Otto Kerner Jr. Quotes

Providing employment for the swelling Negro ghetto population will require ...opening suburban residential areas to Negroes and encouraging them to move closer to industrial centers.

You cannot let men live like pigs …. We need not wait for the Millennium to get rid of the slum. We can do it now.

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.

After working in cities for nearly 40 years, I am telling you that every city can improve its quality of life in less than three years, no matter the scale or the financial conditions.

In the housing projects, people talked of ways to reduce crime, relieve overcrowding, and they were good ideas that we plan to study, and possibly implement.

Building sustainable cities - and a sustainable future - will need open dialogue among all branches of national, regional and local government. And it will need the engagement of all stakeholders - including the private sector and civil society, and especially the poor and marginalized.

The biggest thing growing cities need to do is minimize barriers to development so that as long as someone is doing good urbanism, they can get permitted quickly and get building quickly.

You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place.

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.'

We can build new housing while preserving the quality and character of adjacent residential districts and ensuring infill development strengthens the surrounding neighborhood.

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

The slums will be but a memory.

Our overbuilt cities with their congestion, their trend to high office buildings and apartments, their complete indifference to the most elementary principles of civilian defense, their slums representing past neglect and greed, can to a considerable extent be rebuilt on better principles if we are smart enough to look the facts in the eye and brush off the Babbitts who hold that wherever the dirt flies there is progress. On the other hand, cities can not be revolutionized and turned into garden villages or green belts. In the suburbs and near-by country, however, we still have a chance to do the right thing without stultifying compromises....

Only by abolishing private property in land and building cheap and hygienic dwellings can the housing problem be solved.

... the best public housing I've ever seen.

We need to create planned communities: whole new towns with the infrastructure and amenities they need, communities where people genuinely want to live, and built where demand is high.

I want to be known internationally as one of the most creative real estate developers in low-income communities. I want to be known as someone who actually promotes economic diversity and does a great job.

Environment, homelessness, infrastructure and immigration - I'm very focused on all four, which are critical to the success of Los Angeles.

We're planting trees to break up the concrete jungle. We're building public transportation and affordable housing.

I heard that Hubballi-Dharwad is going to be a Smart City. But it should ensure the sense of community and love is not lost.

By scrapping the government's centrally dictated density targets we'll ensure that the right type of new homes are built where they're needed, ending the glut of one- and two-bedroom flats.

Cities around the United States do not have land use planning like we have in Oregon, and they are all struggling with issues like affordable housing.

The city of Rio de Janeiro is setting an example to the world of how to recover quality urban spaces through drastic intervention and the creation of cultural facilities such as the Museum of Tomorrow.

Having viewed slum clearance projects in most major cities of the world may I state that you have conceived and created in the Johannesburg townships what is probably the most impressive and adequate resettlement activity in existence.

There's something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation.