F:\Plodding Deeper Into the Wilderness\Core and Helpful Files
F:\Plodding Deeper Into the Wilderness\Core and Helpful Files
Community Development1.docx
Community Development
Chap 18 Done
Chap 18 Expanded
Chapter 17 as Final Revised
Chapter 16 Ford Foundation through Nixon
Chapter 10 Depression Era CD
Chapter 9 Big City 1920’s CD
Chapter 6 CD and Black Schism
Chapter 2: Puritans, Evolution of Puritan elites, Yankee Diaspora
Journal Issue: What is this Two Ships Thing, Wings of CD, 19th Century CD Through 1890
Chapter 5 (1914) Origins of Progressivism
Missing Puritan ED and towns, capital formation and New England Town Democracy
Chapter 5 2014 Origins of Progressivism
CHAPTER 5
A Second Ship Sails Upstream: Progressivism 1865-1933
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN BIG CITIES: Big City Progressivism
Progressivism Confronts Immigrants and the Industrial City: Parks, People and Planning
The Garden Cities: Suburban sprawl done in good taste
Frank Lloyd Wright (the City in a Garden)
Social Reformers: an alternative to the Privatist approach
The City Beautiful
Port Authorities: the Progressive ship sails into harbor
Neighborhood Planning: The Birth of Community Development
Housing and Slum Clearance Bleeds into Economic Development
Decentralization and Downtown Business Corporations
Gild the Ghetto?
Part I Summary
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CHAPTER 5
A Second Ship Sails Upstream: Progressivism 1865-1933
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN BIG CITIES: Big City Progressivism
The stream to which we attach the label, Progressivism is very much a reaction to industrial capitalism, immigration and the social-economic-demographic change unleashed by these forces. In a previous chapter we introduced our initial sense of the Progressive approach and left it in the tender, so to speak, mercies of Josiah Quincy. That colonial-early Republic Progressivism could be summarized as:
A definite spirit of civic reform … directed by members of the ‘happy and respectable classes’ who obviously saw themselves as high-minded and responsible stewards of the city. Members of old Boston families, like Josiah Quincy, were intent on using their powers of political leadership to refashion and renew the urban community in which they lived–not only for themselves, but also for all the people of the community. This reform impulse, however, was destined to go far beyond the physical and material benefits of the city, gradually influencing the moral and intellectual standards by which the ordinary people of Boston lived and the heights to which they might eventually aspire.[1]
Over the next several decades Progressivism evolved into a multiplicity of “isms” and movements. Abolitionism was the most impactful, but Temperance and Prohibition, Women’s Suffrage, not to mention Transcendentalism and a goodly portion of pre-Civil War American literature sprung from this perspective. Most of these evolved into movements and community, indeed national, social and political change. Politics and political action and the use of politics to help the “common man” but the least fortunate of society, however, defined, and to remove evil and injustice constituted a very visible wing of Progressivism to the present day. Almost all these movements eventually centered about the federal government and national legislation as the most effective means by which these goals could be achieved.
Still Progressivism was, and never will be, one single set of values and priorities; it was always several. The tendency of Progressives to focus upon subsets and policy areas for special attention was always a feature of the approach. Education, for example, was a central policy concern and from 1837 Progressives such as Horace Mann (Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education) schools and professional training-expertise was primary and permeated other policy concerns as well. The Boston Public Library (1848), the first large municipally owned public library was the crown jewel
Also Boston was an early leader in schools for the blind and Julia Ward Howe (Battle Hymn of the Republic) established the Perkins Institution for the Blind. While concern for the mentally ill probably originated with Quakers of Philadelphia, Boston’s Dorothea Dix was the leader in establishing the first “hospital for the insane”. The orientation around community and the belief that residents of the community, no matter their class or occupation, should not only benefit to the extent possible, but should be improved, a sort of early American self-actualization was also prominent. The concern for not just the “common man” but for the least fortunate was deeply embedded into the Progressive approach:
Those who set the standards for excellence in the city, like George Ticknor and his fellow Brahmins, were seriously concerned that even those people who occupied the lowest rungs of Boston’s socioeconomic ladder should have more ‘useful knowledge’ in order to raise themselves up and improve the quality of their lives … ‘and Boston was determined that the boys and girls, and the blind and insane as well, should have the opportunity to know enough’.[2]
Boston, Massachusetts and southern New England were pioneers in the crystallization of our Progressive approach–but other cities and regions also developed their own versions as well. The emigrants diffused this perspective across the nation as population movements crisscrossed the nation. Also other religions, Quakerism for example, added their own perspectives to Progressivism’s Puritan core. Progressivism would diffuse across the nation and by the late 1880’s it could be found in varying degrees of strength in regions and cities from coast to coast (Hawaii especially). And as it confronted and incorporated other cultural approaches prevalent in other geographies, Progressivism evolved into several different versions.
From all this we can glean several crisp elements of what constitutes our Progressive approach to economic development:
- It draws from and is led by an upper and upper middle class business and intellectual elite
- There is a clear separation between business/employment and the needs of the overall community. Private corporations are responsive to different values and forces and cannot be trusted to automatically address the community needs.
- The needs of the community, and responsibility to satisfy those needs, is paramount and the greater virtue for both the individual and the corporation.
- The greater concern is with people and directly addressing the needs of community residents. There is less sympathy (and trust) for indirect means and non-governmental entities.
- There is an optimistic, Rousseau-like belief in the least fortunate elements of the community and the obligation of the elite to improve their lot and provide the means by which these elements can improve.
- There is comfort with government and the use of government to accomplish the needs of the community.
Progressivist economic development, similar to Privatist comes in several flavors (several “decks” using our ship metaphor). In this chapter we will trace three particular Progressive decks: (1) one which desired a physical urban pattern the polar opposite of the industrial city around which a community could prosper; a second (2) which attempted to modernize the industrial city to inspire the better angels of a new immigrant population and integrate them into the modern economy and society in order to avert social disorder, unionism and potentially European-style revolution; and finally (3) a reform of society, politics and economy to provide opportunities and fairness for the common man (including and eventually most focused on the most disadvantaged), the masses, from the abuses and injustices of an ever-powerful elite-dominated industrial economy [3].
As suggested in earlier chapters the Progressive Movement was dominated by the business elite of the early industrial period. Progressivist economic development is driven by business elites whose purposes and values are far from monolithic and which reflect the different occupations, scope and type of business owners/firms and their values and goals. The distinguishing characteristic among these three Progressive decks, therefore, reflects both the distinctive coalitions underlying each approach and the variation in attitude and purpose in business elites. Bluntly, if one views the business community as monolithic, a capitalist class for instance, this perspective will make little sense.
[1] Thomas O’Connor, The Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001) p. 93.
[2] O’Connor, op. cit. pp. 102-103
[3] While our conception of Progressivism follows more traditional interpretations reasonably, the reader should understand our purposes is to adjust the complex and multiple-faceted late nineteenth and early twentieth century Progressive movement to contemporary economic development policy and professional history. We see continuities in Progressive style economic development, flowing from this period into contemporary economic development, which offer understanding to the historical evolution of economic development. They key factor underlying our different decks of the economic development-related Progressive approach is the supportive constituencies which provided the muscle and power in affecting the economic development policy-making.
We, however, see important differences between elements of the business community which are “professionals” (lawyers, journalists, social welfare, architects, higher education, etc.), owners and employees drawn from local and regional firms, and a “corporate elite” composed of owners and employees serving in firms operating at multi-regional, national (and later global) scales. As we hope to demonstrate, these categories of business elites can differ in key ways from each other on how they wish to shape sub-state economic development. How (and if at all) each category enters into the economic development policy process is also likely to differ as well. In this period, for instance, our third category, corporate elites, were often the “bad guy”–the targeted evil-doer–of the other two categories. These corporate elites in the pre-New Deal era were much more likely to operate within the Privatist motif. Incredibly perhaps, these corporate elites tended to work well and closely with the leadership of immigrant-based political machines against which much of our second business category, the local and regional business community, strongly opposed.
Chronologically, the first of expression of the Progressive style in our transition era is the “parks movement”, a forerunner of the American planner movement. Geographically the parks movement, although within city boundaries, was most prominent in its periphery, vacant and less densely settled areas. In that our corporate elite grouping was in process of coming into existence (the robber barons were mere muggers at this point), the parks movement support was drawn from the professional class and the local business community. The political machines, based on early migration, if they existed at all, were relatively weak.
Progressivism Confronts Immigrants and the Industrial City: Parks, People and Planning
During these transition years, two needs rose to prominence: adjustment of the existing colonial city to the influx of migrants and immigrants (a population boom, if you will) and the identification and installation of an industrial city’s core infrastructure. In other words, social-economic integration of a new population and an expansion of the city physical landscape were the principal economic development-related goals[1] of these growing cities. Into this environment and time (1850-1870) wandered an exceptional and path-breaking individual, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. [2] Born in Hartford Connecticut, Olmsted was a journalist, the so-called father of landscape architecture, and an oft-times bureaucrat-public official (Sanitary District). Some also credit him as a forerunner of modern American urban planning. As we relate Olmsted’s various contributions, the contemporary economic developer may wonder what this all has to do with economic development.
To people like Olmsted, the expansion of city, its increased size, separated its residents from nature and distressed the humanity and morality of their residents by burying them in the conformity, pollution and congestion of the industrial-residential districts.
As the American city expanded …, it simultaneously deteriorated as a place for human life and activity. In a nostalgic attempt to overcome these barriers, city improvers offered urban parks as normative institutions. These [parks] would be points of contact between the afflictions of congested dwellings and a curative natural environment, between uncouth masses and the social values of an ideal rural order….
They saw a need to revitalize and restore the balance between urban dwellers and nature, even if at government expense. It was right and just, they argued that the state should regulate and control the boundaries beyond which man could not travel without being a detriment to him and to civilization….
[They] believed a civilization of cities would not survive if it was cut off from nature. Nature had the power to uplift the downtrodden and instill the best ideals ….Thus islands of nature had to be inserted into the artificial urban milieu…[3]
And so in 1857 promoted by business leaders, New York City dedicated 700 plus acres between 59th and 106th streets to an urban park (Central Park) and commenced a landscape design competition. And the rest is history, so they say.
Olmsted (and Calvert Vaux) won the bid and the “Parks Movement” (1857-1890’s) was off and running. In the next twenty years (interrupted by the Civil War) Central Park was built out along Olmsted and Vaux’s “Greensward Plan” and similar parks were designed for Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Rochester, Montreal, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Hartford, Wilmington, Detroit, Marquette, Milwaukee, Louisville, Chicago, University of Chicago, UCLA and Stanford Universities, Capitol Building and other cities as well. Philadelphia, Baltimore, St Louis, Omaha, Kansas City and San Francisco hired other landscape architects and developed their urban park infrastructure as well. “The fact that the park was planned in anticipation of future open-space needs is but one reason why Central Park deserves to be considered the beginning of modern city planning”[4]. The parks movement has made it into our economic development history in that the parks movement was the introductory step in the emergence of the planning movement–to which economic development is very much linked.
Central Park and the Parks Movement also represent to us the first clear, widespread, “jelling” of the values inherent in the second stream. Community well-being, integration of the immigrant population, an antidote to the negative externalities of urban growth and economic change, its use of government and public action to impart moral as well as socio-economic values (health and a bulwark against contagion and disease was a major motivator as well as the healing effects of nature on the human soul), and its dependence upon professional experts rather than private firms and its linkage to a rational plan, and politically powered by an upper middle class in the name of the less fortunate. To us, the parks movement fits quite well into our Progressive approach.
The economic development task the early progressive planner-architects addressed was to integrate the new workers and urban dwellers into the newly emerging industrial cities and in so doing create a sustainable urban fabric. At its earliest, this meant creating public water systems and urban parks; as we moved into the 1900’s it mean creating a sustainable municipal prosperity which could translate into jobs for city residents. Jobs and the household wealth they engendered would restrain the need that the new immigrant would turn to unions and political machines–and in extreme situations to violence and demands for social, economic and political change not dissimilar from the socialism that was reshaping European societies and governments. How this was to be accomplished is outlined by M. Christine Boyer:
… between 1897 and 1940, the city fabric, urban laborers, the poor and restless rabble-rousers were to be marked by a nexus of improvement schemes. Economic prosperity would be used to mask the problems of social unrest and the devastating conditions of congested cities. … congested city centers, overcrowded tenement dwellings, pauperization and destitution of the laboring classes, and uncouth frontier and country manner would dissolve with the overall rise in economic prosperity …. City improvers (progressive planners and their allies) could take hold of the physical environment of the American city. These select missionaries of taste would reveal the secrets of a natural and rational order with a degree of perfection that could discipline alike the baser instincts of common man and the exploitative impulses of the capitalist.[5]
While infused with a Marxist motif (and sarcasm), Boyer does reach into the link (physical modernization/upgrading and infrastructure) of the early planning profession with economic development. Through rational planning the physical landscape of the urban area, the city, could be manipulated to achieve both social and economic ends and goals. In many ways, this was the ultimate task that the progressives as a whole were attempting to confront: how to integrate all classes and elements into the newly emerging industrial city. The fear of ethnics, workers, strikes, and the union movement, the housing and mental health reforms, the park systems, the early garden cities, all were linked together to create through rational planning of the physical landscape a sustainable urban economy and society
In the end, do we consider the Parks Movement as an example of nineteenth century economic development? No, we do not think of Park Movement advocates as economic developers. Parks are an urban infrastructure, to be sure, and broadly conceived Parks advocates would have thought of parks as a necessary infrastructure and precondition for economic growth of the new industrial city. But our interest in the Parks Movement is that it is the first concrete example of the second stream coalition and values coming together in a national movement. It is not evident to us that the link between parks and social integration is sufficiently close to economic growth and prosperity that we can consider them as our first economic developers in the Progressive tradition. Rather, we tend to think that within the planning-architect nexus was a seed from which a Progressive wing of American economic development would eventually evolve.
The Garden Cities: Suburban sprawl done in good taste
Olmsted, to his lasting shame, also ventured into city-building. In 1869 he and Vaux planned and formed the Riverside Improvement Company to build a new residential community nine miles north of Chicago. Embracing 1600 acres, linked to the central city only by commuter train, they platted 2500 individual, half-acre lots on which they proposed construction of single family detached housing located on winding, tree-lined (non-grid) road system with several parks sprinkled within the overall development. They called Riverside a “garden city” and it was meant for workers as much as anyone and was advertised as “a perfect village in a perfect location”. The project went into bankruptcy in 1873 and was incorporated into a Cook County village in 1875[6]. Olmsted also worked with the New York City suburb, Staten Island. He developed a plan-proposal to transform “that malaria-ridden swamp into a system of winding tree-lined roads and parks suitable for residential speculators”.[7]
The garden city raises the specter of the planned creation of a new city outside the limits and jurisdiction of the industrial (now central city).This is an example of Progressive city-building. Equally important it, could also be construed as a rejection (at least an alternative to) of the industrial city as the desired form of urban evolution. If so, garden cities as planned suburbs can be a serious entry point to introduce the phenomenon of suburbs. The originator of the garden city concept is usually accredited to Sir Ebenezer Howard, a Brit who in 1902 founded a company that built the first real garden city, Letchworth. Howard titled this suburban development as the Garden City, derived from Chicago’s motto, Urbs in Horto, or “city in a garden”[8]. Howard’s path-breaking book was eventually titled “Garden Cities of To-morrow”.
Garden cities, we argue, will presage the Progressive approach to city-building which in the more established Northeast and Midwest took the form of suburban developments[9]. Garden cities do not draw their inspiration, or consider as part of their heritage, the Privatist city-building efforts such as Pullman, Illinois (which opened in 1884)–the company town of the Pullman railroad car fame (and the later scene of a great strike, riot, and federal government crackdown)[10]. Indeed they are a reaction against it.
The function of Letchworth and the garden cities that followed–indeed their chief attraction–was to serve as alternatives to the crowded industrial city. However, none of the garden cities that were built achieved the economic autonomy that Howard envisioned. Instead, they invariably depended for employment on a nearby metropolis.[11]
The garden city, we will argue is Progressive solution to the social ills associated with congested, polluted, densely populated and large central cities through a new physical form of a “natural” urban community. The garden city in some version will become the pre-World War I model for many of our earliest nineteenth and twentieth century suburbs. The irony is that the suburban alternative has been identified as Privatist. In that density and central cities has since the mid-twentieth century become closely associated with Progressive economic development, it may come with some shock that it was not always so.
Garden cities would arrive in America largely due to Frederick C. Howe and Frederick Law Olmsted, the younger. Howe was a Progressive reformer and his notion of garden city captures much of the distinction that we draw between Progressive and Privatist city building. Howe noted that
generations of urban living had produced physical and moral decay in the fibre of [Britain so that] it initiated the garden city movement. Howe believed that garden suburbs would not only urbanize the American countryside, but would revitalize the city as well, for they represented a shifting of emphasis from property to people … A garden city, Howe claimed, offered the first escape from tenements and cramped apartment lives…[12]
Howe himself wrote of his garden city as much more than a planned subdivision; he saw it as a total rejection of that nightmare of private profit[13]:
The city problem is primarily an economic not a personal problem. Our failure to see this is far more costly than the inefficiency and dishonesty about which so much has been written [the city efficient movement]…. The basis of the city is physical. The health, comfort, convenience, happiness of the people is intimately bound up with the material side of the city. Much of the poverty is the product of our neglect to control the economic foundations of the community. The houses we live in, the streets …, the air and sunlight …, distribution of wealth, the cost of living and the vice and crime of the community …. are intimately connected with the way the city is built.[14]
And for Howe the city at that time was being built, built badly, by Privatist forces:
…a million men are thinking only of their individualist lot lines, of their inviolable right to do as they will with their own, irrespective of its effect on the community. We do not think beyond our own doorsteps, we do not think in city terms. We have exalted the rights of the individual above the common weal. Our cities have been permitted to grow with no concern for the future and with no thought of the community or the terrible costs which this uncontrolled development creates.[15] …our cities have been planned by a hundred different land owners each desiring to secure the quickest possible speculative returns
This last statement could be written today; it was written in 1912.It was written not to attack sprawl, but to defend the need to create new suburban communities, planned to overcome the Privatist evils.
It was left to Frederick Law Olmsted the younger[16] to design and construct Howe’s first American garden city concept: Forest Hills Gardens (in Queens, New York) founded in 1908[17]. With no restrictive covenants, the 142 acre site, linked to Manhattan by the new Long Island electrified rail (a fifteen minute ride from Penn Station), projected a population of 5000, housed in mostly detached single-family homes, with some apartment buildings, row houses and twins. The town square was the commercial center, behind which was a village green and then curvilinear tree-lined parkways “snaked their way” to the periphery. “The overall effect recalls a medieval Bavarian town”.[18] The garden city concept outlined their conception of a “planned” suburbia, designed and built in essence, to overcome the dysfunctionality of a city built for private profit and to overcome the perversities of density[19].
While we confess to a bit of cynicism in our characterization of garden cities versus the subdivision suburbs which emerged in the fifties, the distinction seems somewhat valid in distinguishing Progressive city-building from Privatist city-building like that of Denver and Miami–and certainly Levittown of a future era. Suburbs though they might be, Olmsted’s creations were “planned” communities. Through the plan, design and land use was intentionally meant to counter Privatist grid-speculation which supported the dominant pattern of private profit by developers.
All of which leads us to finalize our conception of the relationship between city building (either Privatist or Progressive) and economic development. City-building is a form of economic development; it is not conventional economic development, nor is it especially prominent today (exceptions being the New Urbanism and retirement communities). Traces of it can be found in the “new urbanism” and in the Privatist style in the retirement communities frequently built in the Sunbelt. Gated communities and subdivisions owned and managed by homeowners associations, i.e. Privatopia could also be versions found in unincorporated areas. Texas has several large master-planned communities and so does California. The New Deal and the Rouse Corporation would also launch several new planned communities. Oak Ridge Tennessee in its own weird way was a sort of Privatist city built by the Manhattan Project and whatever Disney World set off is another hard to classify form of city-building. In short, while “conventional” economic developers do not usually identify with these initiatives, it really serves no useful purpose to deny that they are a consistent, time-honored element of the profession.
Frank Lloyd Wright (the City in a Garden)
If the Curmudgeon may once again over generalize, he would observe that contemporary Progressives are quite uncomfortable with suburbs as a category of urban form. There is a tendency to believe the suburbs exert a zero-sum impact on their beloved large, diverse, dense and efficient central city. Worse it is the residential, and until the last census employment center for the Privatist class–and those “escaping” blight and racial change. There are those, however, that tend to adhere relatively closely to Progressive values that do not think the central city is the “be all” and forever of our urban landscape. Their concern is with the common man and not with the capitalist class. Their focus is upon community–but a community of individuals. Frank Lloyd Wright is one thinker that embraces the suburb. His ideas, the polar opposite of Le Corbusier, will shape the future suburban expansion. But at heart Wright espouses the “planned” city–it just happens to be a suburb and not a central city neighborhood or CBD–and it bears a marked resemblance to today’s sprawl.
Wright certainly is a part of the planning-architecture motif common to early twentieth century Progressive urbanism. He simply did not believe the central city of his day would survive–“I believe the city as we know it today, is to die”. The cause of its death: obsolescence caused by the then-modern technologies such as the automobile and communication-technology induced decentralization. “People can spread out–they no longer need to live in dense concentrations. Wright did not want to inject nature into dense concentrations of people; he advocated dispersing people into nature (countryside). The home of the individual social unit will contain in itself … all the city … plus intimate comfort and free individual choice[20]. Where’s the sign-up sheet for “bowling alone?”
He called his new conception of a city “Broadacre City” because it was based on a minimum of an acre for each family. Rybczynski assets that Wright was actually influenced by the old socialist, Henry George and that Wright conceived of Broadacre City as a land redistribution scheme for the common man. Wright’s classic, the Disappearing City[21] contains few firm details or sketches, but the cheap land “out there” in the hinterland made his image somewhat “doable”. Later works, however, provided more substance to the image and concept of Broadacre:
Wright imagined a hypothetical site: four square miles of vaguely Midwestern topography including farmland, a portion of a river, and a section of hillside. Following Midwestern custom, a grid of roads divides the land into quarter sections; some of the roads are two level highways, cars above and trucks below, with specially designed interchanges… There is no functional zoning; instead schools, civic buildings, factories, a county seat, and an arena are scattered among orchards, vineyards, farms, and recreational spaces. People live in houses on acre lots, as well as apartment towers, and on small farms…. There is no center or commercial core, nothing that resembles a traditional downtown …. (and) Wright’s plan does not represent a complete city; it is merely a small portion of an urban pattern that can go on forever.[22]
This is the planned, unplanned city and aside from its fairly radical 1930’s perspective, it does seem a reasonable reflection of today’s outer ring suburban sprawl. Whatever else like it or hate it, Wright’s crystal ball must have been pretty clear and amazingly accurate.
Wright never actually built a Broadacre City and no one tried to copy him. But he did seem to launch a new literature and a recognizable focus to the future American home–the house. He did publish home designs in House and Home and House Beautiful. His concept, Levittown’s future “Rambler” is today’s pervasive ranch-style housing. He called it the “Usonian” and he built more than 150 examples. His incomplete or partial depiction of a complete suburb arguably gave rise to the concept of subdivision and the “glass-roofed roadside markets” drawn in his image of Broadacre City reasonably resemble an enclosed shopping mall. The pervasiveness of various transportation modes in his Broadacre City image (rail, auto, planes, and believe it or not, personal Jetson-like flying cars bespeak his recognition that Broadacre City and the new urban landscape rests upon decentralizing transportation (and communication) technologies[23]. Wright saw the central city of his day as “disappearing”; it didn’t–although in the 1970’s it came damned close. But Wright did seem to understand how many Americans thought and what and how they wanted to live. The thrust of Broadacre seems very Privatist, but more precisely it is based around the individual and his/her family and is needs and wants as Wright imagined them and his notion that this community best expressed the needs of the average American family.
Social Reformers: a real alternative to the Privatist approach
After the late 1880’s through the first decade of the twentieth century, several large cities elected mayors who proceeded to enact a series of Progressive social and economic reforms. Some were one-termers (Seth Low, 1903, New York City, former President of Columbia University) others, more popular and successful, stayed around awhile and even got elected to higher office (Hazen Pingree, Detroit, 1889). Tagged with the label, Social Reformers, this selected group of mayors represents a Progressive big city alternative to either the City Efficient or the boss-political party machine. The first issue we confront with social reform mayors is the question of why are they included in a history of the economic development profession?
Several reasons led to our including social reform mayors in the history. First, the Progressive economic development stream is evolving through these transition years and social reform mayors are a significant aspect in that evolution. To understand social reform mayors is to better understand the core principles and values of the Progressive approach. Also, understanding which constituencies were attracted to social reformers may suggest segments of society and business from upon which the Progressive approach is drawn. Finally, and importantly, in reviewing the social reform mayors, we can see how, and to what extent, economic development was a vital element in their policy agenda and better appreciates the legacy of these mayors to the economic development profession?
Hazen Pingree and Detroit is an excellent starting point for understanding social reformer mayors and economic development. Pingree, a wealthy Republican shoe and boot manufacturer CEO, first won election (1889-1897) on the platform of anti-government corruption, and fear of corporate control (in the form of streetcar, telephone, gas and electric utilities). His coalition was a combination of old style Republican Yankees and ethnic Canadians and Germans.. This is not to say, however, that he replaced a long line of ethnic-based immigrant political machines. He didn’t; ethnic-based machines and political bosses did not have a major role in Detroit’s previous history and a large number of previous mayors were also business owners. It is also noteworthy that Pingree will preside over the early entrepreneurial development of the automobile industry[24]. He also engaged in what may have been Detroit’s most aggressive annexation period. He was reelected three times and then elected to Governor.
Pingree rooted out dishonesty and inefficiency in a fashion that excited civic up lifters … He brought the power of his administration against crooked contractors, bad workmanship, and the lax policies of municipal departments.[25]
As early as his first administration, Pingree exhibited a sincere concern for the working class. He fought hard and consistently to keep utility and streetcar fares down and eventually he became a strong advocate of municipal ownership of both industries. The Panic of 1893, however, prompted Pingree to confront directly high unemployment and working class distress by expanding welfare and public works programs (schools, parks, and public baths). He developed his “potato patch plan” which turned vacant city-owned lots over to the poor for gardens. He secured municipal ownership of the light plant, heavily taxed wealthy corporations and railroads/utilities in particular. In 1894 he said in a speech:
The most dangerous enemies to good government are not the saloons, the dives, the dens of iniquity and the criminals …[rather most of Detroit’ problems could be] traced to the temptations which are offered to city officials when franchises are sought by wealthy corporations, or contracts are to be let for public works.[26]
Pingree’s voting constituency shifted from middle class and business support to working class and poor and, if anything, he was able to forge the closest thing Detroit had seen to an ethnic political machine.
To the Curmudgeon, the most interesting economic development-related policy initiative of many Progressive-style social reformers is the establishment of the municipally-owned, later publicly (usually state monitored) owned utility. In this period, electric power was coming on line and to the early Progressives municipal ownership prevented corporate abuses and mispriorites and ensured the protection of the average man in a necessary service. Over the years, municipal and public utilities will develop in communities across the nation. Connecticut, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Kansas, California, Oregon and even Texas and Florida[27], for instance, as well as the Great Lakes social reform cities of the 1880’s will establish numerous municipally-owned utilities in the next half-century. The Curmudgeon suggests that the municipally-owned utility presents the almost perfect expression of the key Progressive belief that services as well as economic development ought to benefit the community at large and not be driven by private profit. This concern for the overall community, the community as a whole, especially its disadvantaged, and its fundamental distrust of the effects of the pursuit of private profit on the community as a whole, as hallmarks of the Progressive “ship” and Progressive-style economic development.
Social reform mayors were also elected in Toledo (Samuel ‘Golden Rule’ Jones, wealthy oil drilling manufacturer, 1897-1903) who was followed by a second social reformer, Brand Whitlock (5 terms as mayor), and Cleveland (Thomas Johnson, wealthy businessman, 1901-1909). Each of these social reform mayors followed an essentially similar agenda over a twenty year period. The geographical proximity of these three cities, we suspect, may be a clue to their political uniformity.
Another variant of social reform mayor can be identified in Milwaukee. Beginning in 1910, a socialist machine, based on a heavily German immigrant populations with an obviously strong working-class consciousness complete with its own socialist boss. A succession of socialist mayors held power until 1940. Obviously, these socialist mayors came into power without an instruction manual on how to be socialist. In many ways they mirrored much of the city efficient agenda–including honest government, administrative efficiency, use of experts, formation of a Bureau of Economy and Efficiency, but they did oppose commission and city manager forms as well as the various electoral reforms (nonpartisan, at large, short ballot). The lack of home rule authority prevented them from municipal ownership of the streetcar and utility firms which they did advocate. However, they aggressively pursued housing reform, factory safety, park development, a city-run employment office, paid union wages, eight hour day, compulsory strike arbitration, and free concerts. These socialist mayors were attacked from the left as “mere sewer socialists” for their pursuit of municipal ownership of utilities and better services rather than the overthrow of the capitalist system.[28]
Other social reform mayors were also elected in New York City (Seth Low, 1901-03), Jersey City, Philadelphia and Cincinnati but they were unable to establish dynasties or forge a durable electoral machine. For the most part in most northeast large cities, the home base of the ethnic political machine, social reformers were much less evident or successful. There is a noticeable geographic (Lake Erie and Great Lakes) and probably cultural (immigrant German-Scandinavian) propensity related to establishing a sustained social reform machine.
