the fruits of your labors have ripened and the Municipal League
has become indisputably the spokesman for municipal government
in our State.

It was satisfying to me to note the success you had with your leg-
islative program in this first session of the General Assembly of my
term as Governor, I hope the constitutional amendment authorizing
your municipalities to utilize the resources of the vast Federal Urban
Renewal Program may, in years ahead, aid you in your effort to
make your cities more attractive and more prosperous. I was grati-
fied, too, that you were able to obtain funds with which to estab-
lish your Municipal Technical Advisory Service, and that the reso-
lution you sponsored to set up a commission to study city-county
fiscal relations was adopted. It was a pleasure to me to be able to
sign it.

Your Technical Advisory Service, I am told, is ready to go into
operation. Reports that have come to me have indicated that it is
in need of a larger staff and a larger budget to do the job that is
expected of it. If that be the case, I should think that in a few years
it will obtain both.

On occasions such as this when men gather to discuss affairs they
have in common, it is the custom nowadays to speak of matters at
hand in terms of problems and their solutions.... With all the
problems that surround us today, I would hesitate to attempt rank-
ing them in any order of gravity or enormity. But I will say that
you who grapple with the problems of cities—the pains of growth
on the one hand and the agonies of decay on the other—can make
out a good case that yours is a problem with a very high ranking.
Your problem has been stated so many times by so many people
that it needs no lengthy restatement by me.

The automobile provided the inducement to people to flee the
cities and take up residence in the fields and forests which surround
them. The automobile which returns the expatriated urbanite
daily to his place of business or employment in the city has con-
gested streets to the point that the city becomes increasingly unat-
tractive as a place in which to live, do business or have fun. And
so, people not initially lured by forests and fields are constrained to
join the exodus, leaving behind them houses which soon fall into
dilapidation because they are no longer livable. That, in synopsis,
is the tragedy of the urban slum. Let us look at the coin on its
reverse side. Houses spring up in forests and fields like dandelions

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