This book is the result of painstaking work done during the second half of
1979, mostly in Philadelphia, but also in St. Louis, Chicago, New York City
and Washington D.C.
It includes a collection of materials from federal agencies such as the
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the General Accounting
Office (GAO); from community sources, such as Philadelphia and St. Louis Legal
Aid Societies; and from independent sources, such as foundations, private
corporations, books, private papers, etc.
The search for and collection of this material began in August, 1979, when
housing activists in Philadelphia first stumbled across the strangely-worded
theory called "spatial deconcentration." A letter had been forwarded
from the Philadelphia-area regional planning commission to activist attorneys
in one of the legal service agencies announcing a new "fair housing"
program called the "Regional Housing Mobility Program." It might
have been all greek to housing activists had they not already known that some
type of sweeping master plan had already swung into effect to depopulate
Philadelphia of its minority neighborhoods. The massive demolition operations
in minority neighborhoods; which had been systematic, and the total lack of
reconstruction funds from public or private sources spoke to that fact.
Activists had fought pitched battles with the city administration over
housing policies for some three years before the word "mobility" was
ever mentioned among their ranks. In march of 1979, in fact, Philadelphia
public housing leaders launched an attack on a city organized and HUD
sponsored plan to empty the city's public housing high-rise projects. The
question at the time had been: "Where will all the tenants go?" When
the mobility program was unearthed in August, the answer fell into place like
a major piece in a jig-saw puzzle. The answer, naturally, was the suburbs. It
seemed to fit perfectly into the "triage" or "Gentrification"
scheme, which froze the inner city land stocks for the returning suburbanites
who were finding city life more economical than the suburbs.
Focussing their attention on this phenomenon called "Mobility,"
the activists dug for more materials at the planning commission office. With
the new materials available they began to slowly understand that the Mobility
Program was much more than met the eye. By late September they only understood
that the program seemed to be a keystone among federal housing programs and
that HUD was making special efforts to avoid a confrontation over the
matter.
It was tactically decided that the program was too massive to be fought on
a local level. Activists in other cities would have to be sensitized to the
Program and encouraged to swing into action against it. Between early November
and late December, such contacts had been developed in St. Louis, Chicago and
New York City -- all key Mobility cities. All the information that had been
collected in Philadelphia before November was distributed to community
activists in these cities. This action helped uncover massive amounts of new
information about the program, which would have been impossible to procure on
the east coast for various reasons, and which changed the basic nature of the
struggle the activists were waging against the government.
The Philadelphia housing leaders had fought their campaign between 1976 and
1979 under the assumption that their struggle against the land speculators and
government bureaucracy had an economic base. They understood
"gentrification" perfectly, but thought it had developed because the
speculators were slowly but steadily viewing the land in minority
neighborhoods as some kind of gold mine to be vigorously exploited at any
cost. The information uncovered about the mobility program slowly taught them
that they were entirely wrong, and perhaps this misdirection had prevented
them from realizing any measurable amount of success in forcing the city or
government to start-up housing construction projects in the city. It is now
clear, in 1980, that instead of being economic the manifest crises that plague
inner-city minorities are founded in a problem of control.
The so-called "gentrification" of the inner-cities, the lack of
rehabilitation financing for inner-city families, the massive demolition
projects which have transformed once-stable neighborhoods into vast
wastelands, the diminishing inner-city services, such as recreation,
health-care, education, jobs and job-training, sanitation, etc.; are all
rooted in an apparent bone-chilling fear that inner-city minorities are
uncontrollable.
Lengthy government-sponsored studies were conducted in the wake of the
riots of the 1960s, particularly after the 1967 Detroit fiasco which cost 47
lives and was quelled only after deployment of 82nd Airborne paratroopers
flown in from North Carolina which had been commissioned for duty on the
emergency order of then-President Lyndon Johnson. Among intelligence agencies
pressed into service to study the problem was the Rand Corporation. In late
December, 1967 and early January, 1968, Rand was requested by the Ford
Foundation to conduct a three-week "workshop" concerning the
"analysis of the urban problem." It was "intended to define and
initiate a long-term research program on urban policy issues and to interest
other organizations in undertaking related work. Participants included
scientists, scholars, federal and New York City officials, and Rand staff
members.
