Relocation." The thoroughness of this study and its particular relevance to the needs and problems facing our nonwhite population have made it something of a classic in the field. A good number of the proposals that the minority on the House Special Subcommittee on Housing have made in the past 2 years have been based, at least in part, on the findings contained in this study, as well as its recommendations. The improvements in relocation, compensation procedures, code enforcement, and the new rehabilitation tools suggested by Republicans and passed with bipartisan support by Congress owe a great deal to the FAMILY RELOCATION UNDER URBAN RENEWAL IN CONNECTICUTPROBLEMS AND PROPOSALS IN A TYPICAL FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PROGRAM INVOLVING RELOCATION (Report of the Connecticut Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, July 1963) MEMBERS OF THE CONNECTICUT ADVISORY COMMITTEE Subcommittee I (on relocation) Prof. John D. Maguire, chairman, Middletown. The Reverend Edwin R. Edmonds, New Haven. Prof. Rex Charlton Neaverson, Hartford. Hon. Robert Satter, Newington. Subcommittee II (on apprenticeship training) Mrs. Sarah Rosenthal, Branford. Consultants to Subcommittee I: Dr. Henry G. Stetler, research director, Connecticut Civil Rights Commission; Robert Feldman. PREFACE This report was submitted to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by the Connecticut Advisory Committee. The Connecticut committee is one of the 51 committees established in every State and the District of Columbia by the Commission pursuant to section 105(c) of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Its membership consists of interested citizens of standing who serve without compensation. Among the functions and responsibilities of the State advisory committees, under their mandate from the Commission on Civil Rights, are the following: (1) To advise the Commission of all information concerning legal developments constituting a denial of equal protection of the laws under the Constitution; (2) to advise the Commission as to the effect of the laws and policies of the Federal Government with respect to equal protection of the laws under the Constitution; and (3) to advise the Commission upon matters of mutual concern in the preparation of its final report. The Commission, in turn, has been charged by the Congress to investigate allegations, made in writing and under oath, that citizens are being deprived of the right to vote by reason of color, race, religion, or national origin; to study and collect information regarding legal developments constituting a denial of equal protection of the laws; to appraise Federal laws and policies with respect to equal protection; and to report to the President and to the Congress its activities, findings, and recommendations. INTRODUCTION Cities in Connecticut were among the very first to obtain major Federal assistance through the Housing and Home Finance Agency's Urban Renewal Administration when it was formally established in 1949. New Haven and Hartford were rapidly followed by smaller towns like Ansonia and Middletown, so that by July 1962, there were 29 Connecticut municipalities engaged in 63 urban renewal projects, requiring the relocation of 12,949 families. By the summer of 1962, 3,125 of these families had been relocated.1 By October, principally because of the launching of a comprehensive general neighborhood redevelopment plan in New Haven, the number of families to be displaced had dramatically risen to 20,760. In this period, only 200 additional families were relocated. Overall, enough families had been relocated to obtain a representative sample of their praise or complaints regarding the process. (Indeed, throughout the extensive interviewing described below, only seven families refused to be interviewed.) A growing number awaited relocation, enough to make a critique of the process urgent. The relocation of individuals and families occurs, of course, not only in connection with urban renewal projects, but also in connection with clearance for public housing, stricter municipal code enforcement, turnpike and highway construction, or the construction of schools, parks, or other community facilities intended to improve a city. However, urban renewal projects have already involved every major Federal housing program and agency and therefore are representative of Federal Government involvement in efforts toward local community improvement. The character and quality of relocation in conjunction with urban renewal projects may therefore be relevant to relocation in connection with these other Federal-local programs. Hence it was relocation accompanying urban renewal projects within our State which subcommittee I of the Connecticut Advisory Committee studied. 1 Housing and Home Finance Agency, Region I, quarterly report, June 30, 1962. 