What may be more surprising to the reader is that large cities ethnic machines/bosses have considerable staying power–persisting at least to the 1920’s and in several instances to World War II. Whatever challenge manifested itself to the ethnic-base machine and boss politics were usually led by business coalitions which supported reform along the city efficient lines, rooting out corruption, emphasizing structural reforms, and attempting to transform government administration into a more or less mirror image of a corporation. These business coalitions were firmly rooted in the previously described Chamber of Commerce Privatist approach and their core constituency was the urban middle class and professionals. Progressive social reformers and traditional Privatist business-middle class reformers not only differed in their approach to economic development, but reflected somewhat different constituencies.
Because much academic research has viewed social reformer mayors as drawn from the 1880-1910 period, it does not include an individual we regard as the most important social reform mayor of all time, Fiorello LaGuardia, the three term mayor of New York (1933-1945). LaGuardia fits the social reform Progressive mould to the tee. Incorruptible, working-class and people-oriented, anti-large business, the Republican harkened back to the Teddy Roosevelt era–and his intermittently close political ally FDR. LaGuardia unified the transit system under municipal direction, broke the city’s dependence on bankers, built parks, low-cost public housing, re-installed a merit-based civil service, reorganized the police force, built airports and highways and fought tirelessly against the remnants of Tammany Hall.
La Guardia’s parks commissioner was Robert Moses and it was during La Guardia’s tenure that much of Moses-initiated bridge, highway, and tunnel construction occurred. In fairness, during La Guardia’s tenure, Moses had acquired such administrative, fiscal and political independence, based on his quasi-authority bureaucratic empire that Moses was for the most part beyond the control of even an aggressive and dominant mayor as La Guardia. Indeed, Moses regularly took on, and not infrequently won, serious battles against the President of the United States who was unwillingly partially financing a great deal of Moses’s most famous projects. Most members of our contemporary economic development profession would be reluctant to claim, or include, Moses as an economic developer–we do, however.
Inclusion of “the Little Flower” as he was then nick-named, allows us to better link the phenomena of social reform mayors to more contemporary politics and economic development. La Guardia is easily regarded as one of the very most respected and important mayors of the twentieth century. His politics and personality, however, (he reminds the Curmudgeon more of LBJ in personality) and his perceived association with Robert Moses, his Parks Commissioner (who was a frequent political rival and whom La Guardia seriously did not like), has complicated his historical reputation among modern Progressives. Nevertheless, La Guardia is clearly associated with the great infrastructure solution to the urban-Depression era crisis of his day. While not directly linked to urban renewal which was a post-World War II development (LaGuardia died in 1947), La Guardia came as close to it as possible with many housing projects, airport, highway, bridge and tunnel constructions (the Cross-Bronx) and his leadership and use of federal dollars and programs flowing from the pre-war New Deal. He retired in 1945 with New York City on the brink of fiscal collapse resulting from, it is alleged, bloated union wage public bureaucracies and debt to pay for outsized infrastructure installation.[29]
A couple of observations related to economic development seem warranted. First, social reform mayors, where successful, could forge a machine-like alliance with immigrant and working class voters. These social reform coalitions, probably because of their honest and Progressive political agenda, are seldom considered as machines and social reform mayors are never thought of as bosses. The agendas of the two varieties of social reform mayors are distinct, but can, especially in their anti-corruption focus, overlap.
There is a discernible policy distance between social reformers and the more structural city efficient reforms. Indeed Progressive anti-business platforms are a turn-off for strong business support. Its use of government (municipal utility ownership) is a marked departure from the policy tone of the period. The social reform economic development agenda, to the extent it has modern day applicability, is certainly more “people” than “place”-based. Indeed, it is our observation that the Progressive preference for people-based agendas is a clear departure from the transition era dominance of place-based tools and strategies. The latter are quite possibly of secondary or tertiary priority in a Progressive public policy agenda. This is an early formative period to be sure, but the two streams are different as early as the 1890’s. To the extent, we are correct in our inclusion of LaGuardia; social reform mayors are, in fact, to be a prototype image of the contemporary Progressive mayor.
The City Beautiful
The City Beautiful Era (loosely including 1893-1920–it actually continued through the Depression and New Deal public works often embraced it’s principles) is an important period in the tale of our profession, albeit a somewhat subtle, if not confusing one. The era is much more critical to the planning profession than to the economic development profession, but, we will develop our perspective that Progressive and Privatist significant elements of what will be economic development travels alongside (arguably within) the planning profession through the end of World War II. The story is complicated, to be sure, in that City Efficient planning will evolve simultaneously and alongside the City Beautiful planning–but they are not quite the same thing and spring from different roots. At the outset, however, the reader should be aware there is considerable overlap between the advocates of these different approaches.
It is a reasonable argument that during this era, several of these rings jelled and rapidly evolved to create comprehensive planning and the city planning profession[30]. At no point did during the City Beautiful Era/Movement was economic development the dominant or principal element. Economic development is at best a derivative concern of City Beautiful proponents. The City Efficient advocates, we would argue, focused upon structural reforms, honesty-anti-corruption and efficiency more as necessary preconditions for effective and efficient governance which was the foundation for future economic development. City Efficient did not envision a strong government as the initiator of a vision to change the community.
Some of the drivers internal to the Progressive City Beautiful era include: the Garden Cities folk described above, the Municipal Art Movement, the landscape architecture profession (including journalists and academic types), the women’s movement (an example of moral Progressivism drawn from Mohl’s earlier-described typology of Progressivism), and the “civic improvement or betterment” association movement. The constituencies that powered these sub-movements are disproportionately middle-upper class women, landscape architects and other professions, and the newly formed national-regional corporate elite. Landscape architects in this period were the driving force behind comprehensive and city-wide planning.
Lurking offstage inspiring early City Beautiful initiatives was the massive (1860’s) Haussmann renovation-modernization of Paris, the mother of all urban renewal projects (60% of city structures were alleged to have been affected), and Vienna’s Ringstrasse. The twelve grand boulevards of Paris, radiating out from the Arc de Triomphe, tree-lined, and laced with magnificent grand civic buildings and residences provided a visual benchmark and a none-too-subtle model for American proponents of the City Beautiful.
The assumption underlying City Beautiful was that beauty, in the form of Beaux Arts architecture and tree-lined boulevards would inspire the city residents to a life of moral and civic virtue. How far anyone but an architect of arts culture-phile could actually believe this assertion is unclear to the Curmudgeon. Still City Beautiful shared with the Garden Cities a belief that nature and beauty was what was missing from the industrial city. Beauty was the antidote to deterioration, congestion, and misery in the physical form of the industrial city which extended to its poor and immigrant residents. Living in misery, without the presence of beauty and virtue, the poor (and their unions, bosses and political machines) tended to crime, violence, hopelessness and potentially to revolution. To better grasp the goals of many Progressive planner-developers during this period it would follow that “place” and the physical improvement of the landscape applied to place is the most effective vehicle to help and empower “people” who live in that place. That is not always the goal structure desired by contemporary Progressive economic developers–there will be a shift in Progressivist economic development later in the century.
Today, many economic developers believe jobs and skill empowerment, job creation if you will, is the logical solution to these miseries. This goal, however, is a relatively recent arrival to the profession. We will argue that through the 1960’s, the dominant strategy of economic development (and planning) was not job creation nor skills-education enhancement, but the physical (real estate, logistical-transportation access and infrastructure) transformation of the city and the region. Say it another way more pertinent to the City Beautiful period, infrastructure and modernization, clothed in beauty and reminiscent of nature and small town America, were the solutions for individual virtue, a moral society, social and class stability, and economic development–and the best counter to the pernicious effects of immigration and the industrial city.
… ‘thoughtful people’ … were ‘appalled at the results of progress; at the waste in time, strength, and money which congestion in city streets begets, at the toll of lives taken by diseases when sanitary precautions are neglected; and at the frequent outbreaks against law and order which result from narrow and pleasure less lives’
The American city was marked by a void. It was blamed for having destroyed the uplifting qualities of the physical environment; everything had been sacrificed on The altar of industry and capital acquisition. No one had questioned every man’s right to disfigure the city with heavy smoke from soft-coal furnaces, stenches from soap factories and leather tanneries, unsightly billboards, and aesthetic nuisances.… There had been no time (in the building of the industrial city) to develop the finer instincts, to transform the ideals of communal living into an adequate physical environment.[31]
The solution, of course was “the city beautiful”. We shall concentrate upon two dynamic forces which drove the early City Beautiful era: the women’s-civic improvement association movements, and Daniel Burnham, the personification of the skyscraper, the architecture profession, and for our money, the father of American city planning.
[1] The reader should understand at the outset that we do not define or even link economic development with goals such as tax base-revenue raising or job creation which, for good or ill, are dominant today. We reject the notion that there exists, except in the most general and useless sense, a common set of goals for all cities which is timeless. In any period of time, cities differ in the purposes to which economic development is tasked; cities certainly differ in their goals over varying periods of time. A universal goal, such as job creation, for all economic development programs strikes the Curmudgeon as cute, convenient, but not descriptive of actual expectations placed upon the practicing economic developer.
[2] We use Olmsted as a stand in for a number of exceptional individuals who were prominent at this time or who were partners with Olmsted in his various activities. In particular, Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux were also important figures in the early second stream.
[3] Boyer, pp. 34-35
[4] Albert Fein, Frederick Law Olmsted and the American Environmental Tradition (1972) quoted in Mohl, op. cit. p. 75.
[5] M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1994), pp. 5-6.
[6] Today, the village of Riverside is headed by a village manager and economic development lead is performed by its chamber. A Main Street program is in operation.
[7] Boyer, op. cit. p. 41. We also should mention that Olmsted laid out Brooklyn in an essentially grid pattern, with a CBD housed in a distinctive architectural focal point (the Crystal Palace) and a walkable scale.
[8] Rybczynski, op cit. p. 30.
[9] the 1857 Llewellyn Park suburb (the Ramble), thought to be the nation’s first planned suburb (and home to Edison) in New Jersey (twelve miles from New York City), usually stands on its own, more a Privatist gated community than a forerunner of the modern suburb, the Progressive planned city or even the Garden City itself.
[10] Either does the planning profession apparently. Mel Scott’s, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969–the classic history of the profession does not mention, even in passing (we do appreciate that 1884 is before 1890) the Pullman or Sunbelt city-building we have previously described. This is for good reason, planning had little to do with that approach.
[11] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities” (New York, Scribner, 2010) pp. 31-32
[12] Boyer, op. cit. p. 41.
[13] Notice Howe’s discomfort with the “city efficient” movement which we have earlier discussed under the Privatist rubric.
[14] Frederic C. Howe, “The City as a Socializing Agency: The Physical Basis of the City: the City Plan” American Journal of Sociology, volume 17 (March 1912), pp. 590-601.
[15] IBID. pp. 590-601.
[16] Olmsted Jr. established the nation’s first graduate landscape architecture program at Harvard, first President of the American City Planning Institute and a private architect and author.
[17] Home of the West Side Tennis Club which hosted the U.S. Open until 1978 and in 2007 voted by Cottage Living as the “best cottage community. Residence of Anthony Weiner; see Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969) pp. 90-91.
[18] Rybczynski, op. cit., pp. 33-36. The Curmudgeon senses some compatibility with these designs and those of the “New Urbanism” of the 1990’s.
[19] Some examples of future imitation of the garden city include: Kohler Wisconsin, industrial villages in Camden, New Jersey, Worcester, Massachusetts, Erwin, Tennessee, Wilmington, Delaware, John Nolen’s garden suburb of Mariemont Ohio (outside Cincinnati) and several in Bridgeport Connecticut. Other examples are Venice, Florida, Shaker Heights in Cleveland, the County Club District in Kansas City and the well-known Palos Verdes Estates south of Los Angeles. In the late 1920, planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright used garden city concepts to build Sunnyside Gardens in the Queens and Radburn in suburban New Jersey. See Rybczynski, op. cit., pp. 37-39.
[20] For all this, and much that will follow we are indebted to Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities” (New York, Scribner, 2010) especially Chapter 4: “Mr. Wright and the Disappearing City). The above quotes are taken from pp. 67-69.
[21] Frank Lloyd Wright,The Disappearing City (New York, William Farquhar Payson, 1932).
[22] Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 71-72.
[23] Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 75-76.
[24] By 1903 (Pingree served as Governor until 1901) Ford, Packard, Chrysler, Dodge, William Durant and others developed in the Detroit metro area during the nineties.
[25] Melvin G. Holli, Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics (New York, 1969) quoted in Mohl, op. cit. p.123. Dennis R. Judd, The Politics of American Cities, op. cit. pp. 74-79 offer an excellent description of Pingree and social reformers as well.
[26] Pingree was quoted in Mohl, op. cit. p. 123.
[27] As of 2013 there are an estimated 2000 municipally-owned utilities remaining in the United States. See Five Star Consultants, “Municipal Electric Utilities: Analysis and Case Studies” www.fivestarconsultants.com
[28] Mohl, op. cit. pp. 124-127. Schenectady, New York also elected George Lunn as a socialist mayor in 1911. Minneapolis did also in 1916. Other cities with socialist mayors included Haverhill Massachusetts, Lackawanna New York, Flint Michigan, Granite City, Illinois and Butte, Montana all between 1910 and 1920.
[29] See Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York, (New York McGraw-Hill, 1989); Alyn Brodsky, the Great Mayor: Fiorello LaGuardia and the Making of the City of New York (New York, Truman Talley, 2003); and Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2013). Apparently his biographers agree that LaGuardia was responsible for the “making of New York City”.
[30] Again, Mel Scott’s chapter, “The Heyday of the City Beautiful” presents the City Beautiful period as seen through the planning prism. To the extent that Progressive economic development will dovetail with the planning profession for more than two generations, that history does have relevance to our economic development profession as well. We will, however, tend less to repeat Scott’s presentation than to draw from it (and others) the more economic development aspects of the City Beautiful. No claim is made that we are trying to describe the entirety of City Beautiful anymore than the entirety of the planning profession. We are culling out of this period only what, to us, appears of interest to the economic developer. This, also, was the age of professionalism as well as Progressivism. In this period the National Municipal League, the action arm of local progressives, (1894) was formed. Within two years the NML had 180 local municipal organizations as members. Alongside the NML was the National Civic Foundation (1900), the American Economic Association (1885), the National Housing Association (1910), the National Association of Settlements (1911), the American Political Science Association (1903), the American Institute of Planners (1909), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (1912), and many others such as the National Association of Port Authorities, the National Conferences of Mayors and City Managers, and the Municipal Finance Officers Association all came into existence and are still around in some form today.
[31] Boyer, op. cit., p. 43.
Civic Improvement Associations {saved from 2015 File, and amended Jan 10, 2018)
The civic or village improvement movement dated back to 1848 with Andrew Jackson Downing’s encouragement to city dwellers to establish “rural improvement societies for encouraging tree planting and tasteful architecture”.[1] The first such group to form was in 1853, Stockbridge Massachusetts which became “the prototype for all that followed”. “By 1880, Massachusetts had twenty-eight associations and Connecticut between fifty and sixty”. In the 1880’s and 90’s associations spread first to the Middle Atlantic, then to the South East and by 1900, California, probably the last, “had several dozens of associations.[2] All in all there were probably thousands across the United States. They should be considered as evidence of an instinctive need to form neighborhood-level entities, to accomplish civic, ED and CD ends and purposes.
These municipally-based civic improvement associations were led-disproportionately populated by upper and middle class women, many of which were mobilized behind several of the other moral social reform and later Progressive movements ongoing at the time. Like chambers of commerce civic improvement associations arose almost naturally in many smaller cities and towns. Neighborhood improvement associations (NIA) also could be found in new Big City subdivisions, as most Big Cities were still able to capture much of the 19th century “drive to the periphery” because existing city boundaries were not yet reached, or annexation was still possible. The attractiveness of the political machine, and the more desperate economic/social needs of the immigrants imparted a middle-class character to the 19th century neighborhood movement. Lacking a ward-base political machine, it can be imagined that either the Church or voluntary civic improvement associations could have formed among working and ethnic immigrant classes.
Like chambers civic associations were far from monolithic in their views and purposes. In fact, both Richard Hofstadter and Craig Turnbull describe these civic associations as “the coexistence of illiberalism and reform”[3] in that many used beautification and real estate techniques to keep undesirables out of their areas–a not so Progressive orientation. In later years of the City Beautiful era, the early Great Migration deeply affected the policy and activities of these associations. To counter what was viewed as “conservative parochialism”, Progressive reformers created a national association (similar to the NML) which came to be called the American League of Civic Improvement at first located in Springfield Illinois, and then in 1902 moved to Chicago.
Nineteenth Century: There are several issues that impede analysis of 19th century neighborhood civic improvement associations. First is they were neighborhood-hood level, and related was that much of the movement was female—neither of which captured the interest of male-dominated Policy World. More defensible was their quite varied agenda of concerns, which ranged from civic beauty and planting trees and flowerbeds (which became a tourism strategy for a small town), to public sanitary conditions, and importantly a direct connect to the landscape architecture profession, to the parks movement, and from there to planning—even touching upon municipal water supply and filtering.
Given its direct connection to the parks movement which was the prime mover for the first national ED/CD strategy/program, the City Beautiful, a brief description is important to our history. Newburgh (NY) born Andrew Jackson Downing was born precisely as the Second Great Awakening entered its growth years (1815). Drawing upon its fervor, Downing embraced not religion, but horticulture and landscape gardening/design. His first book, Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America was an instant success, and made his a bit of a literary celebrity. He followed up with a series of books and founded journals. He was a prominent leader in founding state-level agricultural colleges.
Downing espoused a “philosophy” and approach to neighborhood organization that seized upon his belief in what today is captured in “a home is a castle” for a family, and families and their home are the foundation of a neighborhood. Families take pride in their home, and they develop it in ways that express their material prosperity, education, and their pride in community and nation. Civic pride results from home beautification. Civic pride begets happiness, or at least a measure of contentment, which leads to more stable citizenship and moral lifestyles. In this one can see an ethos on which future suburbs would be built, but in 1850 it was applied to Big City homes and subdivisions. Turnbull asserts Downing espoused three cornerstone principles and goals for his concept of civic beauty: (1) the civilizing power of house and garden, (2) the capacity of both to reflect the moral and civic character of their inhabitants, and (3) the important role of the credible expert in shaping that environment (Turnbull, p. 28). Downing in the last instance was the leader of an emerging profession, an expert, whose services were essential to the achievement of is other purposes. In this Boyer will also concur (pp. 18ff). Rural improvement associations were the vehicle by which these purposes would be wrought.
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His success and competence leads many to consider him the “father of landscape architecture”. That title was awarded because Downing in the late 1840’s pressed hard for the construction of a huge park in New York City. On a trip to England in 1850, he picked up a junior partner who moved from England to Newburgh—together they worked on another prestigious project, the National Mall. In 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was founded, and located on a site on the National Mall. President Millard Fillmore (1850) awarded a commission to Downing to prepare a plan/report for the design of the mall. Downing issued the report in 1851, causing a stir in that it was a radical departure from L’Enfant’s paradigm. Downing wanted a “national park” that would serve as a model for the nation and its Big Cities—“a public museum of living trees and shrubs”. Fillmore got his startup funds, but the plan was never fully implemented.
In the height of his fame, disaster struck. In July 1852, while onboard with his extended family, the steamer, Henry Clay, exploded on the Hudson River. He burned to death at age 37, along with 80 others. That left his junior partner with the contracts, journals and Downing’s business. In 1857. New York City. The junior partner arranged a meeting with the Superintendent of NYC’s Central Park—which had been approved by the state legislature in 1853. They had earlier met upon introduction by Downing back in 1850. The two decided to submit a plan, one of 33 submissions, for the design of the Central Park. They won. So, Downing’s junior partner, Calvert Vaux, and the Superintendent, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. designed and built Central Park. The rest as they say is history—and will be further discussed in later articles.
As the reader might notice—what has this got to do with neighborhood improvement associations? Frankly, not much. It is a tangent that describes what will turn out to be a CD Profession/Specific Policy Fifth Wing landscape architecture/public planning/parks movement–that while related in important ways to urban infrastructure and MED/CD economic development did not take on a primary MED/CD character until it matured in the late 1890’s in the form of City Beautiful. Neighborhood improvement associations, also an offspring of Downing, followed a different path after his death.
Downing did not want or believe that landscape architecture, or home beautification was meant for wealthy elites—he wanted it to be a part of middle class life. Turnbull, and others, observe that Downing wanted to make beautification part of middle class lifestyle (Craig Turnbull, An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890-1920 (Cambria Press, 2009, p. 28)). To this end, the he stressed formation of a rural improvement society
Beginning with the Laurel Hill Association in Stockbridge MA in 1853, the first incorporated village improvement society in the United States … [Laurel Hill} transformed the townscape of Stockbridge through voluntary subscription, rebuilding the ‘irregularly laid out and unevenly graded main street and planting on the town’s treeless sidewalks and common green (Turnbull, p. 29)
Downing’s most impactful convert was Birdsey Grant Northrup, a Congregational minister from CT, who took it upon himself to promote formation of the rural, village, and urban neighborhood improvement associations throughout the nation. Initially, most successful in New England, it eventually spread to Pacific Coast states by the turn of the century. Northrup intended civic beautification to instill rural values and character into an increasingly urban and industrial America. He insisted each board of directors, be composed of a majority of women, who were, he believed, better able to raise money and secure the cooperation of others, and recruit volunteers. Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s and Scribner’s, leading media of the day, embraced improvement associations and published a stream of supporting articles in their defense and promotion.
Northrup also stressed nonpartisanship, and insisted association membership be open to all economic classes. For him a local improvement association and its services could ameliorate “the animosities of politics and religion in furnishing a safe common ground for the display of mutual beneficiary activity” (Turnbull, p. 31). In this sense, he incorporated into a local association a curious tension between the expert professional, and participatory democracy. “Maximum feasible participation”, as Moynihan would later label it, was a part of the neighborhood movement since its inception.
By the 1890’s local association initiatives were producing solid MED/CD outcomes of preserving and enhancing property values, lessening external population outmigration, serving as what today we call tourist destination benefits, and in general conveying a civic pride and satisfaction that protected the community from negative competitive impacts. Nineteenth century associations concentrated attention, aside from civic beautification, on public works, streets especially, and public schools. In short, they had become an EDO/CDO (p. 32).
Such claims attracted Thorstein Veblen’s attention, not in a good way, of course, as rhapsodizing about the benefits of expensive beauty initiatives as yet another example of conspicuous consumption, in this case by the middle class. (P.33). His was not the only concern or criticism. By the 1890’s, it was clear to many improvement associations were not only not “open” to lower classes, but were also instruments in preserving neighborhood class homogeneity (this is an era previous to Black immigration). This bifurcation of neighborhood associations, into those pursuing CD principles, and those adhering to more MED purposes was fully developed by the turn of the century Progressive Era.
Progressive Era: Charles M. Robinson in 1899 injected new vitality into the civic improvement movement with his publication of a three-part series “Improvement in City Life” in the Atlantic Monthly[4]. Robinson enlarged upon that movement and it is to him that we attribute the label, “City Beautiful”. The dimension Robinson brought into play was that public buildings and even infrastructure could reflect beauty and that a city hall, a public library or even a tree-lined boulevard and statutes-monuments could accomplish civic improvement goals and purposes:
‘When one speaks of the aesthetic side of American cities, one thinks at once of their public buildings; of their parks, statues and boulevards. But in any right conception of urban loveliness these would be only the special objects of a general and harmonious beauty’
Robinson took the broadest possible view of what he called civic art and discussed practical ameliorations such as limiting the height of buildings, removing advertising, cleaning streets, planting trees, improving lighting and installing public art…. He emphasized that while city governments sometimes took the lead in these improvements, a variety of private organizations such as municipal art societies, park associations and (of course) civic clubs (associations), also had roles to play, in a way that anticipated today’s park conservancies and downtown business improvement districts.[5]
Robinson’s ideas were incorporated quickly into the civic improvement association movement[6].
Thanks to his writing, Robinson became a national figure and was engaged as a planning consultant by a number of cities, including Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Fort Wayne, Denver, Des Moines, Omaha and Honolulu. He was part of the team that designed a ‘Model City’ for the popular 1904 Stain Louis World’s Fair; served on planning commissions in Rochester, New York and Columbus Ohio; and was appointed professor of civic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two universities in the United States to offer courses in city planning (Harvard was the other).[7]
By 1902 civic improvement could be defined as “the promotion of outdoor art, public beauty, town, village and neighborhood improvement”, in the same year the Chautauqua institution prepared and disseminated “improvement study guides” to the association’s members. At its third convention in 1002, the League created fourteen advisory committees including ones on “municipal reform” and settlements, sanitation”. Billing itself as a “federation of organizations and individuals aiming to promote the higher life of American communities” the American League was spearheading the spread of civic associations in municipalities across the nation–to large cities such as Buffalo, Chicago, St. Paul, Milwaukee, and St. Louis and to smaller, frontier and left coast towns. A1905 survey revealed that nearly 2500 civic associations existed[8].
How does all this fit into a history of economic development?
Forgive us the comparison, but one might construe these civic improvement associations as non-business, Progressive chambers of horticulture and real estate improvement. That these associations crossed over at times into municipal economic development is certain. Equally certain is that these associations were not primarily driven by economic development purposes. In many other ways, however, the civic associations were comparable to the municipal reform leagues described earlier in our discussion on Privatism. They make sense as economic development-related if we recall that the physical landscape, home and neighborhood beauty and order writ municipally large, reflected the period’s dominant perception of how to achieve order and prosperity through integration of immigrants into mainstream society and setting the standard for their neighborhoods and homesteads. No one at this point in time was defining economic development as job creation or knowledge-based economic growth–instead beautification (and order) improved the character and the moral spirit of American industrial municipalities by attempting to preserve a touch of small-town America into community and neighborhood. If viewed in this manner, civic associations can be viewed as an early forerunner of Great Society community development associations.
Daniel Burnham
The more obvious link of City Beautiful with economic development arises from the life work of one of America’s greatest architect, Daniel Burnham. Daniel Burnham, an Upstate New York native, had established himself in Chicago as a noted architect and co-founder of a firm which was regarded as a nationally-known practitioner of the newly emerging Chicago school of architecture. The Chicago school’s signature distinction was, of course, the skyscraper. We pick up Burnham’s career in 1890 and the Chicago World Fair. The Fair, wherever it was to be held, was authorized by Congress to celebrate the 400th birthday of Columbus’s discovery of America. It was to be a national celebration, described as America’s coming out party and a testimonial to America’s coming of age[9]. The closest comparison of contemporary life would certainly be the Summer Olympics.
As might be expected a raft of big cities competed for certification by Congress. Each city was represented by a citizen’s and businessman’s host committee, each with the support of their municipal and state governments. Each out-promised the other (can the reader picture the lobbying techniques employed to acquire favor of Congress) and one plausible explanation for Chicago’s nick-name, the Windy City, arises from this competition. Say what you will about city planning, and city beautiful, this competition was sheer municipal boosterism that would make any economic developer proud. Chicago, then the second most populous city, had just completed a huge annexation, established a sewer district which embraced much of Cook County, and had commenced the construction of a ship canal that would reverse the flow of the Chicago river. Chicago was on a roll and was not about to lose the competition.
It didn’t. Burnham, a leader of the Chicago delegation, was chosen to be the Fair’s chief planner and director of the works. In the spring of 1893, The Great White City placed on exhibit America’s (and Chicago’s) technological and inventive achievements before the world. More than twenty-one million people attended (Burnham apparently was Chicago’s tourism director as well). The architecture, the unified plan, and the canals, as well as the infamous “little Egypt” (a stripper), ignited the crowds, and the imagination of the world. If timing is everything, Burnham timed it right (excepting that it coincided almost exactly with the Panic of 1893). He emerged from the Fair as the nation’s best known architect and the desire of virtually every American city to copy in some way the Great White City was to launch officially the City Beautiful movement and start the process which would culminate in the launch of the city planning profession. It also greatly increased business at his architectural firm and given Burnham’s natural entrepreneurship, a considerable dose of privatism was unloaded upon the city beautiful.
To be sure, the four year Panic slowed the pace dramatically, but by 1897 the race was on.
… a penchant for structures of classical stability, and in the colonnades and pediments of the White City … was, indeed, a prophecy, forecast of monumental city halls, public libraries, museums, union stations, banks, and academic halls to be built over the next twenty or thirty years. As clearly as a royal edict, the fair proclaimed the aesthetic principles that would govern the design of civic centers, malls, boulevards, university and college campuses, waterfronts and other expositions for two decades or more. It powerfully persuaded visitors from Omaha, Buffalo, St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego and other cities that they too must commemorate great events in similar fashion.[10]
The City Beautiful Movement picked up considerable steam when the U.S. Senate (1900-1902) established a commission to plan what would become today’s Washington D.C.’s national mall. Several members of this McMillan Commission, including Burnham, had worked together on the 1893 World’s Fair and they constructed a new plan for Washington D.C. which included the mall, the Federal Triangle, Union Station and the Lincoln and Jefferson monuments. The plan established a model for other cities to imitate. In 1910 Congress established the Commission of Fine Arts to implement the McMillan Plan and over the next decade much of the mall was rebuilt and the Lincoln Memorial was constructed. Following this lead world fairs in Saint Louis, San Francisco and San Diego propelled the city beautiful design principles to ever-higher visibility and added a considerable “coolness” factor to the movement.
