An educated and healthy people require surroundings in harmony with
their hopes. In our urban areas the central problem today is to protect and
restore man's satisfaction in belonging to a community where he can find
security and significance.
The first step is to break old patterns--to begin to think and work and
plan for the development of the entire metropolitan areas. We will take
this step with new programs of help for the basic community facilities and
for neighborhood centers of health and recreation.
New and existing programs will be open to those cities which work together
to develop unified long-range policies for metropolitan areas.
We must also make some very important changes in our housing programs if we
are to pursue these same basic goals.
So a Department of Housing and Urban Development will be needed to
spearhead this effort in our cities.
Every citizen has the right to feel secure in his home and on the streets
of his community.
To help control crime, we will recommend programs:
--to train local law enforcement officers;
--to put the best techniques of modern science at their disposal;
--to discover the causes of crime and better ways to prevent it.
I will soon assemble a panel of outstanding experts of this Nation to
search out answers to the national problem of crime and delinquency, and I
welcome the recommendations and the constructive efforts of the Congress.
The Beauty of America
For over three centuries the beauty of America has sustained our spirit and
has enlarged our vision. We must act now to protect this heritage. In a
fruitful new partnership with the States and the cities the next decade
should be a conservation milestone. We must make a massive effort to save
the countryside and to establish--as a green legacy for tomorrow--more
large and small parks, more seashores and open spaces than have been
created during any other period in our national history.
A new and substantial effort must be made to landscape highways to provide
places of relaxation and recreation wherever our roads run,
Within our cities imaginative programs are needed to landscape streets and
to transform open areas into places of beauty and recreation.
We will seek legal power to prevent pollution of our air and water before
it happens. We will step up our effort to control harmful wastes, giving
first priority to the cleanup of our most contaminated rivers. We will
increase research to learn much more about the control of pollution.
We hope to make the Potomac a model of beauty here in the Capital, and
preserve unspoiled stretches of some of our waterways with a Wild Rivers
bill.
More ideas for a beautiful America will emerge from a White House
Conference on Natural Beauty which I will soon call.