Johnson also ordered a particularly significant study of the riots to be
commissioned which has led to the emergence of some of the most dangerous
theories since the rise of Adolf Hitler. It was the National Advisory
Commission Report on Civil Disorders, more commonly called the Kerner
Commission Report. Strategists representing all specialities were contracted
by the government to participate in the study. Begun in 1967 immediately in
the wake of the Detroit riot, it was not published until March of 1968. But
only weeks after its emergence, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated and
the most massive wave of riots that was ever recorded in American history
almost forced a suspension of the Constitution.
Samuel Yette reported in his 1971 book, The Choice, that the House
Un-American Affairs Committee, headed by right-wing elements, had put heavy
pressure on Johnson to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law in the
cities. Johnson resisted and instead ordered government strategists to employ
the finest minds in the country to analyze the cause of the revolts and
develop strategies to prevent them in the future.
The workshop participants were asked to prepare and submit papers
recommending "program initiatives and experiments" in the areas of
welfare/public assistance, jobs and manpower training, housing and urban
planning, police services and public order, race relations, and others. The
papers were grouped into four headings, including two called "urban
poverty," and "urban violence and public order."
The Kerner Commission strategists came to the conclusion that America's
inner-city poverty was so entrenched that the ghettoes could not be
transformed into viable neighborhoods to the satisfaction of residents or the
government. The problem of riots, therefore, could be expected to emerge in
the future, perhaps with more intensity and as a more serious threat to the
Constitutional privileges which most Americans enjoy. They finally concluded
that if the problem could not be eliminated because of the nature of the
American system of "free enterprise," than American technology could
contain it. This could only be done through a theory of "spatial
deconcentration" of racially-impacted neighborhoods. In other words,
poverty had been allowed to become so concentrated in the inner-cities that
hopelessness overwhelmed their residents and the government's resolve to
dilute it.
This hopelessness had the social effect of a fire near a powderkeg. But if
the ghettoes were thinned out, the chances of a cataclysmic explosion that
could destroy the American way of life could be equally diminished. Inner-city
residents, then, would have to be dispersed throughout the metropolitan
regions to guarantee the privileges of the middle-class. Where those
inner-city minorities should be placed after their dispersal had been the
subject of intense research by the government and the major financial
interests of the U.S. since 1968. In the Kerner Commission Report, Chapter 17
addressed itself to this prospect. Suburbs were its answer: the furthest place
from the inner-city.
A high proportion of the commissioners for the Report and their contracting
strategists were military or paramilitary men. Otto Kerner, himself, chairman
of the Commission, was the Governor of Illinois at the time of the Report but
before that had been a major general in the army. John Lindsey, Mayor of New
York City, had been chairman of the political committee of the NATO
Parliamentarian's Conference. Herbert Jenkins, before becoming a commissioner,
had been chief of the Atlanta Police Department and President of the
International Association of Chiefs of Police, a reputed "anti-terrorist"
organization. Charles Thornton, the fourth of the seven commissioners, was
chairman of the board of Litton Industries at the time he accepted his
commission, one of the country's chief military suppliers and, before that,
had been general manager of the Hughes Aircraft Corporation -- another major
military supplier -- and a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, a trustee of the
National Security Industrial Association, and a member of the Advisory Council
to the Defense Department.
The Commission's list of contractors and witnesses was no less glittering
in military and paramilitary personnel. No less than thirty police departments
were represented on or before the Commission by their chiefs or deputy chiefs.
Twelve generals representing various branches of the armed services appeared
before the Commission or served as contractors. The Agency for International
Development, the Rand Corporation, The Brookings Institute, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the
Institute of Defense Analysis, and the Ford Foundation all played significant
roles in shaping the Commission's findings.
A hardly-noticeable name listed among the intelligence and military giants
was that of one Anthony Downs, a civilian. Unlike most of the other
contractors, whose names were followed by lines of titles, Downs was simply
listed as being from Chicago, Illinois. His name was to become very prominent
among inner-city grassroots leaders around the country by the end of 1979.
Philadelphia housing leaders had remembered Downs as having been the author of
the so-called "triage" report of 1975 which led to a storm of
controversy at the time.
