difficult this year due to so many changes in the schools in the state—changes in name and enrollment. APPENDIX B INcoME POVERTY GUIDELINES FOR DETERMINING BEricIBILITY FOR FREE AND REDUCED PRICE LUNCHES Pursuant to Section 9 of the National School Lunch Act, as amended (42 U.S.C. 1758, P.L. 91-248), the income poverty guidelines for determining eligi- 2236 bility for free and reduced price lunches in National School Lunch Program and «commodity only schools are prescribed, as of July 1, 1970, as follows: 48 States, District of Columbia, and tle outlying Family size areas! Hawaii Alaska $1,920 $1,210 $2, 400 4 , 900 3,1 3,120 3,590 3,900 3,720 , 280 4,6 4,270 4,910 5,340 4,820 5, 540 6,025 5,320 , 115 6,650 5, 820 6,690 7,275 450 520 0 -1 “Outlying Areas’ include the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam, Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Beginning January 1, 1971, the income poverty guidelines set forth above are the minimum family size annual income levels to be used by local school food authorities in establishing eligibility for free and reduced price lunches in schools. The income poverty guidelines are based on the latest statistics, as of July 1, 1970, on poverty levels reported by the Census Bureau's Current Population Reports, as directed by Circular No. A—46 of the Bureau of the Budget dated June 17, 1970. Variations for Hawaii and Alaska are consistent with such varia- tions established by the Office of Economic Opportunity in its Income Poverty Guidelines (34 Federal Register, Page 20431, December 31, 1969: 35 Federal Register, page 5948, April 10, 1970). “Income,” as the term is used in this Notice, is similar to that defined in the Bureau of Census report, Poverty in the United States, 1959-1968, Consumer Income, Current Population Reports, Series P-60, No. 68, December 31, 1969. “Income” means income before deductions for income taxes, employees’ social security taxes, insurance premiums, bonds, etc. It includes the following: (1) monetary compensation for services, including wages, salary commissions, or fees; (2) net income from nonfarm self employment; (3) net income from farm self employment; (4) social security; (5) dividends or interest on savings or bonds, income from estates or trusts or net rental income; (6) public assist- ance or welfare payments; (7) unemployment compensation; (8) Government civilian employee or military retirement, or pensions, or veterans’ payments; (9) private pensions or annuities; (10) alimony or child support payments; (11) regular contributions from persons not living in the household; (12) net royalties, and (13) other cash income. In applying these guidelines, school food authorities may consider both the income of the family during the past 12 months and family’s current rate of income to determine which is the better indicator of the need for free and reduced price lunches. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, Little Rock, Ark., August 20, 1970. To: Superintendents Operating School Lunch Programs From: Ruth Powell, Director School Food Services Topic: Application for a Free School Lunch The enclosed self certification form has been developed for use with the new School Lunch Law. Even though the regulations have not been finalized, this form would appear to be entirely consistent with Congressional intent with respect both to statutory language and the regulations promulgated by the Department of Agriculture. The proposed self-certification form provides all in- formation necessary under Section 9 of P.L. 91-248, and is intended to be con- clusive proof of the child’s eligibility for a free lunch. Although the law does not go into effect until January 1, 1971, school districts are encouraged to use this self certification form immediately and receive federal reimbursement. 0 oh ae a School District 106A] ‘GIOUD: os mimi swim 2237 APPLICATION FOR FREE SCHOOL LUNCH The new School Lunch Law (P.L. 91-248) says that every needy child shall be given a free or reduced price lunch. In accordance with the federal statute (42 U.S.C. 1758) and federal regulations (Title 7, Secs. 210 and 245, Code of Federal Regulations), I request a free school lunch for my children. The guide- lines used below are those prescribed by the Secretary of Agriculture (Federal Register, Vol. 35, No. 153, Friday, August 7, 1970). Names of all children in school, age, and school From other sources: $______ From Welfare: $_.____ Find your family size on the chart. If your monthly income from all sources is less than the figure given on the chart, you are eligible for a free school lunch for your children. Number in family 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.5.9 10 11 12 Monthly income.......c.ccnveunn-- $160 $210 $260 $310 $356 $401 $443 $485 $523 $560 $598 $635 The information given on this application is correct to the best of my knowl- edge. 1 certify that my children are eligible for a free school lunch. AAATORE Cr aa Copyright 1970, Arkansas Community Organizations For Reform Now, Box 695, Little Rock, Arkansas 72203. All Rights Reserved U.S.A. This form may not be distributed, altered or reproduced without the written permission of Arkansas Community Organizations For Reform Now. ArpPENDIX C ACORN, Little Rock, Ark., September 10, 1970. Mr. CLIFFORD HARDIN, Secretary of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. DEAR SIR: Many low income people in Arkansas have expressed some concern at the vagueness of the new regulations of the Amendment to the National School Lunch Law. Members of the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an organization of low income people numbering over six hundred members, are particularly concerned with local school official’s reac- tion to the new legislation. We feel that unless U.S.D.A. point blank expresses whether or not the money for reimbursement to the school districts will be avail- able if they use U.S.D.A.’s income poverty guidelines in September, thousands of children will go needlessly hungry. This would be a frustration of the con- gressional intent that every needy child be fed. 2238 I urge you to reply not only to my letter—as that would effect only the chil- dren of Arkansas, but to publically declare that money for federal reimburse- ment will be available to school districts if they use U.S.D.A.’s income poverty guidelines in September. Miss Ruth Powell, the State School Lunch Director, has already urged school districts to use the new guidelines (enclosed is a copy of her letter), but many school boards have refused because they fear that federal reimbursement will not be forthcoming. Please help Miss Powell to reassure them. Bread/Justice, GARY DELGADO, Assistant Director. U.S. SENATE, Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Washington, D.C., September 16, 1970. Mr. GARY DELGADO, Children’s Foundation Representative, A.C.O.R.N., Little Rock, Ark. DEAR MR. DELGADO : As you know I was a co-sponsor of the school lunch legisla- tion that became Public Law 91-248. Proper implementation of the provisions of this law is vital to the normal development of the impoverished of our nation and in fact is in the best interest of all Americans. Therefore, it is my solemn hope that school officials will enforce the poverty income guidelines of the school lunch program in an inclusive matter, in order to reach all eligible children as Congress intended. Good luck with your efforts. Sincerely, GEORGE MCGOVERN, Chairman. Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Little Rock, Ark., September 21, 1970. Mr. RICHARD LYNG, Assistant Secretary, Washington, D.C. DEAR MR. LYNG: I've written a letter to Secretary Hardin (dated Sept. 10), requesting that he publicize the following : (a) That school boards will be reimbursed at a rate not in excess of up to 100% or a maximum of sixty cents a meal, and (b) That the Federal Regulation, except for the income poverty guidelines, became the law of the land upon publication in the Federal Register. Thus far, I haven't even received a reply to my letter. The Arkansas Community Organization for Reforma Now (ACORN) prepared a fact sheet for school superintendents and newspaper publication in which we stated what the federal regulations were and how the North Little Rock School Board (and many school districts all over the country) is violating them. We even suggested that local reporters call you or Secretary Hardin at U.S.D.A. to verify the facts. In a recent letter to Senator McGovern, dated August 7, 1970, you state that “To further delay the issuance of final regulations by public hearing and espe- cially in view of the completeness of the written comments we are receiving on the proposed regulations would, in our view, be a disservice to children who can benefit only after local implementation.” Yet you did a disservice to that local implementation by refusing to admit to a reporter from the Arkansas Democrat (see enclosed article) that school districts could be reimbursed up to 100% the cost of the lunch up to sixty cents. In section 210.11 part (d) of the regulations you signed it states that “the total reimbursement for generai cash— for food assistance funds and special cash assistance shall not exceed 60 cents (12 cents from general cash—for food assistance and 48 cents for special cash assistance) for each Type A lunch served free or at a reduced price to children meeting the school’s approved eligibility standards for such lunches.” There is no excuse for the lack of public definition from U.S.D.A. Countless School Districts all over the country are refusing to adopt not only the new income—poverty guidelines but also all other parts of the Amendment and guidelines until January 1, 1971—and I suspect some of them may not comply even then. 2239 I don’t understand the reluctance of U.S.D.A. to intervene in loeal school dis- trict’s or even State School Lunch Director’s bad policies—when they are bad. There is no politics to letting children go hungry to avoid ‘political confronta- tions.” HUNGRY CHILDREN IS A “POLITICAL” REALITY. In North Carolina, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, just to name a few states that I'm familiar with in terms of the School Lunch Program, school districts are balking. U.S.D.A. is allowing them to balk by not declaring that the law (except for the income poverty guidelines) is in effect now and has been in effect in its present state since the New Regulations were published in the Federal Register. Enclosed is a copy of your telephone interview with the reporter from the Arkansas Democrat, a copy of the article describing the administration of the School Lunch program in North Little Rock and a copy of a recent letter from Senator McGovern to me. I realize that you probably aren't aware of the extent of the abuses of the school lunch law (right here, in Pulaski County, children are working for their lunch) but children all over the country could benefit greatly from a public dec- laration from U.S.D.A. Thank you very much. Sincerely/In the Struggle, GARY DELGADO, Assistant Director, Children’s Foundation Representative. APPENDIX D [Telegram] Washington, D.C. Mr. GARY DELGADO, Little Rock Ark.: In regard to your query on the recently published school lunch guidelines: Secs. 210 and 245, Federal Register, vol. 35, No. 173—I am pleased to inform you that they became effective and binding as of date of publication, Friday, September 4, 1970, with exception of mandatory income guidelines. School district has until the end of October to submit policy statement on free and reduced priced lunches but in interim must operate under regulations. GERALD CASSIDY, General Counsel, Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. AprpPENDIX E [From the Arkansas Democrat, Aug. 31, 1970] SHORTER RESIDENTS ORGANIZE—GROUP APPLIES FOR FREE ScHooOL LUNCHES (By Martin Kirby) Eighteen residents of Shorter College Gardens, accompanied by several chil- dren and supporters, today presented application forms for free school lunches to North Little Rock School Supt. George KH. Miller. About 40 residents had attended a meeting earlier at the Sherman Park Rec- reation Center at which they formed the Shorter College Gardens Community Organization. They were organized by Wade Rethke and Gary Delgado and a committee of residents. Entering the board room where the Shorter group was waiting, Miller obvi- ously was irritated by the demonstration. “You people have a spokesman?” Miller said. “Why these forms may I ask?’ Miller said “We have forms of our own.” Miller told the group that the school district gave 189,829 free lunches during the last school term. Mrs. Barbara Howard, who resigned June 7 as a North Little Rock teacher said the question was did everyone who was entitled to them get them. Miller said that prices of lunches for children who paid had to be increased to “to take up the slack” caused by school-lunch program had a $33,000 deficit last year. Mrs. Howard said that she had turned in a “long list of names of children who were eligible,” but she said not all of them received free lunches. Assistant Supt. Doyle Crownover, asked, “Who turned them down?” The woman said she did not know. 42-778—71—pt. 8—9 2240 Crownover said the principals of schools were the final authorities on certifi- cation of eligibility for free lunches. Delgado contradicted this and began to quote a federal law he said gave the parents the right to certify their own children. “I don’t care what the law says,” Miller said. Turning to reporters Delgado said: “You got that? He doesn’t care what the law says.” Delgado repeated his contention that parents have the authority to certify their own childrens eligibility. “As of the first of January, 1971,” Miller and Crownover said in unision. The Shorter Gardens residents gave Miller their forms and left. The visit lasted less than 15 minutes. At a meeting prior to the visit to Miller's office, those in attendance formally joined the Shorter College Gardens Community Organization and most of them also joined the National Welfare Rights Organization. They filled out forms prepared by Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now (ACORN). The forms provided for the listing of all school-age children in a family, and the family income. The forms also contained a chart showing the minimum income as related to the number of persons in a family for which children could receive free lunches. The organizers for ACORN and the Arkansas WRO, Rathke and Delgado, showed reporters a letter from Ruth Powell, director of school food services for the state Education Department, to superintendents operating school-lunch pro- grams.” The letter stated that ACORN’s application forms were satisfactory for use in applying for free school lunches. “Even though the regulations have not been finalized, this form would appear to be entirely consistent with congressional intent with respect both to statutory language and the regulations promulgated by the Department of Agriculture,” the letter stated. “The proposed self-certification form provides all information necessary under Section 9 of P.L. (Public Law) 91-248, and is intended to be conclusive proof of the child’s eligibility for a free lunch,” it continued. “Although the law does not go into effect until Jan. 1, 1971, school districts are encouraged to use this self-certification form immediately and receive federal reimbursement,” the letter stated. Delgado said that although the law did not officially go into effect until Jan. 1, the money already had been appropriated and was available for use by the school districts. The group issued a prepared statement which stated that the national School Lunch Act provides that school districts can be reimbursed up to 100 per cent of the price of a lunch, with 70 cents being the maximum price per meal allowed. “The school district must provide the children of all parents who turn in a school-lunch certification form with a free school lunch, unless (sic) such time that the school district can prove by a fair hearing that the child is not eligible,” the statement said. According to the statement, all persons with incomes of less than $4,000 a year were eligible for free school lunches for their children. Herman Davenport of Pine Bluff, a representative of a group called Food Action and Research, told the group that the ACORN firm was “arranged so the school officials don’t have to pry into a family’s personal business.” “When it comes to what you do on your Saturday nights and all, that’s your business,” Davenport