Federal Aid for Poor Diverted Urban Studies Report Alleges

Funds from the Community Development Revenue Sharing Program, intended by Congress to aid urban poor, are going instead for projects benefiting the general community, a working paper published by the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard says.

"Poor people and minorities are out of fashion," the paper says.

'Much Less'

The report compares the Community Development Program, which began in 1974, to the Johnson administration's Model Cities Program, and finds that the current program is doing "much less than Model Cities did to give poor people a part of the action."

Bernard Frieden, professor of Urban Planning at MIT and co-author of the report, yesterday said the implementation of Community Development differs from Model Cities in two important ways.

The current program sends more money to the newer sun-belt cities and to suburban cities, and less money to the older cities with greater concentrations of poor and minorities, Frieden said.

Once the cities get the funds, he added, they spend them on public works projects like convention centers or parking garages, rather than on programs directly targeted to help the poor.

Frieden said he hopes Congress will act to make what the working paper calls "the rather fuzzy social priorities," in the Congressional directives for the program more clear and binding.

In addition to Community Development grants, the federal government dispenses two other forms of aid: general revenue sharing and grants tied to specific programs. Frieden said only the Community Development Program aims specifically at poverty groups.

The Community Development Program, the working paper says, was created to simplify grant applications, and to give local communities more freedom in spending the federal money than they had under Model Cities.