Burnham’s 1902 Washington D.C. plan remade and enlarged the original L’Enfant Plan. The Mall. Union Station, the buildings and the boulevards transformed Washington into the perfect expression of the City Beautiful and elevated comprehensive planning to a first order urban priority.
Burnham’s Washington Plan drove home the value of comprehensive city planning. Like the Chicago’s World Fair, the monumental Washington plan awakened and nurtured the belief that urban life could be orderly and efficient, that cities could be beautiful and inspiring. Capturing the attention of civic leaders in other cities, Burnham’s grandiose Washington plan gave new impetus to urban planning.[11]
Burnham, as one might expect, did quite well with all of this design and construction. Skyscrapers, which had been confined previous to 1900 to Chicago and New York, spread to almost all major downtown districts– and neo-classical architecture, for good measure was also inserted into central business districts which now became not only a manufacturing but an office, retail and cultural-recreational district. The CBD, as we imagine it in its Golden Age was now in the process of its initial construction. By the definition of most, this aspect of the City Beautiful era was certainly economic development of its day. Daniel Burnham might be also named the “father of the modern CBD”.
City after city sponsored design competition for their version of desired construction–and from these competitions came visions of the urban future. Cleveland, for example, led by its Chamber, its chapter of Institute of Architects conducted a design competition which sought to emulate the cluster of public buildings of the Chicago Fair. From this competition would come the “Group Plan” which cluster a city hall, courthouse, public library and post office around a beautiful park and situated on a grand boulevard. Added to that motley assemblage was the nation’s very first “civic center”.
This civic center project, the prototype of dozens of others in first two decades of our century, was also a slum clearance effort. On the forty-four acre site … stood many old buildings, including a five story light manufacturing structure…[12]
Other cities implemented city beautiful CBD projects over the next few years, including Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Prestigious college’s, such as Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), Rice (Houston), Southern Methodist (Dallas), California Institute of Technology (Los Angeles) and the University of Colorado (Denver) designed the campus around city beautiful principles. Train stations, built in imitation of Union Station, were constructed in New York, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Dallas and Los Angeles[13].
“Plaster fantasy”[14] as it was, the World’s Fair and the City Beautiful could not hide the deterioration so very evident in the central city and even in the new CBD. Alleys connected the resident to ghettoes and slums and the tenement house of Jacob Riis. Beauty and buildings alone was not going to successfully confront the dangers lurking in the new industrial city. Pioneered by Burnham, the need was for a complete remaking of the city and to do that one needed “the comprehensive plan”. In 1896, at a formal dinner party Burnham proposed to a group of elite businessmen (such as Pullman, Marshall Field, and Phillip Armour), a scheme which would evolve over the next decade into a formal plan for the entire Chicago region. The Burnham of “make no little plans” fame had commenced in earnest his urban planning career.
Burnham and his comprehensive plan did stumble badly in San Francisco, however. Its failure there makes more visible the contrast between the City Beautiful Progressive plan and Privatist economic development. In early some 1904 San Francisco merchants and a former mayor, desiring the city to issue a series of municipal bonds to finance a hospital, sewers, schools, streets, library, jail and playground and parks improvements, formed a civic association (Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco (AIASF)). Phelan, the San Francisco Bulletin and other business leaders were at the same time locked in a bitter struggle with the Ruef political machine–which they would topple and send Ruef to jail in 1907. The AIASF had more limited aims:
… to formally discuss a plan for the improvement of San Francisco ….San Francisco is at a turning point of its growth. It can either be a great and beautiful and attractive city where men and women of civilized tastes and wants will desire to live, or a great and ugly and forbidding city which people will shun.[15]
Other improvements included an opera house auditorium, a music conservancy, planting of flowers and trees, prohibition of overhead trolley car wires (“as not befitting the dignity and beauty of our principal streets”) and the construction of harbor improvements made “necessary by the growth of commerce and the increasing population …”), but all was to be achieved through a comprehensive plan which would “elevate the public taste” and serve as a “great advertisement for our city”[16].
San Francisco businessmen, like their counterparts elsewhere, were generally optimistic about the prospect of remaking their city. They sensed that man could control his environment, that almost anything could be accomplished. A beautiful planned city would, they thought, lessen discord among different groups and help their cities capture the national reknown they deserved.[17]
In February 1904 the AIASF invited Daniel Burnham to town–Burnham brought along his assistant, Edward Bennett (who would later devise Portland’s comprehensive plan). In due measure, 1905, Burnham and Bennett produced a wonderful plan following faithfully city beautiful and McMillan Commission principles and design. In the midst of the discussion on the Burnham plan, San Francisco (April, 1906) suffered through the famous earthquake and almost totally burned down. While terrible for the city and its populace, the virtually complete destruction of the past built environment had to create an opportunity for the plan’s speedy implementation. To the contrary, over the next year the plan went nowhere and the city was rebuilt with little or no correspondence to the outlines and principles of the Burnham plan.
Street construction proved to be a particularly contentious issue, for until the locations of streets were fixed and the streets rebuilt, businesses could not fully resume operations. Merchants and other businessmen who had long supported planning now broke from it in the interest of getting back in business as soon as possible. … Another divisive matter was the proposed extension of new strict ordinances governing the building of fireproof structures … to make San Francisco more secure against future blazes. The attempt led to vociferous opposition from small business owners … as too expensive…. A third issue that immediately surfaced was that of the building of a civic center (which) some businessmen countered, however, that San Francisco could not afford the expense of such a luxury… Overarching all of those individual issues was … a common fear on the part of many businessmen they could not afford the higher taxes they thought would be required by the improvements mandated by planning.[18]
Still, city planning had arrived as a profession and as an instrument of urban revitalization during the city beautiful decades. In 1907[19], Harford Connecticut established the first Planning Commission in the nation. Within a decade, virtually every city had one. By the 1920’s these planning departments were developing metropolitan plans for their regions. The EDO companion to the Chamber, the city planning department, took its place in the governmental bureaucracy.
It would be most helpful for contemporary economic developers to appreciate that planning, especially in its early years, was itself a “big tent”. Universities started courses and programs and students “piled” into them–lured by a new, exciting, and potentially full of opportunities for career experiences. The profession had yet to “professionalize”, and it certainly had not siloized in this period. Within a municipal bureaucracy, the planning department could easily have been the “go to” place to dump special projects and new initiatives. The overlap, as we see with our San Francisco case study, of the comprehensive plan (and zoning-industrial parks) with economic development was considerable in these early years.
Moreover, one should not assume that a planning department in one city, region or state was the clone of all others. Internal units within planning departments likely were composed of distinctive staff. For instance, over the next generation, it is likely, in our opinion, that more Progressive planners gravitated into housing-related or metropolitan planning programs and activities, while more Privatist planners shifted into zoning and building codes. We suspect the Planning or Housing Departments housed those Progressive programs and activities which came closest to economic development in function and purpose. Perhaps interestingly, to this very day, over twenty per cent of EDOs are lodged in planning/housing departments.
Port Authorities: the Progressive ship sails into harbor
The Curmudgeon, always on the lookout for those phenomena which seems to make his “two ships” metaphor seem, if not relevant at least minimizes any perceived clumsiness, was happy, if not surprised, to discover the role of port authorities in the evolution of American economic development. Our discussion of Northeastern port cities in Chapter 2 skirted around the public port authority–observing that none were used in those jurisdictions and that their non-use was an exception to the larger national pattern. The unappreciated reality of early twentieth century economic development is that the formation and expanded use of public port authorities was an important, indeed major, step in the evolution of our profession and economic development practice. Public port authorities have largely dropped off the twenty-first century economic development radar screen, but interspersed among the great variety of contemporary economic development organizations can be found the surprisingly widespread, strategically powerful, but very little noticed dinosaur-like port authority[20].
Port authorities have an interesting past. Not surprisingly, much of the nineteenth century port facilities were privately-owned and de facto shipping monopolies of railroads, power utilities and mining corporations. Today’s public port authority is more than likely a quasi-public, state chartered, often locally driven public authority whose first priority is to service, of all things, a port (and often an airport). They are perceived by many economic developers as certainly economic development related, but not directly in the business of economic development and port authorities and airports, have their own professional associations[21] which operate outside the parameters of conventional economic development. In the Curmudgeon’s mindset, however, transportation infrastructure and trade functions are critical to the practice of economic development that the distinction and separation of these structural forms from the core of economic development practice seems quite arbitrary and a distortion. This mindset is reinforced in that most current port authorities include rather conventional economic development tools and programs. In a few states, port authorities to this day are a vital element of sub-state economic development , not to neglect that port authorities exist in every state SSS and in some states are a core EDO-type (see Oregon, Washington and Ohio for instance).
We shall in the next few pages suggest that public Port Authorities from their birth functioned as economic development agencies. And that the port authority was the first economic development-related structural expression of early Progressivism. As we shall quickly discover, however, as much as Progressives inspired and employed port authorities to achieve their purposes, Privatist-oriented economic development would also seize upon the EDO structure and adapt it to achieve Privatist ends as well[22]. In any case, using New Orleans and Portland Oregon as examples we shall demonstrate how early ports (and some port authorities as well) served as an initial battleground (with serious economic development relevance) in the Progressive pushback to private power and business monopolies.
Previous to the first decade of the twentieth century there were a few examples of a public port authority in operation. The most notable were those in San Francisco (1863) and New Orleans, the latter authorized by Louisiana state legislation in1896. The former was a state commission and the latter was a state empowered, locally driven municipal level “authority” governed by “commissioners (appointed by the governor from local nominations of individuals “predominately identified with the commerce or business interest of the Port of New Orleans”)[23]. New Orleans as a port had by the turn of the twentieth century commenced its decline (in 1835 it was the world’s largest port and by 1900 it had fallen to be the United States’ twelfth largest port).
The decline prompted the private businesses which dominated the port (the New Orleans Steamship Association) to take corrective action. It was their leadership and political pressure, exercised through the New Orleans Board of Trade and Chamber of Commerce which prompted and secured the approval of empowerment state legislation. Essentially, in the New Orleans situation, Privatist elites turned to the state and governor for a quasi-governmental vehicle with which they could operate and manage a revitalization of the port’s business–while preserving private decision-making and protecting private assets (a” Big Easy elite–an informal business grouping)[24].
We believe that in these early years, this type of private domination of the port authority was also shared by the 1853 San Francisco Port Authority and the soon to be discussed (1891) Port of Portland[25]. Indeed, it appears that in this era, the ceding of semi-public power to business such as railroads was not restricted to the Western frontier and the transcontinental railroad.
If we conceive of the seaport as a modal shift point for cargo, the interest of railroads in seaports is quite logical. Important contemporary seaports such as the Port of Los Angeles had their genesis as freight entrepots and were originally creations of railroads. However, their influence at the waterfront–not to mention their ability to act monopolistically in cargo movement–eventually brought public condemnation and a call for reform.[26]
The “lock” over the appointment process detailed in the empowerment legislation, however, ensured that in New Orleans’s case, Privatist control was not effectively challenged for generations. Initially the New Orleans authority acquired privately owned jetties, wharves and piers and then was stymied; it was only in 1908 that the authority undertook dramatic projects financed by its first issuance of authority bonds. This delayed programmatic aggressiveness is interesting in that 1907-1911 was the period during which a virtual horde of newly created and specially empowered port authorities spread across the nation’s coasts[27] (except, of course, the Northeastern cities).
The truly remarkable emergence of the port authority as our first economic development agencies is vividly demonstrated by the events occurring within the older (1891) Port of Portland Oregon; The Port of Portland was created in 1891 to perform fairly limited duties and quickly became mired in an ever-constant series of scandals (which persisted through the first half century of its existence). By the turn of the century,
… many Portlanders worried that railroads and other private corporations held so much waterfront land that Portland’s competitive position … was being damaged. In 1910 the city’s voters approved $500,000 to acquire land for public docks. Mayor Joseph Simon, a political boss with obligations to the railroad, vetoed the council ordinance to sell the bonds. In response voters used the new initiative process to approve $2.5 million and create an independent Commission of Public Docks to break the railroad monopoly.[28]
The two co-existed, uneasily, alongside each other until they were consolidated into one port authority in 1970.
Oregon’s story does not stop here. Earlier, in 1909, the Oregon legislature approved a series of Progressive reforms which included, in an attempt to break the hold of railroad interests not only on Portland but the entire state as well. Included in this package of reforms was a single chapter (Chapter 777–Chapter 778 applied to the Portland) which stipulated a process by which many Oregon municipalities could create their own port authority. Also specified was the governance and the powers which these port authorities could exercise. Oregon’s coastal communities, empowered to create their own municipal port authority (with locally elected governance) immediately approved a series of local port authorities: Coos Bay (1909), Siuslaw Oregon (1909), and Astoria Oregon (1910). Others were to follow and authorization was later extended to communities along Oregon’s major waterways. In 2013, the Oregon Public Ports Association asserts that twenty-three public port authorities exist and are currently operating in the state.
Just upstream, in the state of Washington, the story is much the same[29]. In Washington the public struggle between Progressives and Privatists focused around public ownership of port and transportation access and facilities. “In Seattle, Tacoma and elsewhere railroad companies had long controlled much of the urban waterfront as a result of concessions granted as cities competed to become railroad destinations”.[30] As early as 1907, the Governor (Mead) vetoed approved port authority legislation and attempts in 1909 were rebuffed as well. Every dog has his day, however, and in 1911 a series of Progressive reforms were approved by the Washington State legislature, and included among them was the Port District Act.
The Port District Act, signed into effect by Governor Hay, empowered municipalities to create port authorities and directly elect their commissioners. “Progressives argued that public control (of harbor access and facilities) would permit coordinated development, financed by government-backed credit, and would ensure standardized rates and equal access to port facilities”[31]. Specifically, the port districts were authorized to acquire, construct, lease, and operate waterways, docks, wharves, and other harbor improvements, rail and water transfer and terminal facilities, and ferry systems. They were given power to levy taxes and (with voter approval) issues bonds, and exercise eminent domain. The three commissions of each port would be elected and the port authority itself would be independent of other governmental jurisdictions
Similar to Oregon, “only more so”, the port authority evolved to be the single most significant element of the state’s economic development effort. In 2013, there were ninety-five operating port authorities in Washington State–more than any other state. Washington’s two largest ports, Seattle and Tacoma are held to be the largest ports in the world with directly elected commissioners. Post 1940 state legislation would further empower Washington State port authorities to create industrial development districts and develop specific industrial sites, access to rail lines and to attract private industries. On top of this, state legislation authorized port authorities to embrace airports and airport-related activities.
All this was just the beginning of the era of port authorities. Port authorities were created along the Great Lakes. The City of Milwaukee as early as 1908 formed a Harbor Commission which led to city acquisition of land and construction of waterfront terminals. In 1914, the Wisconsin state legislature authorized the creation of the Port of Milwaukee. Albany (1925) and Duluth (1929) would follow in the 1920’s. California was a hotbed of port authority creation as well. As mentioned earlier, Los Angeles and Long Beach established their port authorities in the 1907-1909 period–other California municipalities followed suited through the 1920’s (Oakland, 1926, for example). Arguably, however, the crown jewel of the transition era ports authority movement was the New York-New Jersey Port Authority created de novo in 1921.
The trouble is the NY-NJ Port Authority just doesn’t quite live up to our very high standards. First, the New York and New Jersey Port Authority is not locally controlled and should not really be viewed as a sub-state EDO. It is an interstate compact. In addition, the title, port authority, back in 1921 was somewhat of a misnomer in that the NY-NJ Port Authority operated for more than twenty-five years before it acquired responsibility for any port or harbor related facilities. The NY-NJ Port Authority for its first quarter of a century was a transportation infrastructure authority which since 1948 has oozed itself into seaport functions and facilities. As a creature compatible with Progressive values, it fits pretty well, however.
To be sure, the Port Authority at the present time manages formidable port-harbor related facilities and programs; it is currently the largest port complex in Eastern United States. Its existence owes more to the federal Interstate Commerce Commission than to any Progressive effort to rescue the public interest from monopolistic private elites. Its birth flows from a Harbor Development Commission set up in 1917 as joint advisory bi-state entity, which was part of the solution to New Jersey’s 1916 law suit against New York. The lawsuit led to an ICC opinion directing the two states to play nicely in their shared sandbox, the Hudson River. While some economic development stories arising from “the Port Authority” will be picked up in a later chapter, suffice to say at this point is that port-waterfront facilities of the New York-New Jersey Port Authority are mostly located in New Jersey–not New York City. The Authority did not acquire control over the Port of New Jersey until 1948. Its New York City seaport related facilities were first obtained in1985 (Staten Island Howland Hook Marine Terminal) after their 1973 acquisition by New York City and leased to the Authority in 1985. The second major New York City facility (Red Hook Container Terminal) arrived on the Port Authority’s doorstep in 2011.
The New York-New Jersey Port Authority raises the issue and question as to what degree we can treat a port authority solely as a Progressive instrumentality. The NY-NJ Port Authority certainly utilized an organizational structure that was compatible with its ownership and operation of key bi-state infrastructure, including eventually airports, maritime facilities, tunnels, bridges and God knows what else. The powers useful to accomplish these functions were readily available and incorporated into the port authority structure.
These powers and resources necessary for those activities accompanied and were incorporated into a port authority by at least two related, yet distinct factors. The first reason was that the 1908 Port of London Act (which itself had been kicking around for several years previously) was both an inspiration and an instruction manual for importation to the United States. Secondly, as we have seen in both the Oregon and Washington State models, the port authority amassed a quite extraordinary horde of public powers–including eminent domain, bond issuance, all sorts of real estate powers and resources, planning and taxation. All this in one package, located in a separate entity-jurisdiction from any sub-state general purpose unit of government, simply to our knowledge, did not exist previous to the 1910 era port authority. The combination of these powers into one EDO-like structure, therefore, became available for other future uses as well. As such, we will see modifications made to create structures suitable to issue industrial development bonds (1940’s), federal power agencies (TVA), and housing-urban renewal agencies in post-second world war era. In short, port authorities deserve inclusion into our history if, for no other reason, than the port authority EDO-type became a staple of economic development for the next one hundred years.
And ironically, Privatist communities and jurisdictions were attracted to a structure containing these powers and resources for their own reasons. A fascinating example of how the Progressive structure adapted itself to Privatist city-building ish activities is found in 1910 Houston, Texas. The formation of the Port Authority of Houston Texas (1910) combines city-building, with managerial privatism unleashed by the hurricane which devastated Galveston in 1900 (that storm as the reader will remember also prompted innovation in city governance in the form of the commission form of municipal government). That storm was the storm that built Houston into what we know today.
As of 1890, Houston Texas was home to about 27,000 fine folk and Houston was about forty-five miles inland from Galveston Texas. Galveston Texas was home to 29,000 equally fine folks in 1890. Connecting the two was a not very impressive, fairly shallow sliver of water called the Buffalo Bayou. Cargo from large ships would break bulk in Galveston onto barges and the barges would make their way inland on the Buffalo Bayou to Houston. Congressman from Houston (Tom Ball) wanted to convert that sliver of water into a shipping canal and make Houston a deep-water port–but he got nowhere, for at least ten years. And then the storm struck in 1900. Eight thousand Galvestonians lost their lives and much of the city was swept away.
Almost at the same time as the storm, oil was discovered, at Spindletop, Texas (near Beaumont) on January 10, 1901, and the opening shot of Texas Oil Boom was heard. Somehow Congressman Ball was able to persuade his House colleagues to fund fifty per cent of the cost of dredging Buffalo Bayou and making it a deepwater canal. All that was needed was the other fifty per cent (about $1.25 million). In 1909 the County formed the Harris County Houston Ship Canal Navigation District (seven words in the title–they do think big in Texas–it’s a port authority anyplace else).
A campaign was launched to convince voters to approve the port authority and a bond issue–and both were approved. On January, 1911 the Port Authority of Houston went into operation. It shortly after issued the bonds. But no one would buy the bonds. Jesse H. Jones[32], then a mere bank President, convinced each bank in Houston to ante up and the bonds were purchased. The canal was dredged and today in 2013 the Houston Port Authority is the top ranking United States port in terms of foreign tonnage and home to world’s second-largest petrochemical facility.
As Texas grew in no small measure to the Texas Oil Boom, Texas cities blossomed also and as they expanded, so did their need to acquire port access to the Gulf. Throughout the 1920’s additional port authorities were created in Brownsville (1925), Corpus Christi (1926), Post Isabel-San Freeport Texas (1927), Brazos River, (1927) and Benito Texas (1928). In 2013 sixteen Texas port authorities were operating. Lake Charles Louisiana also established its port authority in 1924. Also, the 1910 federal Rivers and Waters Act provided the first significant dose of federal funding for what would eventually be a 3,000 mile Intracoastal Waterway. Florida Port Authorities were not far behind as Palm Beach established theirs in 1915, St Lucie (1920) and Port Everglades (Broward County) Florida in 1927. The Tampa Port Commission, another city-building Privatist endeavor was in operation by 1924.
This burst of port authority creation was only phase one of port authority history. We will see other bursts after World War II and especially during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Today there is literally hundreds of operating port authorities across the nation and yet their huge role and significant heritage within the conventional economic development profession is still little appreciated, but, for no other reason, the economic development structure which was pioneered by the port authority has proven to be the key structural vehicle for much of mainstream economic development.
If we combine our second chapter observations on the lack of port authorities with our present treatment of port authorities, we are struck by the variability of purpose-goals that port authorities were intended to achieve. The same structure with essentially same powers was used in the Pacific Northwest to challenge monopolistic pricing and access control by railroads and other harbor-logistics interests, while at exactly the same time, other communities are creating port authorities to “build cities” or to protect, if not enhance these very same harbor-and railroad interests. That the same EDO-structure can be used in the same time period to achieve varying, if not contradictory goals, is not shocking–probably not even surprising. But there is value in calling this reality to the reader’s attention. In future chapters new structures and programs will parade before our ever-glazed eyes, and the reader should not, perhaps never assume, that these programs are similar and uniformly implemented throughout the nation. In fact, the opposite is more likely the reality. Urban Renewal, EDZ, TIF, IRB and a whole assortment of other programs will evidence their own patterns of variability and pursue multiple goals. It is the variation and goal disparities that are to us more interesting and in constant need of explanation and understanding.
Neighborhood Planning: The Birth of Community Development
The dominant paradigm in the early planning movement reflected a sincere belief that the physical environment could (1) change/affect individual attitudes, behavior and values to reflect desired social ends and (2) that economic growth and community prosperity could be achieved through the provision or modernization of the physical structures, infrastructure and land use patterns of urban areas. The emphasis, obviously, was upon the built environment of a city.
As time passed, some Progressive reformers, notably those social reformers whose concerns principally were for the individuals, the immigrants, the victims of mental health disease, and the poverty-stricken. They were ultimately more interested and concerned with “people”. In the early years of the social reform movement, such social reformers could accept that change in the physical structures, away from the tenement, and establishment of mental health facilities in park-like environments, were wonderful solutions to the misery of individuals. As time elapsed, however, the link between individuals, the people, and fixation upon the built environment became more obscure and even tenuous. By the middle 1920’s and 1930’s, while many housing advocates advocated slum clearance and public housing, other social reform types openly questioned where the individual, the residents of these structures, fit into the picture. Were they largely being forgotten? Had planning become too rational? Too bureaucratic? Too aligned with “business” interests and profit?
Perhaps the first obvious manifestation with this unease of social reformers, mainstream housing planners and City Beautiful advocates jelled around planning for neighborhoods. A leader in this neighborhood planning sector was Clarence Arthur Perry; Perry was deeply involved in the earlier period with the Forest Hills Gardens project (developed in 1909 and with the support of the Russell Sage Foundation). Satisfied that Forest Hills preserved the balance between the physical and the social (individual), Perry then, as an employee of Russell Sage, moved into the community center–recreation movement[33] Perry’s 1910 book, Wider Use of the School Plan became the movement’s bible and it was supplemented by many additional pamphlets and monographs over the years.
Perry himself described the community center movement as “but an extension of the settlement movement”[34] and perceived neighborhoods and neighborhood facilities as the link between individuals-residents, their overall well-being, and an effective democracy.[35]
In the more fluid period of their history, before planners attempted to establish as separate discipline, social and recreation workers were active participants in planning circles, thereby interjecting many of their special concerns into planning proposals. The neighborhood approach to those civic concerns can be traced to a 1907 St Louis plan. While other cities, following the inspiration of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, were proposing centralized civic centers as part of their efforts to promote the city beautiful, the Civic League of St Louis suggested formation of a half-a-dozen civic centers in various parts of the city that could combine semi-public and private facilities around a common center.[36]
At that time, the notion that “physical changes in the urban fabric … could improve social life and enhance citizenship”. These links were supported by a 1909 work by Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization, in which he argued that the family, the play group, and the neighborhood or community group of elders were the three most important factors in the socialization process–he saw the neighborhood as the nursery for what he called the primary ideals, such as loyalty, truth, service and kindness”.[37] For these early neighborhood activists and planners, the neighborhood, if planned correctly, could recreate in urban America the small town and the virtues associated with small town living. In 1924 Perry wrote that a planned neighborhood
…with its physical demarcation, its planned recreational facilities, its accessible shopping centers, and it’s convenient circulatory system … would furnish the kind of environment where vigorous health, a rich social life, civic efficiency, and a progressive community consciousness would spontaneously develop and permanently flourish.[38]
How do these social reforms tie into economic development? In the minds of these social reformers it worked this way: for example a park and recreational system in Birmingham Alabama in 1911 was defended by its planner, the noted Charles Mulford Robinson in the following way:
To an increasing degree, the better class of labor chooses its abode, and chooses the city where it secures the most for a given wage. Undoubtedly also opportunities for wholesome recreation increase the efficiency of labor and its contentment. When the offices of the National Cash Register Company, a few years ago were asking a city in which to locate anew their plant, one of the first questions asked was regarding the park acreage, its accessibility and the opportunity for recreation.[39]
The positions advocated by these neighborhood planners dovetailed nicely with the prescriptions and perspective of the early Chicago School of Sociology represented by the work of Robert Park, Burgess and McKenzie[40]. The school of thought was built around its conception of the city as an ecosystem that evolved in a Darwinian-like manner (urban ecological approach). As such competition, between social groups, over physical space led to the development of distinctive geographies (an example would be a neighborhood) populated by individuals associated with the social (usually ethnic and racial) groups. As would be expected, class and income would enter into the competition and the competition would result in a hierarchy of neighborhoods and this hierarchy was expressed in rental and housing prices. Age of housing would normally become associated with the low end of housing values and prices and naturally the least wealthy would be “filtered” into the oldest housing and the wealthy into the newest.
Based on this an approach to housing and neighborhoods, called neighborhood succession, was developed in which the addition of new housing, destruction of older housing and/or the introduction of additional social, ethnic and racial groups would launch a population flow from one neighborhood to the next–creating a new hierarchy of neighborhoods. As such neighborhoods and their resident population would “evolve” in a pattern of neighborhood succession over time and distance. The first Chicago school fell out of academic favor long ago, but it persists in the various real estate professions to the present day. Variations of this Chicago school theme were used to explain suburbanization[41] as well as central city evolution. Contemporary economic developers would be wise to keep this approach in the back of their mind in that, while exceptions to their approach can occur (gentrification, for instance), many current neighborhoods do superficially, at least, follow the outlines of this now very aged model.
As we shall discover in a future chapter planners and housing advocates moved toward slum clearance and housing projects as their solution to deteriorated housing and slums. Some social reform advocates abandoned the neighborhood concept as “obsolete” (Jesse Steiner, President of National Community Center Association). These revisionists argued that for neighborhoods to achieve their version of revitalization, the neighborhood itself need to be more or less, homogenous–and that Depression era neighborhoods had become too heterogeneous and too dense to achieve the desired effects. Neighborhoods had, they argued, become “pseudo-neighborhoods”.
The issue of homogeneity or diversity of residents would eventually be resolved by new conceptions of neighborhood based more on their replication of American diversity at the neighborhood level—but this reconciliation was thirty years or more in the waiting. In this pre and post Depression period, social reformers either joined with housing planners and moved toward public housing and slum clearance or were pretty much shoved aside. Some like Mary Simkhovitch retained their sympathy for and commitment to settlement house style neighborhood planning and Daniel Carpenter, Hudson Guild Neighborhood House in New York City stuck to his early concepts well into the 1950’s. In general, however, this approach to community and economic development descended into a very lean period which would last through the end of the fifties. The first phase of community development ground to a halt and the action moved into other policy areas.
The disillusionment, frustration and fragmentation in the neighborhood planning movement, the arrival of the Chicago school models of housing succession and neighborhood change coincided with the emergence of the “business-Progressive” approach to housing and slum clearance. They all came together in the midst of the Depression and the drift to the Second World War—not a very fortuitous time for considered and thoughtful policy-making. The business progressive model, as we shall discover was concerned with both the decentralization phenomena (suburbanization) and the effects of the Depression on CBD-adjacent neighborhoods. In that the realities associated with the rapidly accelerating tempo in the Great Migration intensified physical-structural blight, neighborhood heterogeneity and housing succession, the drift to a future crisis ob big cities was perhaps inevitable.
[1] Jon A. Peterson, “The City Beautiful Movement: Forgotten Origins and Lost Meanings”, Journal of Urban History, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1976, Sage Publications, p. 422.