2 Id. Oct. 30, 1962. A number of recommendations to the U.S. Commission, to be forwarded by them to the appropriate Federal agencies, have emerged from our study. For convenience sake, all of them are contained in chapter V. In some instances, we suggest changes in the administering of existing policy by the Urban Renewal Administration, either at the local or regional level, to assure nondiscrimination in the relocation of all families. In other instances, we propose basic changes in the policy itself. Wherever there are relevant statutes, directives, or Executive orders bearing on a recommendation, these are also cited, and the texts of these key regulations are found in appendix C. The reader may wish to refer to the recommendations at the outset of his study of the report. Each member of the committee shared the conviction of the 1959 "Report of U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that”: 3 "The most difficult and important test of urban renewal programs is in the relocation of displaced families. This is particularly true with respect to nonwhite families whose mobility is limited not only by virtue of their economic status but also by racial restrictions." Our unsystematic, impressionistic observations suggested that racially segregated neighborhoods (which bred and reinforced conditions requiring urban renewal) were, in too many instances, being reproduced by relocation in other areas of the city. If relocation were providing the occasion for the recurrence of segregated housing patterns, we wanted to know why, especially since one-fourth of the families involved by October (5,569 of them) were nonwhite. (In a number of States, the percentage of nonwhite families involved is considerably higher.) We sought to learn from the families who had been relocated the types of assistance received from the relocation offices; the extent of their self-relocation; their satisfaction with the new location and their plans to move or stay; whether they owned their new place or were renting; the racial composition of their neighborhoods before and after relocation; and their satisfaction with the racial composition of their new neighborhood. The subcommittee used two major instruments for probing these questions: extended interviewing and a weekend conference. (See Acknowledgments.) Two schedules were designed to be administered by interviewers in those five cities within the State having projects involving both the largest total number of families to be displaced and the largest number of nonwhite families to be relocated. (See schedules II and III, appendix B.) These cities are New Haven (12,540 families to be relocated, 3,325 of them nonwhite), Hartford (1,212 families to be relocated, 492 of them nonwhite), Bridgeport (1,148 families to be relocated, 447 of them nonwhite), New Britain (1,205 families to be relocated, 231 of them nonwhite), and Norwalk (403 families to be relocated, 123 of them nonwhite). Projects in these five cities thus involved about three-fourths of all the families in the State to be relocated, about four-fifths of all the nonwhite families involved, and about nine-tenths of all nonwhite families that had already been relocated at the time we launched our inquiry.5 Chapter II, relying heavily on an extended study in the West End of Boston, and other studies outside the State, tells much about the emotions of families facing relocation. An extended interview schedule for relocation officers was administered to 14 such officials through Connecticut. (See schedule I, appendix B.) These 14 cities in which relocation is occurring include approximately three-fourths of the total nonwhite population of Connecticut. Our findings from these interviews, which often differ from the reports of the relocated families which were interviewed, are provided in chapter III. A representative sample of relocated white and nonwhite families in these five cities was interviewed. Of the 720 already relocated white, Negro, and Puerto Rican families from the five cities in our original sample, 351 were finally interviewed; 142 were Negro, 179 white, and 30 Puerto Rican. (This 49 percent success was quite remarkable in light of the fact that we could not interview 186 families because they were not living at the addresses provided us by the relocation offices; furthermore, our interviews were conducted during January and February 1963, the worst winter in New England in this century.) The stories of these families interviewed are told in figures and comments in chapter IV.9 1. BACKGROUND: THE CONNECTICUT SITUATION IN NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE The word "relocation" first came into technical use in the mid 1930's when the Public Works Administration started clearing slums to build public housing. Then it meant simply displacement forcing people to move so that old buildings could come down to make way for the new. In the 1930's and 1940's, it had only one purpose: to get people off the site so that construction could begin. There was no requirement to find housing for displaced people, nor to pay moving expenses, although many local authorities waived rent to defray moving expenses and helped the families in many kind and humane ways. Growing public conscience brought changes. In 1949, the Federal Housing Act set a new goal: Localities must try to relocate families in standard housing and local renewal agencies could pay moving expenses. These changes were regarded as adequate safeguards against hardship; relocation in standard housing with reimbursement for out-of-pocket moving expenses was regarded as an adequate goal. These changes, however, seemed inadequate to the concerned ob• Fried, "Grieving for a Lost Home," "The Environment of the Metropolis," ed. Leonard J. Duhl (1963) (a report of the West End research project of the Boston Center for Community Studies). A word about nomenclature. Sometimes analysis uses only white and nonwhite racial categories. The Puerto Ricans are distributed in an unknown proportion between the two categories, although the nonwhite category is predominantly Negro in Connecticut. In this particular analysis dealing with data secured from field interviewing of relocated families, white refers to white respondents but excluding white Puerto Ricans; Negro refers to Negro respondents but excluding Negro Puerto Ricans; Puerto Ricans includes all respondents of Puerto Rican origin regardless of color. 