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This 100th Bulletin of the Regional Plan Association sketches the way the New York Metropolitan Region will look in 1985 if present economic trends, popular taste and public and corporate policies continue. The economic trends are based on the New York Metropolitan Region Study (“Harvard Study”) which was conducted for the Regional Plan by the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration under the direction of Raymond Vernon. The research for this publication was financed by The Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Taconic Foundation.

What follows is not a prediction. Its purpose is to alert the Region to the total effects of current development decisions - mainly the decisions of municipalities but also those of other local governments, individuals, corporations, the three states and several federal agencies operating in the Region. The policies and apparent preferences that are fashioning the Region’s development have been added together and their total impact on our future projected.

Regional Plan Association does not think that the events projected here will necessarily take place. Our function is to present the facts to be used by the Region’s citizens in guiding the metropolis to the rich future that its natural beauty, economic strength, historic greatness, and cultural and intellectual leadership could provide - if we do not continue to drift from these foundations.

The next steps in taking hold of the Region’s destiny are to (1) pose alternatives to the present development, (2) consider the meaning of the alternatives for the way we want to live and the efficiency of our business, (3) investigate how policies produce different kinds of development, and (4) choose the Region we want and the policies to reach it. The current program of the Regional Plan Association is to prepare alternatives to the pattern projected here and to initiate wide public discussion of ways to achieve the regional plan we want.