[2] Peterson, op. cit., p. 422. Peterson observes that many of these New England associations “were anxious to capture the summer trade”–i.e. for those associations the city beautiful was very much a tourism strategy.
[3] Craig Turnbull, An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890-1920: Chicago in the
[4] He later added several important works such as Improvement of Towns and Cities and his classic, Modern Civic Art.
[5] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities (New York, Scribner, 2010) pp. 16-17; the first quote is Robinson’s drawn from Improvement in City Life (Atlantic Monthly).
[6] Robinson was actually a member of the board of the American League of Civic Improvement and the American Civic Association board as well. His concepts deeply affected both the emerging planning movement and were adopted by the newly founded American Society of Landscape Architects. See Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 18-19.
[7] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis op. cit. p. 23.
[8] Peterson, op. cit, pp. 425-430.
[9] We are using Mel Scott, op. cit. and his chapter, “Boosters, Builders and Planners” as well as Mohl, op, cit. pp. 78-80
[10] Mel Scott, op. cit. p. 36.
[11] Mohl, op. cit. p. 79.
[12] Mel Scott, op. cit. p. 62.
[13] Rybczynski, op. cit. p. 25.
[14] Scott, op. cit. p. 45.
[15] Mansel G. Blackford, The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast 1890-1920 (Columbus, Ohio, the Ohio State University Press, 1993), pp. 38-40.
[16] Blackford, op. cit. pp. 40-41.
[17] Blackford, op. cit. p. 46.
[18] Blackford, op, cit. pp. 49-50
[19] Steinberger, op. cit. p. 27
[20] A little background may be in order. First, the role and authority of the federal government while paramount in interstate commerce and foreign export trade (i.e. “what” can be traded and how “the what” may legally be traded) does not extend to the physical facilities of trade. The federal government has little legal control over the port facilities themselves. In fact, the facilities fall under the authority of states (or localities if delegated by the states) and hence the states are the primary regulator of the physical infrastructure associated with trade. Secondly, some ports are not managed by port authorities, even today (New Haven Connecticut for example) but by private corporations and subsidiaries of larger corporations. Some private port-related corporations are even foreign-owned and trade on foreign stock exchanges. Much of the physical infrastructure of trade remains in private hands to this day. The reader, therefore, should be prepared to make the distinction between privately-owned port facilities and publicly regulated and presumably controlled port authorities. Perhaps more important, the reader should also be flexible and recognize (as we shall describe in later chapters) that the “port authority” has evolved into something much more expansive than simple control over harbor and waterfront activities. Currently, many port authorities have expanded into airport management, intermodal centers and logistical empires. Most economic developers think of these behemoths as “transportation authorities”–and they are, but they are also formidable economic development agencies who often employ rather conventional economic development programs and strategies. Usually, port authorities (again, frequently including airports) today include a tax advantaged, foreign trade zone, industrial parks, and a tax abated incentive promotion program alongside its transshipment, break bulk and intermodal facilities (wharves, docks, railroads and warehouses).
[21] The American Association of Port Authorities was formed in 1912.
[22] EDOs we shall argue consistently in this history may draw their roots from either Privatism or Progressivism, but structures being essentially vehicles carrying programs and tools, can serve multiple, even contradictory, ends and goals.
[23] Brian Lloyd Azcona, “The Razing Tide of the Port of New Orleans: Power, Ideology, Economic Growth and the Destruction of the Community”, Social Thought and Research, Volume 27, www.kuscholarworks.ku.edu, p.80
[24] Brian Lloyd Azcona, “The Razing Tide of the Port of New Orleans: Power, Ideology, Economic Growth and the Destruction of the Community”, Social Thought and Research, Volume 27, http://www.kuscholarworks.ku.edu
[25] As support we cite the “Port of Portland” Oregon Encyclopedia, “The first board of fifteen commissioners appointed by the (state) legislature, represented the Portland business elite, with William S. Ladd as the first commission President.
[26] James A. Fawcett, “Port Governance and Privatization in the United States: Public Ownership and Private Operation, Chapter 10, Research in Transportation Economics, Volume 17, 2007, p. 211.
[27] For example, we shall focus attention upon the Oregon Port Law of 1909, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Port Authority (1909) and the Washington State Port District Act of 1911. Long Beach and Los Angeles, as well as Houston, Texas were other port authorities formed in that four year period. There were others as well.
[28] “Port of Portland”, Oregon Encyclopedia, op. cit. p. 1.
[29] Some examples are: Seattle (1911), Grays Harbor (1911), Vancouver Washington (1912), Tacoma (1918), Bellingham (1920), Everett Washington (1917), Kalama Washington (1921), Longville Washington (1921), Olympia (1922), Longville Washington (1922), Anacortes Washington (1926)
[30] WWW.HistoryLink.org — the Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History.
[31] IBID. p. 2 A Progressive leader in port legislation was Virgil G. Bogue who would later draft waterfront plans for Seattle and Grays Harbor and Tacoma. His motivation was to create coordinated public ownership “as practiced by European ports”.
[32] Jesse H. Jones, later allegedly called “Jesus H. Jones” by FDR turned down several offers by Wilson to be in his administration. He headed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (for Hoover) and later became FDR’s Secretary of Commerce. He was seriously considered for the 1940 Vice Presidential nomination. His PAC, the Suite 8F Group, contributed mightily to political careers of folk such as John Connolly and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
[33] This movement was very active through World War I, formed a national association, the Community Center Association, and attached itself to the newly emerging discipline of sociology (most associated with the Chicago School of Sociology). The American Sociological Association and the Community Center Association met jointly in 1923. The movement started by urging public schools in neighborhoods to let their playgrounds be used for general neighborhood resident use and then moved onto the construction of community centers which could serve a variety of resident needs including neighborhood meetings, adult education, and recreation. “Every school house [was to be] a community capital, and every community a little democracy” was its public goal. See Howard Gillette, Jr., “The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning: From the Progressive Era to the 1949 Housing Act”, Journal of Urban History, Volume 9, Number 4, August 1983, pp. 421-444.
[34] The settlement movement’s golden years were between 1880 and 1920. The idea was to build “settlement houses” in poor neighborhoods where middle class volunteers would live, share values, alleviate poverty and provide health services, daycare, education and serve as role models to neighborhood residents. By 1913, it was claimed that 413 such settlement houses were in operation in 32 states (H. Husock, “Bring Back the Settlement House”, Public Welfare, Volume 51 (1993), Number 4). Jane Adam’s Hull House is a prominent example and the PBS-BBC “Call the Midwife” is a visual depiction of an English urban facility much like a settlement house. Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers hospitality houses continued this tradition through the Depression years.
[35] Gillette, Jr. op. cit. p.423.
[36] Gillette, Jr. op. cit. pp. 423-424. Henry Wright was intricately involved with this St Louis plan. Charles Mulford Robinson endorsed civic center movement and by the 1920’s the movement was very much included in planning journals and the profession. Boston’s Mary Follett and Robert Woods were also prominent advocates of this movement.
[37] Gillette, Jr. op cit. p. 425.
[38] Quote in Gillette Jr., p.427 from Architectural Record (January, 1932), p. 41.
[39] Cited in Boyer, op. cit., p. 36
[40] There are today two schools of Chicago sociology. We refer, of course, to the first which was in its heyday before the 1940’s. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie, the City (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1925) is the focal point of our discussion. Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson’s, City Politics carried that perspective into the sixties and extended it to political science. One can perhaps argue that this approach took a turn with Roger S Ahlbrandt, Jr. and James V. Cunningham, A New Public Policy for Neighborhood Preservation (Praeger, 1079) and with Anthony Downs, Neighborhoods and Urban Development (Washington D.C., Brookings Institution Press, 1981) who plugs in an “arbitrage” model to neighborhoods succession.
[41] See for example, Hanlon and Hanlon and Vicino.
Housing and Slum Clearance Bleeds into Economic Development
The Big Picture
Our Progressive approach to economic development, as discussed initially, was based in large urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest–and driven by immigrants and Great Migration migrants and second wave of industrialization in our larger cities. Our present Progressive housing-slum clearance–urban renewal tale starts in the 1880’s and, in this chapter, ends with the Great Depression and 1932 victory of the FDR Progressives. The economic developer may, at this juncture, be wondering why she need be particularly concerned with housing reform in that housing is usually not a policy concern associated with economic development.
To make a long story short, a significant wing of economic development, a cornerstone strategy associated with economic development (urban renewal), and a critically important set of economic development agencies will eventually emerge out of housing reform efforts. Housing reformers, as had planners (the two overlap considerably) can be considered as midwives of important elements of our contemporary Patchwork Profession. As it unfolds in this section and over the next several chapters, housing reform story will be led by big city-based reform coalitions composed of individuals and organizations fully contained with the Progressive tradition and the larger Progressive Movement. There will be some overlap with the previously discussed “Neighborhood Movement” and a shared heritage with the social reformers of the late 19th century.
An interesting story, and one of the most important stories in the evolution of American economic development, concerns the development of a tool which would simultaneously counter the ill effects of slums and deteriorated housing on the disadvantaged, poverty-stricken ethnic and racial neighborhoods adjacent to the CBD and the efforts of the downtown business elite to both revitalize the downtown and save it from the now perceived pernicious effects of decentralization (suburbanization). The tool, of course, will be urban renewal and urban renewal itself is not the concern in this chapter. Urban renewal hit like a sledgehammer in the immediate postwar years and will be discussed then.
Our dilemma in this chapter is, first to alert the reader that we regard urban renewal as a Progressive-developed tool which was seized upon by a Privatist business community to transform the downtowns of the older central cities of the nation and modernize them to more effectively compete with the rapidly growing suburbs. This viewpoint, we believe, leads us to the unmistakable conclusion that the story we tell in this chapter is the development of arguably the most powerful tool in the history of economic development: urban renewal. Urban renewal still exists in contemporary economic development (we call it today by a different set of names) and urban renewal itself will be the core dominant economic development tool of the Northeastern, Midwestern and older cities of the nation for over forty years. As uncomfortable as it may be, urban renewal occupies a huge space in the annals of American economic development.
A second unmistakable lesson from this chapter’s tale is the interplay between big city Privatism and Progressivism and how a purely economic development tool emerged from what was a Progressive social reformer- planner-housing dominated process. We are, in effect, describing the separation of economic development from the planning movement and, the development of a hybrid business elite which embraces significant elements of Progressivism. This is a story with many characters and a lot of interacting moving parts. Hopefully, the reader will recall or reacquaint themselves with our introduction to both housing reform and the pivotal role/problems of the CBD included in Chapter 5. Both will be useful as we pick the story in this chapter.
To provide some cohesion we will divide our story into two major parts: (1) a Progressive planning-housing to slum clearance focus and (2) a CBD-decentralization-Privatist focus. We will outline the role the New Deal played in both stories and the agents who fought tooth and nail in Washington to forge federal legislation without which housing-slum clearance-urban renewal would never had happened—at least in the form it did. It is the reader’s job to remember that all these separately described stories occurred more or less simultaneously amid the context of the Depression and the entry of America into the Second World War. Good luck to us all!
The Story Begins
Fogelman and early housing movement
Harkening back to Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890) and his “Battle with the Slums” (1895)[1], the Social Reform wing of the Progressive Movement had long been deeply concerned with the effects of decrepit, obsolete, unhealthy tenements and neighborhood packed with these dwellings on foreign-born immigrants drawn into the industrial during the golden years of European immigration. To them, the unwholesome and disabling environment crushed the ability of many, maybe most, of their occupants to escape poverty and integrate themselves socially and economically into our society. The human costs, the destruction of the family and the social costs to deal with the dysfunctionality caused by the housing and slum neighborhoods was borne by society and the tax payer.
The tenement house weakened the family. Demoralized by the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, deprived of the independence and privacy vital to its well-being, the family disintegrates….’Just as the adult goes to the saloon, so the child goes on the street [where] boys, while yet of tender age, are introduced to the viciousness and petty crime’ [and] ‘young girls from their earliest teens engage in an almost hopeless struggle for moral preservation’.[2]
The moral outrage inherent in this treatment of people demand redress. To this task the social reformers and their planner allies commenced a several decade long campaign to deal with the physical and human consequences of sub-standard housing and deteriorated neighborhoods. Their remedy was a multi-pronged alteration of the physical environment in which the immigrant and disadvantaged lived.[3] As summarized by Robert Fogelson, this reform campaign consisted of three prongs[4]:
(1) prevent builders from constructing new tenements which “were as bad as the old ones”. New York City’s Tenement House Law of 1901 and planners building codes limiting building heights and lot sizes, banning rear tenement apartments, and requiring larger rooms, metal fire escapes, bigger windows, sink and toilets are all examples of this element of housing reform;
(2) devising building designs for new tenements that could be built at costs sufficiently low to make a profit so that “the proper housing of the great masses of working people can be furnished on a satisfactory commercial basis”. To this end several reformers set up corporations to build such housing in neighborhoods at the city periphery and even suburbs;
(3) “Expedite the working class from the tenement houses in the center (of the city) to single family homes on the periphery—and into homeownership.
The success of the individual elements of the housing reform strategy was uneven and while there were certainly some positive effects, especially in the first and third elements, the continued presence of clusters of sub-standard, what today we call ghetto housing and broken neighborhoods persisted, and even expanded over the next thirty years. The situation wasn’t hopeless by any means, and certainly during most of the 1920’s both policy-makers and the American public in general were fairly optimistic—it was, after all the Roaring Twenties.
Most encouraging was the second generation of immigrants were leaving the slum tenements of their parents and migrating to newer housing at the city’s periphery. The housing was privately built, and increasingly the car was commonplace, but discretionary income and wages were growing (imagine that!) and working and middle class were pushing the city periphery further and further out—until, as mentioned earlier, the suburban voter and the state legislature clamped down on annexation. The central city boundaries became fixed in stone; it could no longer chase its periphery-bound middle class. But the oldest neighborhoods, those closest to the downtowns still had lots of old tenement-like inadequate housing, was ever more beat up, and in-migration (immigration had been legislatively limited since 1920), mostly black Great Migration refugees were still piling into the worst neighborhoods. Thirty years of housing reform and rising income still had not fixed the original 1890’s problem.
Housing was caught up in poverty, migration and unemployment syndromes. Desperately poor needed a roof over their heads and the big city governments had no option other than to devise some sort of solution to the crisis. Let’s not dwell on the fact nobody had a clear idea how, or who, was actually going to pay for any policy initiative. The reader should keep in mind that municipal bonding in these days usually required a two-thirds voter plurality. Tactically, housing reformers in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s had two choices: (1) individual unit moderate or substantial housing rehabilitation–the latter usually meant demolition and replacement by essentially new housing, or (2) construction of new homes in the Big City periphery neighborhoods (which was opposed by Privatist real estate and business firms and groups as well as the middle class residents of these periphery neighborhoods).
Pre-1933 municipal efforts to implement either of these two options proved unfruitful, ineffective and garnered politically negative results.[5] It was soon very clear that something other than individual unit moderate-substantial rehabilitation was needed.[6]. Coalitions of reformers crystallized to figure it all out. Housing reformers or “public housers” by the early thirties concluded that in order to reach the volume of housing units sufficient to make a dent in the housing crisis meant abandoning the individual unit approach. Public housing, i.e. large-volume “projects” and “planned redistricting” (what later was called slum clearance) would be required.
In the planners and housing reformer’s mind, any “cleared” district area in a planned redistricting project would be filled exclusively with housing. Planned districts, certainly in these earlier years, were blocks and not neighborhoods. In these early years, it was fully appreciated by planners and reformers that some commitment to relocation of existing residents would have to be made. So, with a new housing strategy in their pocket, planners and housing reformers went to their bosses—the mayors of the big cities. In their briefings with the mayors the housing reformers stressed the necessity to clear blocks, often several blocks, of deteriorated, unsafe, and unhealthy housing and to replace it with new, Le Corbusier-style housing projects.
How to do this, how to pay for it, and who would operate and maintain the new housing next had to be confronted. The volume, the associated cost, and the specialized expertise and access to housing finance left no doubt to housing reformers that actual construction of the housing had to be contracted to private sector developers. The completed housing and the land, however, would be retained by the newly created, quasi-public entity: the Public Housing Authority. These projects would never go off budget—they were permanent additions to the cost structure of the municipal budget. Almost immediately, it was obvious that municipal governments were unwilling (and unable) to commit resources sufficient to implement the new housing policy-approach.
The obvious candidate to provide additional resources, given the composition and priorities of state legislatures of the period, was the federal government. Hoover, despite his current image, was desperate to facilitate what he could. A sustained federal financing-legislative initiative, however, would be needed and someone had to coordinate the effort and overcome still considerable pockets of resistance. The National Association of Housing Officials, in existence since 1910, was entrusted to be housing reformers principal federal lobby in this legislative endeavor.
The chief pocket of resistance (aside from conservative Congress) to NAHO was expected to encounter was the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB formed in 1908, as the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges); NAREB was their national lobby and industry advocate[7], but their members were the Real Estate Bureaus and Exchanges just down the street from the local planning departments. The question as to whether these fine folk would be on board with slum clearance and housing project construction had to be confronted if federal help was to be had. The answer was, perhaps surprisingly, that until the late 1930’s the real estate bureaus were focused on their own problems and solutions (which we shall discuss in the next section). To be sure, if pressed, elements of the local real estate industry, housing and residential developers, perceived the planning-housing authorities as competition; others, of course, envisioned themselves as constructing the projects and flipping them to the housing authorities. In any case, through most of the thirties depression years, the private real estate industry was coping with decentralization, not the need for new housing per se.
Decentralization, Downtown Obsolescence and Downtown Business Associations
The real estate industry and much of the local and regional business communities were watching decentralization or suburbanization. Today most commentators pinpoint the start of Northern and Midwestern central city decline coincident with the perceived suburban-bound exodus of their residents in the period immediately following the Second World War. In actuality, for most central cities suburbanization and noticeable central city decline commenced after 1920. The population exodus, although less dramatic than post 1945 suburbanization, became a feature of Northeastern-Midwestern life during the twenties; this early suburbanization predated any material growth in the black population arising from the Great Migration. The car in particular was the innovative technology that made this decentralization possible.
Business leaders became involved in both ends of the suburban transaction, building in the suburbs and dealing with the effects of this “decentralization” in the central city. Throughout the twenties and thirties sizeable elements of the business community were focused on central city decline and were already calling for action. To them the negative impact of population migration was felt most in the downtowns, the CBD. The word they used to describe the post First World War suburban growth was “decentralization”. To them decentralization was defined in terms of downtown property values—values which were falling sharply—more than anywhere else in the big city. They also were concerned with cars, congestion, parking, and the loss of pedestrian traffic at the anchor CBD department stores. For the most part, they did not focus on housing, or even the CBD adjacent neighborhoods.
Perhaps, in this bifurcation between planners-housing reformers and business community-real estate business we can best see evidence of how the Privatist and Progressive ships responded to differing sets of needs in the same community and developed simultaneously two quite different approaches and tools to confront their differently defined urban crisis. A balanced view might be that both ships were right—but no one wants to hear that. In any case …
Decentralization had aroused only mild concern among downtown business and property owners when they first became aware of it in the mid and late 1920’s. … at the same time that downtown business interests were first becoming aware of decentralization, the central business district was undergoing the greatest boom in history. Retail sales were at record levels. So was new construction. And downtown’s daytime population was larger than ever.[8]
There was one problem, however, that would not go away. In these boom years downtown property values and real estate sales declined. During the 1920’s downtown property values fell fast and hard. Decentralization, while reaping its share of the blame for declining property values, however, appeared to the business community (and popular opinion) as natural as mom and apple pie, as natural as buying a car. Indeed, even housing reformers themselves encouraged movement to the city periphery, and to the suburbs, as a means to empty our immigrant slums and clear the tenements of their occupants. The downtown business elites felt little fear because such businessmen believed that no matter where people moved, they would come to shop, be entertained, and to work and spend their money downtown[9]. They might sleep in the suburbs—but that was about all they would do there. In this vision, the car was downtown’s best friend. The downtown decline in property values was attributed to the car: congestion, lack of accessible parking, and pollution.
In the decades previous to 1930, time, effort and innovation of transportation planners and downtown business owners were devoted to figuring out how to deal with that car. It was key to keeping the downtown prosperous and maintaining the optimistic belief that decentralization was not a threat to either downtown or the central city. Fogelson in his wonderfully titled chapter, “Wishful Thinking” describes the innovation and techniques devised to deal with CBD congestion and parking–to facilitate travel by car and public transit into and out of the CBD. This is where the attention of downtown business elites was focused at the time the planners and housing reformers were developing their notions about slum clearance, housing authorities, and housing projects in deteriorated neighborhoods.
But by the late 1920’s “this internal movement (decentralization) was not only heavier than expected; it was also ‘highly selective’ … the middle and upper middle classes were leaving the center. But the lower classes made up in large part of ethnic and racial minorities, was staying behind….The central business district was losing many of its best customers, keeping many of its worst, and ended up surrounded by blighted areas, which were viewed as a cause as well as a symptom of decentralization”.[10] There were other perceived causes, such as over-zoning commercial space, excessive property tax assessments (Fogelson cites one Seattle downtown property owner that was paying ten times what equivalent suburban owners were paying), and stringent building and safety codes.
In many cities across the nation during the twenties building owners and managers began to react, and take action to counter decentralization and the litany of other issues which affected downtown properties. The Depression by 1930 was the last straw. At that point many downtown property owners believed…
the central business districts would have to be at least as well organized as the outlying business districts. To put it another way, the downtown business interests would have to form organizations devoted exclusively to the well-being of the central business districts, organizations of the sort that had already been formed in San Francisco and Los Angeles.[11]
Oakland established their Downtown Property Owners Association in 1931, Milwaukee in 1935, Chicago and Detroit in 1939, Baltimore (1941), and the Allegheny Conference in Pittsburgh (1943). These ancestors of future Main Street and Business Improvement Districts demonstrated that downtown business organizations had been formed to react to decentralization long before Levittown. The downtown property owners associations took steps to halt decentralization usually in the form of promotional activities and advertising campaigns intended to increase downtown pedestrian and shopping trips. Otherwise, these associations systematically would “grieve” property tax assessments; in other instances they pressed for some form of rapid transit, municipal construction of parking—and increasingly “to convince the authorities to eradicate the blighted areas surrounding the central business district, replace them with middle-and upper middle class neighborhoods, and thereby create a vast new market for downtown goods and services”.[12] This last concern, the deteriorated adjacent neighborhoods, will segue way into a major initiative and confrontation with housing reformers—to be discussed in the next chapter.
In summary, as we approached the 1932 Presidential elections, the forces of change had already been unleashed in the downtowns and adjacent deteriorating neighborhoods. In a literal sense, the two trends did not directly clash in these years; they did arise from different motivations and certainly viewed the nature and constituency associated with change differently. One was fighting poverty and perhaps powerlessness; the other was attempting to recapture increasingly lost markets and consumer populations. They prescribed different end points which reflected their different perspective of what economic development was about. Such is the essence of our two ship metaphor.
PART I:
SUMMARY
So what are the takes away from our first four chapters which have both introduced our approach to this history and carried us forward through 1933? One thought is that the past does offer value in our understanding of contemporary economic development. A second thought might be that history is more than valuable; it is essential and necessary to an understanding of what is going on out there today. But, the Curmudgeon guesses that would be self-serving.
The most fundamental lesson for an economic developer is that both the practice and the theory behind economic development hugely reacts to and reflects the various dynamic forces which propel our society and economy. Secondly, all cities, states and regions do not react to identical dynamic forces in precisely identical ways. Sub-state economic development does not occur in a vacuum and there is immense variation among our individual communities and states. It seems that while economic development responds to forces outside the community, the particular response to these forces is often shaped and propelled by forces within each community. What’s more, that individual community variation in response is not only affected by obvious variables such as population size, but is also affected by (1) political culture distinctions represented by our two ships of economic development: Privatism and Progressivism; and (2) by the extent to which the community perceives itself as growing or declining–and population, not jobs, seems most critical to that perception. The perception of community decline seems, if the South is any guide, to generate the most intense economic development program and policy reaction. Decline is very much associated with strategy and program innovation.
At first glance, the most powerful external force involves the movement of people–immigration and internal migration. Population change either means a growing (or probably low wage) labor force, or its opposite, population loss, threatens the viability of the community itself–at minimum it can be perceived by community residents as a rejection of their home town (this is especially true of population loss is disproportionately composed of the young and those perceived as most productive-promising). Population change seems to be a core, perhaps the core, factor which generates economic development policy.
Moreover, population migration change which crosses state and especially regional boundaries, almost simultaneously affecting a mass of neighboring communities, seems especially threatening or gratifying–depending upon whether your community is on the losing or gaining end of the transaction. Widespread shared population decline seems to prompt a larger, more uniform regional response. The Great Migration arguably set in motion a Southern economic development state and local set of strategies designed to cope with its seemingly unstoppable exodus. Immigration, on the contrary, generated societal pressures and economic expansion. The community’s need for to mitigate the former and increase the latter.
Population change, either migration or immigration, sometimes after a considerable time lag can prompt significant physical redevelopment programs: the City Beautiful movement is a reaction to turn of the century immigration and housing reform/slum clearance in large measure more associated with the effects of the Great Migration on the Northeast and Midwestern big cities. Population migration into unsettled geographies obviously provided an opportunistic setting for city-building entrepreneurs who after setting into place an initial infrastructure then engaged in a rather intense promotion campaign.
Geographies suffering from population decline may well attempt population recruitment strategies, but in the Pre-Depression period, these were rather infrequent and not especially successful. The BAWI-Mississippi program, however, pioneered an innovative tool, the IDB wrapped into a more sophisticated set of incentives which included the provision of facilities and equipment in an attempt to “buy a payroll” for unemployed workers in their area. BAWI and the Kentucky programs (as well as Carolinas textile-related efforts) developed a focused “recruitment” program, in some case involving the assistance of site-selector-like firms for targeted specific firms and industries. Population change also fueled the development of a new neighborhood-level community center approach to economic development. This approach, while providing and enhancing some physical infrastructure, relied more upon people improvement-empowerment programs to improve the lives of residents in a specific sub-municipal geography.
Immigration, on the other hand, generated in our pre-1933 period a different set of economic development responses. Large scale immigration is clearly association with a community’s need to (1) integrate the new residents, in this period low wage, and unskilled into the larger community fabric–a fabric which often seems threatened by the older, traditional populations. Also, (2) large scale population increase compels infrastructure (and sometimes association infrastructure modernization) installation and development-redevelopment. Infrastructure of all types becomes a foremost economic development strategy. Immigration (3) creates a need for jobs and sensitivity to image and a community’s “place in the sun”–the invisible pecking order within the so-called hierarchy of cities. Recruitment and attraction of firms, as well as still more residents, is a notable feature of growing communities. Copy-cat program innovation, the flurry of world’s fairs and design competitions associated with the City Beautiful movement and the intensity of harbor and ports competition in Western coastal municipalities supports the notion that growing communities get caught up in creating still more growth.
A second, perhaps powerful source of change hits a community in the form of a time-lagged corrosive rot of jobs from a hitherto agglomeration of prosperity-producing industry or a hyperbolic steroidal burst of employment from an industry seemingly rising from the bare ground. As now usual, a growth in such jobs generates community and business hopes for even more growth–and the loss of jobs fosters lost hope and prosperity tinged by an ever-increasing paranoia of job-theft by the community’s economic rival and despised enemy. Industries and sectors, especially industrial and technological, as will be suggested shortly by Ann Markusen (and others) proceed through a cycle of profits which generate jobs, consolidate them and finally lose them to productivity in a desperate effort to maintain sales based on highly competitive pricing. Eventually, the industry and the firms within it fail. Becoming the private firm equivalent of a ghost town. Communities whose economic base is disproportionately saturated with an industry sector ride their job base and prosperity much like a bucking bronco in a rodeo or Gilley’s.
Agglomeration and profit cycle industry pressures also yielded some impressive pioneering initiatives such as scientific management, business schools, and community colleges with specific vocational school training. The latter were the earliest seeds of an independent workforce strategy which would solidify in the sixties and seventies. The onslaught of a new oligopolistic gazelle, the auto and truck industry, would create a true regional cluster centering on Motown-Detroit, Southern Michigan, and the Great Lakes. There was no discernible public program or economic development strategy or approach which was associated with this agglomeration.
New England’s efforts to cope with a rapidly declining textile cluster prompted a true regional promotion and capacity-building initiative led by a pioneering EDO-structural type, the regional EDO. Alternatively, declining communities were left largely to their fate, and unemployed workers were provided little assistance and no retraining. The textile firms which failed, downsized, or actually shifted production to the Carolinas were not targeted for special assistance and together with low wage Southern labor and low tax Southern communities were portrayed as villains. Instead, regional programs engaged in more confidence building, reassurance programs attempting to convince residents and resident businesses alike of the region’s continued vitality and diversified economy.
Simple membership in a free enterprise, capitalist economy seems to generate inherent competitive inter-municipal and inter-state pressures to attract and retain private firms–a sort of testosterone-like entrepreneurial vitality. A my home town is better than yours mentality that needs to win its Friday night football game to prove something to itself seems to reside in many communities across the nation. Economic development in such an atmosphere is a safeguard to the community, at least its business community, protecting its status and place in the perceived urban hierarchy and demonstrating to all its economic muscularity. To put some parameters, ensure fair and competent competition on this urban hierarchical rivalry, a national association of economic developers was formed. This national association was meant to both referee the instinctive entrepreneurial aggression and educate its participants. Also evident in the later stages of the City Beautiful era was an inter-city race to construct spectacular convention centers, monuments and parks–less for private recreation than for attracting tourists and garnering prestige.
Age, time, demographic transition, and technological-productivity innovation exerts an almost inevitable obsolescence in a community’s infrastructure. The “community wheel” needs to be reinvented periodically, sometimes generationally. The need to “modernize” is a constant in community’s long time story. Every so often the old infrastructure, downtown CBD needs an injection of “what’s happening now” to create both excitement and a physical base from which contemporary business models and production technology can effectively compete. Unfortunately, modernization is a double-edge sword, inevitably inflicting pain on whatever remains amid the aged infrastructure. The benefit of community and business renewal and the undeniable loss of vitality exhibited by the old usually drive a community to periodically clear out the obsolete and install the “latest and greatest”. The City Efficient replacing dirt streets with paved and installing not only pipes and wires, but a new structural and managerial governance to replace what had worked so well for nearly a hundred years.
In a sub-state economic development system governed by Dillon’s Law, a final and fifth external driving force emanates from state government. During the early years of our Republic, that state government and its authority-programs were more or less controlled by the municipalities themselves and delegated to the municipalities for implementation. The industrial revolution and national expansion changed all that. The powers of the national government increased and the federal government came to be perceived as a rival to state government. States began to compete among themselves for jobs, taxes, and population and the need for an infrastructure and resources beyond the capacity of even its largest city also arose. Slowly and unevenly some states, oftentimes Southern states more than other regions, were at first prodded, than later more willingly became active players in some segment of economic development.
And so thus far in our incomplete history we have witnessed to some degree at least five dynamic forces (regional and population change, agglomeration and profit cycle evolution, urban hierarchical entrepreneurial competition, the need for community modernization, and state policy direction) that have generated economic development programs and strategies. In future chapters, we will see three more dynamic pressures roll out: labor force competitiveness, small business formation, and the most controversial of all–suburbanization. So long as there is a future, we can count on more history to provide opportunities for yet additional thus far unseen forces to show themselves.
Against these economic and social pressures for change and survival, communities have responded with distinctive economic development strategies, programs and tools deemed appropriate to counter the pressure, opportunity or threat. Urban hierarchical entrepreneurial competition seems to have been best expressed by the chamber-dominated incentive-tax abatement attraction, promotion, recruitment and retention strategies. During the pre-Depression era, this pressure seemed to be confined to and played out at the municipal level and local government was a secondary player in alliance with the privately governed chamber of commerce industrial department. Promotional programs were applied to two targets: tourists and targeted firms and sectors. The effect of all these forces on the structure of economic development is just beginning, but chambers, real estate exchanges, port authorities and planning departments do not seem to be mere organizations–they reflect and contain the reaction to the societal dynamics and change of their home communities. Structures, EDOs embody much more than programs and even staff–but that is a topic for which we need more history to better understand.
But it does seem apparent that the goals of economic development in the pre-1933 period, however tempered by strategies, tools, staff and EDO type, are quite different from those which seem to be practiced in contemporary America. Job creation as we know it today, for instance, is virtually non-existent in this period. Infrastructure on the other hand and inter-city rivalry, not to mention the need of a developing economy to enter the twentieth century and the negative reaction of developed economies to this search for a modern, diversified industrial economy suggest that still other dynamics play a considerable role in the definition of economic goals and policy formulation as well.
As might be evident from our summary, some strategies could be applied, in different ways, to manage the effects of several dynamic forces. A good example is the recurrent use of some form of physical development or redevelopment programs–often combined with the installation of some infrastructure. This “Development and Infrastructure” Approach to economic development could be applied in many different environments, such as: (1) city-building; (2) initial development; (3) redevelopment (i.e. modernization and urban hierarchical entrepreneurship); and (as we shall discover in our final chapter) (4) consolidation. The Development and Infrastructure Approach be used to create a city from scratch, a neighborhood, the CBD, or a new suburb-planned community.
Finally there is the beginning tale of our two ships of economic development that by 1933 have traveled a considerable distance up river. Within each city and state, and certainly among the nation’s regions, the two ships have contended against each other–but in our initial historical period it is not yet clear whether one or another seems to possess some sort of natural advantage in any single municipality, state or region. Frankly, we need more evidence, more history, before we proceed much further along those lines. But it is clear, even in this early period, that each ship contains several decks–that neither Progressivism nor Privatism is a single, monolithic block of beliefs and values. It is equally clear, at least to the Curmudgeon, that there exists a clear distinction in types of economic development practiced within the traditions of each of the competing approaches. We also can suggest that the policy political culture most critical to our two ships is most affected by the nature of the beliefs-values and composition of its business community. Democrat-Republican distinctions seem less obvious and seemingly less important to economic development policy-making–at least in this period.
Quo Vadis
In the next two chapters especially, the reader will be deluged with sections devoted to some aspect of urban renewal. In fact, urban renewal will probably be viewed as a disproportionate element of the entire book. To explain this no doubt accurate perception the Curmudgeon will offer some defense of why this urban renewal “tool” consumes so much attention and space in our, all too wordy historical blather. The following bullet points constitute our defense and explanation–we hope they are sufficient to inspire the reader to trudge dutifully through the following sections:
- Urban renewal dominated a rather long era of American big city history: from 1933 to arguably 1987 when UDAG was terminated. In this period of time, urban renewal was either the prime economic development strategy, or was the prime strategy under attack and in decline. In either case, urban renewal was the center point of economic development in the central cities especially.
- That we have either (or both) forgotten/unaware of our urban history or frankly hate and disparage urban renewal, and those who participated in it, only make a, hopefully more balanced treatment of the strategy more necessary for today’s reader. Urban renewal carries in today’s conversation a negative legacy which obscures a certain reality that we still use urban renewal to this day–but have amended it and renamed it as redevelopment. Urban renewal is only a particular period in the history of two economic development strategies (infrastructure and redevelopment) which remains to this day as core to economic development practice and urban revitalization.
- Urban renewal as it evolved over its fifty year cycle demonstrates the interaction of our national, state and local policy process in our policy area. There is much to be learned as we can see how federalist levels of government as well as local policy actors played at the game of economic development. The assemblage, for instance, of the post-war Progressive Coalition will offer useful perspective to our current economic development policy system. Also, in this period we begin to see the serious evolution of our State-Sub-State economic development system (the “SSS”) and see displayed the essential leadership role of the state in local economic development, the amazing diffusion of economic development programs and strategies-tools among the states, and the “yin-yang” of a tension-filled relationship between the state and its sub-state EDO actors.
- We have characterized economic development as a “patchwork profession” and urban renewal is perhaps one of our very best examples which support our characterization. The interaction of actors within both streams of economic development, cooperating and competing, is responsible for much of the evolution and prominence (and durability) of this classical economic development strategy-tool.
- Finally, urban renewal is our best example of two foundation concepts underlying our book: diversity/variation and the impact of political culture on economic development policy. Urban renewal was never one, cookie-cutter-like program. There were different models and styles of urban renewal programs–even within the same city at different periods of time. Today urban renewal is regarded as one-size-fits all program concepts. We believe that to be incorrect–to repeat, it was never correct. The internal politics of each individual urban renewal policy system (or regime as Dr. Stone would have it) are, while not necessarily unique, quite varied in time, actors, and purposes. We have lost that sense of variety and diversity which has proven to be an inherent feature of our economic policy system.
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WHAT IS THIS Two Ships Thing?
Most economic developers work exclusively on one of my Two Ships. Amazingly, economic developers (the sailors) on-board the largest ship (called Mainstream ED), do not even think of the sailors on the other ship as economic developers. For that matter, neither do the sailors on the other ship (called Community Development). Over the last fifty plus years, community developer’s principal opponent has usually been the Mainstream ED ship, and community developers pride themselves in not being Mainstream economic developers. These “two approaches” are my proverbial “ships passing in the night.”
What divides these Two Ships? Several things (as this article will explore), but foremost is (1) whether they feel comfortable with the current version of American capitalism, and (2) each has different goals, definitions of growth, and different constituencies. Each has its own values and priorities which have endured for the 200 plus year American history. Each form their own organizational structures: EDO and CDO. Each has their own set of strategies, tools and programs. The chamber down the street could easily be more than a hundred years old, and the housing/redevelopment agency downtown is the offspring of a CDO first created in the 1930’s. The earliest purely government EDO I could find was established by compromise between Boss Tweed and the New York City Chamber. It still exists today as a department within a larger ED bureaucracy.
and programs, and operates in its distinctive network of EDOs or community development organizations (CDOs). Each serves different constituencies. There are Privatist forms of community development, and community developers can use Privatist tools and strategies—but they serve different goals and constituencies.
How did these cultures endure for over two-hundred years?
Because the Two Ships faithfully replicate two long-standing competing value systems is the reason they have persisted for so long. Ultimately these two value systems which forged two approaches to American economic development are why we have a two dominant political parties, and why today we constantly refer to Red and Blue in politics–and as will be demonstrated, in American economic development. There is in fact a Democrat and Republican way to conduct ED–or CD. Just so the reader knows, I call these two competing value systems Privatism and Progressivism. The first practices Mainstream ED; the second, Community Development.
Each approach to American economic development chases its own goals, embraces different strategies
Because each value system is found in each region, state and community, –and sometimes in a few individual economic developers– most city and state policy systems evolve/fabricate a hybrid of the two in their policy system. Most contemporary economic/community developers inherited this bifurcated hybrid economic development; it was pretty much in place when they cashed their first paycheck. In the Reddest and Bluest of policy systems, one can easily find traces/strands of the other. For the most part, in any given period of time, one is dominant in each state or community–but this can change.
Change is a subject of a future article which discusses the “drivers of ED policy/strategy”. Still, no one mistook Charleston South Carolina for Boston Massachusetts in 1790; they do not do so today either. In the end such continuity is the best defense for political culture–which is the receptacle into which we pour the two competing value systems. It follows the municipal and state political cultures have a lot to “say” about which approach to American ED is practiced. A caveat. “Say” does not mean determine or cause; it more precisely means shape or influence. Other stuff happens too.
Through most of my history, the Two Ships were not at war. For most of our U.S. Republic’s history, the Two Ships did not necessarily agree with each other’s values and priorities, but they shared a basic comfort with American capitalism; both have striven, each in their own way, to ensure capitalism’s stability, fairness, and growth. That began to change around the time of the Great Society (1964) . By the time we reach today’s post 2000 Contemporary Era, for all practical purposes the Two Ships are at war.
In my view that’s a shame. More than that, the war prevents both Ships from achieving their goals. Working together they could easily recognize they are not inherently zero-sum opponents, but complementary players on the same team. That is a bottom-line hope, probably forlorn, that underscores As Two Ships.
The article below provides the necessary background to integrate political culture into ED policy-making. It will provide explanation and hopefully address questions that naturally would occur to the reader.
Key Questions that underlie “Privatism and Progressivism (P&P)”
Political culture is the foundation (some argue the cellar) of a policy system. Political culture is internal to each individual state, and each individual jurisdiction-community. It is the bottom rung of their policy-making ladder. Each policy system will include both cultures (at least theoretically) and each culture comes in several flavors. In real life P&P operate on a continuum that shifts over time and even by policy.
ED-related state and local policy systems are quite complex; that complexity creates a great deal of variation among states in and of itself. Consider what occurs as we move up the geographic hierarchy. There are many neighborhoods in a city/towns, many cities and towns in a county, and many counties in a state. A lower-level policy system becomes a sub-system of a superior or higher-level policy system. When one thinks about this interwoven complexity of S&L policy systems, it is no big deal, but it does ground oneself on the realities of what an economic developer must confront every day and alerts us to the variation that is natural to our policy landscape. That hyper-variation is at odds with much of our policy-related literature–and our strategies and programs.
When the reader thinks about political culture, she should recognize that (1) its core elements consist of values, personal preferences derived from experience, socialization, and beliefs that often defy science and “rationality”–emotion intrudes into a political culture; (2) differences in each of these elements create choices between policy alternatives that necessitates a decision (or non-decision) on which to implement; (3) and the policy-making process is a more-or-less agreed-upon way to make these choices and render a legitimate decision.
A policy system can be”open”, i.e. a goodly number of individuals and policy actors can meaningfully participate in policy-making, or “closed”, where relatively few individuals and policy actors make the decisions. My history asserts ED policy-making systems are usually more closed than open–relatively few individuals and actors participate meaningfully. That last sentence is important to the ED-relevant political culture.
P&P are not mass-based political cultures. Most of the citizens/members, taxpayers and residents of a jurisdictional-community policy system, for many reasons, do not become involved in ED decision-making. The occasional public hearing, perhaps, but not consistently over time. In fact ED planning, at its best, attempts to expand this participation. But truth be told boards of directors, mayors/city councils, and governors/state legislators make most of the decisions in plain sight with handfuls of folk in attendance–usually entities/individuals directly affected.
Opinion-leaders, activists (often community developers), constituents, bureaucrats, Policy World experts, media, winners and losers affected by the policy, and those who use the policy to accomplish non-ED purposes, elected officials for example, saturate the ED policy processes. I once conducted a public hearing of a nearly $400 million (1990’s dollar) controversial professional hockey stadium receiving tax abatement; not one average citizen or resident showed up. There were probably fifty or so who fit the descriptions in the first sentence.
As Two Ships chronicles that the culture of those who regularly participate in ED policy decision-making is whom we are most concerned. P&P is an elite-based culture, with a high education, wealth, and status that dominate the inside policy processes of day-to-day ED policy-making. Business elites, political elites, and economic/community developers, including Policy World, have been dominant participants in ED policy-making for over two hundred years. In the 20th century, unions, later universities snuck in, but normally (ignoring NYC) they don’t hold a candle to the Big 3.
The power of elite-based political culture is not so great that it predetermines choices, although sometimes consensus is so overwhelming it can. Elites are normally fractured, opportunistic, and have multiple conflicting interests. So political culture does not “cause” or compel certain policy decisions. If one could measure these elite-based political cultures, it is not likely that they highly correlate with policy outputs. ED decisions are either shoe-ins or highly contentious and result from choices made while the sausage grinder of each policy system’s processes their involvement. Where rationality, an adopted plan’s goals, and professional expertise fit in, is anyone’s guess. While some may think I am talking about government policy processes, they should sit in on a chamber board of directors meeting.
Still it is in these meetings, parking lot conversations (and shoving matches), luncheon/breakfast/bar/ kitchen table/golf outings as well as in government legislatures that P&P lives and rules the roost. That is the story told in As Two Ships; it clearly emerges in city after city, and gubernatorial administration after gubernatorial administration that ED-elite decision-making divides along P&P lines. It’s there for all to see. Why elites reflect one or the other culture is a book of its own, but stereotypes, partisanship, and ideology aside, elite policy choices are affected by the values, beliefs, and preferences that underlie Progressivism and Privatism.
When all this P&P stuff first began, back in the 17th century, the values, beliefs and preferences usually reflected one’s religious beliefs. Competing religions in a European world marked by religious wars, refugees and dissenters, and different priorities placed on valuing the individual vis-a-vis the overall community, filled each culture’s stocking and all that was built into their policy systems. There was considerable continuity in those cultures when they made the leap into the 1789 American Republic. Indeed the current Massachusetts state constitution was initially passed in 1780. Over the years, secularization replaced religion, but again, perhaps amazingly, the choices between values, preferences and beliefs demonstrated considerable continuity. P&P is not what it was in the 17th century today, but the old divides are still pronounced, wearing different conceptual clothes and using different terms, but still boiling down to the same core differentiating distinctions of three hundred years ago.
Therefore, to identify those two sets of values, preferences, and beliefs that affect the making of ED policy is pretty important. At its most simplistic level, the two cultures separate on the basis of two core preferences: (1) how one feels about the American capitalist system/economy; and (2) whether the community as a whole, or the individual who drives prosperity and economic growth, is to be advantaged. To advantage the community or the individual (corporation) generally involves the aggressive use, or the limitation, of government. So government involvement enters this picture, if only to delegate ED policy to the individual (private sector or even the corporation itself) or to conduct the ED policy itself.
The first choice involves whether one accepts/believes in the dominant national economic system–capitalism, as it is configured at that point in time. The second choice is whether the community or individual/corporation should benefit from the effects of the ED decision. For the Privatist the ultimate beneficiary are entities congruent with the capitalist system (usually corporations, firms, businesses)–who provide prosperity and economic growth. For the Progressive, the community, especially those most in need or who cannot participate equitably in the economy and/or society. It is to them that the proceeds flowing from capitalism, and protection from its impairments, should go. The winner tends to dominate the governmental policy system, but not infrequently it is shared–or is a battleground between the two.
ED policy-making elites generally acknowledge capitalism’s limitations and inequalities to some degree. Many, however, do not see a reasonable alternative, and/or are willing, to a certain point, to work with and within the capitalist system stay in the Privatist camp. The same used to be true as well for Progressives, but I would argue (with few readers in agreement, I suspect) that has changed in the 21st century Contemporary Era. I’ll deal with that in my second book which is process. In this article, we are concerned with the 19th century. The two cultures typically carry into their policy-making additional choices which follow from the core duo.
- Economic-community development should be led by, and conducted through, (1) private-sector leadership and public-private EDOs or (2) government and government-directed EDOs
- economic development directly benefits private firms so that hard-working, risk-taking individuals can acquire wealth from which the community as a whole can prosper and grow; or (2) economic development that directly benefits the community, not the private sector, preferring instead to benefit people, principally thru non-profit and community-based organizations
- the community competes against other communities for wealth, status, and economic growth in the national and global competitive hierarchy—without growth community decline is inevitable; or (2) economic development should empower economically/politically disadvantaged residents unable to effectively compete because of inequalities that follow from the highly competitive national and global competitive hierarchies
A Privatist is wary of government being the primary agent of social and economic change. Limited government is preferred and business elites are invited to participate in the making and implementation of economic development policy. Private leadership is preferable to government/politicians in economic development; limited government preferable to activist, redistributive government. To a Privatist, prosperity and economic growth are best achieved by a dynamic private sector which creates wealth and opportunities for citizens and residents. The community will prosper through individual hard work, innovation, risk-taking and entrepreneurship. The community benefits from providing a supportive infrastructure and low-cost environment to private enterprise.
For a Privatist, inequality provides motivation for individuals to participate more fully in the economic sphere. The community should level the playing field for firms so they can compete with firms in other communities, or create a supportive risk-taking environment (often characterized as low taxes, a willing and cheap labor force and less regulation). In this perspective government can partner with business or business can direct economic development to the benefit of the private sector and the community. As business competes with other private firms, the community competes with other communities for limited resources, population/workforce, innovation, wealth-creation, and economic growth—failure to compete leads to stagnation, decline and in the worst case, a community “death”.
Progressive communities, conversely, see the jurisdiction, not only as their place of residence, but as polis, in which citizens working together benefit individually/collectively, achieve individual meaning and economic prosperity–together. “It takes a village” taps this conception that individuals achieve personal empowerment by inclusion in a caring community-polis. If each element of a community “does her thing” well and provides benefits to community, members of the community will prosper and provide meaning and support to its members. Business is a member of the community and its actions and decisions must reflect community interests and values.
Raising the capacity/prosperity of the least advantaged may be the ultimate purpose behind Progressive economic development. Progressivist economic development confronts inequality resulting from residents unable to effectively participate in community prosperity. A requirement imposed on Progressive economic development is that it must empower the least advantaged. That requirement is also expected of its private sector and firms. Progressives see the private sector less as an engine of growth and innovation, than as society’s vehicle for distributing the benefits of growth and prosperity to community members. There is mistrust of the profit motive, propelled as it is by greed, and is often perceived at cross purposes with community economic development goals.
Don’t expect any “Welcome to our Privatist (Progressive) community” sign when you cross a state, municipal, or county boundary. How are we to know? Privatist and Progressive communities are very different. An economic or community developer would be hard put not to feel it from the get-go.
ED-Relevant Values Embedded into Political Structures: As the Twig is Bent
The two cultures were carried over to the United States by European, principally English, settlers over the several hundred years of our pre-American Republic history. In turn, these settlers brought these with them as they traveled and established roots in the regions and states that became the United States. Population mobility and generational change have been the principal vehicles for the diffusion of each political culture. That these systems of values and behaviors have endured so well—at least well enough for us to see their influence as we construct this history—is remarkable, but not incredible.
ED policy and strategies was first fabricated from policy systems set up in newly-founded cities and States–both in the colonial years for East Coast cities and the Early Republic Years (1789-1870) for South, Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi Midwest. These early years were very important to American ED history, but they are not well-known, and probably not very interesting for most readers.
My research demonstrates that in the earliest years of each city’s/states’ existence, the values associated with each of the political cultures are embedded, incorporated, built into the key “structures of governance–in particular the state constitution, required forms of local government, and municipal charters. These early structures lasted much longer than most might think. As time went on, electoral systems (district/neighborhood city council elections are a relatively recent example) and city manager have proven important. Perhaps, the most impactful structural embedded value is the state gift and loan clauses which became a factor after mid-1840.
How a city could define and implement ED programs and strategies was first set up in the initial state constitutions. Sub-state government is a “creature” of state government; it enjoys no sovereignty under the American constitution, other than what the state constitutions allows. A good example of structural embedded values is the Yankee town or township. Migrants from New England carried them into twenty states–in 2002 there were 16,500+ towns/townships still operating. With two exceptions (the two Dakotas), these states are “Blue”. From ED’s perspective, town/township local government is the least likely form to engage in ED strategy and business assistance programs. They rely on counties or the state itself. Instead, their scope of program areas favors more progressive concerns, such as neighborhoods, land use, basic infrastructure, and social services and education.
So in the Early Republic years of the 19th century Pennsylvania and New York City developed their own style of Privatism. Yankee New England Progressivism migrated from Boston to San Francisco, Portland and Seattle (missionaries impacted Hawaii, and Yankee gold-rush miners even Alaska)–and filled in the northern third of our transcontinental nation. The central heartland was settled by Mid-Atlantic migrants and early immigrants (southern Germans, and Irish). The South, from 1800 on abandoned our Founding Father’s Tidewater and raced to the Mississippi, setting up cotton (mostly) slave-based plantations–but few cities. As a result state governments became a big deal in policy systems they established.
Hybrid structural systems often resulted when different cultures came into contact–and usually clashed when they constructed their first state constitution. Kentucky, Indiana, and Missouri were examples. Ohio is where four major immigrant cultures met–and compromised. Small wonder that as Ohio goes, so goes the nation. ED in Ohio is conducted mostly at the municipal level with a system of state-created port authorities handling its many river cities and Great Lakes coast. The only other place one sees the latter this is Oregon and Washington, and the Inter coastal Waterway.
That fusion of competing cultures into one document set up today’s fifty-state ED system, placing distinctive policy and ED priority wrinkles among, and within each state. No one knows this better than an economic developer who has taken a job in another state. By the end of the Early Republic (1870) half of the nation’s major cities in existence today were well-established; by the end of the century almost all of today’s top 100 largest cities had been founded/incorporated with their nexus of embedded structural values in place. Say it another way, much of today’s ED’s policy-relevant structures were in place a hundred–or more–years ago.
As time went on each state configuration produced different policy systems that defined its own version of ED that reflected its state constitution, subsequent judicial decisions, its distinctive combination of migratory groups and sector economic base. The ED outputs of each one, not only competed with, but in the case of Southern policy systems repudiated the priorities of the others. These distinctions, priorities, styles, and variations over time harden into a “legacy”, setting the parameters of “how we do business here”–parameters that often defied changes in the current system’s political culture. Very impactful were the (Deborah Stone-ish) “stories” that residents remember of past traumatic events that incorporated into the jurisdictional policy processes often set parameters and third rails into policy-making
Segue Way: Privatism, Progressivism (P&P) and the Hegemonic Big City
As Two Ships Early Republic discussion concentrates on federal involvement in S&L, “Clay’s New American System”–which attempted a to forge a significant role for the feds in infrastructure–and instead prompted a Jacksonian populist reaction. Case studies of Philadelphia and Boston were used to demonstrate the early existence of Progressive and Privatist approaches to ED. What would have been nice, if pages allowance had permitted, was discussion of how P&P interrelated, and how that interrelationship evolved into two hugely important late Early Republic/Gilded Age developments: the formation of the Northeast/Midwest (North) Industrial Hegemony (a mouthful), and “the Big City” its fundamental urban-ED foundation.
The below discussion further confirms what we already know: P&P live in two different worlds–to wax nostalgic with my maritime metaphor–they sail on different oceans. That separateness, however, is not complete. They despite the metaphor come into contact, cooperate and clash directly with each other. In the period under discussion (pre-Twentieth Century), both became intertwined with the northern industrial hegemony and the Big City.
Issue 2
“Wings” of American Community Development
Everybody knows there is something called “economic development” and something else called “community development”. For some they are synonyms, but most sense something about each is different from the other. They attract different types of professionals, work in different programs that affect different constituencies, often are found in different locations in the community, and each seldom interrelates professionally with the other. In fact, it is not rare for community developers to show up at a MED project public hearings and try to kibosh the project. So here’s the deal as I see it …
Each is a valid separate and distinct approach–and perspective–to American State and Local Economic Development. Although like Siamese twins they are joined at the hip, they have proceeded down separate paths for over two centuries. We have argued each devolves from its own particular political culture. Privatism begets Mainstream ED (MED), and Progressivism’s many offsprings are collectively aggregated into something called Community Development (CD).
I have made the claim both have been around since the founding of our American Republic in 1789. A previous article claimed that both approaches started out in what we call the Big Cities of our northern industrial hegemony during the 19th century. Indeed, several key MED strategies (tax abatement, bond issuance and eminent domain, for example) date from the colonial governments. MED is lucky in the sense its reference points are the firms and industry sectors lodged in existing community economic bases–or firms/sectors it wants to attract or develop. If MED can establish clear and effective lines of communication, those changing needs can be potentially accommodated into MED theory, strategies and programs.
Community development is another matter. It’s story is more complicated–much more complicated.
CD is not a warmed-over MED. As explained in our initial article introducing Privatism & Progressivism, each culture defines ED with vastly different philosophies, values, goals and strategies, beneficiaries–and nearly everything else. The cultures can, and historically have, found a way/rationale to work with each other–but currently that seems out of the question. Why that is so, I think, reflects why the two separate approaches developed in the first place. What separated them during the Early Republic years is each served ends desired by different groupings with distinctive political cultures.
MED’s simplicity of working with firms/sectors (albeit not simple in practice/execution) is not shared with CD. In the below topic area, I assert CD is a “big tent” that houses four or five very different “wings” each reflecting its own styles, purposes and definitions. These wings can work together, clumsily–and they have–but not enough to develop a shared leadership, common EDOs, and more-or-less unified vision of where CD is going. If MED’s great weakness is its accommodation to capitalism however that system evolves, CD’s greatest weakness is that it is not internally coherent–there are too many brothers and sisters sharing the same room.
CD can be Privatist as well as Progressive. Not all capitalists took delight at watching immigrants and desperately poor starve. Philanthropy existed and any number of efforts to feed and care for the sick, aged and unemployed characterized the Gilded Age. Perhaps the earliest was the YMCA movement, started in 1864 NYC, offered a gym and upstairs residence. Inspired by Chicago’s Dwight Moody, “Y”s constructed large fully-equipped, staffed gyms, baths, bowling alleys, and residential dormitories in nine of America’s ten largest cities by 1885 (McKelvey, 1963, pp. 147-8). Another Privatist example was imported from London in 1877. The Buffalo Charity Organization Society spread across northern Big Cities, eventually to nearly every major American city. Changing its name in 1917 to “Community Chest”, since 1961 it is known as “United Way”.
This diversion, tangent perhaps, is meant to alert the reader early on that Privatists have entered into CD’s “people-focused” territory—and open the reader up to the reality that CD has also developed its own versions of MED strategies and programs. Each approach uses the tools of economic development in ways that reflects is principles—Privatists use eminent domain differently than Community Developers, likewise tax abatement. Ronald Reagan, for example intruded deeply into CD territory with his earned income tax credit. The intrusions of CD into MED, smart growth, growth management, and climate-change are probably well appreciated by the reader. Our history, for its own purposes tends to “compartmentalize” MED and CED, but the reality “out there” is there is a spectrum of programs and strategies that invade each approach. Having said there exists a “gray area” between the two cultural approaches, I conclude that in the main, there is no mistaking CD from MED; ACORN is not United Way, and no one thinks of Black Lives Matter as a warmed over MBE-based Black Capitalism.
The section below, ““Wings” of American Community Development” outlines five important wings that constitute Contemporary Era CD. This complexity existed when CD first congealed during the Early Republic years (1790-1870) when CD was “born”. Although not all the different wings were born in these years, three were–and they are still around today.
In “As Two Ships”, and in my forthcoming book, “Twilight of Growth“, I argue CD evolved through the 19th and 20th centuries, developing and incorporating a variety of “influences/perspectives” into its approach. I call these CD sub-approaches (the academic in me) “wings”. They are still evident in the 21st Century, our Contemporary Era. These wings offer insight into the polarization within current state & local (S&L) American ED.