8 A town-by-town breakdown of the completed and uncompleted interviews of relocated families follows: Sample of relocated families selected for interviewing, January servers of relocation and certainly unsatisfactory to the people being relocated. Pressures led to the Housing Act of 1954, which converted the notion of urban renewal from mere slum clearance to total community improvement. It required communities seeking Federal assistance to build into their plans strict housing codes and zoning enforcement, a comprehensive community workable program, communitywide citizen participation, a neighborhood-byneighborhood analysis of blight, and-most important-the provisions of decent, safe, and sanitary housing for displaced families.1 As the 1961 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report and numerous other sources testify, the great difficulty for the Urban Renewal Administration nationally, and for its local relocation officials especially, has been in making this workable program work. Cities across the country often had weak housing codes laxly enforced. Their preparatory plans for a community program were often altogether inadequate. Often census data and other printed records were used instead of on-the-spot inspections to "analyze❞ the neighborhood needs and to determine housing supply. The projects themselves were mostly of the clearance, rather than rehabilitation type, and were hastily planned and pushed through. Citizens' planning and action committees frequently functioned only spasmodically and ineffectively. But the major problems for renewal authorities and their officials seemed to root in the relocation with many children, and what have become to be called multiprocess itself, and to involve racial problems, low incomes, families problem families. Our study confirms in part these relocation problems. The study required "placement" by the LPA (local public agency under shows that while only 17 percent of the white families interviewed families and 33 percent of the Puerto Ricans required this assistwhose auspices relocation takes place), 36 percent of the Negro ance.2 Families with no gainfully employed worker required considerably more relocation assistance than those with one or more wage earn Improvement (Workable Program)" (1960). 1 Housing and Home Finance Agency, "Program for Community 2 An indication of the representative character of our sample may be seen by comparing our interview results with the percentages reflected in the Jan. 31, 1963, LPA reports to the Urban Renewal Administration from the same 5 cities. The proportion of families who said that they were "self-relocated" is in substantial agreement with data available in the records of the LPA to the effect that 73 percent of the whites and 68 percent of the nonwhites relocated themselves. The higher proportion of "self-relocations" in our study results in part from our grouping of home purchasers and renters whereas the LPA records refer only to self-relocation of rental families. In fact, our study reveals that 90 percent of the home purchasers, whether white or Negro, were self-relocated. On the whole, the consistency between our data and the LPA records is indicative of the representativeness of our sample. The LPA reports follow: Characteristics of relocated families in recent urban development projects in 5 cities (Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, New Britain, and Norwalk) from which families to be interviewed were selected [Source: LPA reports for Jan. 31, 1963] ers. (Families without any gainful worker included those who were receiving welfare aid or social security benefits, and those in which the principal wage earner was either unemployed, disabled, or retired.) Almost half of the relocated Negro families interviewed (60 of 134) reported families of five or more persons, and three-fourths of the Puerto Ricans interviewed (23 of 30) reported five or more in their families. Clearly, the larger the family, when it is a minority-group family, the greater the assistance required.5 Our study disclosed more than these obvious problems. It revealed that, while 60 percent of the whites requiring relocation are 50 years of age or under, 85 percent of all Negroes and 90 percent of all Puerto Ricans requiring relocation are under 50 years of age. Forty-seven percent of the Negro families interviewed were composed of adults, and children 15 years of age or younger, while 67 percent of the Puerto Rican families had this same youthful cast. The comparative youthfulness of the minority-group families involved in relocation seems to support the suggestion that it can be accounted for only by extensive immigration of such groups to urban centers, and that these recent arrivals