Change and Diversity in American Community Life

Abstract

In any Discussion of American community life two beliefs are likely to quickly come to the fore. First, that we have over the last 50 years undergone a revolution in community settlement patterns and today we are an urban nation with more and more of our population crowding into our urban areas. Many now speak with disdain about the runaway urbanization and the emerging “ant-hill society.” A second theme that almost always accompanies the first is that the quality of life in our urban communities is deteriorating rapidly. One can hardly read a daily metropolitan newspaper without spotting a headline which sounds the alarm. Not long ago, for example, the New York Times had a front-page spread with the startling headline, “Eleven Mayors Warn Here of Collapse of U.S. Cities.” Stewart Alsop, in a Newsweek column with the foreboding title “The Cities Are Finished,” managed in the course of one page to inform his readers that the cities may be “finished” because they have become unlivable; that the net population of cities will continue to fall; that the future is statistically predictable—in another 10 years most of our cities will consist mostly of blacks; and that the cities will come to resemble reservations for the poor and the blacks surrounded by heavily guarded middle-class suburbs. More recently, Sol Linowitz, Chairman of the National Urban Coalition, declared, “We have abandoned our cities … [and while they] are not on fire today, most of the conditions that caused the civil disorders in recent years have worsened.”