said. INCONSISTENCY CITED In a news release, the organization cited this alleged instance of inconsistency in the School District program of provding free or reduced price lunches: “Mrs. Nina Aldridge of Silver City Community Organization is an example of the hit and miss attitude of the North Little Rock School District. She has four children in school at the present time. One child is receiving a free school lunch. Three are not. This represents a direct violation of Title 7, Sec. 2453 (a), Code of Federal Regulations. “The child that is receiving a free lunch is forced to use special tokens to purchase the lunch, in direct violation of Title 7, Sec. 245.8, Code of Federal Regulations. Mrs. Sue Kirsey, who also lives in Silver City Courts, has a child attending the same school as Mrs. Aldridge’s child. “Mrs. Aldridge’s child is receiving a free school lunch, Mrs. Kirsey’s is not. Yesterday, Mrs. Aldridge’s son got an application form for free school lunches, 2241 Mrs. Kirsey’s did not. Both families are on welfare. Certainly, with respect to congressional intent, at least families on welfare should qualify for a free school lunch, as well as all low income children in North Little Rock.” The Silver City group was the second to take a bus to Miller's office to discuss school lunches. The first, from Shorter College Gardens, met with him on August 2%, This week, a third group of residents, from the Eastgate and Hemlock Courts public housing projects, took a bus to the School District office to talk about the lunch policy. Miller accepted lunch applications from the group. School officials said they had tried to get further information about the new school lunch law from the State Education Department and other sources with- out success. Miller said that until the district heard something definite it would do the best it could. District VioraTing LuncH Law, Group SAYS This “fact sheet,” prepared by Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now, was presented by National Welfare Rights Organization members to the School District last week : “l. The amendments to the National School Lunch Law (P.L. 91-248), signed by the President May 14, 1970, provide a free or reduced price lunch to every low income child in the country. “2. President Nixon has pledged that all low income children in the nation shall have a free or reduced price lunch by Thanksgiving, 1970. “3. Miss Ruth Powell, State School Lunch Director, in a letter dated August 11, 1970, to all school districts in Arkansas, recommended set forth the new USDA minimum standards for school lunches and suggested schools begin to use these standards in September. “4, These guidelines provide a free or reduced price lunch to every child from a family of four earning less than $3,720 a year. “5. Miss Ruth Powell, in a letter dated August 20, 1970, to all school districts participating in the National School Lunch Program, recommended adoption of a self-certification form developed by ACORN and based on the minimum stand- ards prescribed by the Secretary of Agriculture. “6. The Agricultural Appropriations Act of 1971 (HR 17923) authorizes ad- ministration of the National School Lunch Program at a reimbursement rate in excess of the amount requested by the bill, thus assuring USDA that the program should be administered as if the appropriations bills had already passed. “7. The federal regulations established a reimbursement rate to schools for free and reduced price lunches of up to 100 per cent of the cost of the lunch up to 60 per cent. “8. The new regulations require that minimum eligibility standards be estab- lished in accordance with Title 7, Sec. 245, Code of Federal Regulations. Manda- tory standards go into effect January 1, 1971. Interim standards must be sub- mitted by October. “9. Every school district must distribute to all parents of school children: (a) The eligibility standards; (b) How to make application; and (c) How to appeal a decision with regard to the application. “10. The law specifically states that poor children, as a condition for receiving a free or reduced price lunch, cannot be made to: (a) Work for their meals; (b) Eat at a different time or at a separate place; (¢) Eat a different meal; or (d) Use special tickets or tokens that are different from what other children use. “North Little Rock has not : “1. Established minimum standards of eligibility. “2. Distributed the necessary information to parents. “3. Set up an appeals procedure approved by the State. “4, Distributed application forms to all parents. “5. Acknowledged that the regulations are effective immediately and binding upon them by publication in the Federal Register. “6. Treated low income children with dignity or respect. “7. Tried to save the taxpayers of North Little Rock a cent by applying for the higher reimbursement rate now available. In view of the new regulations to the National School Lunch Act there is no reason for a school district not to give a free school lunch to every low income 2242 child other than the fact that the school district has deliberately and with malice decided not to comply with the law, even when faced by hungry children. “Furthermore, money from Title I is presently being used for school lunches without exhausting available funds from the National School Lunch Act. These same funds should be used for school books, transportation, and clothing. This is clearly a violation of the intent of Congress and the regulations of the Title I program.” [From the Arkansas Democrat, Sept. 18, 1970] ScuoorLs CAN Use Lunce Prawn School districts may participate now in the National School Lunch Program and receive reimbursement for free or reduced price lunches served to needy children, but the districts are not required to participate until Jan. 1, an assist- ant secretary of agriculture said today. Richard E. Lyng of Washington, interviewed by telephone, said the bills au- thorizing reimbursement for free and reduced-price lunches have been approved by the House and Senate. However, he said, the Senate bill contains a provision for appropriating an additional $217 million for the school lunch program that is not included in the House bill. Lyng said that until the two houses of Congress eliminate the differences be- tween the two bills, the federal Agriculture Department is operating the school lunch program under a joint resolution authorizing early implementation of the program. MOVED FAST He said the USDA moved “as quickly as we possibly could to get our regula- tions out before school started so that schools that wanted to could go ahead (and participate in the program).” “We have encouraged the states to go ahead and as quickly as possible to gear up on this,” Lyng said. “Many states are going ahead on that basis.” Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN, stated in a “fact sheet” issued today that the USDA regulations “establish a reimburse- ment rate to schools for free and reduced price lunches of up to 100 per cent of the cost of the lunch up to 60 cents.” “YT don’t think we pay that much,” Lyng said, “I’m not sure of that. ACORN also made public a memorandum to “superintendents operating school lunch programs” fom Mrs. Ruth Powell, director of school food services for the state Education Department. The memorandum stated that “amendments to the National School Lunch Act” use family income levels as guidelines for determining eligibility and require that superintendents report to the state Education Department by Oct. 1, “the number of children in your school district who are eligible for free or reduced- price lunches along with the number receiving free or reduced-price lunches. FAMILY INCOME “Since most administrators like to begin the school year with the regulations which they expect to use throughout the school year, it is strongly recommended that this family size income level be used when school opens. This also insures lunch through the school year for all children.” The memorandum continued: “We cannot tell you at this time what the rate of reimbursement will be for the next school year; however all indications are that we will be able to pay a higher rate than that paid during the last school year.” [From the Arkansas Democrat, Sept. 18, 1970] TEMPERS FLARE IN NEw ProrEsT AT NLR OFFICE (By Herb Wright) Tempers flared and a fist fight almost broke out about noon today when mem- bers of Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) con- fronted officials at the administration officers of North Little Rock schools. About 30 Negro mothers and some of their children arrived at the adminis- tration office in two chartered buses. The women were residents of Eastgate 2243 Terrace and Hemlock Courts, two public housing projects. They were accom- panied by Gary Delgado and Wade Rathke, ACORN representatives. MET BY MILLER The group filed in the administration board room where they were met by George Miller, North Little Rock school superintendent. Miller, proclaiming that he had “heard it all before,” collected free school lunch application forms from the mothers. The forms were contained in small brown paper bags that had been inscribed with the words, “Feed Our Children.” Miller tried to dismiss the group with, “Thank you for coming,” and left the room. Miller reappeared to tell them they could stay all day if they wanted to, but he didn’t have time to listen to their arguments. The women, at the urging of the ACORN representatives, next filed into the lobby of the building and demanded that an emergency meeting of the North Little Rock School Board be called. NOTICE REQUIRED They were told that they would have to give the board two weeks’ written notice to be put on the agenda. The women, again at the prompting of the ACORN representatives, asked for a list of the school board members. Miller was leaving to get the list when a Negro woman told him to hurry up and get the list “right now.” He wheeled around and told her: “If you're going to order me around you'll have to get it with a court order.” *® * 8 * * * ® The women restrained Delgado and Miller beckoned for him to “come on.” A few minutes later Delgado was invited to step outside and “settle this,” by Doyle Crownover, assistant superintendent for administration. Crownover ac- cused Delgado of calling him a liar at an earlier public meeting. Delgado and Rathke argued that the school district is required by recently- passed federal legislation to provide all eligible children with free school lunches. The school officials replied that they do not yet have the funds, nor have they had directives from Washington to implement additional free lunch programs. [From the Arkansas Democrat, Sept. 20, 1970] EicETY RESIDENTS DEMAND FREE LuNcHES—THEY CHARGE NoN-PAyYING CHILDREN GET DIFFERENT TREATMENT About 80 residents of the Granite Mountain. Highland Courts and East Little Rock areas rode three chartered buses to the Little Rock School District Offices at Markham and Izard Streets today to demand that federal guidelines for free lunches for their children to institute immediately. In a meeting with Dr. Paul R. Fair, deputy superintendent, and Floyd Langston, assistant superintendent for business affairs—Mrs. Rosie Washington, chairman of the East End chapter of the Welfare Rights Organization, charged that poor children on the district’s free lunch program were being treated differ- ently from other children. With Mrs. Washington as spokesmen for the group were Mrs. Barbara Hampton, chairman of the Granite Mountain WRO chapter, and Mrs. Rosetta Lewis, co-chairman of the Highland Courts chapter. The residents were accompanied by Gary Delgado and Wade Rathke, organi- zers for the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. Delgado is also an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization, and both men have organized visits of other community residents to the North Little Rock School District Offices. Delgado said the chartered buses were paid for by the Children’s Foundation, which he said was a national foundation headquarters in Washington. The resi- dents, mostly women, carried empty paper bags on which had been written “free lunch.” Mrs. Washington said the group had come “to see that all poor people are given free lunches . . . There are a lot of children in the same household, and only part of them are getting free lunches. 2244 She also charged that many children in the Little Rock School district who are receiving free lunches are made to eat out of separate colored plates, given special tokens, and are made to stand in separate lines. A white woman who refused to identify herself charged that this practice was going on at Horace Mann High School and Booker Junior High School. Jethro Hill, principal at Booker Junior High School, and Edwin Hawkins, principal at Horace Mann High School, say children receiving free lunches are not distinguishable from those paying for their lunches. When asked if those receiving free lunches used a different lunch token, stood in a separate line, used a different colored plate, or were singled out in any way, the principals answered with emphatic no's. Hill explained that paying customers place orders for lunch tickets in the office during the morning. During the home room period, lunch tickets are passed out to both free and paying lunchroom customers. “No one can tell,” said Hill. At Mann, students pay for their lunches as they enter the cafeteria. Hawkins says the lunchroom supervisor knows who the students are getting free lunches and let them pass. A tabulation is kept in the lunch room on the number of free lunches served, and student’s names are checked off as they enter. “We try our best not to emphasize them,” said Hawkins. He said the school had some problems last year with a Neighborhood Youth Corp worker, who would collar students receiving free lunches and ask “you got a ticket.” Fair told the residents that although legislation for a new free lunch program has been approved by Congress, allocations of funds have not been Education Department guidelines for administering the funds had not yet been received. Jay Lipner, a Legal Aid Bureau attorney who also accompanied the group, acknowledged that money had not yet been made available but argued that the district would be reimbursed for the additional lunches, and therefore should begin the program immediately. Fair replied “we have had experience with these kinds of bills before.” He said the district had faced a “similar situation when it began its Neighborhood Youth Program. “We can’t do anything until the state tells us how much money we have,” Fair said. [From the Arkansas Gazette, Sept. 28, 1970] AT LEAST A 2-WEEK WAIT oN LUNCH GUIDELINES EXPECTED, OFFICIALS TOLD It will be at least two weeks before the release of federal guidelines for ad- ministering the new free school lunch program, North Little Rock school officials learned Thursday. Andrew C. Power, assistant superintendent for education projects of the North Little Rock District, and Doyle Crownover, assistant superintendent for administration, learned this when they met with Miss Ruth Powell, state diree- tor for the school lunch program. Power and Crownover wanted clarification of the administrative guidelines for the revised program, which goes into effect nationally January 1. Miss Powell said that the United States Agriculture Department, which funds the program, was still working on the guidelines. Interpretation of the existing guidelines has varied between school officials and at least four neighborhood citizens groups, who have visited the school ad- ministrative offices seeking immediate implementation of the expanded program. BOARD WAITING FOR FUNDS, GUIDELINES The School Board, on the advice of Superintendent George KE. Miller, has declined to adopt the expanded school lunch program until it has the federal sup- plemental funds and guidelines. The residents have argued that the District would be reimbursed for expenditures if it adopted the program now instead of waiting until January 1, when the District will be required to adopt it. Meanwhile, the District continues to offer the free lunch program under the old guidelines. In an interview Friday, Miss Powell said that she could not “blame” school boards for not adopting the revised program without the new guidelines or the assurance of funds. Asked if the Districts would be reimbursed for the free lunches if they began now, she replied, “They will be reimbursed until the money runs out.” 2245 MISS POWELL MEETS WITH USDA OFFICIALS Miss Powell met earlier