gravitate to the most deteriorated housing areas, hence become involved in urban renewal. As for their training and capacities for employment, 51 percent of the Negro families and 71 percent of the Puerto Rican families reported their gainfully employed family members in semiskilled or unskilled occupations; 36 percent of the Negro families and 26 percent of the Puerto Rican families reported no gainfully employed workers.8 Indeed, of those who had workers, only 11 percent of the Negroes and 5 percent of the Puerto Ricans were engaged in whitecollar occupations." Without speculating as to causes, it is also clear that the expectations about improved housing were not high in these families. Although they were informed that the relocation officer could help them, a strikingly high percentage of the families, regardless of racial considerations, did not desire or seek information from the relocation office in regard to different neighborhoods into which they might move. This is the more significant, since those who, on the basis of earlier evidence, needed such assistance most did not ask for it.10 By all reports, Connecticut's situation is not untypical of those elsewhere. The 1961 report spoke of a "stream of ** educated, unadapted, largely nonwhite migrants moving into the central cities and becoming fenced off into older, deteriorating neighborhoods." " And Whitney Young, the director of the National Urban League, infers from Department of Commerce figures that "by 1975, 85 percent of all Negro citizens will live in major urban centers, mainly in the North*** and unless some way can be found for housing them adequately especially in connection with urban renewal, slum clearance, and superhighway construction, which will further dislocate them-they face the specter of becoming more segregated, not less segregated, in the unattractive areas of the cities which remain educationally, culturally, and socially substandard." 12 Our study seems to confirm Mr. Young's bleak prophesy. It discloses that such integrated communities (approximately half white, half nonwhite) as existed prior to relocation were rarely preserved during the process and that, more often, a polarization took place, with whites using this opportunity to flee from racially mixed neighborhoods into ones which are either all white or mostly white in composition, while the overwhelming majority of Negroes ended up being relocated in neighborhoods having 50 percent or more Negroes (see ch. IV). Family relocation in connection with urban renewal in Connecticut is thus probably typical, for better or worse, of programs throughout the Nation. Alterations needed here are likely to be needed elsewhere. Thus, in light of our findings, many of our recommendations suggest concrete ways in which the "workable programs" of the Housing and Home Finance Agency can be improved nationally; The statutes and guidelines governing relocation need to be modified and tightened up, as we indicate, to assure availability of housing sites and of projects adequate to house all displaced families in various parts of the city. Our findings also suggest the necessity of a shift in mood on the part of local authority officials from one of mere near-compliance with the present minimal standards, sometimes ambiguously phrased, to one of actively utilizing the relocation occasion as an opportunity for achieving a more genuinely diversified, residentially desegregated community. This will require involving the families earlier; placing information about a range of housing possibilities before them (sometimes in spite of their difference); explicitly encouraging and aiding them to move into neighborhoods of their choice; working to prevent a repetition of such segregated housing patterns as formerly existed; continuing communication for a period after these families are resettled; and putting the local social agencies in touch with them when it is clear that additional outside help is needed. Only a sweeping effort to help families fulfill goals, which perhaps they never thought possible, can minimize or nearly eliminate the hurt of relocation. The Urban Renewal Administration, while hardly the sole force at work in this process, does play a crucial and principal role. And a shift in mood affecting the planning and execution of its policy is required if this desirable residential diversity, now too often lost, is to be realized. The URA must move to prevent discrimination at the time of relocation. Our experience shows that unless the local authority actively promotes desegregation at the time of relocation, it will inevitably perpetuate further residential segregation. This calls for a rigorously executed positive policy of diversity by design. Otherwise, the physical renewal that Federal programs bring to the city may produce further human blight in the lives of low income nonwhite families. And should this happen, the recent observation of Howard Moody will prove true: 13 "A city is dying when it has an eye for real estate value but has lost its heart for personal values, when it has an understanding of traffic flow but little concern about the flow of human beings, when we have increasing competence in building but less and less time for housing and ethical codes, when human values are absent at the heart of the city's decisionmaking, planning, and the execution of its plans in processes like relocation-then the city dies and all that is left, humanly, is decay." 