Toward an Accidental National Urbanization Policy

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Abstract
A national redistribution of population and economic activity known as the “shift to the sunbelt” is currently underway. Several federal programs, such as the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, may be subsidizing this phenomenon. Through a case study of the implementation of Title I of the Community Development Act, the authors find that the nonmetropolitan grant allocation formula is favorably biased toward the applications of county governments. The crux of the issue is the use of several social indicators as surrogates for poverty and poor housing. The social indicators are used to establish a funding priority among each intrastate set of competing applicants. The work argues that the surrogates are imprecise and at times misleading indicators of potential users or groups in need of publicly provided aid within nonmetropolitan areas of the nation. It is concluded that the continuation of such a policy will encourage abuse in the use of the grant money and will simultaneously support the growth and development of rural areas through the construction of a public infrastructure. In view of the relative absence of growth controls and growth management capacity in the unincorporated parts of nonmetropolitan areas, the consequences of this policy could be extensive scattered development and perhaps the demise of small-town America.

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