The CD wings are:
- the Elect:
This CD wing was CD’s first, and has proven to be its most durable and adaptable. Philosophically it is indebted to Puritanism and began with John Winthrop, Massachusetts first governor. Its appeal has been to large business, now corporate elites. The Elect distinguishes between political and commercial values, priorities, goals and practices–creating in effect two separate codes of behavior, ethics and policy. Make no mistake, however, the Elect is capitalist, and its political side is firmly rooted in preserving and expanding capitalist growth–political and economic ultimate purposes are considerably blurred. The Elects’ political and ED/CD goals call for antidotes to externalities/inefficiencies of market capitalism.
Along with applying business logics/rationality, business leaders engaged in political life draw upon strategies such as marketing, market share and market competitiveness for their communities. Price sensitive by training and experience, they apply fiscal conservatism to community-jurisdictions. For this reason, the Elect nearly always embrace MED strategies, putting special emphasis on modernizing infrastructure and logistic advantages. The Elect is a CD wing, however, because they usually put all this aside, including fiscal conservatism when they attempt to correct for market inefficiencies and externalities. Foremost among these is concern for the downtrodden and those on the margins of the economy. Inequality is arguably the gravest threat to system stability. Some of the most aggressive redistributionist policy-making arise from the Elect.
The Yankee, New England “Elect”, as we have discovered with Josiah Quincy, underwent a considerable evolution from John Winthrop, through the American Revolution, and in recent decades adjusted to the 1789 American Republic. The Early Republic’s first two decades (Federalist Period) provided a rollercoaster ride for the New England Elect, and left it in tatters by 1820. No longer confined to New England, Yankee Elect had diffused across the nation’s northern and east-Midwestern states; internally more complex, it was less cohesive, way out of step with the more populist politics of Andrew Jackson, and, in states/territories forced to contend with other political cultures. In each new state/territory Yankee-Elect redefined itself and exerted a spectrum of impacts in the formation of new policy systems.
Even in its homeland, New England, the Quincy transformation from Federalist to “populist” or in our lexicon, mass-based municipal-level CD, suggested that the Elect’s approach to urban governance and ED/CD would undergo future change as time unfolded. It should be little surprise, then, that an Elect faction, more devoutly religious than secular, would be attracted by the preaching of evangelical Protestant Second Great Awakening, and in due time, would apply those religious values and beliefs to the benefit of the community, and in particular to remedy their inequality, political, social and economic, through direct action and initiatives. By definition, possessing great wealth, status, and some power, this Elect faction provided the seed capital, legitimization, and moral support to our second CD wing: the Missionary-Foundation wing.
Since the 20th century, the other wings have felt uncertain regarding the Elect. Today called Neo-Liberal and personified by mayors like Michael Bloomberg, alliances with the other CD wings are rare; opposition is the default. This was not the case during the 19th century through to the Depression. Boston’s Josiah Quincy started a tradition that offered a businessman-led urban governance by Gilded Age businessmen-mayors, turn-of-the-century social reform mayors, and Roaring Twenties City Beautiful/Functional mayors. Using chambers of commerce and port authorities the Big City northern municipal policy systems fought political machines/unions and carried the Progressive Movement into power. In so doing they transformed urban governments, literally creating/legislating administrative capacity in municipal and state governments to enable them to assume leadership in ED. If powerful governmental EDOs dominate our Contemporary Era, it is substantially because of their empowerment by The Elect.
Working at the national level, they created the Federal Reserve system, helped FDR administer the economy and war production, and in Cold War, the CED guided national policy balancing domestic with global concerns. The effect and legacy of the Elect on American S&L ED, CD or MED, has been immense. Redefined to include new gazelles, names like Bloomberg, Zuckerman, Gates, Buffett, Dayton, Fiorina, Dimon and Tillerson can be thought of as Contemporary Era Elects. Maybe even Koch and Soros.
- the Missionary-Foundation Wing:
America since 1790 had been engaged in its Second Great Awakening, a profoundly intense, evangelical Protestant movement that proved to be a seed bed for much of American 19th century community development. It led to the “birth” of our Second CD Wing: the Missionary-Foundation Wing, and from it spread hydra-like social reform movements of all stripes and persuasions. While most of these social reform movements are not included in definitions of CD, 19th century CD cannot be understood without our acknowledgment the whatever CD manifestations developed in this century, they were never the central thrust of where social reform was at any point in time. Rather, CD adherents were usually drawn from these movements, and when their initiatives crossed CD definitional boundaries, they were usually a reaction to the inequalities of a rapidly developing industrial economy and its concomitant urbanization.
Caught up in the fervor of the Second Great Awakening (1790-1830), the Elect bifurcated. The more religious and socially-committed Elect abandoned political involvement, and embraced almost completely identification and resolution of poor and needy desperate plight. Joined by ministers, educators and the emerging professional middle-class, the wing’s adherents applied religious morals, “the Social Gospel”, to social-CD policy instead of the Elect’s commercial values/strategies. Concern with the jurisdiction’s economic base and the needs of its firms and sectors was totally left behind, and of little consequence to the Second Wing. MED was irrelevant at best, harmful at worst, to the resolution of poverty, political/economic inequality, and a deteriorated physical landscape personified in the slum, or today’s distressed neighborhood.
In the section below, the Early Republic rise of this religious/moralistic/missionary wing will be chronicled. Its post-Civil War blossoming into concern with the immigrant and the rise of settlement house movement also will be described. In latter articles concern for the immigrant, the Great Migration, and chronically depressed racial/ethnic immigrant neighborhoods will follow. This wing during the 20th century—continuing to this day–has served as the CD core “wing”–around which the other CD wings circle, like planets around the sun. It did so because of the infusion of Elect donations to foundations and philanthropies, initially from the robber barons. Directly, and indirectly, these foundations provided financial and policy expertise to the wing’s multi-faceted initiatives, but have also provided seed capital to form other wings.
These foundations have formed policy/think tanks/institutes, staffed by educators and moralistically-inclined middle class professionals. From its Puritan Yankee roots, this wing secularized, embraced scientific experimentation and methodologies, and infused itself into policy systems established during the Yankee Diaspora, even to Hawaii and Alaska. Companion adherents drawn from New Netherland (NYC metro area), Midlands (Quaker-southern German) elites/middle class, and Pacific coast large cities infused membership which overtime concentrated on northern industrial Big City neighborhoods, and in the post 1970 Transition Era frequently assumed dominance over the now declining Big City-State government policy systems.
This wing concerned itself with a wide variety of individual needs and problems, and early on assumed a goal to attack those multiple problems with “comprehensive” multi-policy area initiatives. This perhaps inevitably led to a shared expertise common to specific policy areas–a shared expertise that led to CD “professionalism”. First social work, then planning, followed by housing, welfare–and so on. During the Transition Era, CD itself became professionalized. Professionalization has proven to be a double-edged sword, leading to bureaucratic CDOs, policy development over policy implementation effectiveness, and a weakly-shared rhetorical common vision often used to raise funds and justify professional policy preferences such as an architect’s “beauty”, today’s new urbanism, historic preservation, density planning. Housing, neighborhood quality, and various social service/welfare initiatives, however, still dominate its neighborhood CDO policy agenda.
- the “Socio-Economic-Political Mobilization” Third Wing:
If the second wing goes out of its way to be apolitical, scientific, expert, and humanitarian, the third wing is pretty much the opposite. All sorts of Third Wing Mobilization “movements” have occurred over the years, ranging from abolitionism to smart growth, minimum wage, soda taxes, and sanctuary cities. The great majority of them fall into CD’s “people-based CD” classification. Community development “social reform” can attempt to change people, but Third Wing CD aggregates or mobilizes them politically and economically to achieve their desired ends. Social mobilization uses the political process to change a policy system, alter behavior of its economic base firms, and in the Contemporary Era frequently extends political, economic, social and civil rights of CD-targeted groups.
CD as already alluded to strives for “comprehensiveness, and that means it can easily reach into a large number of policy areas, of which economic development is only one. Over its two hundred years, CD has more consistently been involved in civil and political rights, than a pursuit of economic equality. This means at any given period, CD can be off wandering into other policy areas, and non economic priorities. This happens a great deal in the 19th century. Temperance, abolitionism, public education, suffrage, asylums and mental health–and there were others–were dominant throughout that century. None of these fall into our scope and definition of community development. Several lesser-known 19th century movements, however do: unionism, ethnic/racial political machines, and “civic beauty” (a forerunner of today’s historic preservation and “new urbanism”). Public health was another, but we will deal with that in another article.
Movements are inherently political, and typically involve, simultaneously, several policy areas. The 1950’s Civil Rights movement, Saul Alinsky’s neighborhood mobilization CDO, Cesar Chavez, ACORN, and almost any neighborhood-level CDO–and Occupy and Black Lives Matter–are more current versions of this third CD wing. Immigrant and racial groups have proven a cornerstone “target” of this wing. Neighborhoods have been the jurisdictional preferred level for CD’s third wing–and city councils their most consistent source of municipal leverage. Post-Transition Era CD-oriented policy systems reflect this reality–a major transformation in American S&L ED.
Unions and political machines may strike the reader as outside today’s definitional paradigm of ED. The latter is usually a wing/faction of a major political party–certainly not a CDO. It strains the imagination, for example to think of the neighborhood bar/social club of Boston’s fabled ward-heeler Martin Lomasney as a CDO. Viewed from a functional perspective, however, it was. Unions, certainly very germane to economic development, generally fall into the interest group classification–not a CDO. One wonders, how they differ from a chamber of commerce, however (they, after all, represent the economic interests of their members), which pretty much everyone concedes are/were an EDO?
Furthermore, our history supports the active involvement of unions and neighborhood level entities as major and impactful elements of a jurisdictional policy system associated with community development. So whatever the reader chooses to define these institutions/policy actors as, they fall into our third wing of community development.
In the first CD-relevant article in this series ” 19th Century CD: Birth of Three Wings“, we will ignore ethnic political machines, and instead focus on a snapshot of Early Republic urban craft unionism. It is little-known, highlights the first example of a third wing to show up in our history, lays the foundation for unions as CD-related, and explains why, unlike in the European experience, labor political parties did not develop. Unions became an interest group. That distinction is major in recognizing differences in European and American ED. The rise of unions, their admittance into the S&L policy systems, will also exert major impact on the flow of regional ED cultures, policy-making and strategies to the present.
- Black Political Culture and Experience the “fourth” CD Wing
The third rail of political culture analysis has been race. Include it into your framework and it is only a question of when your framework will be rejected. So be it. There “black” political culture(s) and they have entered into American S&L ED.
Race being what is in American life, Blacks after the Civil War, developed jurisdictional-level political cultures that reflected their unique experiences and history. Discrimination and segregation meant that residential districts/neighborhoods were central to such cultural development. “Exit” and “Arrival” movements (i.e. the Great Migration for example) proved to be page-turning dynamics for regions (South and the northern-industrial-hegemonic Big Cities), municipalities, and the individuals involved. How would American S&L ED look today without the Great Migration?
Drawing from distinctive values, life experiences, demographics, the reality of persistent racial discrimination, and Jim Crow repression in the South, Black communities developed their own definitions/goals/strategies of what ED/CD was about. Initially rooted in the rural/small town southern experience, they were transformed by new urban northern realities brought about by the Great Migration–and afterward, two or three generations later, by the realities of declining hegemonic Big City ghettos in which they resided.
Urban renewal (UR) left in its wake a massive and defining legacy full of misinformation and selective bias. Later on the series I will label it as the “scarlet letters” of American S&L ED. Most concentrate on its MED-related lessons, but UR’s effect on CD was equally massive. UR profoundly intersected with Black political culture and was instrumental in the development of ED/CD strategies tailored to address Black community’s neighborhood needs.
It was partly responsible for the War on Poverty/Great Society which intensified the federal government already deep involvement into S&L ED/CD policy-making and led it into a role as an active midwife in the birth of a new “modern” Third Wing and the crystallization of a CD Wing primarily focused on Black-majority neighborhoods and jurisdictions. The subsequent 1970’s northern-industrial Big City hegemonic collapse lined to suburbanization, deindustrialization and regional change created a Big City white” power” vacuum into which Black/minority mayors and Black/minority city councils flourished. That transformation continued well into our Contemporary Era.
While there are Privatist Black-related MED strategies (Black capitalism, MBE, for example), the dominant post-Great Migration Black-related strategies have been lodged under CD’s big tent. The “Community ED” strategy, was the most wide-spread and influential. Discrimination and residential racial segregation–a very complex phenomenon–simply refuses to go away and accordingly has been hugely important factors in this wing’s evolution. Cohort generation change has also played a huge role, as have the academic Policy World. Whatever their promise, these strategies advanced in the Transition Era do not seem to have achieved consistent success. The hard realities of 1970 are arguably even worse today. Frustrations have produced new, more polarized and mobilized CD strategies in recent years.
Detroit’s bankruptcy, Ferguson Missouri, the Baltimore Freddie Gray riot, and Chicago’s criminal justice meltdown, sitting on top of the persistence over seventy years of chronically depressed, high inequality neighborhoods constitute arguably the most important failure of Contemporary American S&L ED. That gentrification and Confederate monument removals are regarded as a serious problems and solutions is yet more proof that MED/CD have failed to assimilate, integrate and co-exist with Black ED/CD strategies and goals. There is a “white” and “black” way to do ED/CD and culture/experience explains much of that distinction. The latter remains our fourth CD wing which continues to defy solution.
In a later article, I will develop how and when (post 1890) Black ED/CD wings formed.
- Professionalism and Policy-Specific fifth wing(s): Siloization on Steroids
The final, fifth wing included in my CD framework is the Professional and Policy-Specific wing. It’s a composite abstraction, an artificial concept, but real nonetheless. Its members share parentage, but each offspring live unique lives. In many ways this wing is the CD flip side of professional siloization. Siloization has been an especially important evolutionary phenomena in American S&L ED/CD, and this, appropriately named “fifth wing” traces how it took root within CD. Using real “Fifth Wing” examples, planning is a “professional-based Fifth Wing, data-driven CD a recent addition, at least compared to neighborhood organizing; “New Urbanism” is a Policy-Specific example, as is “Historic Preservation”. CD’s best Policy-Specific example is housing. If the reader wants an MED example to compare, then knowledge-based ED is one, university-led ED yet another. Relevant to both CD and MED, climate, growth management, regionalism, and good-old environmentalism are Policy-Specific wings or silos.
Silos can form around CDO (or EDO) types, for example Main Street CDOs and their functional MED equivalent BIDs. Most of us work in silos, and literally can no longer see the forest from our tree. Many of us are so young as to have never seen a world different than the present one. American S&L ED has decentralized to the point it has become an uncoordinated aggregate of “tons” of quasi-autonomous professional and policy silos. One might argue that any strategy, tool or program could, and most have, evolved into a silo. CD Fifth Wings can also include structures, CDOs in CD’s case, community development agencies, neighborhood-based CDOs, housing redevelopment agencies, faith-based CDOs–and the list goes on.
What happens is within the profession its EDOs, and strategies, tools, and programs, over time encrust themselves with expertise, shared experiences,, similar occupational/disciplinal training, funding sources, and develop a common world view. From time-to-time a policy-based initiative captures many imaginations and is adopted by many communities, state and federal “trade associations” are soon to follow, common workshops, etc. and before we know it we live is a specialized world oblivious to other specialized worlds. Robust, fully-formed silos are a complex of professionals, CDOs, occupations, certification, NGOs, trade associations, and a nexus of for-profit and nonprofit consultants, think tanks, and policy institutes.
Simply, silos are semi-autonomous specialized bureaucracies scattered throughout the Policy and Practitioner Worlds–sort of “carve outs” apart from the larger policy area or profession. While not without its strengths, it is a world where ED/CD planners develop plans, tax-exempt bond-issuers issue bonds, redevelopment agencies redevelop, BIDs and Main Street redo CBD’s, and so on and so on, and so on. The larger picture is lost. What’s relevant is that which pertains to the silo—not to the larger picture. In many ways, silos seeking some measure of coherence and a larger picture have embraced one or another “paradigm”, today the knowledge-based—innovation paradigm is perhaps the most impactful. Each silos, having adopted a good-fit paradigm then develops its particular rationale linking the two. Paradigms are the weaker of the two; once a better paradigm emerges, the silo moves on. Silo-maintenance is the bottom-line.
When a community or mainstream ED economic developer falls into the abyss of their particular profession or policy-specific wing, there is no getting out. They are, for all practical purposes, lost to the larger CD or MED world. Without going into a “rave”–and that is not a good thing–over the two-hundred years of our profession and policy area, most of our practitioners and policy professionals have siloized to the point the larger functions and goals of the policy area are replaced by the silo-relevant goals, strategies, tools and programs. Not only have we lost much of our intellectual and professional cohesion, but we have lost our policy-way in the professional and policy-specific maze that we have become.
In CD as in MED, this Fifth Wing happens throughout our history. It is not a recent phenomenon at all—as I will try to mention, one can observe it in the 19th century when Professional Wings start to emerge—housing and planning manifest an observable Fifth Wing evolution during the Gilded Age, as do Real Estate Exchanges in MED-land.
What is the concluding takeaway? As we age and grow, we fragment into Fifth Wings or silos. “Professional and Policy Fifth Wings/Silos are endemic to both MED and CD, and are seemingly inherent in the ED Policy Area. They are the reason why there is no single ED Professional Society, but rather a host of specific and autonomous Professional and Policy-Specific, state and national “associations”, consultants, and Policy World—each with their own membership, expertise, and world view. That is why my history is the first serious attempt to chronicle a two-hundred plus year old policy area. Our professional and policy siloization is a major reason we have not been able to adjust from an Era of “growth”, into an Era of “Decline”.
That is a topic that is most relevant to our Contemporary Era–and to my second book, Twilight of Growth. Unfortunately, the reader can watch it in slow motion as it unravels in As Two Ships two hundred year story. Specialization and expertise are synonyms for fragmentation, experts for isolated and useless knowledge, and silos for organizational, professional and strategic islands who work in the same office and do not talk to each other.
Article 3: Early Republic/Gilded Age CD
Early Republic and Gilded Age Community Development
Snap-Shots of 19th Century CD Wings
As Two Ships second chapter concentrates on Puritanism, its iconic leader Governor John Winthrop, and his impact on the constitutional structure of Massachusetts. Its principal concern was to introduce the two political ED cultures to the reader. The surprise for most readers was my linking Privatist MED with Progressive CD as two diametrically contrasting paths within American S&L ED.
Like it or hate it, MED is pretty well known to most, CD is another matter. An awful lot of, probably boring, background was necessary to ground the reader in its history. Progressivism was as “apple pie” as George Washington throwing a dollar across the Potomac (he didn’t BTW). But it is not found in textbooks or ED/CD-relevant literature. So Chapter Two describes Progressivism (and Privatism) and then traces how both spread across the East, to the Mississippi River during the Early Republic period. I spent time describing Progressivism’s origins (Calvinist New England Puritans) and outlined its post-17th century evolution. The reason why I spent so much effort on this topic was that this Puritan-Progressive Elect was the first, and probably the most important wing of American Progressive ED. Bloomberg, Buffet, Gates, Bezos and Zuckerman continue in the traditions of this “Neo-Liberal” wing today.
Progressivism, as we now know, contains several “wings” which differ in their purposes and how they approach Cd. Literally the five Progressive wings each got their start during the 19th century–the time period for this article. Given the likelihood that most Americans are fairly unfamiliar with specifics in 19th century (Early Republic 1790-1870, and Gilded Age (1870- into the 1890’s) once again the need is to provide some background. Readers, I believe, can best understand the wings, and how they differ, if they can more fully appreciate how, who and why they were “born”. So we are back to yet more “pretty exciting stuff”!
In the below sections, I present a snapshot for the Elect, the Religious-Foundation Social Reform, the first “Mobilization” appearance—craft unions, and the first “Backyard Neighborhood Revolution. A brief snapshot will also introduce the reader to an important beginnings of a major Fifth Wing that started in 1848. Later issues will deal with the Black-Political Culture, and follow up on fifth Professional-Policy Specific wings. There’s a lot more to tell, but brief intro snapshots can whet the appetite for those of you interested in history.
This issue is primarily a “nativist”, non-immigrant story, and, without making a major issue of it, the CD wing formation was a reaction to the incremental urbanization and industrialization of what was to become our northern, industrial Big City hegemony. At this point we need not concern ourselves with the South or West. By 1789, the start of the American Early Republic Era, one can find functioning Progressivism in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City (and smaller urban centers as well). The first wing on the CD stage was “the Elect” appears in the form of Boston’s second mayor, Josiah Quincy (1823).
The “Elect” Takeover Boston
During the first two decades (or so) of the Early Republic, New England Progressives took over the new Republic in the national capitol. Textbooks focus on Washington and Hamilton, perhaps John Adams and their “Federalist” Party. The nation’s capital was where the action was, so Progressivism was relatively uninvolved in state and local affairs. That changed in 1800 with Jefferson, and it all really came apart during the War of 1812, the secessionist New England Hartford Convention, and the rise of Jacksonian democrats. It did not end well for the Federalists and by the 1820’s Massachusetts Federalists by 1820 were packing their moving vans, and heading back to Boston.
Boston in 1790 was a thriving cosmopolitan trading seaport city of 18,000(America’s third largest). By 1820, Boston increased to 43,000, and being already several hundred years old, needed infrastructure modernization and an upgrading to accommodate population and a fishing/newly emerging textile industry that needed dredged harbors and rebuilt wharfs. Towns, however, lacked the authority to accomplish these tasks. So the first step was for Boston to abandon its town status, and obtain state-approval for enhanced ED powers/governance to manage its new-found situation. Boston became a city in 1822, approving a new city charter that permitted a bicameral city council and a strong-Winthrop-style mayor in whom “the administration of all the fiscal, prudential and municipal concerns” were vested.
Elected in 1823 as Boston’s second mayor (he then served six one-year terms), Brahmin Josiah Quincy stepped up to Boston’s infrastructure and service crisis. Concentrating on the oldest sections of the city, crushing the determined opposition of old Town elites, he established a municipal bureaucracy of experts accountable to him. Quincy then appointed himself as chairman ex-officio of the considerable number of independent boards and commissions and assumed authority not contemplated by the state constitution or the shift to city status (O’Connor, 2002, p. 93).
Quincy hired teams of sweepers to remove six tons of “dirt” from city’s streets, established municipal garbage pickup, Boston’s first police and fire departments, and created a department of corrections for youth offenders–which was a “good” thing. Acquiring control over the city’s sewers, he minimized harbor and street pollution. He also systemized and extended municipal programs to benefit the city’s poor. He then became President of Harvard. Two other Josiah Quincy’s became mayor in by the end of the century.
Oh, BTW, Quincy, conducted Boston’s first municipal urban renewal program–clearing downtown land re-building 18th century Faneuil Hall, and constructing what is now known as Quincy Market. Ironically Logue’s 1960-era urban renewal project touched on both, and, of course, in 1976 James Rouse’s “revolutionary “festival market” separated ED’s physical redevelopment strategy from urban renewal. When the reader visits Boston be sure to stop by Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market/Government Center, it is one of American ED’s magic historical locations.
The Boston Quincy left behind in 1828 was rated as the healthiest city in America–and the most indebted. His was the first clear Progressive municipal-level CD strategy, which despite the arrival of hooligan Irish, set the tone for future Bostonian CD Elects for the remainder of the century, giving way to a glorious culmination in the six year, Chamber-Elect-led Progressive “Noble Experiment” that ended with “Boston–1915”.
CD’s Second Wing Is “Born”
Periodic economic recessions, which through the 19th century were remarkably long-lasting and lacking a governmental support-system, were horribly hurtful. The “panics” affected working and immigrant classes most severely, causing considerable consternation among both Privatists and Progressives. Arguably moral/religious Progressives responded by creating different programs and forging CD strategies and CDOs, while Privatists formed their own corporate-based “people-helping” EDOs. This was most evident during/after the 1873 Panic, the worst to that date. In this section, we briefly outline the birth/rise of the Second CD Wing, the Missionary-Foundation Wing, as it evolved through the Early Republic and Gilded Ages
Early Republic–Early Republic antebellum social, proto-CD reform first appeared after the War of 1812, gathered momentum after 1820 and “crested in the 1830’s and 1840’s. For the most part these Early Republic movements were not CD/ED-related (temperance, abolitionism, education, mental health). By the 1840’s women’s rights had entered into the policy foray. The 1837 Panic caused such misery in urban areas that second wing CDOs were founded.in the Big Cities of the North. They arose from CDO-like entities created by Protestant evangelists during the Second Great Awakening.
As we shall also see yet another set of “people-focused” entities, Third Wing Mobilization entities also responded to other needs. Included among them were the development of the ethnic neighborhood/ward machine and early unionism—the latter discussed below. One might also mention Nat Turner’s rebellion (1831), a factor in formation of the Black political culture—and an anomic mobilization event—also occurred. It should also be mentioned that while much “birthing” was going on during the Early Republic, it was the subsequent post-Civil War Gilded Age that witnessed a great flowering of all CD wings.
Antebellum [social] reform flowed through the veins of evangelical Protestantism unleashed during the 1790-1830 Second Great Awakening. “With a leavening of rhetoric from the American Revolution and a dash of economic and scientific thought …1820’s and 1830’s reformers usually thought they were attacking sins, not social problems, and they urged individual repentance rather than legislation and coercion. By the 1840’s that began to change … The ineffectiveness of [previous] voluntarism and moral suasion [however] pushed reformers into advocating diverse forms of governmental action”[iv].
The ineffective voluntarist organizations are the first recognizable second wing CDOs that formed as “urban ministries” for evangelists in the middle years of the Second Great Awakening. Offspring of what Walters called the evangelist Protestant missionary “benevolent empire”, a sophisticated set of related Second Great Awakening organizations dedicated to proselytizing Protestantism across America and foreign lands (such as Hawaii). Examples include American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, American Anti-Slavery Society, Sunday School Union, and American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions). This benevolent empire consisted of formal national/regional evangelical entities who …
… propagated the same world-view, tapped the same financial resources, and had many of the same men on their boards of directors. They often held their conventions at the same times, in the same cities” and were quite experienced in interdenominational cooperation/coordination. “The driving forces of the benevolent empire were people like Arthur and Lewis Tappan, wealthy New York merchants who were at the center of nearly every one of the greatest religious and secular reforms of the day”[v]—the George Soros (Koch Brothers), of the Early Republic.
Fed and protected by the Religious Elect, the Missionary-Foundation wing, were infused with members from a new class composed of “professionals” (moderately affluent, highly educated occupations) concerned with social justice and rank-in-file middle class, mostly females committed as individuals to alleviate the plight of the urban distressed. In the Early Republic years, the predominant theme was to change “people” so they made better decisions, lived better lifestyles, and avoided behaviors/decisions that crippled their physical and moral being and crippled their economic condition. The “missionary” motivation, one class changing the behavior or a lower class, remains a constant, with ebbs, flows, and greater complexity, of the Second Wing—as does the role of “Religious Elect” as protector, resource-provided, and idea generator.
Among the very first of these eastern urban CD-like offspring was the City of New York-based Society for the Prevention of Pauperism founded in 1817. That society “investigated both economic and moral aspects of slum life, suggested changes in city-run institutions, and opened savings banks to encourage thrift. It also sent out home visitors … gathered statistics … and sold firewood cheaply to poor families” [vi]. Shades of Chicago’s (and Bill Clinton’s) South Shore Bank. Often relegated to the pejorative classification of private charity, they can be considered the first American CDOs.
Over the next few years Americans formed a variety of voluntary agencies to help destitute and “deserving” fellow citizens (a distinction was made between worthy and unworthy poor). By 1825 over a hundred relief organizations operated in New York City alone”. Having entered into the neighborhoods of the East’s urban poor, “these urban missionaries increasingly gave attention to the social factors that kept people from escaping the slums—unhealthy food and housing, bad family life, evil companionship, unemployment and ignorance. [vii] . This concern for environmental factors above and beyond moral behavior and character deficiencies was a significant step and it broadened considerably the complexity and scope of Second Wing CD.
For example, the notorious first report of the New York City Magdalen Society (founded 1830) claimed prostitution was ‘the result of sheer necessity, poverty, rather than preference”. The outcry against this report was so intense, however, the Society dissolved itself –even though informally, it continued to be led by Mrs. Charles Grandison Finney (whose husband is a founder of the Second Great Awakening and modern revivalism).
Today “Faith-based” CD is a legitimate and wide-spread CD strategy. It has a long tradition, which certainly found expression during these Early Republic years. Called “social Christianity” or “social gospel”, it was personified by Washington Gladden (1836-1918), a Congregationalist minister, raised in Oswego (part of “burnt out district”), educated at Williams College, who is now acclaimed as its “father”. Deeply concerned with the plight of the working man and with urban blight, he stressed it was a Christian’s responsibility to become involved, and to redress abuses and poverty. A well-known labor mediator, Gladden worked closely with the civic association movement to popularize that commitment.
A plethora of church-based initiatives later responded to counter the various urban problems that beset the immigrant during the Gilded Age (McKelvey, 1963, pp. 160-66). Perhaps the most durable of these 19th century faith-based movements was the Salvation Army, introduced from England in 1880 established places of respite in nearly every sizeable immigrant slum in America’s Big Cities. Its leaders, Ballington and Maud Booth, by the time they retired in 1896, founded a second organization, Volunteers of America, with 2000 officers and 25000 volunteers in 17 rescue missions, 24 lodging homes and 3 farm colonies. Also, the Catholic Church, inspired by Leo XIII 1891 Rerum Novarum, formed the secret American Protective Association that claimed over 2 million members by 1895 (McKelvey, 1963, p. 164) as a CDO grappling with religious-based discrimination.
