Mr. DILWORTH. There being little time, and Mayor Mead having covered the subject so well, I would like to hit the highlights because we have a fairly lengthy statement.

The CHAIRMAN. You may proceed as you please, Mr. Mayor. You may incorporate your statement in the record and comment on it, as you desire.

Mr. DILWORTH. I think if I might start with this, the question was asked about how essential is public housing. In a city like Philadelphia, which is of course a very old city, and we have to emphasize for years and years there was tremendous neglect as recently as 1941, a city administration turned down a $20 million grant for public housing from the Federal Government. The result was we have not only been very late in starting, we had a bad situation with which to start.

Being an old city, narrow streets, many many old homes, we today have 15,000 homes in the city that have no plumbing facilities, no running water, no electric lights. It is an amazing situation for a great American city.

We have in the city 70,000 units that are not merely substandard, that are actually slums, and we define slums as unfit for human habitation, in which we have 300,000 people living. So that even if the Federal Government-we figure and we have had really excellent civic organizations that have made complete surveys of the situation, and it is agreed that to clear up our situation, that is, to abolish all slums in the city of Philadelphia, and substitute for them the housing necessary, would cost between $600 million and $750 million and we are acutely aware of the fact if we don't take care of that problem, the city is going to suffer very badly just at a time when we have tremendous potentiality for industrial development, so that the public housing is essential, because I think in big cities such as ours, it has been the universal experience that when you tear down a slum, anywhere from half to a quarter of the people have to be relocated or you simply compound the slum if you try to put them all right back in that same area. We do meet very bitter resistance to public housing.

At the present time we have selected 21 public housing sites which scattered them in every section of the city to be absolutely fair. The citizens think we are being absolutely unfair. We are going through a very rugged session of citizen objection to the location of public housing units, although we have kept them all small, none over 200, some as low as 20 units.

We will fight it through. We are convinced we need them. We have the support of the civic organizations and the newspapers, and I think we can put it through.

I think there is also a feeling and a very legitimate one that maybe the cities don't make all the effort that they should. Philadelphia does have a bonded indebtedness of about $580 million, a good deal of which has been spent for these very sort of things. We are within $25 million of our total borrowing capacity in the city as laid out by our charter, so that we are right up against the wall as far as borrowing goes.

I think most of the large cities are in that similar situation, so that that is what we are faced with.

I think we all realize that there has got to be a decentralization of the great cities, but if it goes on the way it is going on now, the subur

ban counties, at least in our area, certainly are not acutely aware of it, I don't think as yet, of the overall problem that we all have to work together.

Possibly one of the reasons for that is we are allowed to assess a wage tax on everybody who works in the city of Philadelphia, which has caused enormous resentment among the inhabitants of the outlying counties, although if they didn't pay it, we wouldn't be able to keep the city up, so it would be the kind of city they would work and play and make their money in.

Those are some of the tremendous problems that we have.

Specifically, sir, we believe that the requirement of $1 of local funds for each $2 of Federal aid should be changed. We believe it should be about 4 to 1 instead of 2 to 1, and that that would be a fair and reasonable allocation.

In Philadelphia, we have at present used up a great part of the areas that we can use as credits, but we are right up to date on our work. In other words, we have gotten $30 million authorized, only 8 actually appropriated, but we are actually ahead of the Government. In other words, we could use this year more than twice as much money as is available to us, and we have actually condemned 413 acres of land in our city, and in that connection, I would like to bring this out:

I think when you get the proper government atmosphere in a city where the people of the city believe that the city government is really interested in the problem and intends to clean up the blighted areas and doing something about it, when they see the Federal Government taking the steps-and I think we all realize no city, particularly in Pennsylvania, has the taxing power necessary to do it, in addition to which the State of Pennsylvania has, I regret to say, never appropriated a dime for public housing or slum clearance, so the cities have to bear the responsibility entirely themselves that when the people of the city realize that the administration itself is intensely interested and will do all that it can, and we are today putting up more than 10 percent of our annual budget specifically for the curing of urban blight, slums, relocation and all that, we are putting $17 million a year into that pot, which is quite a strain on us, that you get great help from the citizens, and whereas on paper you look at it, every year we have 5,000 units sinking into slum condition, due to the multitude of old houses we have.