In his HUD-sponsored study, Downs argued that the inner-cities were
hopelessly beyond repair and would be better off cleared of services and
residents and landbanked. The middle-class should then be allowed to
re-populate these areas, giving them a breath of new life. The activists, in
their rush to uncover information about the Mobility Program, discovered, to
their surprise, that Downs had written Chapters 16 & 17 of the Kerner
Commission Report; the chapters devoted to demographic shifts in the
inner-cities and spatial deconcentration.
Housing activists studying theories of "mobility" and
"spatial deconcentration" stumbled upon yet another
"strategist," also, like Downs, out of Chicago, named Bernard
Weissbourd. Weissbourd wrote two papers in Chicago in 1968 concerning the
crisis of exploding minority inner-city populations. In one paper, entitled An
Urban Strategy, he proposed a so-called "one-four-three-four" plan.
Inner-city minority populations represented such a growing political threat by
their growing numbers, he argued, that a strategy had to be quickly developed
to thin out their numbers and prevent them from overwhelming the nation's
biggest cities. He proposed that this be accomplished through a series of
federal and private programs that would financially-induce minorities to
migrate to the suburbs until their absolute numbers inside the cities
represented no more than one-fourth of the total population.
It is not clear if An Urban Strategy was written before the Kerner
Commission Report was released or before the end of the Rand Corporations
"workshop." Around the same time, however, he wrote another paper
entitled, Proposal for a New Housing Program: Satellite Communities.
Weissbourd argued that the bombed-out inner-city neighborhoods should be
completely rebuilt as "new towns in town" for the middle-class. As
in his Urban Strategy paper, he discussed the threat of explosive inner-city
minority populations and their threatening political power. He suggested that
this threat could be repulsed with the construction of new housing outside the
cities for inner-city minorities. He also suggested that jobs be found for
these people in the suburbs and that ". . . some form of subsidy" be
developed to induce them to leave the inner-cities. It is not clear whether
Downs knew Weissbourd or borrowed his theories in time for his Kerner
Commission Report, or if, in fact, the Report was finished after Weissbourd
published his works, although it is likely, since both worked out of Chicago.
It is clear that both strategists saw American middle-class life-styles as
being challenged by the same explosive, racially-impacted inner-city
neighborhoods.
In the same year that Downs had completed his Kerner Commission Report
chapters and Weissbourd published his theories, President Johnson requested
the formation of a research network that could focus on analyses of inner-city
evolution and area-wide metropolitan strategies. This "thinktank" is
called the Urban Institute. Since its founding in 1968, the likes of Carla
Hills, Robert McNamara, Cyrus Vance, William Ruckelshaus, Kingman Brewster,
Joseph Califano, Edward Levi, John D. Rockerfeller, Charles Schultze and
William Scranton, have served as members of its board of trustees.
The five Blacks who have served, or are serving, are Whitney Young, Leon
Sullivan, William Hastie, Vernon Jordan, and William Coleman; all prominent
middle-class "yes-men." The board of the Institute has had an
interlocking relationship with the boards of trustees of the Rand Corporation
and the Brookings Institute, both close CIA affiliates. Rand's Washington
office, in fact, is located in the same building where the Institute has its
headquarters.
The Institute, to say the least, is a bizarre agency. It was supposedly
founded in the spirit of harmony between the races, but has been dominated by
a substantial number of presidential cabinet members and major U.S.
corporations and Universities, such as Yale and Chicago. Worse, the Institute
has conducted a substantial portion of the research that has led to the
development of Mobility Program techniques. Its president, William Gorham,
recently described the agency as a HUD "testing laboratory." It is
theoretically dominated by the likes of the quasi-military strategists that
dominated the Kerner Commission, especially one John Goodman, the Institute's
major "mobility" specialist.
In terms of the types of experiments the Institute has conducted over its
short history and the highly-sensitive nature of its research work, it ranks
on a par with the CIA itself. Goodman, for instance, heading a team of
strategists, developed, between 1975 and 1979, a series of experiments to
determine the best way to induce inner-city Blacks and other minorities to
leave the cities. A favorite ploy they developed was housing allowances and
the so-called housing "subsidy" progress, whereby low-income
families are supported in their rent payments, or paid cash grants, if they
first agree to move out. Heavy experimentation was also conducted by the
Institute on tactics that could be used to shape the Section 8 Program into a
counterinsurgency tool against minorities.
