Weaver Foresees New Direction In Urban Redevelopment Policy

While 50 pickets paraded outside with signs declaring "Urban Renewal is Legalized Thievery" and discontented citizens interrupted his speech with hisses, Robert C. Weaver '29 last night maintained that the federal urban renewal program is becoming "more humanoriented."

Weaver, who is administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, told his Sanders audience in the second Godkin lecture that there is "a new direction" in the urban renewal program in which "moderate-income housing and rehabilitation of existing housing will be stressed."

With the use of such "new tools" as rent subsidies to displaced families and cash payments to displaced small businesses, there will be "a lessening of the relocation load, and greater preservation of existing neighborhoods," Weaver explained.

Need Economic Base

While proper housing is important, he continued, cities must also have an economic base. "If the central city is to survive, it needs to provide space and facilities for those economic activities it can attract," he said.

For revitalizing these "core areas," urban renewal allows the city to acquire a total area and deal with it as a unit by the use of eminent domain. And urban renewal subsidies "accelerate and in crease the demand for central locations."

But it is "a romantic illusion" to be lieve that urban renewal will solve all the city's economic problems or clear all the slums, Weaver emphasized. And in the past, he added, renewal programs have too frequently complicated rather than cased these problems.

In the future, urban renewal "will not do the whole job." Grants for construction of "social public facilities," and improvement of mass transportation. Weaver concluded, "will have even greater impact on people."