You see, we are literally a city of homes there. We have 600,000 homeowners in the city of Philadelphia, and all too many of them are very old. We are only renewing at the rate of about 2,000, which looks as though we are losing the fight every year, but we actually aren't.

That is why we need Federal aid so much more badly, because the cities, I am convinced, when they have the proper climate, as I say, do a tremendous amount to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Civic organizations, such as the chamber of commerce, have started a clean-up, paint-up, fix-up campaign which actually results in the rehabilitation of some 400 of our 10,000 blocks in our city, and we have very big blocks in the city of Philadelphia.

Those, of course, are mostly 1-family homes or at the most occupied by 3 families, but what has been done in those 400 blocks in a period of 4 years is perfectly astonishing.

Right within 3 blocks of where we ourselves live, in the center of the city, 6 years ago were the worst slum conditions I have ever seen; little old boxlike houses which a hundred years ago had been houses in which people of reasonable means lived, had become so bad that a third of them were actually abandoned. You couldn't even get slum dwellers to live in them. Today 8 of those blocks have been completely rehabilitated and are occupied very largely by sort of professional people, young doctors, young dentists, professors, teachers, people of that kind, and that are in an income category of from 5 to 8 or 9 thousand dollars a year.

That has been done by private organizations in the city, with the help and encouragement of the city, the help of an office like our developer of housing coordination, Mr. Rafsky, who has done an extraordinary job of bringing all of these things together.

So that these are the problems with which we are faced.

As I say, we think that it is important that the Federal Government put in, instead of 66% percent, put in 75 and 80 percent for the slum clearance projects.

We also believe that there should be a greater allocation. At the present time, as I understand it, it is only 10 percent of the money that can go to any one State with a leeway of $70 million. We believe that that should be upped and that the recommendation of President Eisenhower's Advisory Committee that one-third of all the sums be made available to special circumstances should be taken into consideration, because there is no doubt that you cannot divide up your urban blight problem simply by population or by States, and that if it was done on a one-third basis, it would be fairer to every community. We also believe that it is important that the goal to be set be the $2 billion rather than the $1 billion goal, and that we get back to the 1949 standard of 200,000 units.

Of course the Rains bill provides, as I understand it, for 50,000 units a year for 3 years, but we believe that even that is very considerably below the goal at which we should shoot.

Now, there are certain specific things which I think we can touch upon briefly:

Mayor Mead touched on some of the problems of actually straightening administrative procedures out. We have found, just as he has, that all of the Federal housing agencies are conscientious; want to cooperate with us in every way possible, but there is an enormous amount of redtape still involved, and we have two specific examples, one a very important project which we call the East Poplar project, another an important project called the North Triange project.

We have been waiting almost 2 years for approval, with the result we have lost some of the private developers who were interested, and it makes it very difficult to get private developers interested and to hold them in once you get them in when there is such a long delay, because of course in their own private developments they are accustomed to closing up a deal within 60 to 90 days, and they can't figure why they have to wait 2 years for these kinds of things.

We also think that it is extremely important that the terms of the FHA home improvement loan insurance be liberalized and that it not merely be optional but actually simply be flatly provided that those loans can go to 5 years.

We believe from talking-and some of our big banks have been very helpful in this field and have been very civic minded-they feel very strongly if there is the mandatory 5-year provision instead of the present 3-year provision, they can tremendously increase the loans that they make, and as a result have that much greater citizen participation.

We also think it is very important to help the middle-income residents. I know it is always necessary to define that, because I think every city has a different idea of what is your middle-income residents. We figure them in people from $3,500 to $5,500 a year.

In our opinion, if we can give more help to those people in financing, relocation for them, financing their own homes and their own improvements, we will go that much further and that much faster in improving

areas.

Again, if I could disgress for 1 moment as to what it means to have the Government come into areas, the Federal Government, and the State, of course, have given us great help in the last 5 years in redeveloping our whole Independence Hall area. We are not only going to have a wonderful mall there, they are going to move 5 or 6 blocks to the east toward the Delaware River and restore a lot of the fine old buildings there.