In 1970, Downs wrote a little known book called Urban Problems &
Prospects, in which he more graphically detailed the theory of spatial
deconcentration. He developed a bizarre concept in the book entitled "the
theory of middle-class dominance." According to him, the dispersal of the
inner-city populations to the suburbs could not be successfully completed
unless and until a model of dispersal was developed whereby the
artificially-induced outflow of minorities from the inner-cities would be
controlled and directed to the point that they would not be permitted to
naturally reconcentrate themselves in the suburbs.
This was the heart of the government theory which was later to become the
theory of "integration maintenance." This type of control had to be
exercised, according to Downs, because white suburbanites would not remain
stable in their bungalows if they were led to suspect that the incoming Blacks
and other minorities were gaining power through their sheer numbers in the
suburbs. The consistent theme of Down's Problems, Chapters 16 & 17 of the
Kerner Commission Report, and Goodman's works at the Institute, was that of
control.
The line of thinking about control found reinforcement in another book
Downs wrote in 1973, entitled Opening Up the Suburbs: An Urban Strategy for
America. Down's theories from the Kerner Commission Report crystalized, taking
as their cue his arguments laid down in Urban Problems. The theory of white
"dominance" was carefully discussed in Suburbs. Included here were
ideas for ". . . a broader strategy," where ". . .a workable
mechanism ensuring that whites will remain in the majority . . ." were
produced. But Chapter 12 of Suburbs carefully laid down a mechanism which
could transform the theories of his former works into practical
application.
The chapter was called "Principles of a Strategy of Dispersing
Economic Integration," and laid down five basic concepts: 1 --
establishing a "favorable" political climate for the strategy; 2 --
creating "economic incentives" for the strategy; 3 --
"preserving suburban middle-class dominance; 4 -- rebuilding
inner-cities; 5 -- developing a further "comprehensive strategy." In
outline format, he analyzed each one. He noted that experiments should be
conducted before the strategy was effectuated and that ". . . more
effective means of withdrawing economic support . . . " should be
developed for the inner-cities to clear the way for landbanking inner-city
neighborhoods.
To the amazement of the inner-city housing leaders across the country,
Down's theory of "dispersed economic integration" was exactly
reproduced in HUD's Regional Housing Mobility Program Guidebook, issued six
years after Suburbs, in 1979.
Also by 1977, a mysterious "fair housing" group in Chicago, the
Leadership Council for Open Metropolitan Communities, was contracted by HUD to
begin mobility programming experiments on Black high-rise public housing
tenants in the Southside and Westside. It was called "The Gautreaux
Demonstration Program" and achieved in two years the removal to the far
suburbs of 400 families. Materials from HUD's 1979 review of the Gatreaux
experiment are included in this anthology.
By 1974, the Congress had enacted the Community Development Act. The
legislation fused together the Urban Renewal programs of the Johnson era and
the Revenue Sharing programs of the Nixon Administration. The title to the Act
laid-out its theory: 1 -- reduce the geographic isolation of various economic
groups; 2 -- promote spatial deconcentration; 3 -- revitalize inner-city
neighborhoods for middle and upper-income groups.
It wasn't until 1975 that point four of Down's theory in Suburbs,
rebuilding the inner-cities, was fully analyzed. It was done in the form of
the "triage" report, completed under HUD contract while he was still
president of the Real Estate Research Corporation in Chicago; a firm founded
by his father, James, some twenty years before. In this report, Downs made it
clear that he wasn't projecting the inner-cities being rebuilt for its present
residents -- the minorities -- but for the white middle-class; the so-called
urban gentry; a theory completely compatible with the Community Development
Act of the previous year, Weissbourd's 1968 writings, and the Kerner
Commission findings. Under point four in Suburbs, Downs wrote that ". . .
new means of comprehensively 'managing' entire inner-city neighborhoods should
be developed to provide more effective means of withdrawing economic support
from housing units that ought to be demolished."
In his "triage" report, he wrote that Community Development funds
should be withheld from inner-city neighborhoods so as to allow ". . . a
long-run strategy of emptying out the most deteriorated areas. . ." A
city's basic strategy, he wrote, " . . . would be to accelerate their
abandonment . .. ." The land having been "banked," it could be
redeveloped for the gentry. He argued that instead of being given increased
services, minority neighborhoods should be infused with major demolition
projects.