in the week in Dallas with USDA officials from Washington. The guidelines will explain administrative details, procedures to enroll chil- dren, an appeal procedure for the program have been approved by both the Sen- ate and the House of Representatives, but a conference committee has yet to decide on the exact amount that will be released. Miss Powell said last year’s program was not funded until January, but it also reimbursed schools back to the beginning of the school year. She said the new guidelines were necessary because of the various interpre- tations of the law. She said the federal lawyers and the lawyers of poverty ac- tion groups apparently disagree on the law. Since the National School Lunch Program is audited by the Office of Inspector General, “we have to go by what their lawyers say,” she said. In North Little Rock, residents have been organized under the Arkansas Com- munity Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN's organizers, Gary Delgado and Wade Rathke have argued that the Board should begin the program immediately. [From the Arkansas Gazette, Oct. 8, 1970] NorTH LITTLE ROCK: LUNCHES WITHHELD SUIT CONTENDS A suit was filed Wednesday in federal District Court contending that the North Little Rock School District is not providing free lunches to some poor children who are eligible for them under the School District's eligibility requirements. The plaintiffs are the Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now (ACORN) and the parents of eight school children. The suit was filed as a class action in behalf of all poor school children in the district. The suit alleged that all eight children came from families whose income was low enough to qualify for free lunches under the School District guidelines. It said that seven had applied for free lunches but had been turned down and that the mother of the eighth had never been notified by the School District of the right to apply for free lunches. Superintendent George Miller said he would investigate the complaints. “As far as I know we have been applying our regulations equitably,” Miller said. The suit alleged that the School District used different criteria to determine eligibility for junior and senior high school students, but Miller said the criteria was the same for them as for elementary students. Miller is named as a defendant in the suit along with the School Board and Miss Josephine McGill, director of food services for the School District. The parents who filed the suit are Mrs. Shirley Ann Martin, on behalf of four children attending Lincoln Elementary School; Mrs. Juanita Rainey, on behalf of a grandson, Danny Broyts, a student at Jefferson Davis Junior High School ; Mrs. Mozella Rollins, on behalf of a son, Andrew Rollins, a student at North Little Rock High School; Mrs. Johnnie Mae Crudup, on behalf of a son. Larry Crudup, a student at Rose City Junior High School, and Mrs. Lessie Mae Everett, on behalf of a son, Anthony Swiney, a student at Lincoln Elementary School. Mrs. Martin, Mrs. Rainey, Mrs. Rollins and Mrs. Crudup all alleged ‘that their family incomes were low enough to meet the School District's eligibility require- ments for the free lunch program. Eligibility varies according to the size of the family. Mrs. Martin alleged that the School District had refused to provide free lunches for all four of her children. Mrs. Rainey, Mrs. Rollins and Mrs. Crudup said that the children, for whom they brought the suit had been denied free lunches, but that elementary school children in their families were receiving them. Mrs. Everett alleged that her child was eligible, but said that she had never received any information from the school District about the free lunch program and had not applied. She said her only information about free lunches came from ACORN. The plaintiffs asked the court to issue an injunction directing school officials to provide free lunches to all school children who qualify under the District's regulations. 2246 1,424 FREE LUNCHES BEING PROVIDED The School District is providing 1,424 free lunches out of an enrollement of 12.900. The plaintiffs also asked the court to order the defendants to send notices about the free lunch program and application forms to the parents of all school children in the District. Miller said this was being done this week in compliance with a new federal law that takes effect January 1. He said the law required school officials to send notices of the free lunch program and application forms to all parents and to accept the information the parents certify on ithe form about their income. Under the old law, school officials could investigate to determine if the parents had listed their correct income, Miller said. The plaintiffs also asked that principals not be allowed to sit on the panels which hear appeals from denials of free lunch eligibility. The principals make the initial determination of eligibility, so it is unfair that they also sit on the panel which reviews the case, the plaintiffs alleged. Miller said the School District was still waiting on guidelines from the federal Agriculture Department on implementing the new law. He said he didn’t know what the guidelines would provide about who can sit on the appeal panels. The appeals are now heard by a panel composed of the principal, the school social worker and the children’s teachers, the suit said. The plaintiffs are represented by Jay C. Lipner of the Pulaski County Legal Aid Bureau, Ronald F. Pollack of the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law of New York, and Philip E. Kaplan, a Little Rock lawyer who handles many civil rights cases. [From the Arkansas Gazette, Oct. 1970] Apurrs SEEK MORE HELP FOR LUNCHES PINE BLUFF.—Twenty-nine adults representing the Welfare Rights Organiza- tion met with officials of the Pine Bluff School District Friday morning to seek increased aid for the free lunch program. Herman Davenport, a representative of WRO, said 50 petitions were being presented to the school administration to ask for additional aid under Title I federal funds. The protest was centered on requests for more specific additions to welfare clients children in the school lunch program. The group arrived by chartered bus and met with school officials for 20 minutes. They left quietly. Dr. C. B. Garrison, superintendent of the Pine Bluff School District and Larnell Davis, a Negro administrator for Title I funds, met with the WRO representatives. Garrison told the group that every hungry child was being fed under the free lunch program and urged that any request for investigation for further aid should be submitted in writing to school officials. Davis told the group that Title I funds covered dental, medical aid and cloth- ing, plus participation in the state’s school lunch program and any request for help in these fields would be taken into consideration immediately. Davenport announced that a representative of the WRO would meet Tuesday night with the Pine Bluff School Board at the regularly scheduled meeting. TO: School Board Address od Arkansas Selon) Dist let. School Board DD At i ei etal mam mins I request that the School Board of the —.____________ School District make complete use of the reimbursements available under the new amendments to the National School Lunch Law (P.L. 91-248, federal statute 42 U.S.C. 1758 and fed- eral regulations. Title 7, Sec. 210.8 Code of Federal Regulations) which should 2247 provide my children and all low income children in the district with free lunches. I further request that the Title I-8910 funds not be spent on school lunches. My reasons for this request are the following : 1. Title I is a valuable though limited program. These funds could be better spent on needed books, clothing, and transportation for my children. 2. I feel that the free school lunches are an expense that can and should be met by the National School Lunch Act, not Title I. 3. Since the School District is now spending Title I funds for school lunches when there is another, more suitable, federal program with recommended guide- lines for that specific purpose, our district runs the real danger of being cut off from Title I funding. A federal audit could find the district misusing federal funds. Thank you for your consideration. Name Address ada City or TOWD cee ; Arkansas Local Group: Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Box 695 Little Rock, Arkansas 72203 Senator McGovern. Mr. Thoms? Mr. Troms. Thank you, Senator McGovern. The testimony which follows may differ somewhat from that of previous speakers, in that I will speak about a community that has no school-lunch program. I am an attorney employed by Rhode Island legal services. My reason for coming today is to describe the efforts made by a group of people in one community, the city of Central Falls, to establish a school-lunch program. Over the course of 5 months earlier this year, the issue was focused upon and a great deal of effort was expended in organization and action to find a solution for the problem. I believe the history of this campaign will demonstrate the interest in school lunches felt by significant numbers of people in a city with no program at all. There will first be a brief description of the city itself, followed by an outline of the structure and operation of the school-lunch program throughout the State. Lastly I will try to portray specific efforts made this year to institute a program—efforts not yet suc- cessful, but definitely not abandoned. Central Falls is one of 39 cities and towns in Rhode Island. It has 18,000 people, or 2 percent of the State’s population. The city’s population is 5,500 less than it was in 1950, although the State has grown by 150,000, to about 950,000. In the 1970 census the city was one of four to lose population since 1960. Twelve percent of the population receives some form of public assistance. In July 1969, Central Falls had 4 percent of the State’s AFDC caseload. The city is just over 1 square-mile in size. Its land is fully de- veloped. But the development is very old. Only 1.5 percent of the housing units were built after 1950. Some brief 1960 census figures: Owner-occupied dwellings are 25 percent. The State’s average is 54 percent. 2248 Housing units with central heat—35 percent. The State’s average is 71 percent. Medium family income—$4,875. The State’s average is $5,590. The number of families below $3,000 in family income—20 percent. The State’s average is 16.7. In 1968 there were 800 vacant apartments in the city; but a great percentage of these were in uninhabitable condition. ; The major economic problem of the city is that governmental and educational costs have increased, while the tax base has not expanded and will not expand without imaginative and costly new ideas, which have not materialized. The city made a request to the State government this year for a $200,000 loan. This kind of request was unheard of, but its uniqueness did not persuade governor Licht to grant it. The following is a brief description of Central Fall’s educational system : There are seven public and six parochial schools. The total student population is 4,500, or 2.5 percent of all Rhode Island students. The pre-pupil expenditure in Central Falls is $402 for all schools. The State’s average is $552. The State government’s educational reimbursement level is the maximum for the city. This is the only city in the State with the maximum level of reimbursement for general educational expenses for the entire city. 17 percent of persons over 25 have completed high school. The State’s average is 35 percent. There is no school-lunch program in the city, and no school has facilities for cooking or dining. Here is a brief description of the State’s organization of the school- lunch program. Perhaps Rhode Island is unique in that the State department of education is heavily involved in the school-lunch pro- gram. For most programs in the State, the cost and control of administrative and kitchen personnel, storing, processing, and trans- portation of the food are all in the hands of the State. These expendi- tures, plus student payments for lunches, make up the non-Federal share of the operation of the school-lunch program. The State involvement provides consistency of quality, although not necessarily of policy. Statistically, in 29 communities there are only State-sponsored programs. In five communities there are only locally operated programs. And in four others there are both kinds of operations. Every public high school in the State, except that of Central Falls, has a lunch program. Thirty-six of 38 junior-high schools have pro- grams. 140 of 295 elementary schools serve lunches. In 1968-69, the State-sponsored programs provided 65 percent of all lunches served in the State. Locally-operated programs provided the other 35 percent. In the 1967-68 school year, 166 schools were in the State school- lunch program, providing 528,000 free or reduced-price lunches out of a total of 4,600,000 served. In 1969-70, 189 schools participated in the State-sponsored pro- gram, and in these schools 1,660,000 free or reduced-price lunches out of 6,400,000 were served. 2249 Thus, in 2 years there was a 300-percent increase in free and reduced-price lunches, while the total number of lunches served increased by 50 percent. 1 will now describe, in abbreviated form, the events that took place in Central Falls in the effort to get a school-lunch program started. Last fall, the present school committee was elected. One of the significant issues on which several school-board members ran was the initiation of a school-lunch program. Those persons who sup- ported such a program were elected. That is where the battle began, for many people in Central Falls, mainly parents, requested the school committee for a commitment during the winter of 1969-70. The Catholic Inter-City Center, of the Diocese of Providence, established a branch office in Central Falls. It was a project called HOPE, which focused on several issues facing poor persons in the city. The most important issue quickly became school lunches. 1 will recount briefly the series of meetings that were held in the winter of this year. On February 12, a small group met with the State school-lunch supervisor, Mrs. Maureen O’Connell, who expressed surprise that the high school that was supposedly being built in Central Falls had not yet gotten off the drawing board. This school will have school-lunch facilities, but its completion could be several years away. Murs. O’Connell indicated that the state had been and still was very interested in seeing Central Falls have a program. She provided the people who came from Project HOPE with facts and figures and an outline of a lunch program. On February 18, 100 parents met with other officials from the state school-lunch office. Again the program was described, and much interest was generated from the meeting. On February 20, another small group went back to the State school-lunch office with more questions, and received more detailed information. On the 24th of February, 100 parents met with the school com- mittee and State school-lunch officials. The meeting produced much debate concerning the need for and cost of a program; parents were on both sides of the issue. The school committee was very reserved in expressing concrete views. Issentially, the school-lunch issue was dodged by the committee. The members were reluctant to consider specific proposals. During the next few weeks, a great deal of work was done by members of the rather large group interested in school lunches. Efforts were made to contact Senator Pell, who was interested and helpful. Senator Pastore was also kept informed. Specific appropriation figures were brought to the school com- mittee, which continually hedged on the proposals. On March 22d a meeting attended by 125 persons heard a progress report and discussed the question whether an application from the city to the State was an irrevocable commitment, which had been an issue with the committee. A clear consensus was that it would not be. The State officials in the meantime took the position that it was not their affirmative duty to establish a program. There were three additional large meetings. On April 6th, at a crowded, spirited school committee meeting, Gerard Broussean, the chairman, reported 2250 on the committee’s effort to establish the cost of a program. The report stated that the city itself would have to contribute several thousands of dollars, which were not available, in order to start a program. The supporters of school lunches vigorously contested the committee’s facts, assumptions, and conclusions, without success. A vote to table the school lunch question for this year passed unanimously. On May 4, the school committee met, and considered new pro- posals briefly. Through the efforts of Senator Pell, the office of Economic Opportunity offered Central Falls $5,000 to start a break- fast program for the balance of the year. It was refused. Another offer, based on OED proposals, of $20,000 to start a school-lunch program was also refused by the committee. This was perhaps the first time in the history of the State that money without strings attached was completely rejected ; the refusal was ironic in view of the clearly established interest and need. At the end of the school year, an extraordinary and contested campaign had resulted in little concrete success aside from the intangible benefits of citizens having organized to confront the system. Several individuals and project hope staff people came to Rhode Island legal services in late May seeking a legal solution. Up to this point, we have negotiated with the School Lunch Office of the State Department of Education, and have reached an impasse. The Department will not take affirmative steps to establish a pro- gram in the only community in the State without one. The legal issue at present is whether or not the State’s involve- ment in virtually every other community compels it to take affirma- tive action in Central Falls, despite the reluctance of the financially overburdened city itself to apply for a program. We are presently discussing with our clients the advisability of litigation in Federal Court. Whatever results from legal action, if it is taken, will not solve the greater problem of carefully ensuring that federal food programs are fairly administered and fully funded. It is to be hoped that this committee will continue to operate as a forum for continued strengthening of such programs. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. Senator McGovern. Thank you, Mr. Thoms. Mr. Fuqua, have you observed that considerable confusion about the new school-lunch regulation among local officials as to when they think they are to go into effect? Mr. Fuqua. Most of them that I have had contact with seem to think they don’t have to go into effect until January. Senator McGovern. That is a general impression, that January 1 is when they become applicable? Mr. Fuqua. Yes. Senator McGovern. In the school-lunch application form that I read to Miss Martin this morning, there was a question there, as you know, about a total weekly income of the family. And that was taken from one of the counties in your State. Upon receipt of this information, what income scale is used to measure whether or not a family’s child is eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch? 2251 Mr. Fuqua. In this particular system where the application form came from, they do not use an income scale. I don’t know how they determine it. That is our basic point of difference with them—how do you determine which children in this system you are going to provide a free or reduced-price lunch to? Senator McGovern. Do most of the local districts, so far as you know, use the $3,700-income scale established by USDA ? Mr. Fuqua. I believe most of them are generally using that scale at this point. Senator McGovern. Mrs. Hurley, I was wondering, in connection with the suggestion you made about really taking extreme action to the point of a citizen’s arrest, were you aware of the story in the Modesto area that the two previous witnesses referred to, where a group of citizens actually filed suit against the school board in court to require that a free and reduced-price school-lunch program be operative? They not only filed suit, but they won the case. Were you aware of that? Mrs. Horiey. No, I wasn’t aware of that. And that is a good thing to do. But when young kids are hungry and you have to work for the court system, it takes a long time. And I am not willing to wait, and my children aren’t. And a hell of a lot of other people are not willing to wait. The people in America may be tired of hearing of the hunger issue, and ecology is the thing to get into. But I am not tired of it. And T have been hearing of it a long time. My kids are hungry, and other kids are hungry. And as far as I can see, nothing has been done at the local level. Senator McGovern. Do you see any evidence that the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, is working with local school districts and trying to get these guidelines implemented ? Mrs. Huritey. I have seen welfare rights groups in areas in Massachusetts be able to get something done. People by themselves, first of all no information is given out. The average person on welfare or low income or they are laid off because of the condition the economy is in right now, do not know they can get a free or reduced price lunch. The information is not given out, it is held by a few people in turn let the people they select have those free lunches so the people don’t know what to do. The only thing that can be done to get guidelines or to get the lunches given out is to have a group action and usually it is formed around a welfare rights group already formed in that area. Then it is still hard. The city of Boston filed a law suit because of not being able to get guidelines or anything and we lost that lawsuit. Senator McGovern. How do the school officials themselves respond to you and other members of your community when you come in to try to make the kind of plea as you have before this committee. Do you get any kind of response? Mr. Horrey. All kinds of raises responses. Usually we go through the procedure where we try to play the game their way until it comes to the thing where we have 30 people going to a school board 2252 meeting and say look we are going to talk about school lunches, these are the regulations, we are supposed to be getting them. Nine times out of 10 they will walk out or call the police or say something like the head of the department in Chelsea says, “when the welfare department starts teaching the children then we will start feeding them.” They are just not willing to meet with us on these things. They know the money is there and they know they are supposed to do 1t but in a lot of cases they just don’t want to and they just don’t care. It is just too much of a hassle to them. Senator McGovern. Mr. Delgado, you testified about one case, as I recall, where the child in the family that was eligible for free lunches but other children in that same family were not. I am not quite clear how that could happen under the present regulations. Could you elaborate on that a little more? It wasn’t clear to me just exactly how you thought that situation had occurred. Mr. Dercapo. Actually it can’t happen legally under the present regulations. Senator McGovern. What was the rationalization for it? Mr. Dereapo. The school officials are required to hand out a form and eligibility standards and an appeals procedure at the beginning of every year. But in this particular case they hadn’t been handed out, new children had entered into the school system and had not received the free lunch. That is just what happened. It is a situa- tion in which one of this woman’s children was receiving the lunch and three weren’t because of that type of a progression. Senator McGovern. It was very clearly in violation of the regula- tions. There is another point that you made that I was not quite clear on. What is the confusion that you referred to surrounding the regulations in regard to the timing in the school year when local officials are supposed to prepare and distribute applications, what was the point you were making there? Mr. DeLGapo. In one section of the regulations, I think it is section 245.10 of the regulations, school districts are required to prepare, (1) eligibility requirements, (2) set up a fair hearing procedure, and (8) a school lunch form. They are required in that section to send that information out to the community and publicize it in newspapers at the beginning of every school year. But in another section of the regulations (245.12) they are actually not required to formulate those type of procedures until 2 months after the beginning of the school year. For instance, the regulations which were published in the Federal Register September 4 state that the school district has got to have that information ready to send to the State school lunch director 2 months after publication in the Federal Register, which is the end of October. Therefore in the time span between September and the end of October school districts argue, not very legitimately but they have argued that they aren’t required to send out that information to the community until the end of October and this has happened. Senter McGovern. The regulations are really ambiguous on that point? Mr. Dergapo. On that point, yes, very. Senator McGovern. What do you see are the weaknesses in the appeal procedure that have been set up under the new law; where 2253 is the burden of proof or eligibility; is it on the parent or the poor person who is trying to qualify his child or is it on the school board ? What is your feeling about the appeals set up in the new law? Mr. Dercano. The legislation and according to what I have read on the legislative intent, especially in section 9, the burden of proof was clearly to be on the school district. But in practical application, if the school district refuses to set up an appeals procedure, the poor person is then forced to appeal to the school district. If the poor person appeals to the school district he takes that burden of the appeals off of the school district just by making the appeal himself, and also he appeals to the same people that refused him the lunch in the first place. So it is sort of a double jeopardy situation that a poor person 1s placed in. Senator McGovern. I would like to ask this question to each one of the three witnesses here. I think you can tell there is a growing amount of frustration on the part of the members of this committee about the difficulty that we have in getting these regulations func- tioning the way we intended. Now perhaps a lot of that fault belongs on the Congress, I don’t know. But in any event do you think there needs to be a continuing surveillance, perhaps field hearings from time to time by this or some other committee of the Congress where we go into the com- munities from time to time and turn the public spotlight on the actual operation of our school lunch program and maybe on the absence of those programs? Does that kind of effort help or does it mean when we go in we get a little flurry and then it is forgotten after the committee moves on. Mr. Fuqua, would you want to comment on that? Mr. Fuqua. I think most assuredly that would be a step in the right direction. Congress proposes laws and regulations, provides funds, the intent is always good, I think, and then when it gets down on the local level you have people who try to circumvent those laws and regulations through some philosophical difference of their own, perhaps, or simply because they don’t want to comply. I know before we made contact with the Children’s Foundation this summer we had groped around in the dark for about 3 years trying to find out, you know, the workings of local school lunch policies; who did you appeal to; who did you go to; what did the law say. We didn’t know anything, hardly, until we got their publication of the School Lunch Bag. I think every community certainly should have access to that publication because it is laid out step by step how you can possibly improve the local school lunch program in your community. Senator McGovern. I have the feeling, if it had not been the probing of this committee over the last year and a half, in the absence of that a lot of these programs would just be frozen, they would be inoperative entirely or at least limping along on a level where most of the people that we intended to assist would be entirely outside the scope of the program. Miss Hurley. Mrs. Hurcey. I think that short of threatening local school com- mittee people with arrest, or other things, that a Senate committee 2254 coming in and keeping them honest could be the only thing that could prevent what is happening, to keep it from continuing to happen. Mr. Dereapo. I think I would preface my answer by saying the only support I got on any efforts in Arkansas has been from this committee through a letter from you, Senator McGovern, and a telegram from Mr. Cassidy. I think that it would be a really im- portant thing to do in a lot of the country to keep school officials honest, as Mrs. Hurley said. I think it is a very important idea. Mrs. Hurrey. Another thing that would be important is maybe a bill similar to the Massachusetts bill, 1504, forcing all schools to have a school lunch program. Because it is bad enough when they have one and have to go through hell just to get it but the ones that don’t have a program and don’t have school lunches, there is nowhere to go. Senator McGovern. Thank you very much, we appreciate your testimony, especially your willingness to come back this afternoon. I want to thank each one of you. The committee will be adjourned. (Whereupon, at 3 p.m., the committee was adjourned.) APPENDIX RoCKINGHAM COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES, Reidsville, N.C., September 23, 1970. Hon. CLiFForRD M. HARDIN, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. DEAR MR. SECRETARY: As Director of the Rockingham County Department of Social Services (public welfare agency), I am concerned by the malfunctioning of the National School Lunch Program within the Eden City School System, Eden, North Carolina. I am enclosing copies of correspondence originating be- tween my office, the office of the Superintendent of Eden City Schools, and the office of the North Carolina State Director of School Food Services for the pur- pose of stating what the problem is and the attitude of those concerned with the problem. Also, enclosed is a copy of the Eden City School Lunch Policy and Application Form. This matter has been previously brought to the attention of Mr. Hubert D. Rorex, Director, Child Nutrition Division, United States Department of Agri- culture by a staff member of the Children’s Foundation. We were heartened by President Nixon’s promise of school lunches for all needy children by Thanksgiving 1970, as stated by his nutrition advisor, Doctor Jean Mayer. We know your commitment is no less. We urge you to study the policy, application form and other conditions applicable to the Eden City School System’s lunch policy. If you find their policy not in compliance, we urge you to have the lunch program brought up to the standards set by the Congress and your department. Sincerely yours, GLENN D. FuqQua, Director. DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, Raleigh, N.O., September 15, 1970. MR. GLENN D. Fuqua, Director of Social Services, Rockingham County, Reidsville, N.C. DEAR MR. Fuqua : Thanks for your letter of September 8, 1970, expressing your concern over the free and reduced priced lunch policy in the Eden City Schools. The new requirements and regulations to carry out the provisions of the amendment to the National School Lunch Act Public Law 248-91 do not go into effect until January 1, 1971. All school units have been advised to continue to use their free and reduced price lunch policy that was inforced for the school year 1969-70 until further notice. I am sure Mr. Hough will place the new guidelines in effect as soon as we provide these requirements. Sincerely, RarpE W. EATON, State Director, School Food Services. EpEN City SCHOOLS, : + Eden, N.C., September 10, 1970. MER. GLENN D. Fuqua, Director, Rockingham County Department of Social Services, _ Reidsville, N.C. DEAR MR. FuqQua: We are handling our problems very much in the same man- ner as Raleigh and other systems are having to handle them. I seriously doubt (2255) 42-778 0—71—pt. 8——10 2256 that we have a single indigent who is not eating lunch in our schools. Thank you for the names you sent me. Very truly yours, JoEN HoueH, Superintendent. SEPTEMBER 8, 1970. Me. JoEN HouGH, Superintendent, Eden City Schools Eden, N.C. DEAR Mgr. HoueH : Thank you for your letter of September 1. I regret, how- ever, that none of the questions in my August 28 letter were answered. In view of this, I have directed a letter to Mr. Ralph Eaton requesting his