The Panic of 1837 pressed the launch button for this Second Wing. The New York City Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (founded in 1843) serves as an excellent example (another 1853 NYC Children’s Aid Society, and Norfolk VA 1843 Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, founded by young entrepreneurs ( (Goldfield/ Brownell, p. 164)) to demonstrate several trends that characterized this wing. Internalizing its religious fervor and missionary tendencies, the hard realities of Panics and the ineffectiveness of past initiatives, intensified second wing reliance on applying rationality/science (in the form of data analysis/planning) to tackle physical and social-psychological pathologies concomitant with poverty and slums.
Identifying, for example, what today we call juvenile delinquency as a primary concern requiring solutions—much like the 1950’s Ford Foundation ‘gray areas” experiments. The perceived need to attack, more or less simultaneously, a number of such problems, what the soon-to-be-discussed settlement houses termed “comprehensive” change strategy also remains an important criterion in today’s Second Wing vocabulary. Also, early forms of professionalism inevitably appeared. Home visits assumed a “case manager” function as agency personnel attempted to increase awareness and capacity in their clients. They lobbied for governmental action, and served as intermediaries with governmental agencies. [viii].
Enlightened “outsiders” improving the poor’s lot, led naturally to “on-the-job expertise” carried unintentionally overtones of “class”, “experts”, “elites”, and it questioned the legitimacy of working class values, priorities, and behaviors—thereby paving a way for more class-based populist alternatives as Second Wave CDOs struggled for commitment to their approach by their target population. That too remains a perennial concern. In any case, these transformational Early Republic CDOs would, forty or so years later, be adopted by settlement houses,–and two generations later, by the newly emerging profession called social work.
Gilded Age Second Wing: Remembered as “the Long Depression”, the Panic of 1873 triggered an explosion of relief programs, this time addressed to a flood of new immigrants, and focused in the hellholes of older distressed urban neighborhoods. Jane Adam’s Chicago Hull House (1889) is the best known but not the first. The original idea, developed at London’s East End Toynbee Hall in 1884 and carried to New York City by Stanford Coit in 1886 called Neighborhood Guild) was America’s first. Coit worked with Lower East Side Jewish immigrants. Graham Taylor (Chicago Commons) and Robert A. Woods (Boston’s South End House) were other notable examples.
The movement founded “settlement houses” in poor, mostly immigrant, neighborhoods. They were staffed by middle/upper class volunteers (again mostly female)who would live in them, and offer workshops, counseling, and outreach whose ultimate purpose was to instill middle-class “American” values, that if practiced would alleviate poverty and facilitate assimilation into American society and economy. Volunteers were expected to serve as role models, and their comprehensive array of services were intended to educate as well as enhance the quality of immigrant life (e.g. recreation) as well as material well-being.
Services offered in settlement houses varied, but the laundry list included: classes in English, civics, cooking, sewing, dressmaking, wood and sheet-metal working, legal aid, employment counseling, laundry facilities, baths, some health care, nurseries for working mothers, recreation and athletic programs, concerts and theatre and even vegetable gardens. Providing such a cacophony of services, reflected an instinctual awareness that transformative personal change required a vast array of services, facilities and education—since labeled “comprehensiveness”.
The settlement house “was an effort to build a bridge of understanding between the [upper] middle classes and the inner-city poor”. Their non-profit boards of directors were predominately affluent Progressives—settlement volunteers, contributors, and boards of directors were emotional and class outsiders to the immigrant neighborhood. Settlement houses were intended to be transformative vehicles for northern urban Big Cities, not merely apolitical neighborhood-based service centers. Characterized as “spearheads for reform” (Davis, 1967), settlement house reformers were intended in the aggregate to lead to fundamental social reform. Social reform in the settlement house era meant assimilation–and assimilation meant the maintenance of a productive social order and capitalist economy. The ever-present companion of Second Wave CDOs, the Religious-Increasingly Secular Elect—were an important resource and a constant presence—and for them capitalism at that point in time was not a bad thing overall.
Too others, however, assimilation meant social control by business elites and Ivy League settlement house volunteers. To neighborhood residents, most of whom retained identification with machine ward politicians and ethnic churches, settlement workers were oft-times “useful do-gooders” providing a “safety net”. Writer Jack London, no friend of the settlement movement, said settlement house volunteers “do everything for the poor except get off their back … They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages and try to sell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him” (Bremner, 1964, p. 65). Trolander, more charitably, observed settlement workers “work for, but is not of” the neighborhood. While settlement houses had many individual successes, their net impact was in no way transformative.
Contemporary community developers draw much from the settlement house movement. That heritage included (1) focus on “the needs of low income neighborhoods”; (2) provision of direct and “comprehensive” array of services to neighborhood residents; (3) and an ultimate purpose being to alleviate the underlying causes of poverty and social problems on a national scale. The peak of the settlement house movement was just prior to World War I. In 1913, 413 settlement houses operated in 32 states (Trolander, 1987, pp. 3-4). After World War I, settlement house volunteers were replaced by professionally-trained social workers (with newly minted MSWs)—generating controversy that professionalization of social workers changed the nature and direction of settlement houses—and the CD Second Wing.
Boxed Edition
So when did the Foundation enter the picture? M. Christine Boyer believes it arrived in the form of the Civil War United States Sanitary Commission—which Lincoln referred to as “a fifth wing to the coach (p. 19). I think she is correct. The Commission was a private elite-based effort to “utilize the latest medical and sanitary knowledge in the inspection of civil war camps and hospitals, drainage and water supply, ventilation, and dietary methods”. ”The commission also aimed to united all local relief societies into a national organization that would direct the work of thousands of volunteer women’s services”. “Local branches of the commission collected money, food clothing, and bandages before distributing them among hospitals, battlefields, and emergency aid stations …tabulated vital statistics … and prepared thousands of medical monographs to military doctors, and in the largest cities provided lodging, food and convalescent homes and nursing services” (p. 19). Its first secretary-general was Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. “Shunning any connection with government powers, distrustful of corrupt and incompetent politicians, the commission prided itself on its moral rectitude and honor” (p. 19). The relief efforts of the commission “and its zealous volunteers. Olmsted felt, must be controlled and moderated by experts … professionally paid sanitary workers … (p. 20)
“Philanthropic reformers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century would draw upon this model of a disciplined society … they would apply the latest techniques of scientific inquiry and knowledge in order to discipline and control both the benevolence of the giver, and the self-sufficiency of the receiver; and they would represent a mediary role outside of government authority, a moral elite free of political pressure. … The burst of philanthropic activity following the civil war was greatly influenced by the success of the Sanitary Commission. (p.20) For example the first time by establishing its control over local institutions of charity was 1863 in Massachusetts State formed the “voluntary and advisory Board of State Charities”. P. 20. Ten years later, the Panic of 1873 hit.
Birth of CD’s Third Wing: mobilization strategies, and class-based political movements
The changing economic base of the Early Republic “large” cities helped produce CD’s Third Mobilization Wing. The colonial class system under stress, a proletariat evolved from the success of new sector manufacturing gazelles. Prosperity or its lack, even if gradual and relative, raised issues concerning its distribution (equity) while its clunky distribution created pockets of affluence—a middle class for instance—that was free to devise new expectations—alongside oceans of poverty whose basic needs remained unsatisfied. Distribution and redistribution necessarily involved politics and political action. Success in politics required organization and leadership. None of this fit very well with a more class-based, closed and elitist Second Wing. Those advantaged and those disadvantaged had their own ideas of what they wanted, and their own sense of who best could get it for them.
There was little that smacked of religious fervor that arose from a new “class”, the working class of Early American industrialism. They formed their own CDOs, and leadership. As Walters described it, “As early as the 1820’s, an assortment of artisans, visionaries, politicians, and opportunists put together a series of organizations to help workers. In many respects these stand at the opposite extreme from Protestant missionary [our second wing] activities. The two kinds of endeavor shared virtually no personnel, drew leadership from different classes, and disagreed over the effectiveness of religion as a means of social change”[ix]. These new organizations were “workingmen’s associations” and by mid-1820 there were hundreds of such “local labor societies”—organized around the workplace, not residence or home.
Composed of “journeymen”, or skilled workers, they established the first craft unions in America during the 1820’s. Like guilds before them, they set rules, standards, rudimentary safety net, and a sort of benefit/recruitment package that provided a basic package of practices, rights and benefits for their “craft” and workplace. In the 1820’s their principal motivating need was a ten-hour, not sunrise to sunset, working day. The movement was northern Big City-wide, but Philadelphia, the nation’s second largest city (a bit less than 100,000) was the hotbed and focal point. In 1827, a journeyman carpenter’s association (600 workers) went out on strike for the ten-hour day. The strike quickly collapsed, but the reaction from other workingmen associations proved transformative.
The not-always-obvious need to join together to press one’s demands took hold and, in 1828 a citywide federation of workingman’s groups formed: Mechanics Union of Trade Associations, composed of 15 workingman’s associations. Industrialists fought it bitterly with lawsuits, political repression and an economic downturn strangled the Union through 1832. Nevertheless, its mere existence served as model to workingmen associations in other cities. By 1833 they had formed federations in Baltimore, New York, Washington, Louisville and Boston[x].
In short order the Mechanics Union, believing it needed an action arm to accomplish its objectives, formed in 1829 a Philadelphia Workingman’s Party. The Party contested city elections every year through 1831 unsuccessfully—when it collapsed completely. By that time, however, Workingman Parties had exploded across the north and Midwest. Wikipedia claims sixty cities formed a workingman’s party between 1829 and 1832. Walter’s states “it appeared throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and New England—wining “impressive” victories in Newark, New London and Wilmington—and came close in NYC. Indeed, a workingman’s convention in 1832 Boston resulted in the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and Other Working Men.
Their principal opponents were Jacksonian Democrats (which included non-religious Elect) who dominated courts and city hall. Like President Trump, Jackson was a polarizing agent, but the platform agendas for the Workingman’s Parties embraced Jackson’s attacks against monopolies and rich elites. Agendas also included free public education, end of imprisonment for debt and compulsory militia service—and wanted no restrictions on sale of liquor (temperance was now a social reform movement). While we have yet to talk about “corporation charters” (which were the dominant Mainstream EDO at that time), they opposed such delegations of public powers which in their mind only made the rich, richer (p. 185). They preferred legislation that addressed their needs, not those of business owners. Workingman Parties were mostly unsuccessful and after an 1836 Philadelphia 6,000 man workingman strike, they, like the strike, failed—effectively ending forever any notions supporting a union-based American third party movement.
Refugees fled to both Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs. In an increasingly unstable and desperate atmosphere created by the long-lasting 1837 Panic, state legislatures adopted the ten-hour day—indeed in 1840 (Jacksonian) President Martin van Buren by executive order required it on federal contracts (p. 188). Also State legislatures terminated/reformed ED corporation charters and ended imprisonment for debt. Other social reform movements got free public education. Working within the system, early unions were remarkably successful. They eventually became classified as interest groups, but their ever constant participation and involvement in subsequent community development issues, strategies and policy advocacy—which as the reader knows continues to this day—meant they had meaningfully entered into CD (and MED) policy-making. From our perspective, they can, in some measure, be considered a “mobilization” CDO.
They would be soon joined by a new neighborhood/ward based faction of a political party. With immigrants flowing in hugely increasing numbers, ethnic political machines stirred. Tammany Hall made its first organized attempts to recruit ethnic immigrants in the 1840 election. Every bit as conceptually complex as the union, ethnic ward-machines, with their bosses and Christmas turkeys, made their appearance—and in many instances they were successful because ethnics perceived the need to “organize” in order to withstand the “discrimination” and outright hostility of many Big City urban policy systems now heavily influenced by populist—former Jacksonian Know-Nothing adherents.
However, one views these union and machines efforts—and there are several ways to look at them– a new “wing” of CD, composed of organizational allies or a CDO (both), was sharing, and sometimes contesting, the CD turf with the Second CD Wing. In the post-Civil War Gilded Age, several additional mobilization movements appeared on the scene, and they had equally serious repercussions on community development.
infrastructure and modernization, clothed in beauty and reminiscent of nature and small town America, were the solutions for individual virtue, a moral society, social and class stability, and economic development–and the best counter to the pernicious effects of immigration and the industrial city.
… ‘thoughtful people’ … were ‘appalled at the results of progress; at the waste in time, strength, and money which congestion in city streets begets, at the toll of lives taken by diseases when sanitary precautions are neglected; and at the frequent outbreaks against law and order which result from narrow and pleasure less lives’
The American city was marked by a void. It was blamed for having destroyed the uplifting qualities of the physical environment; everything had been sacrificed on The altar of industry and capital acquisition. No one had questioned every man’s right to disfigure the city with heavy smoke from soft-coal furnaces, stenches from soap factories and leather tanneries, unsightly billboards, and aesthetic nuisances.… There had been no time (in the building of the industrial city) to develop the finer instincts, to transform the ideals of communal living into an adequate physical environment.[13]
The solution, of course was “the city beautiful”. We shall concentrate upon two dynamic forces which drove the early City Beautiful era: the women’s-civic improvement association movements, and Daniel Burnham, the personification of the skyscraper, the architecture profession, and for our money, the father of American city planning.
Civic Improvement Associations
The civic or village improvement movement dated back to 1848 with Andrew Jackson Downing’s encouragement to city dwellers to establish “rural improvement societies for encouraging tree planting and tasteful architecture”.[14] The first such group to form was in 1853, Stockbridge Massachusetts which became “the prototype for all that followed”. “By 1880, Massachusetts had twenty-eight associations and Connecticut between fifty and sixty”. In the 1880’s and 90’s associations spread first to the Middle Atlantic, then to the South East and by 1900, California, probably the last, “had several dozens of associations.[15] All in all there were probably thousands across the United States. They should be considered as evidence of an instinctive need to form neighborhood-level entities, to accomplish civic, ED and CD ends and purposes.
These municipally-based civic improvement associations were led-disproportionately populated by upper and middle class women, many of which were mobilized behind several of the other moral social reform and later Progressive movements ongoing at the time. Like chambers of commerce civic improvement associations arose almost naturally in many smaller cities and towns. Neighborhood improvement associations (NIA) also could be found in new Big City subdivisions, as most Big Cities were still able to capture much of the 19th century “drive to the periphery” because existing city boundaries were not yet reached, or annexation was still possible. The attractiveness of the political machine, and the more desperate economic/social needs of the immigrants imparted a middle-class character to the 19th century neighborhood movement. Lacking a ward-base political machine, it can be imagined that either the Church or voluntary civic improvement associations could have formed among working and ethnic immigrant classes.
Like chambers civic associations were far from monolithic in their views and purposes. In fact, both Richard Hofstadter and Craig Turnbull describe these civic associations as “the coexistence of illiberalism and reform”[16] in that many used beautification and real estate techniques to keep undesirables out of their areas–a not so Progressive orientation. In later years of the City Beautiful era, the early Great Migration deeply affected the policy and activities of these associations. To counter what was viewed as “conservative parochialism”, Progressive reformers created a national association (similar to the NML) which came to be called the American League of Civic Improvement at first located in Springfield Illinois, and then in 1902 moved to Chicago.
Nineteenth Century: There are several issues that impede analysis of 19th century neighborhood civic improvement associations. First is they were neighborhood-hood level, and related was that much of the movement was female—neither of which captured the interest of male-dominated Policy World. More defensible was their quite varied agenda of concerns, which ranged from civic beauty and planting trees and flowerbeds (which became a tourism strategy for a small town), to public sanitary conditions, and importantly a direct connect to the landscape architecture profession, to the parks movement, and from there to planning—even touching upon municipal water supply and filtering.
Given its direct connection to the parks movement which was the prime mover for the first national ED/CD strategy/program, the City Beautiful, a brief description is important to our history. Newburgh (NY) born Andrew Jackson Downing was born precisely as the Second Great Awakening entered its growth years (1815). Drawing upon its fervor, Downing embraced not religion, but horticulture and landscape gardening/design. His first book, Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America was an instant success, and made his a bit of a literary celebrity. He followed up with a series of books and founded journals. He was a prominent leader in founding state-level agricultural colleges.
Downing espoused a “philosophy” and approach to neighborhood organization that seized upon his belief in what today is captured in “a home is a castle” for a family, and families and their home are the foundation of a neighborhood. Families take pride in their home, and they develop it in ways that express their material prosperity, education, and their pride in community and nation. Civic pride results from home beautification. Civic pride begets happiness, or at least a measure of contentment, which leads to more stable citizenship and moral lifestyles. In this one can see an ethos on which future suburbs would be built, but in 1850 it was applied to Big City homes and subdivisions. Turnbull asserts Downing espoused three cornerstone principles and goals for his concept of civic beauty: (1) the civilizing power of house and garden, (2) the capacity of both to reflect the moral and civic character of their inhabitants, and (3) the important role of the credible expert in shaping that environment (Turnbull, p. 28). Downing in the last instance was the leader of an emerging profession, an expert, whose services were essential to the achievement of is other purposes. In this Boyer will also concur (pp. 18ff). Rural improvement associations were the vehicle by which these purposes would be wrought.
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His success and competence leads many to consider him the “father of landscape architecture”. That title was awarded because Downing in the late 1840’s pressed hard for the construction of a huge park in New York City. On a trip to England in 1850, he picked up a junior partner who moved from England to Newburgh—together they worked on another prestigious project, the National Mall. In 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was founded, and located on a site on the National Mall. President Millard Fillmore (1850) awarded a commission to Downing to prepare a plan/report for the design of the mall. Downing issued the report in 1851, causing a stir in that it was a radical departure from L’Enfant’s paradigm. Downing wanted a “national park” that would serve as a model for the nation and its Big Cities—“a public museum of living trees and shrubs”. Fillmore got his startup funds, but the plan was never fully implemented.
In the height of his fame, disaster struck. In July 1852, while onboard with his extended family, the steamer, Henry Clay, exploded on the Hudson River. He burned to death at age 37, along with 80 others. That left his junior partner with the contracts, journals and Downing’s business. In 1857. New York City. The junior partner arranged a meeting with the Superintendent of NYC’s Central Park—which had been approved by the state legislature in 1853. They had earlier met upon introduction by Downing back in 1850. The two decided to submit a plan, one of 33 submissions, for the design of the Central Park. They won. So, Downing’s junior partner, Calvert Vaux, and the Superintendent, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. designed and built Central Park. The rest as they say is history—and will be further discussed in later articles.
As the reader might notice—what has this got to do with neighborhood improvement associations? Frankly, not much. It is a tangent that describes what will turn out to be a CD Profession/Specific Policy Fifth Wing landscape architecture/public planning/parks movement–that while related in important ways to urban infrastructure and MED/CD economic development did not take on a primary MED/CD character until it matured in the late 1890’s in the form of City Beautiful. Neighborhood improvement associations, also an offspring of Downing, followed a different path after his death.
Downing did not want or believe that landscape architecture, or home beautification was meant for wealthy elites—he wanted it to be a part of middle class life. Turnbull, and others, observe that Downing wanted to make beautification part of middle class lifestyle (Craig Turnbull, An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890-1920 (Cambria Press, 2009, p. 28)). To this end, the he stressed formation of a rural improvement society
Beginning with the Laurel Hill Association in Stockbridge MA in 1853, the first incorporated village improvement society in the United States … [Laurel Hill} transformed the townscape of Stockbridge through voluntary subscription, rebuilding the ‘irregularly laid out and unevenly graded main street and planting on the town’s treeless sidewalks and common green (Turnbull, p. 29)
Downing’s most impactful convert was Birdsey Grant Northrup, a Congregational minister from CT, who took it upon himself to promote formation of the rural, village, and urban neighborhood improvement associations throughout the nation. Initially, most successful in New England, it eventually spread to Pacific Coast states by the turn of the century. Northrup intended civic beautification to instill rural values and character into an increasingly urban and industrial America. He insisted each board of directors, be composed of a majority of women, who were, he believed, better able to raise money and secure the cooperation of others, and recruit volunteers. Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s and Scribner’s, leading media of the day, embraced improvement associations and published a stream of supporting articles in their defense and promotion.
Northrup also stressed nonpartisanship, and insisted association membership be open to all economic classes. For him a local improvement association and its services could ameliorate “the animosities of politics and religion in furnishing a safe common ground for the display of mutual beneficiary activity” (Turnbull, p. 31). In this sense, he incorporated into a local association a curious tension between the expert professional, and participatory democracy. “Maximum feasible participation”, as Moynihan would later label it, was a part of the neighborhood movement since its inception.
By the 1890’s local association initiatives were producing solid MED/CD outcomes of preserving and enhancing property values, lessening external population outmigration, serving as what today we call tourist destination benefits, and in general conveying a civic pride and satisfaction that protected the community from negative competitive impacts. Nineteenth century associations concentrated attention, aside from civic beautification, on public works, streets especially, and public schools. In short, they had become an EDO/CDO (p. 32).
Such claims attracted Thorstein Veblen’s attention, not in a good way, of course, as rhapsodizing about the benefits of expensive beauty initiatives as yet another example of conspicuous consumption, in this case by the middle class. (P.33). His was not the only concern or criticism. By the 1890’s, it was clear to many improvement associations were not only not “open” to lower classes, but were also instruments in preserving neighborhood class homogeneity (this is an era previous to Black immigration). This bifurcation of neighborhood associations, into those pursuing CD principles, and those adhering to more MED purposes was fully developed by the turn of the century Progressive Era.
FOOTNOTES
[i] Ronald Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860, consulting editor Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, New York, 1978), p. 4.
[ii] Ronald Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860, consulting editor Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, New York, 1978), p. xi.
[iii] Ronald Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860, consulting editor Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, New York, 1978), p. ix.
[iv] Ronald Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860, consulting editor Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, New York, 1978), p. 214.
[v] Ronald Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860, consulting editor Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, New York, 1978), pp. 33-5.
[vi] Ronald Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860, consulting editor Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, New York, 1978), pp. 174-5.
[vii] Ronald Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860, consulting editor Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, New York, 1978), p.175.
[viii] I believe it interesting that 1840’s community developers did not toss aside their religious values in dealing with the poor. Walters (pp. 177-9) observes the distinction between deserving/undeserving poor was core, as was the bottom line belief that poor decisions and misplaced priorities led to poverty—not unlike neo-conservative positions of the mid-20th century. Yet by the eve of the Civil War he observed CDO moved “a half-step” toward the view that prevailed in the 20th century: the belief that social conditions, not just personal morality, have to be changed, and that the state has the responsibility to do the job” (179). This view, one could suggest radically changed in the 21st century, our Contemporary Era, when discrimination and inequality became the casual factors for poverty and social pathologies, not environmental, physical barriers, or personal decisions and morality.
[ix] Ronald Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860, consulting editor Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, New York, 1978), p.180.
[x] Ronald Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860, consulting editor Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, New York, 1978), p.180.
Boston and Massachusetts
Boston was settled by Puritans, not Quakers, rather Calvinists who preached an “angry” God, a corrupt humanity, a heaven open to only those predestined (the Elect), but an intense preference for a community based on Puritan values/morals, and an intense obligation of the Elect to address needs of the community’s unfortunates. Puritanism rested upon a state-level Puritan “Elect” hierarchy that “guided” shareholder-based New England town democracy. In the Puritan system, town democracy and Puritanism were lodged in the town church–unlike Penn’s Pennsylvania, church and state were united. Structurally and morally the two systems of policy and governance were almost polar opposites.
John Winthrop
Boston’s equivalent to Penn (founder of the Town of Boston 1629)[i] was the former English country squire John Winthrop. Winthrop established a Puritan policy system that distinguished between the roles of private and public in the Puritan community. Puritanism may have combined church and state, but it delinked the state from private profit and economic growth. Instead Winthrop’s Puritanism believed private profits should accrue to the community’s disadvantaged, and business elites distanced from policy-making. In his famous “A Modell of Christian Charity” Winthrop advocated
[that] under a due forme of government, both civill and ecclesiastical” in which the concern for “the publique” must outweigh all private interests. We must bear one another’s burdens … We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of other’s necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality.… For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world. (Winthrop, 1630)
If this “modell” were applied to municipal governance—as Winthrop meant it to —the Model of Christian Charity would be Philadelphia Privatism turned upside-down, inside-out or both. Winthrop’s Puritanism perceived government as primary, to be an instrument to make men holy, and provide for the needs of the community’s most desperate. This (1) primary use of government (2) to care for the disadvantaged are two critical divides between Privatist and Progressivist political cultures. They are as evident in the seventeenth century—as they are today. The focus upon private sector success as key to community economic growth suggest Progressive and Privatist economic development pursue different goals.
Massachusetts Political/Administrative Structures and Relationships
Winthrop stressed the unity of church and state, less in his municipal corporation, than at the state level. The State, led by Elect was entrusted to infuse municipal governance with moral purpose and lead in policy-making. The state of Massachusetts assumed responsibility that towns and residents be moral, hard-working, prosperous citizens, deserving of a future with God in heaven. Municipal government was thus held accountable, not only to the will of the shareholder town meeting (established in 1636 Massachusetts)[ii], but to God and his Elect in the state capital as well. Accordingly in 1642 the Massachusetts General Court instructed each town to “train their children in learning, and labor and other imployments“. In 1647, the General Court required towns of fifty inhabitants to retain someone to teach children to “write and reade“, and a town of one hundred to set up a”grammer schoole” supported by public funds. The intention underlying education was each individual was expected to read his Bible. Literacy was essential, a prerequisite for self-governance at the town level. The role of the Massachusetts General Court in municipally-relevant affairs was significant, and remains so today.
As intense their desire to practice their religion, Puritans emigrated to unleash their middle class entrepreneurial spirits—reflected in the “business” purpose of town meetings and democracy. The Puritans secured their charter from the crown as a “trading company” owned by shareholders. City-building in early New England was a legal, economic enterprise, closely regulated by the state. Town shareholders included investors as well as residents. Each town formed an agreement/contract with its shareholders to perform tasks for the maintenance of the commons and designating tracts of land the proprietor solely owned and paid taxes. Originally, most of the land went unused and a function of town government was to attract and sell such unused units to new residents. This may be the earliest expression of Puritan town economic development. The town, as a private corporation, left to the discretion of the General Court (state government) most public policy areas. With few exceptions[iii], this tightly controlled unit of sub-state government was not replicated elsewhere in the United States. The Town evolved into a pure service delivery unit (Russo, 2001, pp. 10-11).
Wealthy families (Russo, 2001, pp. 49-52, 7-10) invested in new towns across the whole of southern New England (Connecticut and Rhode Island separated in 1662 and 1640’s respectively) and contested New York borders. By 1700 nearly all of New England, excepting the most northern areas, was incorporated. During the seventeenth century, original towns sold off land to form smaller towns. . Commercial centers developed (Cambridge, New Haven, Hartford, Salem, Providence, Springfield, and Boston). Most were ports (on the Atlantic or rivers). Nearly all were grid-platted. Dramatic growth occurred post-1700 with “clustering” of town centers. From that time, New England’s population growth lacked a “place to go”, and “pent up”, it awaited a future Yankee Diaspora.
The now-famous New England town democracy was not formalized by state legislation until 1660 (Massachusetts Open Town Meeting Law); the first town that practiced town democracy in the current sense of the expression was Ashfield. (Robinson, 2011). Over time, town meetings offered an opportunity for rival elites to crystalize; it is no accident that a Boston town meeting (1772), not the Bay State legislature, voted into existence the first Committee for Correspondence (including John Adams, Sam Adams, James Otis, Joseph Warren, and Josiah Quincy Sr. (Baltzell, 1979, p. 148).
The Evolution of Puritan Elites
After Winthrop Massachusetts Puritans softened the tough edges of his original system. As the Bay Colony matured, the religious intensity of Massachusetts’ Puritan governance wilted; a secular humanism displaced the harsh and demanding Puritan value system. This new mentality, however, left untouched critical values associated with Winthrop’s “city on a hill” passage. Commitment to community, a distrust of profit in public policy, the sharp separation of business from government, moral elite leadership of state government, the use of government to address needs of the disadvantaged, and the almost evangelistic function of the city on the hill as the “modell” of civic duty for others to imitate remained at the core of New England’s system of policy-making. The transition from a Puritan Elect to Boston Brahmin took nearly 150 years,
The shift from raw Puritanism (Congregationalism) to Unitarianism[iv] commenced in the late eighteenth century. Long before Unitarianism was first preached at King’s Chapel in Boston (1784), however, generational change prompted by Puritan intolerance and inflexibility, and the development of a maritime sector to balance agriculture, weathered the old Puritanism. Authority, formerly derived from religion and morality, shifted to more secular foundations. Substituting for Calvinism was a Weberian Protestant ethic (hard work, a moral life) and commercial success.
Fifty years after its initial settlement the Puritan Religious Elect was replaced by a new Elect composed of morally-bound, highly-educated commercial elites most of financed or sailed the seas of the planet. Their new-found wealth, used for investment in maritime initiatives, was accumulated through the land sales associated with New England town-building. Post Puritan, pre-Unitarian business elites had evolved into a “codfish” aristocracy, based on fishing, whaling, and trade with Europe and the Far East. But success in business carried with it an obligation to serve the community by helping the disadvantaged and the general public welfare through service in government—a noblesse oblige. “The pulpit and the quarterdeck were the sacred and secular symbols of authority in the family, in society and in politics …. Boston federalism was a secularized version of the Puritan ethic.” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 199)
So unlike Quaker elites, post-Puritan elites accepted responsibility for governmental leadership. Governors after 1688 were drawn from this codfish aristocracy. “They modeled themselves not only on the Puritan ideal of authority, but also on the old Roman ideal of gravitas: self-interest yes, self-indulgence no …. They stood rather than ran for office, they listened to their own consciences, not to the voice of the people …. were collectivists rather than individualists, believing in family and class as organic communities and society as the family writ large” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 199). These men presided over what Baltzell calls a “deference democracy”—a democracy where aristocratic elites made policy on behalf of the “best interests” of its citizenry—“the best people were elected to office, time after time, in town after town for over two hundred years”[v].