That was at one time known as the Society Hill section of Philadelphia, and back in colonial days that is where the people lived, and those homes were so well built 100 or 150 years ago that most of them are still structurally sound, but are now in very, very bad shape, but the fact that the Government is coming in there and doing that has led to a remarkable revival of that whole area.

We are going to have two very fine apartment hotels go up in that area; we are restoring some of the historical landmarks ourselves. That has interested many, many people at every level, and in coming back into that area.

Those old slum houses are now being sold at the rate of close to 10 a week, to people who are taking them, either for their own occupancy, or to develop them into nice apartments for younger married couples, in the low-income brackets, or for professional people, people of that kind, so we believe in the next 4 or 5 years that an area about 1 square mile, thanks to the Federal and State Government coming in and doing what they are doing for Independence Hall and that whole area, will have made it possible for the city, without too great an expenditure on its own part, to actually restore one of the most attractive sections that the city ever had.

I think it shows how much it means to our community to have liberalization both of the FHA loans and provisions whereby middleincome families can better finance rehabilitation of their house.

We of course do feel, as I think everybody feels, that section 220 has not been workable, and that that should be liberalized so that we can get so that people really can take advantage of section 220 and make some real use of it. That is section 220 of the FHA. We believe that if that can be worked out so that you would only have to have about a 21⁄2 percent downpayment, and so that it would run for about 12 years, that we could do really effective work in that area. Also, we believe that another trouble has been in the local agencies, and that is not their fault. We believe it is the policy that has been

laid down, that they fix too high a standard for the neighborhoods that they are willing to go into. We have a neighborhood now that Mr. Rafsky laid out that is sort of a test area in which we are going in under our new housing code, and we have an excellent new housing code, in which we are trying to bring these houses up to standards, and also trying to get loans for them. We may have had very good cooperation from the banks. The difficulty has been that the Federal Government considered that this was such a depressed area, although we think that it is possible to rehabilitate it, we have been able to get little or no help from the Federal agencies on the loans that are necessary to really carry out the kind of rehabilitation we had in mind. The result is that at the end of almost 2 years of that work, we still haven't made anything like the progress that we thought we ought to be able to make.

The same thing is true of section 213 of the program for FHA mortgage insurance on cooperative housing, and finally, because I know it is getting near the end of your time, we are very heartily in favor of that part of the program that will make possible housing for our senior citizens. I think all of us are becoming very aware of the problem of our senior citizens, and there is no more important problem at the present time.

It is almost impossible to take care of them.

Finally, if I may end with this, a matter in which Congressman Barrett and all of us are very interested, a specific matter, and that is the question of housing that was originally defense department housing for the use of the Navy, known as the Passyunk Homes. We are very anxious that that should be turned over to the Philadelphia Housing Authority for use as low-rent housing.

Now, I know agreements have been made with the cities and sometimes they haven't been lived up to on this type of housing. We want to point out that we have very rigidly lived up to that. Defense housing that was turned over to us, units that had no business any longer existing, we have destroyed to the number of 2,700. We have put in good shape 1,400 other units so that part of the temporary housing that should have been destroyed we have destroyed. We have only preserved what should be preserved.

These Passyunk houses, which involve about 900 units really, are essential to us in that part of the city. We do hope they are going to be turned over to the Philadelphia Housing Authority, which will give us a grand total of about 12,500 units that we will be operating.

I imagine that time has now come for adjournment, so I had better

cease.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor, for your splendid statement.

(The full statement follows:)

STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARDSON DILWORTH, MAYOR OF PHILADELPHIA, PA.

It is naturally a privilege as the mayor of one of our oldest cities to appear here today. The fact that Philadelphia is one of the oldest cities in the United States means that the city has an extremely serious problem of inadequate housing, or to put it more bluntly, slums.

I am here today not only as the mayor of Philadelphia, but also to speak for the American Municipal Association. The problem of housing is, of course, not peculiar to large cities, although its proportions, particularly in our older,