assistance in answering these questions. If Mr. Eaton is unable to answer or respond, I shall initiate correspondence with the Honorable Clifford M. Hardin, Secretary, United States Department of Agriculture. You will find enclosed a list of children who presently receive assistance through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children or foster care programs. Where possible we have identified the school and grade placement. During the week of September 21-25 we will contact these children to see if lunches are being provided. As for documentation these children are from families receiving public assistance and further evidence as to need and hardship should be waived. However, if you agree to provide these children with a free or reduced price lunch, we will assist their parents in completing your application form. At this point we, therefore, request a sufficient supply of these forms be sent to our agency for possible future use. As to your letter, “in the administration of the welfare program in my unit do you allow welfare recipients any amount for school lunches ?”’, the answer is “no”. Present State and Federal policy prohibits the inclusion of funds for school lunches within a public assistance grant. Whether or not we increase our client group population is immaterial. I repeat my earlier statement that the Rockingham County Department of Social Serv- ices has committed itself to insuring that every poor hungry school child is fed. To that end we will leave no stone unturned. The matter will not be dropped until we have assurance that welfare children will be fed a free or reduced price lunch. Yours very truly, GLENN D. Fuqua, Director. SEPTEMBER 8, 1970. MR. RaLpH W. EATON, Director, School Food Service, North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, Cameron Village, Raleigh, N.C. DEAR MR. EATON: On August 28, 1970 I wrote Mr. John Hough, Superintend- ent Eden City Schools, Eden, North Carolina concerning the policy applicable to the school lunch program. You were sent a copy of this letter, along with the policy and application form. On September 2, 1970, I received a reply from Mr. Hough which failed to answer any of the questions presented in my August 28 letter to him. I enclose a copy of his reply. I respectfully request your opinion as to whether the Eden policy must state what income scale governs the determination of whether or not a family’s child/ children are entitled to a free or reduced price lunch. If you are unable to provide this information, I shall seek advice from the Honorable Clifford M. Hardin, Secretary, United States Department of Agri- culture. As a welfare administrator, I am sick and tired of poor children being denied access to free or reduced priced school lunches. Furthermore, I repeat my contention that the Eden School Lunch Policy is poorly written and that certain parts of the application form are degrading to any one who would have to com- Ds) it before their child received consideration for free or reduced price school unch. Yours very truly, GLENN D. Fuqua, Director. EpEN CITY SCHOOLS, Eden, N.C., September 1, 1970. MR. GLENN Fuqua, Director of Social Services, Reidsville, N.C. DEAR MR. Fuqua: Yours of August 28, which I received Saturday, exhibits a spirit that one would expect of a disgruntled employer to a dissatisfactory em- ployee. It was very “wordy.” A comparison of the number of indigents of our unit with the others in the County is irrelevant as our district has less than 509 on a per capita basis of the number of indigents as any of the other units. The recommendations of prin- cipals and Mrs. Dunn for additional indigents to be given lunch without pay are immediately honored by the superintendent. If you or the members of your staff know of any indigent in our system who is not being given a free lunch, I shall be happy for you to submit the names with documentation for immediate consideration. In the administration of the welfare program in my unit do you allow welfare recipients any amount for school lunches? Mr. Fuqua, during these times competent and stable leadership are essential. If a public agency proposes to increase its clients, resulting in larger budgets, it should not resent those who may disagree. Very truly yours, JorN Hove, Superintendent. AvucusrT 28, 1970. Mr. JoEN HouaH, Eden City Schools Eden, N.C. DEAR MR. HoueH : This will acknowledge receipt of the Eden School System’s lunch policy. In reviewing the policy we find it extremely vague and confusing. According to our interpretation of current regulations, free lunches must be served to any child from a family whose income is less than the income for a family of the same size as indicated by : The school district's family size income scale governing receipt of free lunches. Question : What is the family income scale currently used for the Eden School system in determining what children receive free lunches? Question: Are all school principals and other appropriate staff aware of the income scale, and is it applied uniformly ? In the matter of reduced price lunches, we understand that this type lunch must be served to any child from a family whose income is less than the income for a family of the same size as indicated by : The school district’s family size income scale governing receipt of reduced price lunches. Question : What is the family income scale currently used by the Eden School system in determining what children receive reduced price lunches? Question: Are the school principals and other appropriate staff aware of the income scale, and is it applied uniformly ? A second major point of ambiguity within your lunch policy is the statement, “when, after visitations, investigations, conferences by the principal and attend- ance counselor the eligibility is verified the application with recommendations is submitted to the superintendent for final approval.” Question: How long does the investigation of a request for free, or reduced price lunch take? Is the investigation process uniformly applied by all school principals within the system ? A third point is the irrelevance of certain questions contained on the applica- tion form. For example, question number 1-7, “If you receive donations from the welfare department, how much of this do you pay for school lunches? Question: What does that mean? As Director of the Department of Social flervice (welfare), I persomally do not understand that question. Why is it necessary for the family to answer question number V on this ap- plication: ‘“The following reliable references may be contacted concerning our character, our work and our financial status.” Present regulations pertaining to the method of application requests merely a simple statement of family income, size and hardship factors. 2258 A fourth point for consideration is the appeal procedure within your policy. Current regulation is that a rejected applicant for free or reduced price lunch may appeal to an official other than the original decision maker who rejected him. Your policy indicates that the applicant must go through the same proce- dure as the original application was processed. This appears to be a time con- suming process and children could go without lunch for days before this process is completed. We are aware that the new NSLA Amendments take effect as of January 1, 1971, and at that time schools must start using nationally uniform standards and policies for determining eligibility and for providing free and reduced price school meals. I have taken the liberty of sending your various sections of the new NSLA Amendments which we feel will be of tremendous benefit to poor children who need free or reduced price school lunches. Our department, and particularly those staff members who serve the Eden area, feel quite strongly that the present policy leaves a lot to be desired. I am sure other organizations in the Eden area feel the same way. The Eden School policy in comparison with the Rockingham County School system policy and the Reidsville City School system policy is poorly written. Above all the policy appears to me to evade the commitment to feed poor chil- dren. As you know, the Congress made a commitment in 1946 to feed the school children as part of their education by passing the National School Lunch Act. You will note that a copy of this letter, along with your policy and applica- tion form, have been forwarded to Mr. Ralph W. Eaton, Director, School Food Services, North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction. We welcome the opportunity to discuss this matter in detail with you and/or members of your staff. Our department is committed to the poor people of this county to insure that every child has a right to receive a lunch in school if his parents cannot afford to pay for it. I welcome your comments and hope that you will be able to clear up those spe- cific questions which I have raised in this letter. Yours very truly, GLENN D. Fuqua, Director. EpeEn CIty SCHOOLS, Eden, N.C., January 31, 1969. Policy Statement of the Eden City School System in accordance with Revised USDA Regulations of the Child Nutrition Acts. The Eden City Board of Educa- tion adopts the attached policy regarding the determination of eligibility for free lunches, and safeguards to avoid discrimination between the paying and the non-paying children. The policy includes the following elements : We provide a lunch for every eligible indigent without pay : Application blanks are available from the principal. When the application is properly executed and submitted to the principal, he and the Attendance Coun- selor investigate the applicant for verification. We want to know: The size of the family, number of children of school age, number working, welfare payments, any other income or related information. When, after visitations, investigations conferences by the principal and Attend- ance Counselor the eligibility is verified the application with recommendations is submitted to the Superintendent for final approval. After approval the name is added to the list and the indigent is given lunch without pay. When there is good evidence of indigency, the principal may, for a short period of time, permit the student to be served lunches without pay in advance of final approval. No overt identification: Students grades 1-9 deliver monies for their lunches to the homeroom teacher in exchange for lunch tickets. From an approved list the homeroom teacher gives indigents tickets without cost. In the lunchroom, students receive lunches in exchange for lunch tickets as received from the teacher. Teachers deliver the money to the cafeteria manager daily without dis- play, not to embarrass indigents. Lunches are identical, there is only one line and lunches are served to all children upon presentation of tickets to the man- ager. In the senior high school grades 10-12, the teacher sends the names of in- digents to the cashier who, without any embarrassment, simply permits the student to pass through the line. 2259 The manager keeps an accurate record of free lunches served and reports to the Superintendent’s office once a month, giving the total number of free lunches served during the month. Appeal : If an application for lunch without pay is rejected the applicant may appeal for consideration again in the same manner as the original application was processed. By following these policies for two decades on a unit-wide basis the number of children eating in our lunchrooms has greatly increased, indigents have been fed, without embarrassment to the individual, and the cost has been kept to a minimum. Our policies are being submitted to the State Department of Public Instruction for approval, after which; they will be published. The board of education understands the State Department of Public Instruc- tion, School Food Service, has responsibility for monitoring the performance through administrative reviews, on-site evaluations, and other means to assure that determinations are being made in accordance with announced policies and to assure that overt identification of any child receiving free or reduced price meals is avoided. Review, State Department of Public Instruction Supervisor, SF'S Unit Fon Date len Superintendent Date 1 Board Chairman Date Note to parent or guardian: There is no such thing as a free lunch! Someone must pay for every lunch served. If you expect your application to be seriously considered, please fill in honestly and accurately every one of the following blanks: We hereby submit application for lunches without pay for the following child: Nameofoehild ......_.. ...- Age -... Grade -... Teacher: -... cannon School oo a en immek emer iaE ae I. Our total income for the support of the entire family of .___ children and ---- adults is as follows: 1. Weekly salary of Father ______. 2. Weekly salary of Mother ______. 3. Monthly income from the County Welfare Department __________. 4. Other income _____._. 5. Total weekly income from all sources ______. we. JVoen will the income of the family increase? ____. Decrease _.___._. Yl i EE SP LS I Gra Bie sm ih x i DE dre Bo 7. If you receive donations from the Welfare Department, how much of this do you -pay for School JUNCHORY. liu vu vo simi om oh 0 Bi it me me 4 II. Our reasons for making applications for free lunches are: III. Does the family own a car? Yes ..._. No _.___ Make_._______ Model... IV. What is your monthly house rent? ______ Have you paid for your school books? Yes __ No __ Other school fees? Yes _. No __ V. The following reliable references may be contacted concerning our character, our work, and our financial status. (If you are working be sure to give the name of your employer.) YL. ie ams = Address... ......... Phone ....... ugh b eens Address _ ........... Phone We hereby certify that the above statements are accurate and correct the best of our knowledge. Signed: Mrs: n--uiivaiin-s Address... ...... . Phone _..._._. Parent or Guardian Date... Signed: Mir, ..... ..cncner Address =. >... Phone’. 3% Parent or Guardian Date =F. Witness... 0... 0. Address ......_.... Date ...... Recommended by: ooo. io. il in. Approved DY Lda taped meme ae Principal School Lunch Supervisor Somnus; i i SE wt i ie a em et ie eee wm 2260 LEAKSVILLE TOWNSHIP PUBLIC SCHOOLS REQUEST FOR LUNCH PERMIT TO THE PRINCIPAL: This is to request that you permit my child, ATR who is ____ years old ull name and enrolled in the ______________ to come home for lunch every school day J (Name of school) duringithe___: __'' school term. I understand that I take full responsibility for his or her safety after he or she leaves the school campus. I will also let you know in writing if and when I wish you to cancel this permit. Signed: ona cdeoeaast aos ete PT (Name of student) (Parent) Permitidssued by: oo cil pin anda pemin ies Approved by _.____.______ Date ooco.coco (Principal) LEAKSVILLE TOWNSHIP PUBLIC SCHOOLS REQUEST FOR LUNCH PERMIT TO THE PRINCIPAL: This is to request that you permit my child, IS who is ____ years old, ull name, and enrolled in the ______________ to come home for lunch every school day (Name of school) during the ........ school term. I understand that I take full responsibility for his or her safety after he or she leaves the school campus. I will also let you know in writing if and when I wish to cancel this permit. Boned. i aa eee wR ed . (Name of student) (Parent) Permit issued by oie ines w Approved by... ....... Date... : (Principal) SEPTEMBER 9, 1970. MER. GLENN D. FuqQua, Rockingham County Department of Social Services, Reidsville, N.C. DEAR GLENN Fuqua: Our field representative, Robin Read, told me how help- ful and interested you and your staff were in our mutual campaign to provide children from low income families with the free school lunches the law says they should receive. Robin showed me your letter concerning Eden cities school lunch policy and we were both impressed by your analysis (my own stuffy way of saying “Wow !”). The school officials are certainly going to have to revise their thinking (and policy making) radically in order to comply with the law, aren't they? I'd be interested in Mr. Hough’s response to your letter. Please do keep us informed. To reinforce your position, I am enclosing a copy of the new federal regula- tion which were issued September 4. They spell out quite clearly what USDA thinks the law says anyway despite Eden school system’s interpretation. I am also enclosing a prototype copy of an application for free and reduced price lunches which was developed during the state school lunch directors meeting with Department of Agriculture officials here in Washington in May. One other thing which may be of interest to you is the National Welfare Rights Organization’s Free School Lunch Campaign booklet which is actually a summary of our School Lunch Bag. We worked on this booklet with NWRO and perhaps additional copies of it might be of use to your staff people. Copies of the kit can be ordered either from us or from the National Welfare Rights Organization, 1419 H Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20005. They charge 25¢ a piece. Because NWRO tends to be somewhat suspicious of welfare departments you might mention that you have been working closely with us on school lunch program problems. : 2261 Incidentally, in case the Board of Education in your area is as confused as many are in North Carolina about finances and federal reimbursement I think that it is worth noting that starting September 1st schools will receive addi- tional federal reimbursement for free lunches even though the appropriation bill is still in committee. States can expect to be reimbursed at an expanded rate from the beginning of the school year on. Congress has already told the administration to spend what it says it needs to meet the President’s promise of free or reduced price lunches for all needy children by Thanksgiving, 1970. One thing to watch out for would be a school board which out of reluctance to provide free lunches tries to get away with offering just reduced price lunches to needy children. Although under the old law, schools could get away with such malicious shenanigans, the new law and the legislative history both say that the neediest children will receive school lunch free. I'm sure that Eden school system’s application form was so off-putting that very few children ever received free lunches. Do you have any figures on how many lunches were served free or at a reduced rate? Also, do you know if the anonymity of children is being protected? Any documentation or examples of discrimination against needy children or identification of needy children as recipients of free lunches would be of interest to us. Again, my thanks for your help and dedication. Bread and justice! BARBARA BODE, Community Coordinator. SEPTEMBER 1, 1970. MER. HERBERT ROREX, Child Nutrition Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. DEAR Mr. Rorex: I know you told Barbara Bode, the Foundation’s Commu- nity Coordinator, that he was exaggerating the situation in communities across the nation. ; I am enclosing an application form received today from Eden, North Carolina. I don’t think Miss Bode was exaggerating. I think she understood the disgraceful and criminal treatment of needy children in the United States. Sincerely, JONATHAN KLEINBARD. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, Foop AND NUTRITION SERVICE, Washington, D.C., September 8, 1970. MR. JONATHAN KLEINBARD, The Children’s Foundation, Washington, D.C. DeAr Mr. KLEINBARD : I appreciate receiving your letter of September 1 and attachment thereto. I certainly agree with your observation about Barbara's understanding of the treatment of needy children in the Nation. The attachment is a prime example of such treatment, and I assure you such an instrument will not be in use in the Eden City Schools this year or any other school if we become aware (by any means) of its existence and use. I must clarify my remarks to Barbara which you mention in the first para- graph of your letter. I did not mean Barbara was exaggerating the point, but that she was implicating large numbers of school boards by generalization and delaying us in corrective measures by such generalization. Eden City will be corrected as will any other board that is operating contrary to the law of the program regulation. Any other illustration she has in hand would be appreciated, and I assure you they will be corrected. Sincerely, HERBERT D. ROREX, Director, Child Nutrition Division. 2262 oN, SPECIAL REPORT Community Nutrition Jnstitute CNI SPECIAL REPORT #1 WASHINGTON, D.C. OCTOBER 15, 1970 SENATE COMMITTEE INVESTIGATES INITIAL PROGRESS UNDER NEW SCHOOL LUNCH LAW Sen. George McGovern called for a supple- mental appropriation for school lunch programs "so that the intent of Congress to feed all needy children can be carried out by the school districts across the country." His pledge was underscored by Sen. Philip A. Hart, who said that $310 million more would be required in additional funds, based on figures developed by Rep. Carl Perkins (D-Ky.) CNI carried the Perkins data in its Oct. 7 report. "We have come a good part of the way on the school lunch problem, Mr. Chairman, and in the next few months, I would urge that our Com- mittee concentrate on finishing this particular job. Let's make sure that we get the additional money in the Supplemental Appropriation bill; let's clear up any remaining barriers in the way of putting the food on the table," Sen. Hart said. "The President has set this goal: At least one good meal a day for every needy child in the nation by Thanksgiving... Let's really celebrate Thanksgiving by helping the President achieve the goal." Increase in Funds of 230% A "Must" Senator McGovern, in his introductory re- marks, observed that the new law promised a heavy impact in the fight to eliminate hunger and malnutrition from the classrooms of America. "But, " he added, "the time has come to guarantee deliverance of the intent of that promise." He ex- pressed concern that eligible children be located and adequate provisions made to feed them. He compared the estimate of 6.6 million eligible children by the Administration with the 8.9 million (Continued from page 4) kk ok kk ok kk ck kk ok ok ok k kk Kk Kk k Kk WITNESSES * : Rodney E. Leonard, editor, CNI % Weekly Report, and consultant to the * Children's Foundation. * Josephine Martin, Administrator, * School Food Services, Georgia Department x of Education. * Philip Neumark and Daniel H. Lowen- stein, Attorneys, Californja Rural Legal * Assistance, Modesto, Calif. * Gary Delgado, Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now. * Mrs. Kay Hurley, Community Repre- % sentative, South Boston, Mass. * Glenn D. Fuqua, Director, Dept. of Social Services, Rockingham County, N.C. Peter Thoms, Rhode Island Legal * Service. * * k kk k k k kk ok kk kk k k k k k k k k Xk Kk k % k k k %k % ok *k %k ok k *k k k k *k ¥k * States Caught in Dilemma They Didn't Make Josephine Martin told the Committee that states are caught in a dilemma on child nutrition. "On one hand they are told to implement the law in 1970-71, and on the other hand having money available only at the 1969 level. She listed five policy questions, most of them shared by state and school district food service directors: : 1. "What kind of leadership is needed to motivate school districts to provide comprehensive child nutrition and nutrition education programs for all children?" (Continued on page 2) 2263 CNI SPECIAL REPORT (Continued from Page 1) 2. "How can the service and education aspects be coordinated at federal, state and local levels to avoid the dilutions of effort through fragmentation?" : "3. "How can we be instrumental in helping USDA perceive the urgency of regulations, and procedures that are timely, succinct and reason- able ?" 4. "How can we cowumunicate to the Con- gress and the President the need for adequate, available funding if we (collectively) are to meet school day nutrition needs of children?" 5. '""How can we utilize the resources of and cooperate with community groups to achieve program purposes ?'' President's Goal May Not Be Possible For the imm ediate school year, however, Miss Martin said that realization of the President's Thanksgiving goal would be difficult, if not im- possible, if the following problems are not resolved: * Providing information to school districts regarding free and reduced price lunch require- ments. * Direction regarding funding available for implementing PL 91-248. * Restrictions, by regulation, limiting amount of funds paid per lunch. * Inadequate non-food assistance funds. * Need for financial assistance for child nutrition coordinator. * Need for positive direction to coordinate nutrition services and nutrition education to pro- vide necessary repetition and avoid undesirable overlap. Particularly, regulations must be issued to implement nutritional education provisions of PL 91-248. Miss Martin noted that in the 23 area meet- ings being conducted in Georgia to help implement the new legislation, school administrators are asking whether funds will be available to imple- ment new policies, and whether personnel can be provided to carry out the expanded programs. "I would recomm~nd the position of child nutrition coordinator for the implementation of PL 91-248, especially the provisions for free and reduced lunches, nutrition education, training and experimental programs and annual plans of oper- ation. "Unless help is provided and standards PAGE 2 OCTOBER 15, 1970 are established, the child nutrition program ef- fectiveness will continue to vary from school to school depending on the interest of the principal." Assurances of Funds Needed Now “She said the concern over funding is great- er now than in September, and requires assurance and positive action from the USDA that funds will be available. "Schools cannot provide free lunches that cost 45 to 50 cents when the reimbursement is less than 20 cents. "Even more di stressing, '' Miss Martin told the Senators, ''we are now advised that the letters of credit for September through Oct. 15 will be based on the level of funds available for the same period in 1969; which will mean 30 to 40 percent less than anticipated under the 1971 Senate appropriations committee bill," Advise Schools of Funding Intent The Georgia school lunch director quoted a policy statement on funding made by Rep.’ Carl Perkins, chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor. Perkins said last month: "While the House and Senate (appropriation) reports have carefully provided for spending at a level to implement PL 91-248, there is nothing in the administration of the program either in guide- lines or in recommendations which advi se states of the position (that adequate funding is going to be provided). It seems to me that states and dis- tricts should be advised of Congressional intent to fund at the level of PL 91-248. We cannot. allow Congressional intent to be thwarted by the failure of USDA to administer programs according to the wishes of the Congress." Regs Block Feeding All Needy Children Miss Martin also stated that USDA regu- lations, specifically those under Section 210, con- tain roadblocks which make it virtually impossible for states to insure that all needy children will be reached this year. Section 210. 11(a) will dilute general cash for food assistance funds (Section 4) because it forces payment of a higher rate for. . children who are not needy. This will undercut the ability of a state to provide for the maximum num- ber of needy children. "Regulations need to be changed to permit states to pay up to 60 cents from a combination of funds with Section 4 funds being paid at the state average, '' Miss Martin said. * kk kk 2264 CNI SPECIAL. REPORT PAGE 3 OCTOBER 15, 1970 Problems Stated: Recommendations Offered "All evidence accumulating today indicate strongly that, instead of having passed through the worst part of the war on hunger, we are approach- ing a crisis of greater dimension than anyone can imagine." So stated Rodney Leonard, who based his conclusion on the observations that: The School lunch program is not reaching enough children, especially those whose parents are poor, and those being reached are not necessarily receiving adequate nutrition. And, except for "the steadfast support of a few individuals" and the Committee's resolute stance, concern over malnutrition and hunger is dissolving in public apathy." Leonard quoted data developed by the’ McGovern committee as well as by the Perkins House Education and Labor Committee to show that the program, overall, is not expanding as might be expected from the weight of more federal dollars. More Needy Children Than Estimated by USDA According to Leonard, "state school food service directors reported for the Perkins study that 8.9 million children should receive a free or reduced price lunch, using eligibility standards which were in effect last school year." Mr. Per- kins, noting that most states were using an in- come standard which is lower than the new in- come guidelines policy announced by Secretary Hardin in August, estimated that over 10 million children would be eligible for special assistance in the current school year. "With funding at the present level now pro- vided in the appropriation bill... the Federal Government will fall short of meeting its real obligations to the states and local school districts by... probably $200 million," Leonard estimated. Local Discriminatory Practices Revealed Referring to information summarized by the Public Information Center, Leonard stated "that children, and their families, who are eligible for special assistance are being denied a service to which they are legally entitled." He recounted practices used by local school officials to keep down the number of children re- ceiving special assistance - quota systems which place a limit on the number of free or reduced price lunches; publishing names of eligible families in newspapers, announcing over the loudspeaker the names of children who get free lunches, segre- gating children who receive free lunches, serving free lunches on different colored plates; withhold- ing or threatening to withhold food as a disciplin- ary tool; withholding wages for farm work to pay for meals; and using application forms which arc clearly illegal. Nutritional Content of Lunch Questioned An analysis two years ago by the USDA re- vealed that more than a third of the lunches did not meet the Type A nutritional requirements, Leonard said, which "raises a question of whether the Federal Government was being defrauded..." In his closing remarks, Leonard, by infer- ence, recommended: * Develop a program budget related to the needs of local communities; * Plan at the community and state level for child feeding five years hence; * USDA should gather, analyze, publish and pro- vide Congress with data similar to the McGovern and Perkins data on which to base funding; * Develop a data base of the food preference of children. Menus are designed on the basis of what people think children like to eat, or should eat; * Institute a research program to analyze and re- port at intervals on the nutritional quality of the food American citizens consume. These are the type of activities, Leonard stated, which are "relevant to the politics of distribution... and that is the nature of the prob- lem... some of us - this committee in particular- are recognizing. And that is the real tragedy. Just when we are beginning to understand the true dimension of the problem, the Congress and the country have begun to find hunger boring. " * kk kk Lyng Comments on Leonard Testimony Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Richard Lyng was quoted in The Washington Post of Oct. 14, as believing that ''we're going to come very close to feeding all poor children by Thanksgiving pro- vided that state and local school officials cooperate fully. The Post article continued: "While acknowl- edging that the actual number of needy children still is not known, Lyng said 'it seems a little early for criticism, particularly from Leonard." "Lyng pointed out that appropriations for free school lunches have risen from $42 million in 1969, Leonard's last year as administrator, to $356 million this year. "Lyng agreed with another point of Leonard's testimony--that many local school officials still illegally deny benefits to poor children or subject them to various kinds of discrimination..." ook kd e——— 2265 CNI SPECIAL REPORT CNI WEEKLY REPORT Rodney E. Leonard, Editor Leslie J. Schmidt, Associate Editor Published by the COMMUNITY NUTRITION INSTITUTE 520 Colorado Bldg., Washington, D.C. 20005 ' (202) 347-4234 Copyright 1970 Community Nutrition Institute. May not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission. ( Continued from Page’ 1) by the House Education and Labor Committee, and said that "under the new law 70.6% more children will be promised the right to a free or reduced price lunch' and asked, '"What must we do to’ guarantee that right ?" The Chairman pointed out that a 230% in- crease in funds will be needed while only a 56% increase is being appropriated for fiscal 1971. He made it clear that he felt a supplemental ap- propriation will be required and that "we intend to supply this funding'' so that the intent of Con- gress to feed all needy children can be carried out by the school districts across the country. Sen. McGovern presided over the hearings on school lunch performance, which were attended by Senators Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.), Charles H. Percy (R-Ill.), Claiborne Pell (D-R. 1.) and Philip A. Hart (D-Mich.) * kk kk Modesto Program Growing: Once Abandoned Modesto public schools in California are serving nearly 1, 900 children with free or reduced price lunches this school year, the Committee was told. The information is significant for a number of reasons, including these: 1. The number of lunches is four times as great as in the last school year, and over 10 times greater than in the 1968-69 school year. 2. The program represents an expansion of 250 percent in the amount of local school board funds made available for school food service. 