Humphrey Calls For Drive On Slums

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31116, 20 July 1966, Page 14

Humphrey Calls For Drive On Slums

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) NEW ORLEANS, July 19. The Vice-President, Mr Hubert Humphrey, said today if he had to live in a city ghetto with rats nibbling on his children’s toes, he might “lead a mighty good revolt” himself.

Addressing a national conference of local government authorities, Mr Humphrey called for a nation-wide drive to wipe out slum housing.

Without rent supplements or rent subsidies for the poor, he said, “we will have open violence in every major city and county in America . . .

“No Answer” “It is time for Government officials to recognise the National Guard is no answer to the problems of slums,” he said.

“People will not live like animals,” Mr Humphrey said. “Nor should they live in some of the filthy, rotten housing that make up urban ghettos. “I’d hate to be stuck on a fourth floor of a tenement with rats nibbling on the kids’ toes—and they do—with garbage uncollected—and it is—with the streets filthy, with no swimming-pools, with little or no recreation.” Mr Humphrey told the conference that if he were forced to live under such conditions, “I think you’d have more trouble than you have had already, because I’ve got enough spark left in me to lead a mighty good revolt under those conditions.”

The Vice-President called for a programme that would make a large-scale impact on the slums of the nation’s older cities. “I wonder how many counties have really begun to think about the role they might play in the building of whole new planned communities?” he asked. "You have to make a choice whether you want all your low rent housing to be federally owned, whether you want subsidies so that the poor can own their own homes, or whether you want violence in America.’ Mr Humphrey also said he had heard of a situation where a city can buy portable swimming pools. “What makes you think that the children of the country club ought to have a swimmingpool and the kids in the slums ought not to have one?” he asked the 2600 delegates to the conference. “Doesn’t Work” “This just doesn’t work any more in America. “You can’t tell people you can have a nice place to sleep and swimming-pools in the rich part of town . . . and nothing in the poor part of town. That’s all over.”