Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Statement by the President Upon Directing the Development of a New Community on the Site of the National Training School in Washington.

August 30, 1967

THIS spacious open tract can become a new, attractive, and well-balanced community at a major gateway to the Nation's Capital. It can provide comfortable and urgently needed housing, built and operated under the new "Turnkey" concept. But it should be more than a housing project. Washington needs and deserves the best in community planning--and this new development can be the best of communities. It should offer a full range of educational, recreational, and other public services to citizens of every station.

This new venture will be first and foremost a partnership--a partnership between local and Federal governments, between public officials, private developers, and the people of the city. The creative involvement of private enterprise will be a most important single element in the project.

But it is my hope that this concept, if it can be applied successfully in the Nation's Capital, will be useful elsewhere in the country. This new project could be the pioneer effort of a new program involving the comprehensive development of surplus Federal land.

With this idea in mind, I have today named a special task force composed of Administrator Knott, Secretaries McNamara and Weaver, and Attorney General Clark to survey surplus Federal properties throughout the Nation, and with State and local leaders, to evaluate the prospects for transforming these lands into vital and useful community resources.

Note: The President's statement was made public as part of a White House release which announced that the President had requested the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Administrator of General Services, and the Chairman of the District of Columbia Board of Commissioners to "move at once to develop a new community within the Washington city limits." The development, the release added, would be built on surplus Federal land, once the site of the National Training School for Boys. It would provide modern housing and services for about 25,000 citizens in some 4,600 units for tenants of varied income levels in a development compatible with a detailed land use study recently completed by a major consulting firm.

The full text of the release is printed in the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (vol. 3, p. 1235).
See also Item 531.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Statement by the President Upon Directing the Development of a New Community on the Site of the National Training School in Washington. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/237799

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