3. Last May ''experts predicted that any effort by Congress to enforce uniform and adequate free lunch standards would drive school boards across the country' to follow the example of Modesto and drop out of the school lunch program. These were the points made by t wo attor- nies from the California Rural Legal Assistance PAGE 4 OCTOBER 15, 1970 program in testimony before the Committee. Daniel H. Lowenstein and Phillip Neumark are are the attornies who in February won a court action which forced the Modesto school board to provide free lunches to every needy child. As a result of that decision, the Modesto schools dropped the National School Lunch program, an action which many persons suggested at the time would be the result of efforts to obtain great- er compliance with program objectives. The California attornies quoted a state- ment made by Dr. Bert C. Corona, superintendent of Modesto schools, that "The continuing financial participation by the state and Federal Government is absolutely essential to the maintaining of the (NSLP) in the Modesto City Schools," and adding that the Modesto experience ''shows that school boards will willingly participate in a program that will feed every needy child, so long as Con- gress provides the necessary funds." * kk k ok Confusion Over Regs Results in Hungry Children An organizer for Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a citizen group of low income families in Arkansas, des- cribed to the Senate the impact of confusion over school lunch policy on families with children in school. Gary Delgado, the organizer who also is field representative for the Children's Foundation, said that school officials in Little Rock "have in- dividually and in unison stated in private and to the press that the new regulations, in whole or in part, do not go-into effect until Jan. 1, 1971." He said this position was stated 'despite constant rebuttal, including direct reference to the "Federal Register, and a telegram from... the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Need." Delgado said USDA should clarify: 1. Appeals procedure place the burden of re- sponsibility on school officials, not parents. 2. Income poverty guidelines are floors, not ceilings. 3. Officials must comply with regulations even though the school lunch policy has not been ap- proved by the state. 4. Specific standards must be set for both free and for reduced price lunches. 5. Reimbursement rates should allow for 100 percent of cost. 2266 [From North Little Rock Times, Sept. 24, 1970] ScHOOL LUNCHES: WELFARE RicHTS Groups SEEK Freer PoLricy; OrriciALS REFUSE, Crt CosTsS Another delegation of National Welfare Rights Organization members made a fruitless bus trip last week to the School District administrative offices to urge immediate compliance with the new federal laws guaranteeing free or reduced- price lunches to pupils from poor families. This time the delegation was from Silver City Courts, a public housing project at 708 West Eighteenth Street. The delegation consisted of eight women and 10 children. Superintendent of Schools George E. Miller received them in the School Board chamber and, from his usual perch on the press table at the front of the room, told the group : The district was not complying with the new law because it did not go into effect until January 1 and because the state Education Department has been unable to say what the rate of federal reimbursement would be to local school districts for free lunches. The district served 189,000 free lunches last year and went $33,000 into the red with its cafeteria program, mainly because it receives no federal reim- bursement for the free or reduced-price lunches it serves to secondary pupils. Any parent who believes his children are eligible for such lunches should apply through the principal's office and their claim will be investigated by the principal and district social workers. THEIR AIM The NWRO members are interested in persuading the School District to begin compliance with the new laws now. A key feature of the laws is use of a self- certification form under which the head of any family who thinks he is eligible can sign up for a free or reduced-price lunch for his children. It is up to the local school district to prove ineligibility, and the applicant is given the right of appeal. Along with self-certification is supposed to come a federal reimbursement rate of up to 60 cents a lunch—a rate that would pay the entire cost of virtually any school lunch. It is this reimbursement rate that the North Little Rock district wants to be assured of before it enters the program. The NWRO members say it is assured now, but the district says that the last word it had from the state Education Department was that the rate was still a matter of congressional debate. Compliance with the new laws is not mandatory until January 1, the district says, so it is waiting to see what Congress does and in the meantime will follow its established policy on free or reduced-price lunches. Miller told the delegation from Silver City Courts that the legislation it was interested in was still the subject of a House-Senate conference. REFERS TO SHEET Walt Rathke, a NWRO organizer who accompanied the delegation, referred Miller to a “fact sheet” the group had brought along. It said the Agricultural Appropriations Act of 1971 “authorizes administration of the National School Lunch Program at a reimbursement rate in excess of that requested by the bill, thus assuring (the Agriculture Department) that the program should be admin- istered as if the appropriations bills had already passed.” Miller glanced at the fact sheet, shook his head and said: “I’ve dealt with the government a long time, and they’ve never gone back and paid for what's been done.” 2267 At one point there was this exchange over the question of availability of fed- eral reimbursement for free or reduced price lunches under the new guidelines: Rathke : “The money is THERE.” Miller : “The money is NOT there.” Rathke : “It’s in the BILL.” Miller: “I don’t care what's in the BILL—where is the MONEY.” Rathke: “It’s there.” Miller : “Not in Arkansas, it isn’t.” MILLER BRISTLES Rathke insisted that except for the income guidelines that the new federal laws on administering the school lunch program are in force. He wondered whether the district needed any help in complying with them. “Not from you, I don’t,” Miller snapped. “We are perfectly capable of running this School District without your help.” Miller also upbraided the delegation for showing up at his office without ask- ing for an appointment. “How did you know I wasn’t in conference?’ Miller asked. “You have no right to come in here and expect us to take care of your whims.” Miller said that if an appointment had been made he could have had district officials fami- liar with the lunch program on hand to discuss it. “Don’t look at me, buddy,” Rathke told Miller. “We asked your secretary if you were available, and she said you were.” Rathke asked Miller whether the delegation could discuss the school lunch program with the School Board at a special meeting. Miller said there was “no possibility” of the board holding such a meeting and that the delegation could appear at the next regular School Board meeting on October 15 if it requested a place on the agenda two weeks ahead of time. GROUP’S ALLEGATIONS The group’s fact sheet alleged that the School District was not complying with a number of provisions of the new school lunch law and that the district was costing the taxpayers money because it had not applied for the new higher rate of federal reimbursement for free or reduced price lunches. “We comply with all laws,” Miller said tartly, “federal laws, state laws, mu- nicipal laws and school district laws.” He told the group that what the group wanted would not save the taxpayers as a whole any money. “In fact, you're piling it on,” Miller said. Rathke said the reason some persons had not applied for free or reduced-price lunches in North Little Rock was that the district had not distributed applica- tion forms as required by the new federal law. “I have found out this about human nature,” Miller said, “if you distribute a form to everyone, then everyone is needy.” Rathke objected when Miller said the district would not accept the applica- tion forms being distributed by the NWRO to some low-income people here. “We CAN use our own forms, and we WILL use our own forms,” Miller said. Nevertheless, Miller took the applications that members of the Silver City Community Organization had brought along, some in paper sacks carried by children. [From the Washington Post, Oct. 14, 1970] SENATE PANEL ToLb oF ABUSES IN ScHoOL LuNcE PROGRAM (By Nick Kotz) Officials disagreed sharply yesterday about whether several million poor chil- dren still will be denied free school lunches by Thanksgiving Day—the date by 2268 which President Nixon has promised that all poor school children will be covered. But there was agreement at a hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition that local school officials still engage in massive discrimination against poor children seeking free meals. Sen. Philip Hart (D-Mich.) termed the various abuses “a litany of horrors.” Rodney Leonard, a consultant for the Nutrition Foundation, said more than 10 million children are eligible for free or reduced price meals, rather than the 6.6 million estimated by the Nixon administration. He said budgeted funds will fall $100 million to $200 millon short of meeting “tragic needs.” Leonard cited a study by the House Education and Labor Committee to support his estimate of needy children. However, Richard Lyng, an Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, said later he believes “we're going to come very close” to feeding all poor children by Thanks- giving provided that state and local school officials cooperate fully. While acknowledging that the actual number of needy children still is not known, Lyng said “it seems a little early for criticism, particularly from Leonard.” Leonard administered the food programs during the Johnson administration. Lyng pointed out that appropriations for free school lunches have risen from $42 million in 1969, Leonard’s last year as administrator, to $356 million this year. Lyng agreed with another point of Leonard's testimony—that many local school officials still illegally deny benefits to poor children or subject them to various kinds of discrimination. Among examples Leonard cited were: Establishing a quota on the number of free lunches, a practice he said exists in Dallas and other cities. No Dighing the names of eligible families in newspapers, a practice in Cairo, eb. Announcing over the school loudspeaker the names of children who receive free lunches, a practice in Topeka. Serving free lunches on differently colored plates, a practice welfare mothers say exists in Little Rock. Withholding or threatening to withhold food, as a disciplinary measure. Withholding wages earned by children in farm labor to pay for school lunches, a practice he cited from Chatham, Va. Requiring children to work for their meals, thereby requiring them to miss classes. All of these discriminatory practices are forbidden by the National School Lunch Act. Mrs. Kay Hurley, a welfare mother from Boston, Mass., said she had been arrested for demonstrating against welfare inequities, and now believes citizen arrests should be made of school officials who are violating the School Lunch Act. 2269 OREO, WHY DO TEACHERS GAY I'VE GOT A EMPTY HEAD? BECAUSE YOU DON'T COME UP WITH THE CORRECT ANSWERS ‘| ENOUGH, PEE WEE / BUT THAT'S NOT BECAUSE / oF Jats > bx .. MY STOMACH 1S | WHAT HAPPENED To YOU | | AGAIN?! WHAT DID THEY | | ... THEY REMEMBERED +.. AND ToOK ME STRA TO THE LUNCHROOM/ AT SCHOOL TODAY PEEWEEY) | DO THIS TIME 2 TAKE _ | | ME FROM BEFORE... You BACK > THE NURSE? 2270 (By Mike Feinsilber) Washington (UPI).—Last December President Nixon said it was his admin- istration’s goal to make sure every needy child in America would have access to a free or cut-price school lunch by Thanksgiving, 1970. Congress wrote that pledge into law. But with Thanksgiving just around the corner, the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human needs was told Tuesday children still go to school hungry and come home hungry. Sen. George S. McGovern, D.-S.D., said only half of 9 million eligible children are being fed. The country, he said, “is bored with hunger.” Witnesses before the committee said many school administrators are reluctant to carry out Congress’ intent. Some are indifferent, they said, and some are hostile. Rodney Leonard, an official of The Children’s Foundation of Washington, D.C. said some schools use free lunches as a disciplinary tool. They give lunches to children who behave, he said, and take them away from children who don’t. Glenn D. Fuqua, Director of The Rockingham County Department of Social Services in Reidsville, N.C., said a paper barrier has been erected between the hungry child and the lunch that congress wants him to have. He said regula- tions of the Eden City School System in Eden, N.C. document this. He quoted from the lunch policy statement of the Eden school systems. “When, after visitations, investigations, conferences by the principal and attendance counselor the eligibility is verified, the application with recommen- dations is submitted to the superintendent for final approval.” A form which must be filled out by the child’s parent or guardian declares: “There is no such thing as a free lunch! Someone must pay for every lunch served.” The application form solicits information—the family’s income, its welfare payments, its “reason for making applications for free lunches,” whether it owns a car and, if so, the make and model, how much rent is paid, whether the family has paid for school books, and two character references. “This policy, said Fuqua, “is a mockery of the National School Lunch Program.” Another witness, Gary Delgado, a field representative for The Children’s Foundation, presented a paper titled “Documented Abuses of the National School Lunch Act in Arkansas.” He quoted George Miller, school superintendent in the North Little Rock School District, as having said he had not distributed apptication forms be- cause “I have found out this about human nature, if you distribute a form to everyone, then everyone is needy.” “But,” said Delgado, “the reluctance of school officials to comply with the law is not confined to Arkansas, or even to the South.” He said his organization heard complaints “from low income people all over the country.” “There is a yawning chasm,” said McGovern, “between what we say we're going to do and our performance. People wonder whether congress can carry out its intention and whether people—from the president on down—mean what they say.” Sen. Charles M. Percy, R-Ill, said “We've put our finger on something that might almost be a scandal.” WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY, \ Morgantown, W. Va., October 21, 1970. Senator GEORGE MCGOVERN, Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, Washington, D.C. DEAR SENATOR MOGOVERN : The enclosed correspondence relating to alleged discrimination against poor children in the administration of the School Lunch Program in West Virginia is being sent to you at the request of Robert L. Nolan, M.D., Professor and ‘Chairman, Division of Public Health and Preventive Medi- cine, West Virginia University Medical School. Last week the Washington Post carried an article by Nick Kotz making us aware of the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition currently in- vestigating abuses in the School Lunch Program. Our experience indicates there is a definite need for such hearings and for periodic surveillance of the school lunch programs at the county level by persons concerned with the welfare of 2271 children who are neither part of the school system nor charged with the admin- istration of the school lunch program. Such surveillance might well be carried out under the auspice of local or regional legal aid societies with the participa- tion of citizens including substantial representation from parents of poor children. Staff of the Division of Public Health and Preventive Medicine were made aware of a variety of alleged diseriminatory practices by anguished low income parents who attended the West Virginia Food Nutrition and Health Conference held at W. Va. University last April. Some of the alleged practices were similar to those cited by Mr. Kotz, others were more subtle and from the depth of feeling expressed, apparently were con- tributing to the alienation of tender young poor children and their families. As the Division’s representative to the Nutrition Conference I came away feeling that this problem of discrimination against poor children in the schools may not be confined to the school lunch program and may well affect other aspects of the poor child’s school experience. It is hoped that the enclosed correspondence, observations and suggestions will support the efforts of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition to bring to light and minimize discriminatory practices in the administration of the school lunch and other federally derived programs intended to benefit deprived children. Sincerely yours, . Lypia S. ASTON, Public Health Adviser, Division of Public Health and Preventive Medicine. ‘WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY, - Morgantown, W. Va., March 30, 1970. Hon. PAuL C. CAMILLETTI, U.S. Attorney, Federal Office Building, Wheeling, W.Va. DEAR MR. CAMILLETTI: This is in follow-up to our conversation last week in which I reported to you the claim made at the West Virginia Food, Nutrition and Health Conference that poor children are discriminated against in public schools in this county by requiring them to work for the lunches provided under the Federal Programs and also by providing different colored meal tickets to them. As I indicated a member of my staff discussed this in a preliminary way with Dr. Lawrence G. Derthick, Jr., who impliedly defended the policy of requiring work under the aforementioned circumstances as desirable. To the extent that poor children are discriminated against in the administra- tion of Federal and local School Lunch Programs this could be a violation of any and all of the following : : 1. The National School Lunch Act of 1946 as amended 2. The Civil Rights Acts 3. The Child Labor Laws Enclosed is a copy of the article from the student newspaper at West Virginia University. The Daily Athenaeum for March 26, 1970. You will note in the second half of the article the allegation concerning discrimination in school lunches. In addition to the actual overt discrimination alleged, I wonder whether there has been any conspiracy by individuals who may be administering the program at various levels to deny children their civil rights or benefits under Federal Programs. The interest of your office in this matter is very much appreciated. Please let me know if I can provide any additional information or assistance in exploring this problem. With all best wishes. Sincerely yours, ROBERT L. NoLAN, M.D., J.D. Professor and Chairman, Division of Public Health and Preventive Medicine. 42-778 O - 71 - pt. 8 -- 11 2272 MORGANTOWN, W. VA., March 31, 1970. Hon. Paur C. CAMILLETTI, U.S. Attorney, Federal Office Building, Wheeling, W. Va. DEAR MR. CAMILLETTI: As discussed in the student newspaper at West Virginia University, The Daily Athenaeum for March 27, 1970. I have been aware that children from low-income families have been required to “work” for the free- lunch program in the Monongalia County Schools. I support Dr. Robert L. Nolan in any action that might be needed to rectify this situation. Sincerely, CLAIRE MAILLOUX, R.N., M.Ed. MoNONGALIA COUNTY SCHOOLS, Morgantown, W. Va., March 31, 1970. Mrs. LYDIA ASTON, 40 Linden Street, WO, Morgantown, W. Va. DeArR Mrs AsToN : I would like to acknowledge and thank you for the clippings - from the Daily Athenaeum relative to the Food and Nutrition Conference recently held at West Virginia University. I also appreciated your call bringing to my attention some alleged violations of federal regulations relative to the provision for free hot lunches for needy children. I am sure there are two sides to this question. I do believe that in most of our schools the principals are attempting to stay within the regulations and take care of children who have real needs. There are some problems in that each school must stay in the black and some schools have greater needs than others. I will bring this feedback to the attention of our principals at our next meeting on April 22. Sincerely,yours, LAWRENCE G. DERTHICK, Jr., Superintendent. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, Foop AND NUTRITION ‘SERVICE, Washington, D.C., April 12, 1970. Dg. ROBERT L. NOLAN, Professor, Medical Center, University of West Virginia, Morgantown, W. Va. DEAR Dr. NorAN: Thank you for your recent telephone call concerning the service of free lunches in Morgantown, West Virginia. We have asked our New York Regional Office to check into this situation with the West Virginia State Director of School Lunch. We will write you again when we have received a report on the matter. Sincerely, HERBERT D. ROREX, Director, Child Nutrition Division. Apri, 3, 1970. Mr. PAuL CAMILLETTI, U.8. Attorney, Federal Courthouse, Wheeling, W. Va. DEAR MR. CAMILLETTI : There is currently considerable interest in Monongalia and Preston Counties in investigating the County School Hot Lunch Programs with regard to possible violations of Federal statutes and regulations. This is to indicate to you that the Legal Aid Society has been interested in this since several clients have complained about the situation. On the basis of what I have been told, I believe that Federal regulations are being violated. This is not necessarily the official policy of the School Administra- tion. However, due to each lunch program being run somewhat independently by each principal and the idea that the budget must balance, certain inequities are bound to occur. 2273 The following are several examples of what has been reported to me personally. I am not attesting to the verity of each, but merely stating that this is what I was told. EXAMPLE I Family A—Mother, 5 children (all in school), $173/mo.— Welfare. Child 1, 18 yrs.; University High School ; no school lunch program ; no lunch eaten. Child 2, 15 yrs.; Jr. High; never applied for free lunch this year; worked for it last year, but got behind in classes ; doesn’t eat lunch. Child 3, 14 yrs.; Grade School ; get lunch without paying; carries garbage out in return; doesn’t mind the work, but objects to doing it in view of other children. Child 4, 13 yrs. ; Same as Child 3. Child 5, 8 yrs. ; Grade School ; gets free lunch without working. EXAMPLE II Family B—Two grade school girls, both work for lunches. One sweeps floors. One who is in the 4th or 5th grade has worked for lunches since 2nd grade. Girls are afraid to tell teacher they want free lunches without working for it. Also, girls stated that they work while other children eat and on a few occasions there was none of the prepared food left for them. EXAMPLE III Family C—Mother, Father, 6 children (4 in school), $183/mo.—Welfare Child 1, 15 yrs.; Jr. High; parents generally buy it, but near end of month money is gone; mother has called Board of Education and the particular school, but received no action. Child 2, 14 yrs.; Jr. High; supposed to be getting free lunch; arranged by Truant Officer ; refuses to eat it since other three do not get free lunch. Child 3, 13 yrs.; Grade School ; no free lunch; generally a sack lunch is sent, but at end of month no food for it; on several occasions has been sent home when no lunch was brought; mother refuses to return child in afternoon when this happens, due to fears of traffic, etc. Child 4,9 yrs. ; Same as Child 3. EXAMPLE IV Family D—Mother, Father, 7 children (5 in school) on Welfare and live in two-room house. Boy in Grade School had to work, but on advice of Legal Aid Society, he requested free lunch without working for it. Principal granted this. Eventually the other children of this family did the same. All now get free lunch without working. In addition to these examples, reports of window washing, sweeping, etc. for lunches are prevalent. We are most willing to help in any way we can with this problem. So far we have merely attempted to handle this on an individual basis, hoping that the School Administration would take the initiative to remedy any inequities which exist and to this end we will provide our services to them in helping set up a non-discriminatory legal lunch program. Sincerely, LARRY V. STARCHER. [From the Daily Athenaeum, Mar. 26, 1970] WELFARE WORKERS, RECIPIENTS AND STATE AT ODDS FIGHT FOR MORE MONEY TRAPS PEOPLE IN MIDDLE (By David A. Milne, Assistant Managing Editor) The West Virginia Hunger Conference ended yesterday, not with a bang, but with a growl. The professional welfare workers and nutrition experts apparently recognized that the growls they heard throughout the three-day conference came from 2274 hungry stomachs, not from embittered poor who wanted to know how to put the right nutrients into their diets. The welfare: hungry did not get any more food to eat, but they made it known to the professionals that they were hungry. There were no immediate resolutions or recommendations, but as one welfare worker put it: “We organized the poor folks. This was the victory of the conference.” The organization she spoke of occurred Tuesday when two workshops were “taken over” by the poor people. They traded places with the professionals and told them about hunger from their point of view. Yesterday’s closing session was scheduled to be a follow-up workshop where all of the recommendations and resolutions proposed during the preceding sessions would be considered and final drafts passed with the approval of the conference as a whole. But this did not happen. The recommendations and resolutions were drafted by professionals, and when they were presented, the poor people would not go along with many of them. So once again they organized and after a lengthy session came up with their own list of resolutions and recommendations. The conference appeared to be heading towards a stalemate, but leaders resolved the deadlock by appointing a 15-man committee composed of six pro- fessionals and nine welfare hungry to pick the best of both drafts and present them some time in the near future in the name of the entire conference. James Childress, supervisor of the State Department of Welfare in Parkers- burg was named chairman of the committee and Tony Sabo, a welfare recip- ient from Morgantown and head of the local Welfare Rights Organization, was named co-chairman. The confrontation between the welfare hungry and the professional welfare workers and nutritionists at the state hunger conference which ended yesterday is indicative of the state of welfare in West Virginia. Welfare workers and welfare recipients are constantly at odds over who is to get the benefits, how they are to be distributed, and how they are treated. The Welfare Department is constantly asking the state for higher allocations to meet welfare demands and for stricter punitive measures to enforce welfare regulations. The people are caught in the middle. It almost tears your heart out when you look at them. The welfare hungry. The thin drawn faces, swollen red eyes so deep with despair that you can’t hold their gaze for more than a couple of seconds. Their cast-off clothing is too tight or too baggy and their shoes don’t fit. Their hair is often tangled and uncombed, but who can afford cosmetics when his stomach is empty ? They are slow to speak but quick to anger, especially when the welfare system is mentioned. Openly they won’t admit they’re ashamed to be on welfare, and won’t readily acknowledge the almost animal-like treatment they receive from more affluent members of the community. Pride is easy to swallow when your kids don’t have anything to eat. But talk to them privately and they’ll tell you of the angry frustration of living in squalor and of the bitterness they have towards the people who look down on them. They’ll tell you stories that sound like nightmares; describe living conditions that will make you sick to your stomach. But there is no real note of despair in their voices. The welfare system offers them hope. It can feed them, clothe their children and retrain them for new jobs, providing they receive all they’re entitled to. This is the problem the welfare hungry have to face and this is what they had in mind when they made themselves heard at the state hunger conference. The confrontation between the welfare hungry and the professionals was pre- cipitated by three major events: The White House Conference on Food, Nutri- tion and Health; the national Head Start conference; and the attempts by West Virginia Gov. Arch Moore to channel funds earmarked for the Head Start program into his kindergarten plan. All three instances resulted in major victories for the poor people. Their prob- lems received national publicity, and corrective measures are being developed to solve the most urgent ones. 2275 The TAKE-OVERS of two workshops at their state conference—though shoddily organized at times—appear to have been successful. They shifted the priorities of the conference from the generalities to the issues. They exposed discriminatory practices in the school feeding program such as making the welfare children work for their free lunches and giving them different colored meal tickets. They asked why a person must wait 60 days before he can get his first welfare check, why a person’s welfare benefits can be suspended without prior notice, and why the welfare offices don’t trust them. The welfare poor said people of the community thought they were dirty and condemned them for asking for help. “How’d you feel if you're on welfare and working on the state road and you make $1 an hour while the guy next to you gets $3 for doing the same thing?” they ask. They cited these figures for one welfare family of four which received a wel- fare grant of $138 a month. $60 a month for rent. $21 a month for gas. $11 a month for electricity. $16 a month for $106 in food stamps (29 cents per person per meal from food stamps). $3 for water hauling. $23.70 a month for lunch for three school children (no free lunch). This family also has to buy clothes, shoes, toothpaste, soap, soap powders, bleach, school supplies, mops, brooms, razor blades and all the other staples a family needs to have a comfortable life. : The statistics are this grim for the other state families on welfare. Spokesmen for the welfare hungry claimed at the conference that income, not ignorance, is the cause of hunger. “The poor are not any more ignorant about food nutrition than anyone else; they just have less money,” they said. These spokesmen charged that the food processing lobby is keeping the poor people hungry and that “they will continue to lobby for hunger in the United States unless we begin to act now.” : “There are at least 1.3 million Americans with no income,” they said, “yet free stamps are distributed in only two counties in the U.S. The welfare workers have had their problems too. One state welfare worker said recently he found it next to impossible to get the state to take.any punitive measures against school systems which violated welfare regulations. The official said that 35 per cent of the people in West Virginia are poor and indicated that state officials apparently don’t recognize this. He said a $4 million expenditure by the state could provide a daily hot lunch for every public school student in the state and charged that Gov. Moore would rather spend $22 on an ineffective kindergarten program. Oo U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES C0e223u0a3e