When Patricia Harris became Secretary of HUD two years after the enactment
of the Community Development Act and one year after the Section 8 Program
replaced the Section 235 and 236 housing subsidy programs, the General
Accounting Office, under the direction of Henry Eschwege, issued a stinging
review of the Department's policies. Noting that the Section 8 Program was the
". . . principal federal program for housing lower-income persons . . ."
the 1978 report suggested, in threatening language, that "HUD needs to
develop an implementation plan for deconcentration . . ." The report
argued that ". . . freedom of choice . . ." was supposed to be the
Department's "primary intent," but that top HUD officials were
confused about the policy. HUD, the GAO insisted, was continuing to offer
"revitalization" projects in the inner-cities, which was
concentrating poverty in the cities. This policy, it stressed, was
"incompatible" with spatial deconcentration.
In 1979, on the heels of the GAO report came HUD's Regional Housing
Mobility Program. The introduction of the program was itself bizarre, let
alone the program. The emergence of the program was kept so quiet that
virtually no grassroots community organizations in the country knew of its
existence. The activists in Philadelphia had not even been aware of its
existence until August of that year. It still wasn't until November that
grassroots leaders encountered an advisory council member to one of the
planning agencies -- and that was in St. Louis -- who openly admitted that the
program's success depended on its "invisibility."
On August 3, 1979, the planning commission directors of 22 pre-selected
regions in the country were asked by HUD to gather in Washington to be
schooled on the mechanics of the program. They were given Guidebooks and asked
to return to their respective jurisdictions and prepare $75,000 to $150,000
applications for the program. The Guidebook made it clear that these regions
had been specially selected because of their heavy concentration of inner-city
minorities. They were instructed to contact major civil rights organizations
and gain their "input" into the program. It was not coincidental
that the National Urban League was one of the very few Black organizations
that knew of the program's existence. After all, Vernon Jordan, its president,
sits on the board of trustees of the Urban Institute.
The Guidebook smacks of computer technology and is prepared with
mind-control phrases, such as establishing "beachheads" in
"alien" communities; initiating ". . . a long-term promotion of
deconcentration;" identifying ". . . homeseeker traits which operate
. . . on a process of suppression not selection;" and banking on the
". . . promotion of target areas" that ". . . will require that
natural inclinations be altered." True to the Down's model established in
Suburbs and Urban Problems, the Guidebook carefully analyzes the financial
inducements to be used by the government to force minorities out of the cities
and to force uncooperative suburban landlords to accept the program.
The Guidebook makes it clear that the program is intended for major
expansion by 1982, when its funding base will be switched from HUD-Washington
to an assortment of agencies, interestingly including the Community
Development Block Grant funds, CETA, an the Ford, Rockerfeller and Alcoa
Foundations. The CETA job component clearly traced its theoretical roots not
only to Downs, but also to Weissbourd. The Guidebook also carefully lays out
the use of the Section 8 Program as a primary base for mobility
operations.
Once it became clear to inner-city housing leaders that the Mobility
Program was nothing more than the first in a set of mechanisms the government
intended to use to effectuate the ideas discussed in the Kerner Commission
Report, it was easy to organize concerned people around the issue. It was
actually a relief to some activists that proof had finally emerged of a real
master plan, and not merely another fictionalized account of some remote
possibility.
Less than one month after the Philadelphia leaders had made their final
contacts in Chicago and New York City, a five-city conference was organized in
Washington. Called the Grassroots Unity Conference, and held in January, 1980,
it focussed on driving the message home to the government, through HUD, that
the masterplan had been exposed and efforts were being organized in key
regions of the country to stop it.
An almost violent meeting was held between top HUD officials and activists
from Washington, Chicago, St. Louis, New York and Philadelphia during the
two-day conference. A busload of inner-city residents literally invaded the
Urban Institute offices and persuaded its staff to hand over dozens of
documents that further reinforced community leader's arguments that a
masterplan existed, and that the Mobility Program was merely the first step in
a new series of programs designed to systematically empty the inner-cities of
their minority residents.