2. HOW FAMILIES ON THE VERGE OF RELOCATION VIEW THE PROCESS What kinds of hopes and fears do families about to be relocated experience? The schedule prepared for interviewing a representative sample of these families probed for answers to these questions by inquiring of such families their hopes for the neighborhood into which they might move-its physical relation to shops, schools, and to the downtown area, its racial composition, and the kind of dwellings it would contain. The schedule further inquired of the families their own appraisal of their needs and the degree and kinds of assistance they expected from the relocation office. (See schedule II in appendix B.) 11 Four, 1961 "Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Housing," 81. 12 Young, Whitney M., Jr., "What Lies Ahead?" (an address delivered before the 6th Annual Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Sept. 27, 1962, Birmingham, Ala.). 13 Moody, "The City: Metropolis or New Jerusalem?" (1963). The Unfortunately, the interviews could not be conducted. reasons for this failure are, however, significant for this report. Relocation offices, when asked for a list of families about to be relocated (from which a sample could be drawn), could not provide one. Various explanations were offered. As soon as a project is announced, it was pointed out, the mobile, motivated families rapidly move out, relocating themselves. This occurs so swiftly in the wake of the public announcement that it is time wasted to attempt keeping accurate records on all the families involved from the outset. A list could be provided, it was explained, of those "problem families" still remaining in projects already launched, but their responses would hardly provide a representative picture of outlooks prior to relocations. This inability to find a cross section of prerelocatees led the subcommittee to abandon this portion of its interviewing, and to rely on the recollections of families most recently relocated about their prior expectations. It left the subcommittee, however, with many serious questions. In theory, Federal urban renewal grants are awarded only to those communities which have already assessed the housing demands of displacees and have determined that adequate rehousing is available. But how can such determinations be made without earlier and more direct contact with the families than is suggested by the inability of relocation offices to provide lists of families to be relocated? In spite of URA policy there is little evidence of any initial discussion with families about relocation preferences or needs. Yet, how can a rational search for new housing be conducted without this prior information? Further, many of the families involved need social service assistance in addition to housing aid. Without contacting all families at the commencement of the renewal project, the LPA can hardly assess the social needs of the families involved, and is unlikely to put them in touch with the community's social agencies. Surely the Urban Renewal Administration should consider requiring this kind of initial contact. Some of our evidence suggests that the relocation office performs only a minimal function, informing those families who linger of housing vacancies in the city's existing supply and urging them to accept this rehousing, without regard to its condition. We found that at least two Connecticut communities had listed public housing as a principal rehousing resource for low-income site families. Ample proof was provided by extrapolating the annual In one of these cities, there were over 500 vacancies altogether at vacancy rate in the Federal low rent and State moderate rent projects. more than satisfied the requirement of the workable program. In the time the survey of the housing supply was made. That number no instance, however, was there any evidence that "eligible" site families were asked about their feelings regarding public housing occupancy. Moreover, no exploration was made to learn whether there were factors which would exclude some of the families from eligibility. Once the project had begun, relocation officials discovered that some of the "eligible" families had been evicted from public housing and, therefore, were in fact ineligible. Other famflies who desired public housing units were excluded because of illegitimate children. Still others simply rejected public housing. The Relocation officials in one Connecticut city encountered among housing resource. In each instance, public housing units were an site families considerable resistance to public housing as a reimprovement over the site quarters in which the families were living. Yet the opportunity for improvement was refused for one reason: the stigma attached to public housing in that community. popular image of public housing-very much a reality in that community-was that it is marked by inferior architecture; that it is inhabited by people who are inferior, precisely because they live there or receive public assistance, or because the projects are rife with crime and muggings, or overseen by tight-fisted managers. The poorest kind of tenant-management relations with the concomitant prevailed; brusque treatment of tenants by public housing emlow tenant