966 ADDRESSES A1\D STATE PAPERS

that have failed. Anyone who proposes no more than continuation
and expansion of present measures, condemns the nation to marching
in place rather than forward movement toward a new day.

The real urban problem is a problem of wretched, uprooted people
caught in an environment which offers too few avenues of change or
escape. It is the problem of poverty compounded by personal in-
adequacies and stifling surroundings that produce hopelessness and
desperation.

Whatever may be said of the war on poverty elsewhere, in the ur-
ban slums it has so far been an unsuccessful holding action. I say
this not in disparagement of the often valiant efforts made by govern-
ment agencies and private groups. Praiseworthy as these efforts may
be, a cold appraisal of results leads only to the conclusion that they
have not succeeded.

The 1967 Manpower Report of the President recognized that "social
and economic conditions are getting worse, not better, in slum areas. "
Every study made of slum areas substantiates this finding. In South
Los Angeles median family income dropped 8 percent from 1959 to
1965. In the Hough area of Cleveland, median income declined by
$766 to $3966 between 1959 and 1964. In the Bronx, spreading slums
reduced median income by $300 between 1960 and 1966.

This decline in our cities has taken place during a period when
incomes have been rising sharply elsewhere across the nation. Even
on the farms, striking improvement has been registered in reducing
poverty — although administration ineptness has reduced non-poverty
income levels. Between 1959 and 1965, the number of farm house-
holds below the poverty line decreased by 53 percent. In part this
drop in poverty in farm areas reflects the effect of a migration which
has transferred the problem from a rural to an urban setting, where
it often takes on a more difficult and explosive form. The important
fact from all this, however, is that the fighting front in any war on
poverty is becoming more and more the urban slums where our
trenches are still undermanned and our heavy artillery is not yet
targeted.

We are woefully short of facts about conditions in the slums. In-
dications are, however, that there is accelerating deterioration on
many fronts. Whereas nationwide the unemployment rate is about
four percent of the labor force, unemployment in the slums is closer
to ten percent, and underemployment affects a third of the working
force there. On the housing front, too, there has been a retreat. The