The friction slowly being generated between the government and the
inner-city communities over this programming and its exposure has the
potential of producing a major domestic crisis in the U.S. Housing and
community activists have for years been confused about the nature of the
deterioration of the inner-cities. The confusion often led to disillusionment
and bitter dissension that sometimes created malevolent situations within the
inner circles of community leaders and groups. Many community leaders knew
that the government was not an innocent party to the problems of the cities,
but few imagined the close association between it and private market forces in
systematically driving the poor and the Black out of the cities.
Fewer still realized that the government had helped organize the
"control" strategy from its inception. Now that the masterplan is
being slowly uncovered by the persistent efforts of grassroots leaders and the
confusion within community groups is evaporating, it may not be possible to
vent their anger in non-destructive ways when the tale is finally told.
Some elements of the Black community, for instance, have argued for years
that the government had declared a "secret war" on Blacks in
America. Now evidence exists which makes the point difficult, if not
impossible, to defeat. At least, an innocent observer must ask the question:
"What kind of a government would allow these types of strategies to
develop and thrive?" Even more to the point, one must ask: "How
stable can a government be with such information emerging?" It now seems
evident that the Constitution, which the Kerner Commissioners and the Johnson
Administration feared was in need of special protections, does not apply to
all people in America, but only the white middle class. The only way the
government can now disprove this argument is to abolish all types of mobility
programming and the "thinktanks" that shaped it.
Researchers in all parts of the country who believe the government is
traveling a lethal path are now uncovering major pieces of evidence to show
the elaborate workings of the masterplan. Some of their arguments are enclosed
in Part III of this book, under the title, "The Minority Response."
Other technical data are enclosed in Part IV and V. Of particular interest in
Part V are the listings offered by the Urban Institute under housing allowance
programs. Section 8 experimentation takes up a good portion of the available
listings. A cursory examination of some of these papers -- and in some
instances a mere reading of the project titles -- plainly shows the
determination of the government to manipulate the Section 8 Program as a key
instrument to force inner-city residents to move into the suburbs through the
Mobility Program.
It aptly explains why these same researchers created the Section 8 Programs
in the first place. Included in Part IV are lists of Boards of Trustees of the
Brookings and Urban Institutes in Washington D.C. Attempts were made, in
preparation for this edition to include a listing of the Rockerfeller and Ford
Foundation's Boards of Trustees. These corporations, however, refused to
release their Annual Reports.
The exposure of the Mobility Program's real intentions will hopefully
change the direction of the government. If not, then the worse can be assumed
for the future of the U.S. because no righteous people on the face of the
earth would or should permit the existence of such policy, even if its
dismemberment means inevitable confrontation or conflagration.
Several aspects of this mobility programming have deliberately been avoided
at this time. Cyrus Vance, for instance, was Deputy Secretary of Defense at
the time of the Detroit riot of 1967 and the initiation of the Kerner
Commission Report. By 1980, Vance was Secretary of State, directly responsible
for at least one organization named in the Report, the Agency for
International Development (AID), widely reputed for its CIA ties. He was also
a trustee of the Urban Institute along with Robert NcNamara, chairman of the
World Bank and former Secretary of Defense under Johnson.
A reasonable question emerges at this point: Why is the military so closely
attached to this mobility programming? Or, worse: What does the military
intend to do in the event that this mobility-type programming fails, and the
Blacks and other minorities remain in large part in the cities into the turn
of the century, and riots create greater so-called threats to Constitutional
safeguards? After all, Downs, himself, stated in Suburbs that he believed the
mobility programming would fail. Is a repeat of the recent history of Greece
or Chile the logical answer to these questions? Did the military, in 1967,
issue an ultimatum to the government to remove the Blacks and other inner-city
minorities to Black suburban "townships" in kid-glove fashion, with
the option, in case of failure, being the iron fist? Furthermore, how could it
have been possible for the surgical demolition operations in the minority
neighborhoods of the cities to be so identical in all major American cities?
Could any organization other than the Pentagon have done this?
These questions have been left unexplored because the weight of available
documentation and the speed with which it is being collected and digested has
been burdensome on anti-mobility forces. Further, this discussion about the
military must be carefully explored by itself because of its obvious
sensitivity. Also left for "Book II" is the discussion concerning
the companion programs of the Mobility Program. Their successful exploration
and revelation may make Watergate look pale by comparison.