morale actually existed; extremely poor living standards ployees was common; exposure of children to clearly antisocial behavior by adults was frequent-all of these conditions were commonly cited as bases for objections to public housing. The relocation officials, under considerable pressure to clear the site of families, and frustrated in the effort to place them in public housing, merely shifted many of the unattended hard core social problem families from one section of the city to another already burdened with problems, and accelerated the trend toward racially segregated neighborhoods and schools. Some of the conditions which served to eliminate public housing as a resource in that particular community were described in detail in a report by a volunteer citizens group in that city. As part of its conclusion the report stated: "Several activities are underway to give (community named) Notable among the face lifting' it has needed for a long time. these activities are the urban renewal program and the movement to overcome the serious lags in public education. The success of these activities will depend in substantial degree upon the efficiency with which public housing operates in the future. * suggests that the Redevelopment Agency *** will have to help bring about needed reforms in local public housing administration." It should be noted that relocation officials in Connecticut seemed to contact the families involved, when they were finally reached, on a personal basis more adequately than their colleagues elsewhere have formerly done. The frequently cited study by H. W. Reynolds of relocation practices in 41 cities from 1955 through 1958 disclosed that in 14 of these cities accounting for 65 percent of all the relocations, families to be relocated received no other official information about their displacement except handbills announcing the demolition dates. Rarely was information given about standards for suitability of housing, how new housing could be found, what rents ought to be paid in relation to income, or, what preparations were necessary for moving.1 In contrast, 66 percent of the 351 recently relocated families interviewed in Connecticut indicated that they were notified by a visit from "the relocation man" that they would have to move. To be sure, about one-fourth of them were notified by letter, but it was addressed to them personally. This surely is an initial step in the right direction, one which would become far more significant if it were taken earlier and included more considerations of the families' needs than housing alone. We do not assume here that the relocation office should solve all the nonhousing needs, but rather that it should inventory them. The striking fact which emerged from the interviewing which was completed is that a large number of families faced with relocation "don't want to talk about it." Forty-three percent of the recently relocated whites interviewed, 50 percent of the Negroes, and 28 percent of the Puerto Ricans, frankly acknowledged seeking no information from any source about schools, churches, stores, transportation or anything else in relation to the new neighborhood into which they might move. Further, as noted in chapter I, only 20 percent of the whites, 32 percent of the Negroes, and 33 percent of the Puerto Ricans wanted any information from the relocation official about alternative neighborhoods into which they might move. While this fact might suggest a total lack of interest, Marc Fried, on the basis of his 4-year study of relocation in the West End of Boston, is certain that it reflects the deep disturbance which many displaced families feel, a "grief" which numbs them into silence. Interviewing families before and after relocation, he discovered feelings of painful loss experienced prior to displacement and persisting as long as 2 years after relocation. To be sure, he discovered that the severity of this grief-indignation reaction depends on prior orientation to the project area. The longer an individual lived in the area, the wider his range of associations there, the deeper his commitment to it, the more severe was his grief upon having to move. Although they rarely verbalize their relation to their home, people to be relocated especially working class people-attach enormous importance to it as, what Fried calls, "a center of their spatial and social arrangements" so that being required to move is a highly disruptive and disturbing experience for them, even when the home being left is, by any standards, in a slum neighborhood. Fried's findings reinforce our other bits of evidence. They all suggest that families living in a renewal area ought to be informed much earlier and much more extensively than at present of the impending project. Only this kind of information and "education" as to what is afoot, can avert the panic which often leads them to run for new housing which is often substandard, unsafe, and for which they frequently pay higher rents. Wherever possible, rehabilitation renewal should be considered. When dislocation and relocation are unavoidable, the project planners might well consider providing for the families to move within their formal residential areas during and after renewal. When new 1 Reynolds, "The Human Element in Urban Renewal," Public Welfare, April 1961 (a University of Southern California study). 