662 CONFERENCE ON NATURAL BEAUTY 



programs that we are recommending at the State and Federal level 

 should be financed by a tax on the automobile user and manufacturer. 

 In summation, we think that this combined program of Federal 

 technical and financial leadership, State-local planning grants, and 

 private investor effort and research will serve the public interest by 

 eliminating the automobile junkyard problem so singled out as a 

 symbol of their efforts to enhance the quality of the environment by 

 both the President and Mrs. Johnson. 



The New Suburbia 



The Chairman, Mr. BEMISS. Next to national defense, the chal- 

 lenge of making habitable, durable, and productive the areas in 

 which will soon live three-fourths of our population is the most urgent 

 piece of public business. It involves both normal metropolitan 

 sprawl and the building of new communities. 



The suburbia of postwar years is maturing into the metropolitan 

 area. It is no longer a pastoral escape from city problems and con- 

 cerns, but a deeply interdependent, specialized part of the metro- 

 politan complex. For most of the United States the metropolitan 

 complex (which is part of the larger megalopolitan complex) is a new 

 condition, creating dynamic problems and opportunities which must 

 be dealt with positively. 



The new metropolitan condition is one with which political sub- 

 divisions designed in premetropolitan days cannot cope. There is a 

 conflict a stalemate between the actual and complete economic, 

 natural resource, and social interdependence of the components 

 versus illusions of sovereign independence, or put in another way, a 

 conflict between short-run local interest and long-run metropolitan 

 interest. The interdependence of people and of resources is not 

 realized, and without this realization the metropolitan area is without 

 a policy and without a program and, therefore, totally unable to 

 move ahead. 



The stalemate must be resolved. The region, the State, the Nation 

 cannot afford this stalemate while urban sprawl creates a disorderly, 

 impractical, and unattractive mess to oppress our children. 



Nowhere is the cost of this stalemate more vivid than in the general 

 failure to acquire open spaces ahead of metropolitan expansion. 

 These spaces which would give the metropolitan area a unity, a 

 dignity, and a habitability, are chopped up and destroyed. Follow- 



