Housing, the South's Number One Economic Opportunity

Abstract

agency. Moreover, the job was largely undefined which placed a premium on resourcefulness and alertness. This brought with it the danger of spreading thin the efforts of those in the agency with ample imagination, who saw almost unlimited possibilities in the program, and, on the other hand, a sense of frustration was experienced by those staff members who wanted something definite to do. Coordination as carried on through the work of OCWS meant an effort to achieve an over-all view of a given community, although with the wartime pressure, it was often necessary to do piecemeal, emergency planning. The generalized approach was further characterized by being closely related to current operations of agencies rather than being formalized in grand blueprints or master plans. Meetings, informal conferences, reports were all used to pull together the diverse elements of rapidly changing community situations where Federal responsibilities were involved. Relating the work to war-created needs gave a definite focus which was fairly obvious in the isolated or boom-town communities. The emphasis thatwas placed by the agency on a limited number of critical areas also provided some limitation to its scope of activities. However, the line between war-related and long-term planning for services became less distinct as time went on. After the emergency period in many communities, the less acute problems showed up in the long pull. In an area like East St. Louis, Illinois, for example, there were war-related community problems which were not war-created. Some of the stresses encountered during the war were the result of previous deficiencies in community structure rather than being entirely new. Local attention began to be focused on the transition from war to peace as the war reached its climax, and toward the end of the general work of OCWS in June, 1945, more attention was being given to long-term planning. The OCWS experience indicates the values of coordination at the regional level of Federal agency operations, where special devices for circulating information and for consultation between Federal and State agencies on plans affecting local communities not only made for a greater degree of administrative smoothness but also resulted in the pooling of experience and combination oi intelligence on the part of various technical specialists. It is evident that the war experience of OCWS provides a basis for further development of Federal-local relationships. In peace as in war there is a job to be done in expressing the cooperative interests of local and Federal governments in the general welfare or in the pattern of relationships known as community organization. The limitations of remoteness and inflexibility of a Federal bureaucracy in dealing with community problems, as well as the inadequacies of local resources and lack of technical counsel, may both be overcome in such a cooperative approach to the planning of community services.