2 The ways in which they were notified: areas must be utilized, the possibilities of assimilating them to former patterns of the relocatees' "style" ought to be explored. Chapter V suggests concrete ways in which this might be accomplished. 3. RELOCATION OFFICIALS: HOW THEY FUNCTION AND HOW THEY REGARD THEIR ROLE The job of the Local Public Agency relocation official is at best a difficult one. He must be, among other things, an administrator, a negotiator, a real estate agent, social worker, loan arranger, adviser, and Government agent. One individual can hardly do equal justice to all these responsibilities-particularly since relocation officers are rarely well paid. Facing multiple demands and only ordinary pay, the officer is also responsible to the LPA's executive director, who, even more than the relocation officer, is also beholden to many "publics." LPA officials must be sensitive and politically alert in order to meet both the requirements and standards of the HHFA regional offices 1 and at the same time satisfy the wishes or demands of the governing forces in the local community. The objectives for the relocation officer's task are set out by the HHFA as follows: 2 1. Families displaced by a title I project shall have the full opportunity of occupying housing that is decent, safe, and sanitary, that is within their financial means, and that is in a reasonably convenient location. the interview and gave most of the responses involving general In almost all instances the LPA executive director was present at policy decisions. One gains the distinct impression that, while the relocation officer may do the day-to-day job in the project area, it is the executive director who actually sets down the relocation policy for the specific LPA. Consequently, the references made in this chapter to the relocation officer may be as validly applied to gathered at the weekend conference of urban renewal officials held the local executive director. This chapter also draws upon material at Wesleyan University. (See Acknowledgments.) Responses to queries made during the interview of all LPA offi cials regarding the characteristics of the families involved in retails of each community may vary, the basic problems of all of them location were almost identical. This suggests that, while the deare quite similar. Ironically, examples of relocation difficulties thought by various officials to be unique resolved themselves into certain major types of problems. A minimal conclusion to be drawn from the similarity of relocation problems is that the major policy changes and innovations we suggest may well be appropriate in virtually all communities currently in the renewal process. When the LPA officials were asked to explain how they viewed the goals of their jobs in relation to their communities, all of them answered in terms which seemed to be paraphrases of the objectives of the official HHFA relocation outline. When asked about their views on using relocations as a device to achieve further residential desegregation, almost all of the officials replied that such How were you notified, by the man from the relocation office, that an activity, i.e., "integration," was neither their responsibility nor you would have to move? [In percent] 3 The responses regarding kinds of information sought: Puerto Rican (30 families) within their authority. Only in isolated instances, however, did any official feel that present ethnic or racial alinements ought to be maintained. Generally, these isolated instances involved elderly people accustomed to a way of life which it would be virtually impossible for them to alter. In view of the LPA officials' rather neutral position on relocation as a device for creating and maintaining residential diversity, it is interesting to note the resulting racial composition of neighborhoods 23 into which LPA-relocated families have moved. (See chapter IV.) It is striking that a far smaller percentage of LPA-relocated families ended up in racially segregated neighborhoods than did families who relocated themselves. 37878 The LPA officials were asked if racial or ethnic clustering had occurred as a result of relocation. All answered that only minor clustering had resulted. This response is supported only if the self Did you want information about the following (from any source)? relocatees are eliminated from consideration. Under the present system it is not altogether just to blame LPA officials for racial clustering by self-relocatees, but this fact does raise the question of what policy changes can be adopted to avoid it, insofar as possible, and the relocation officer's role in such an altered situation. The heart of the present policy problem is that families to be relocated enter the relocation officer's workload only after the LPA, or another public body, has acquired the subject property. By this time, however, most of the families involved have become aware that they must move quickly. Panic often ensues, for the pressure to move before the building is taken becomes great. There is anxiety, fear, and lack of understanding regarding the entire 1 Urban Renewal Administration, HHFA, "Urban Renewal Manual: Policies and Requirements for Local Public Agencies," pt. 16, Relocation. 2 Id. sec. 16-1. 3 Urban Renewal Administration, HHFA, op. cit. supra note 1. 4 Id. sec. 16-3-1. |