Greenbelt is over in Maryland, twelve miles out from Washington. There will be a thousand dwellings. The town is surrounded by several thousand acres of woodland. It is unquestionably one of the prettiest and best selected sites in America.

On the same ground were camped, in the War of 1812, the British Troops who chased our American ancestors through Bladensburg, into our Capital, and then burned the Capitol Building. We have Sons of This and That, but not of that battle. Not a single one of my ancestors, nor of anybody's ancestors, seemed to have taken part in the battle where the Americans ran.

As for history, you can find it right and left, all over Greenbelt. Lord Baltimore owned it, of course. And ever since, it has been cut and slashed and worked to death. Now the surrounding land, twenty thousand acres in all, belongs to the United States. A mile from Greenbelt is the greatest scientific agricultural station on the face of the earth, many of whose staff are to become tenants of the Greenbelt homes.

In the valley below where I walked are the famous Five Springs. Here the Indians came to their councils, and now children will play there: it is a story and a prophecy, and both are declared to be true. Here by the Five Springs are holly trees, just like the pictures on Christmas cards. And not far off, an original "underground railroad" where black slaves escaped from their masters.

But if I get on the subject of slaves and Indians and wars, we will never know about the new place. For, after all, though romance is a part of it, it is a "project," where people must live, die, work, wash babies, cry, send children to schools, and pay their bills.

The Resettlement Administration has gotten out a book, which tells the story of "Green Belt Towns." In it they have a declaration of policy, written somewhat like a professor's Declaration of Independence, and, translated and greatly digested into our native language [Translation by the author, who, by remarkable coincidence, not only understands political clap-trap, but professorial jargon as well.], is as follows:

BASIC PROGRAM

To have one piece of land under single ownership, to avoid the troubles from different and conflicting ownerships;

To have one community, with belt of green around it;

To provide homes for people of modest income, with normal American lives;

To set up a municipal government, similar to those in the State;

To work with other local and State governments; to contribute its share in taxes; to obtain proper public and educational facilities; and at the same time to have low rents.

The place is being developed as a whole according to a plan of general land use. Some of it is for recreation, close to the town, so that people will not have to take an hour's bus ride in order to enjoy a half-hour's walk in the country. There are garden plots available for those who want them. Other adjoining areas are being used by the Biological Survey, the Forest Service, and the Soil Conservation Service for experimental and demonstration work.

The town will trade with the co-operatives of the surrounding farmers. Children can see actual flowers, swim in their own pools, see vegetables in the ground, hear bona fide hens cackle, and in the springtime see the green come out; for good measure they can turn off their radios and listen to birds twitter in the treetops.

There is a project like Greenbelt in Cincinnati, and another in Milwaukee. In Greenbelt Village, we have a combination of sanitation, open air recreaction, up-to-date city housing. There is a school which may revolutionize school building in America. It is a building with many unique features, modern lighting with glass bricks, and is made especially to be used as a meeting place after the children are finished for the day.

There is a theatre. A meeting hall. Classrooms for adult education. There is a lake for the residents, and a real forest wrapped around the village. Here families of small income can live happily and rear their children in health.

Why should we not have much, much more of this kind of housing in America? More has been done in tiny Holland, a country which we could lose in the tail-end of Texas, than in the whole United States! The same is true of England! From 1918 to 1934, while 31,000 homes were being built in the United States with State aid, 1,200,000 homes were built in England.

The Green Belt idea is not slum clearance. There must be low cost housing decently located, just as there should be good food and clothing, at reasonable prices.

Our "big incomes," even of the employed groups, are mostly in our imaginations. The average white collar worker's wage—not including that of laborers and mechanics—is much less than $1,500 per year, or $125 per month, per family. To be statistical, sixty-three percent of our American families have incomes less than that.

Even the National Real Estate Board denounced the situation: "Not today, nor for thirty-five years, has it been possible to build for the low-wage groups at a rent which that group can afford to pay, whether the improvement is constructed well or ill."

More unbelievable, a committee of President Hoover's said: "The largest mass of obsolete and discredited equipment of the country" were our homes—the places where Americans live.

It was then known that around forty percent of the housing in America is definitely below a decent standard. In New York City the "old law tenements," legally condemned as not fit for human habitation, but not yet torn down, house a substantial portion of the population. The same condition exists to a large degree in every city in America.

One of the serious obstacles to correcting the situation is the citizen himself. He has an idea that he must have a separate fee simple title, with separate facilities. This is an outgrowth of pioneer ideas, and the new community-citizen sees no reason why he should hold anything in common, nor does he understand why he should be told anything about land use, or common sanitary practices.

But modern conditions require singleness of general control. The individual "title" can as well be protected through a big unit as if the particular dwelling were an isolated structure, and the only way individual health and living can be preserved is by requiring general standars of building, health and control of land.

What I have just said applies not only to a special project, but to projects generally.

But aside from that there must be town and country planning. The physical conditions of land, water and their location, will often conflict with state borders, country lines, and overlapping municipal jurisdictions. Around New York City, for instance, where several states and cities are jammed together, there will be many serious questions.

For a century our cities have grown this way and that. Suburbs have been without plan. City development was just for the moment, and the cities and towns got more like patchworks and crazy quilts as time went on.

From now on, cities and communities must be planned. Not only that, millions upon millions of dwellings should be torn down, and new communities planned in their places.

I have poked around enough to know all of this is true. Actual inspection of the eastern industrial cities will show it plainly. In times past, there was no chance for planning—for everybody was out to make a living, to get rich if possible, and no one had time to think about it. Who was going to stop the destruction of natural resources, the building of hideous and ugly towns, as long as the money rolled in?

As a result American cities were built by promoters. A surveyor who knew nothing and cared nothing about any plan came along and laid out the land as he was told. The people were sardined together, the lots were too small, and the platting had no reference to drainage areas or levels.

Houses have been and are being built in this country in six or seven weeks. When I was in the lumber and building business an Englishman visited me. I told him how long it took to build. He observed that American houses were built and worn out before English homes were completed.

The building of the Greenbelt Villages, the development of different suburban communities, along with the slum clearance and low-cost housing projects of the PWA, have proved a great deal. Principally it is a recognition for all time that the Government of the United States must afford the opportunity of people to live in decent houses.

Building should proceed on a volume many times—probably twenty to a hundred times—as great as now.

Notwithstanding any "administrative inefficiency," blunders and waste, the Resettlement has pointed the way. Their people have accumulated the experience and information upon which we can base the development of land preservation and community life.

And, as I have purposely said several times, the land problem is just as important to the fellow who lives in the city as the one in the country. Steam, electricity, bricks, carrots, tooth-paste, shoes, ear-muffs, nickels, dimes, dollars and thousand-dollar bills, come out of the earth. On the Big Main Street called "Broadway" and the little Main Streets there are many who have forgotten this.