Transcendental Unitarianism replaced the fire, brimstone and sinners in the hands of an angry God with concern for humanity, a separation of church and state, a tolerance for religious diversity, and the essential goodness for mankind that, if protected from the evils of civilization, would “live long and prosper”. Education, always a first order Puritan priority, became the key vehicle to achieve both moral and economic ends. Education enabled, enlightened, empowered and was core to addressing needs of the disadvantaged. Almost imperceptibly, economic growth meant transforming “people”. Improving business profitability was separate and apart from government’s purposes—it was the responsibility of businessmen themselves. Boston-style Progressivism entrusted policy-making to a business elite, but sharply divorced private and business profit from policy-making as harmful to the overall community, and a bane to the community’s disadvantaged.
With the arrival of the Early Republic Boston’s agricultural and maritime economic base was disrupted by an emerging entrepreneurial business elite: textile manufacturers. As early as 1810 this manufacturing elite, accumulated wealth from factories built in Lowell, Andover, Salem and southern New Hampshire. Using a new form of business structure (the corporation), textile entrepreneurs made fortunes quickly, moved into Bulfinch-designed mansions in Boston high status neighborhoods, and by the 1830’s not only lived alongside the codfish aristocracy, but increasingly married into it. The Boston Brahmin, the Frankenstein-like fusion of these two elites, resulted.[vi] The Brahmin Elect carried with it the old Winthrop mission:
[an] obligation on the part of older families to the welfare of “their town” and new determination to participate actively once again in local political affairs … Boston could be saved if members of the “better class” took over their responsibilities and regained positions of social and political leadership in the community …. [They] emphasized the responsibility of “the happy and respectable classes” to watch over those laws that affected “the less prosperous portions of the community”. Their obvious desire for political control of Boston carried with it a sense of responsibility for the prosperity of the town and the welfare of its less fortunate classes–a sort of moral stewardship, a form of noblesse oblige–that would continue to be an integral part of Boston’s political heritage. (O’Connor, 2002, pp. 87-88).
Josiah Quincy
Only in 1820 did Boston petition the state legislature to change from town into city. By then Boston, a thriving cosmopolitan trading city of 18,000 in 1790 had increased to 43,000. Boston desperately needed modernization of its infrastructure to accommodate population and a fishing industry that needed dredged harbors and rebuilt wharfs. Towns, however, lacked the authority to accomplish these tasks. City status, achieved in 1822, brought with it a charter that permitted a bicameral city council and a strong-Winthrop-style mayor in whom “the administration of all the fiscal, prudential and municipal concerns” were vested.
Elected in 1823 as Boston’s second mayor, Brahmin Josiah Quincy[vii] stepped up to Boston’s infrastructure and service crisis. Concentrating on the oldest sections of the city, crushing the determined opposition of old Town elites, he established a municipal bureaucracy of experts accountable to him. Quincy then appointed himself as chairman ex-officio of the considerable number of independent boards and commissions and assumed authority not contemplated by the state constitution or the shift to city status (O’Connor, 2002, p. 93). While Philadelphia’s Privatist, weak, committee-dominated municipal government neglected its infrastructure and services, Quincy hired teams of sweepers to remove six tons of “dirt” from the city’s streets, established municipal garbage pickup service, established municipal level police and fire departments, created a department of corrections for youth offenders, acquired control over the city’s sewers and minimized their pollution–oh, and in case you missed it, conducted Boston’s first municipal-level urban renewal program–building in the cleared land the first Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market (ironically Logue’s initial 1960 urban renewal project rebuilt both). The Boston that Quincy left behind in 1828 was rated as the healthiest city in America–and the most indebted.
Traveling on a time machine to 1898, we would see his great-grandson Josiah Quincy IV (son of yet another Mayor John Quincy Jr.), the last of the Quincy dynasty as the Democratic mayor of Boston, a political party which included Boston’s immigrant Irish. Still very much a Brahmin, Quincy IV supported “extension of the powers of government and in the rights of organized labor and as mayor employed settlement worker Robert A. Woods, the social worker Alice N. Lincoln, and the founder of the playground movement, Joseph Lee.… [Quincy as Mayor] made Boston’s city government for a brief time the cutting edge of urban reform in America. (Baltzell, 1979, p. 373) In short, the first Josiah Quincy was no exception, his Progressive style of governance and economic development persisted through the nineteenth century.
Boston Progressivism stressed local governmental executive leadership by a Brahmin elite, pursuing the community’s greater good, with an emphasis on education and people related services. Called “Yankee” and “secular Puritans” by Woodard, our Progressives exhibited since the earliest days of the American Republic “the greatest faith in the potential of government to improve people’s lives …. For more than four centuries, Yankees have sought to build a more perfect society here on earth through social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process and aggressive assimilation of foreigners”. (Woodard, 2011, p. 5) Its discomfort with unbridled capitalism, corporate conflicts of interest, and persistent efforts to assist the disadvantaged thru municipal policy distinguish the approach.
“Government … could defend the public good from the selfish machinations of moneyed interests. It could enforce morals through the prohibition or regulation of undesirable activities. It could create a better society through public spending on infrastructure and schools”. (Woodard, 2011, p. 60)
Boston infused into Progressivism its sense of “mission”, its propensity to “impose its ways on everybody else”. “For the Puritans didn’t merely believe they were God’s chosen people, they believed God had charged each and every one of them to propagate his will on a corrupt and sinful world”. (Woodard, 2011, p. 61) This sense of mission overlaps profoundly into contemporary ED. Most evident in our “Policy World”, composed largely of Progressive-inclined academics—setting it apart from the more Privatist “Practitioner World”.
Observations and Questions before Moving On
There’s no mistaking Boston and Massachusetts for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Warner’s Privatism is not replicated in Boston. Nor should we think these are the only forms Progressivism and Privatism assumed. One might assume Privatist elites in Charleston behaved and thought differently than Philadelphia because their Privatism has different roots. A perhaps not-so-obvious lesson to be learned is variation among municipal business elites. Assuming a common unity of purpose, vision and action across cities and regions, a pursuit of profit for example, did not create a unified approach to policy.
The Philadelphia business community stressed low taxes, and economic/population growth and Philadelphia politics was supposedly the most democratic and open in America at that time—in contrast to the more imperial rule of Boston’s Progressive elite to which the masses were expected to defer. The concern for infrastructure, physical redevelopment, education, assisting the disadvantaged—and services to people and neighborhoods was pretty much the opposite of Philadelphia. In any case, leadership by municipal business elites does not justify the conclusion that the outputs of such policy-making will be identical across cities and can be reduced to the simple grubbing for personal gain and business profit. There is something deeper going on—this history suggests a major factor in that difference is political culture.
If so, political culture played a significant role in the municipal policy process. Perhaps, it’s most significant impact is to define goals and beneficiaries for ED policy initiatives and strategies. The existence of such radically different political cultures as demonstrated by Philadelphia and Boston supports our assertion that American economic development has not followed a uniform, monolithic, nation-wide set of economic development goals. There is two visibly different ways to conduct sub-state economic development that preceded the industrial city. As to which is better, the answer rests upon which set of goals one posits. Is one set of goals and beneficiaries better than the other—well …? Philadelphia proved remarkably innovative and through much of the nineteenth century increased population sufficient to make it competitive with its neighbors and the elite cities in America’s urban hierarchy. Less so Boston. But Boston defined its economic development in different terms—terms that worked well enough until Irish immigration smashed the ethnic and religious homogeneity of the Boston community. There are complexity, value preferences, and locational advantages all at play in providing answers to these questions. Ideology and political preferences are much simpler?
New England Yankee Diaspora
“New England Yankees were almost entirely the descendants of 21,000 Puritans who arrived between 1629 and 1640 (Barone, 2013, p. 52). For the next 150 years confined, except through sea trade, to the borders of today’s six New England states, they prospered, became Unitarians, and procreated. The American Revolution, triggered by Yankee belligerence, and the Constitution that followed in 1789 set the stage, but Mad Anthony Wayne’s victory over Native Americans at Fallen Timbers in 1796 pulled the cork from the bottle. First was migration within New England itself, to Vermont and Maine– both populations tripled between 1790 and 1810. But then New Englanders surged across upstate New York —and with that the Yankee dash to the Pacific really started.
Upstate New York
New England shared upstate New York settlement with downstate New York and Philadelphia land speculators such as Robert Morris, of Revolutionary War fame. Morris bought huge swatches of upstate New York in earlier days, but his bankruptcy transferred title to the Dutch-based Holland Company. The Holland Company hired Joseph Ellicott, and he hired Pierre L’Enfant (designer of Washington D.C.); together, they platted central and Western New York, which was subsequently sold to New England emigrants. Other speculators such as William Bingham (could you guess Binghamton) did the same for central/southwestern New York. Bingham sold the land to New Englanders who came in groups, often extended families from the same town. For example, thirty fishermen from Martha’s Vineyard/ Nantucket founded Hudson in Columbia County along the Hudson in 1783.
Eastern and east central New York was settled as a consequence of a little known compromise between New York and Massachusetts. Massachusetts claimed the area (about six million acres) and New York, of course, contested Massachusetts ownership. In 1786 a compromise was negotiated in which New York got the title for the land, but Massachusetts got the proceeds from its sale. So, Boston land financiers put the land up for sale and sold it to New Englanders. And that is how New Englanders moved into New York. In 1805 New Englanders incorporated the city of Syracuse (Woodard, 2011, p. 174). Upstate New York’s 1790 population of 121,000 exploded and increased to nearly 1.4 million by 1830—“at which point Upstate New York had more people than any other single state”. (Barone, 2013, p. 66). New York State, little more than New York City at the time, was minimally involved in the settlement itself—in effect it had contracted it out to out of state land speculators.
From the beginning, it was abundantly clear that Yankee migration meant city-building—industrial cities and commercial trade. New Englanders didn’t just hack out a homestead: “Entire families would pack their possessions, rendezvous with their neighbors, and journey en masse to their new destination, often led by their minister. On arrival they planted a new town—not just a collection of individual farms—complete with master plot plan, with specific sites set aside for streets, the town green and commons, a … meeting house, and the all-important public school. They also brought their town meeting government with them. (Woodard, 2011, p. 176). The resulting settlement, predominately New Englanders, created tension between the State and municipal government. New England towns contested with New York cities. To remedy this, New York State empowered county government as an administrative partner to deliver state services and coordinate those New England-style municipal government activities. That structural heritage continues, today.
The Erie Canal (established in 1810, started in 1817 and completed in 1825) was another effort by New York State to control its upstate counties. The Canal, in any case, facilitated upstate manufacturing and linked Midwestern agriculture to New York City. So textiles in Utica and flour milling in Rochester flourished. Buffalo, its innovation, the grain mill, developed into a great logistics and transshipment center between the Midwest and New York City. That meant upstate New York was developing cutting edge industrial cities. Textiles, familiar to New Englanders, and agricultural processing were the first agglomerations that developed. Transportation, the source of raw materials and export of the finished product, was critical. Upstate New York was transshipment center on a regional scale. Its export economy was not based on native raw materials or resources.
Ohio, Michigan to Iowa and Indiana
Ohio came next. The Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery and divided land for private sale into 36 square mile townships, each sub-divided into 35 sections including one section reserved to build a public school. Believe it or not, the state of Connecticut held title to a strip of Ohio land (the Western Reserve) not included in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. The Western Reserve included present day Youngstown, Akron and Cleveland—and (in theory) extended across several states beyond. Connecticut (1795) sold much of the Western Reserve to the Connecticut Land Company. With the 1796 Fallen Timbers victory, land speculators and surveyors quickly headed west. In 1796 Moses Cleaveland, lead surveyor for the Connecticut Land Company, platted the Reserve into townships, formally founding Cleveland and Youngstown.[viii]
Settlers from Connecticut did stake out land there, including Moses Cleaveland …and was settled almost entirely by Yankees and in the years after the Civil War, when New England cities were thronged with Irish Catholic immigrants, the Western Reserve was, with Vermont, the most Yankee dominated part of the country. Yankee domination lasted until the early twentieth century, when Ellis Islanders thronged to work in the new steel, auto and tire factories in Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown (Barone, 2013, p. 64)
The remainder of Ohio was settled by just about everybody—Virginians, Pennsylvanians, Scotch-Irish and as we shall soon see, Germans. That is why it remains a political swing state to this day. In the north half, Yankees dominated. Following Yankee tradition, settlers founded colleges: Ohio University (first President being William McGuffey), Hiram College (President Garfield’s alma mater), Baldwin-Wallace College, Antioch (Horace Mann first President), Oberlin (1833 by Vermonters), Kenyon (Rutherford B. Hayes) and, Western Reserve College.
When the first Great Lakes steamship launched in 1818, Yankee immigrants, (disproportionately Vermonters) left Western New York and moved into Michigan’s Saginaw River Valley to start a lumber industry (Barone, 2013, p. 69). The Michigan Territory, governed by General Lewis Cass, a New Hampshire native, became home to quite a few transplanted New Englanders. Solomon Sibley, Massachusetts-born and a Brown University graduate was Detroit’s first mayor (1806) and Elijah Brush, a Vermonter (Dartmouth), it’s second. Northern Indiana, Iowa and Illinois followed the same pattern as Michigan. Though far less numerous in Indiana than Ohio, Vermonters and Connecticut men established northern Indiana towns such as Montpelier, Wolcottville, and Orland. Among its first Vermont-born settlers was Governor James Whitcomb, who set up the state’s public school system and Caleb Mills, the first President of Wabash College. (Barone, 2013, p. 69)
Yankees laid down the cultural infrastructure of a large part of Ohio, portions of Iowa and Illinois, and almost the entirety of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. They had almost near-total control over the politics in the latter three states for much of the nineteenth century. Five of the first six governors of Michigan were Yankees, and four had been born in New England. In Wisconsin nine of the first twelve governors were Yankees ….(By contrast, in Illinois—where Midlands and Appalachian cultures were in the majority—not one of the first six governors was of Yankee descent—all had been born south of the Mason-Dixon line). A third of Minnesota’s first territorial legislature was New England-born and a great many of the rest were [New Englanders] from Upstate New York … In all three Upper Great Lake states, Yankees dominated discussions in the constitutional conventions and transplanted their legal, political and religious norms (Woodard, 2011, p. 177).
New England’s “jewel in the crown”, however, was Chicago. Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard (Vermont), following the Black Hawk War’s end (1832), hired William B. Ogden (Delaware County New York) as his lawyer, and along with Grant Goodrich (Chautauqua County New York), formed “Chicago’s first urban elite … made up mostly of young, self-made men from New England and New York State”. As the original city-builders of Chicago, they transformed a wilderness outpost into the great metropolis. (Barone, 2013, p. 70).
Chicago, however, was far from the end of the line for Yankee immigration. Vermont born John Deere set up a plow factory on the Mississippi at Moline (Illinois). From the 1830’s onward, Yankees piled into Wisconsin, and after the 1840’s saturated Iowa. Burlington, Iowa, named for another Burlington back east, and Grenville Dodge (from Danvers Massachusetts, later chief surveyor for transcontinental Union Pacific) founded Grinnell Iowa. Yankees rushed into Kansas and Nebraska to prevent slavery from expanding into those territories (John Brown, for example, was born in Torrington Connecticut–Interesting irony: John Brown’s father Owen, owner of a Connecticut tannery, hired as his apprentice Jesse Grant, the father of Ulysses).
Left to another chapter is the tale of New Englanders in Oregon and San Francisco—not to mention Hawaii. Yankees liked to travel.
Diaspora Structures
More interested in government at the state and national level, Yankees were noticeably less focused on sub-state policy. Yankee first settlers installed the New England Township with its preference for schools, internal improvements, and people-focused policy outputs such as education, caring for the widows, disabled, and economically disadvantaged. Such townships, aside from infrastructure, rarely ranked Privatist-style economic development as a high priority. Even today, townships, compared to other governmental forms, towns are the least involved in sub-state economic development—leaving that policy area to higher levels of government.
The New England system was not applied uniformly in states settled by the Yankee Diaspora. The Yankee Diaspora spread into lands governed by another state (New York), or was shared with settlers from the Midlands and Scotch-Irish. Middle Atlantic States developed their own style of sub-state governance reflecting their New Netherlands, Greater Appalachia, and Midlands political cultures. As Mid-West states set up their initial government and state constitution, the structures incorporated into their state constitutions reflect influences from different first settlement cultures, tempered by the nature of constitution-making, a process naturally dominated by elites. Consider the Wisconsin constitution approved in 1848 (still in effect today).
Wisconsin counties, absent a court system, possessed considerable autonomy from the state, and were robustly empowered to assume responsibility for many policy areas (enjoying powers relevant to economic development, for instance). Yet, Wisconsin townships adopted New England town meetings, highly prioritized road and bridge infrastructure, while providing indigent residents base line medical care and funeral expenses. Fiscal affairs, however, were a “complicated mix of state-county-township revenue-raising and spending”. (Russo, 2001, pp. 103-104) From this example, it is evident that development of various sub-state systems came early in economic development history, thus having ample time to harden into distinct patterns that subtlety affect contemporary policy-making. Wisconsin was a typical example of the patchwork blend of administrative cultural experiences.
New Beginnings: Community Development
Let’s provide some definition to the “community development approach” (CD). The one compelling characteristic that separates community development from “mainstream” economic development is community development focuses on “people”—helping, shaping, empowering, mobilizing and ultimately changing people. CD does not prefer to work with private business, and the well-being of the jurisdictional economic base is far from its prime concern. Mainstream economic development achieves its purposes through business firms and corporations mostly by affecting the costs of production and providing the infrastructure for economic growth. CD achieves its purposes by helping people where they live: neighborhoods; Focusing on people, has (almost) always involved “changing” people—their attitudes, values, and behavior—“people growth”. Why people need to change suggests another difference between mainstream and community development—the goals each pursues.
Like mainstream economic development, community development grew from several disparate, semi-related seeds. The CD garden includes lots of different flowers—which overtime have cross-fertilized, blending and blurring in ways that obscure their separate, distinct, and independent histories (and purposes). To mix a metaphor, CD compares to Russian (Matryoshka) nested dolls. Within the outside large doll are a number of smaller dolls. Not all the dolls work well with each other. In this chapter, several versions of community development will appear. The following will be discussed: social welfare strategies, neighborhood-based approaches, city-wide models, and African-American community development.
Social Welfare Community Development
To make the point early that CD can be Privatist as well as Progressive, “social welfare CD” developed alongside the first post-Civil War immigrant streams. Not all capitalists took delight at watching immigrants and desperately poor starve. Philanthropy existed and any number of efforts to feed and care for the sick, aged and unemployed characterized the Gilded Age. From newspaper campaigns, church soup kitchens, to elite-supported anti-poverty organizations, such as New York City’s Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor did what they could. Gilded Age Privatist social welfare community development jelled in reaction to the early 1870’s initial flood of immigrants and the 1873 Panic (Depression). Perhaps the earliest was the YMCA movement, started in 1864 NYC, offered a gym and upstairs residence. Inspired by Chicago’s Dwight Moody, “Y”s constructed large fully-equipped, staffed gyms, baths, bowling alleys, and residential dormitories in nine of America’s ten largest cities by 1885 (McKelvey, 1963, pp. 147-8)
Remembered as “the Long Depression”, the Panic of 1873 triggered an explosion of relief programs. The above “NYC Society for Improving” qualified 5000 for relief in 1873; by 1874 it was 24,000. Throughout the decade it averaged in excess of 20,000 families annually. The sheer number of private campaigns, still inadequate relative to the need, invited abuse, inefficiency, duplication, and waste. None of these pathologies were well-tolerated by Privatists in a Privatist age. The Buffalo Charity Organization Society offered a model that each city could adopt which addressed, in its fashion, these concerns. The first nation-wide movement, the Buffalo Charity Organization Societies (COS), brought a characteristic private perspective to community development. Its target was individuals/ families, “deserving” of support; its purposes were to order, capitalism and genuinely to assist the truly desperate
“The primary emphasis of the COS movement was “a scientific approach … the use of investigation, registration, and supervision of applicants … [it] coordinated resources and activities of private philanthropies and establishment of centralized ‘clearinghouses’ or registration bureaus that collected information about individuals and families receiving assistance” (Hansen). Building upon Boston’s original 1876 Social Service Exchange (a clearinghouse), COS went beyond to actual follow up with recipients with a ‘house to house’ visitation’, an evaluation of its effectiveness, and feeding back the information into a planning process for the next year. Home inspectors were trained, and was later incorporated into the early social worker casework method. A community-level ‘governing council” composed of representatives from district/neighborhood councils, contributors, and charitable organizations oversaw the program. Each district office had a paid executive and a system of volunteer committees.
The model was taken from the 1869 London COS by an Episcopal Rector from Buffalo (NY) who after spending the 1877 summer in attendance, brought it back to Buffalo that fall. By 1882 there were 32 known COS-like organizations in cities whose population totaled 12% of the nation (almost 7 million). Expanding consistently across the nation, it formed a National Conference of Charities and Corrections. In 1887 Denver adopted its “federated fundraising” approach, and that further fueled growth of the COS model—a model that adapted to the needs of each community. In 1913, Cleveland expanded the model by organizing a single city-wide funding campaign that funneled its proceeds to approved charitable organizations, and enlisting the active participation of business in its implementation as well as funding campaign. The Cleveland innovation is regarded as the first “Community Chest”—which in its turn spread across the nation as well. The Community Chest would continue (through the Depression) into the post-World War II era. In 1961, the Community Chest movement changed its name to United Way—which continues to the present day.
Today “Faith-based” CD is a legitimate CD wing or approach. It has a long tradition, which certainly found expression during these years. Called “social Christianity”, it was personified by Washington Gladden, initially a North Adams MA minister, now acclaimed as its “father”. Deeply concerned with the plight of the working man and urban blight, he stressed it was a Christian’s responsibility to become involved and to redress abuses and poverty. He became a well-known mediator of labor strikes, and worked closely with the civic association movement to popularize that commitment. A plethora of church-based initiatives to counter the various urban problems that beset the immigrant characterized this period (McKelvey, 1963, pp. 160-66). Perhaps the most durable of these 19th century faith-based movements was the Salvation Army, introduced from England in 1880 established places of respite in nearly every sizeable immigrant slum in America’s Big Cities. Its leaders, Ballington and Maud Booth by the time they retired in 1896 had founded a second organization, Volunteers of America, with 2000 officers and 25000 volunteers in 17 rescue missions, 24 lodging homes and 3 farm colonies. The Catholic Church, inspired by Leo XIII 1891 Rerum Novarum, formed the secret American Protective Association that claimed over 2 million members by 1895 (McKelvey, 1963, p. 164).
Neighborhood-Level Community Development:
Several late nineteenth/early twentieth century Progressive reform movements instinctively, gravitated into “neighborhoods”. Immigrant neighborhoods were called “slums” back then—because outsiders felt they lacked social and economic structure. Residents lived in horrible housing, in unhealthy, crime-prone areas, working desperate, low-paying jobs. Boston’s Robert Woods, a leading neighborhood reformer of the period said the best way “to help integrate poor neighborhoods and their residents into the larger society was to first strengthen these neighborhoods and then try to link them to the outside world” (Halpern, Tebuilding the Inner City, 1995, p. 29). Cities to them were “a cluster of interlacing communities. Each having its own vital ways of expression and action, but all together creating the municipality”. A neighborhood “was the only unit of society which included essentially ‘every kind of community need and the resources to meet it’ … neighborhoods were the “microcosm of all social problems” and the “ultimate testing place of all social reforms” (Melvin, 1987, p. 15).
Settlement House Movement
Jane Adam’s Chicago Hull House (1889) is the best known example of this movement, but not the first. The idea developed at London’s East End Toynbee Hall in 1884. Brought to New York City by Stanford Coit in 1886, his Neighborhood Guild was America’s first—he worked with Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side. Graham Taylor (Chicago Commons) and Robert A. Woods (Boston’s South End House) were other notable examples. The movement built “settlement houses” in poor neighborhoods where middle/upper class volunteers would live, instill middle-class “American” values, alleviate poverty, provide health services, recreation, daycare, education, and serve as role models. The peak of the settlement house movement was “just prior to World War I”. In 1913, 413 settlement houses were in operation in 32 states. (Trolander, 1987, pp. 3-4)
The settlement house “was an effort to build a bridge of understanding between the [upper] middle classes and the inner-city poor”. Their non-profit boards of directors were predominately affluent Progressives—settlement volunteers, contributors, and boards of directors were outsiders to the immigrant neighborhood. Services provided in settlement houses varied, but the laundry list included: classes in English, civics, cooking, sewing, dressmaking, wood and sheet-metal working, legal aid, employment counseling, laundry facilities, baths, some health care, nurseries for working mothers, recreation and athletic programs, concerts and theatre and even vegetable gardens. In this cacophony settlement houses instinctively recognized that personal change meant providing a vast array of services, facilities and education—since labeled “comprehensiveness”. Comprehensiveness developed into a defining characteristic of this approach to CD.
From the beginning settlement houses were vehicles by which immigrant could be transformed into mainstream middle-class Americans. Thus settlement houses were characterized by Allen Davis as “spearheads for reform” (Davis, 1967), not mere apolitical neighborhood-based service centers. The settlement house reformers intended their model to be nation-wide, so that the aggregate of their individual success could lead to fundamental social reform. Social reform meant assimilation and assimilation meant the maintenance of a productive social order and capitalist economy.
Too others, however, assimilation meant social control by business elites and Ivy League settlement house volunteers. To neighborhood residents, most of whom retained identification with machine ward politicians and ethnic church, settlement workers were oft-times “useful do-gooders” providing a “safety net”. Writer Jack London, no friend of the settlement movement, said settlement house volunteers “do everything for the poor except get off their back …They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages and try to sell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him” (Bremner, 1964, p. 65). Trolander, more charitably, observed settlement workers “work for, but is not of” the neighborhood. While settlement houses had many individual successes, their net impact was in no way transformative.
Contemporary community developers draw much from the settlement house movement. That movement’s chief characteristics included (1) focus on “the needs of low income neighborhoods”; (2) the provision of direct and “comprehensive” array of services to residents of those neighborhoods; (3) whose ultimate purpose was to alleviate the underlying causes of poverty and social problems on a national scale —social reform. After World War I, settlement house volunteers were replaced by professionally-trained social workers (MSW)—generating controversy that professionalization of social workers changed the nature and direction of settlement houses.
Housing Reformers
A second movement, housing reform, starts from the same period as the settlement movement—and in the same city (New York). Jacob Riis, author of the great housing-immigrant tenement reform work, “How the Other Half Lives” (1889), is credited with popularizing housing reform in immigrant neighborhoods. Having acquired a competence on the issue by visiting with sanitary inspectors the tenements of NYC, Riis, an impoverished Danish-born immigrant, first published that title in the 1889 Christmas issue of Scribner’s. To learn how things really were “on the beat” TR (1895), as Police Commissioner, walked the districts at night. The man he took with him was Jacob Riis. Riis, who worked at the time for the New York Sun, would write an article on the previous night’s observations, and TR, having his policy agenda shaped by his traveling companion, would follow up. The two were life-long friends and allies.
Housing reformers focused on one of two strategies. The first urged passage of restrictive housing legislation that required tenement owners to fix and maintain their sub-standard housing to minimum standards as prescribed by the law. New housing was required to conform to those minimum standards. The second approach (which continues to this day) sought to create good, safe and suitable housing below its construction cost, if possible (Andrachek, 1979, pp. 159-60). Riis’s great achievement the landmark 1895 Tenement House Act[ix], followed the first strategy. Picked up by others such as reformer Lawrence Veiller (A Model Housing Law, 1914), attacking real estate developers and the slum lords that built and owned these tenement became the primary line of attack by subsequent “housers”—“we must [first] abolish privy vaults before we build model tenements”. Watching this from afar thirteen states and many Big Cities passed laws similar to the later 1901 NYC Tenement Act—only one, Kentucky, was from the South (Andrachek, 1979, pp. 166-67).
The problem was existing tenement complexes were beyond repair, the “dumbbell” apartment could never be suitably made safe or reasonably livable while immigrants still poured in and housing inspectors were “flexible”. Without zoning and building codes, new housing that met minimum standards did little to solve the immigrant plight, and probably only increased rents. As early as 1909, the NYC Municipal Research Bureau, after conducting a ‘friendly investigation’ found more than 66000 violations ( (Andrachek, 1979, p. 169). Nevertheless, an almost exclusive reliance on restrictive housing legislation continued through the end of World War I (1920). Only after criticism by the likes of Edith Woods (Wood, 1919), starting in 1919, that housers picked up the second approach which has dominated since. From that point housing reformers started down a road that led in several directions, to suburbs, master planned communities, public housing and slum clearance, urban renewal, and the Great Society. Arguably, this wing of CD, at least in terms of what the reader will encounter in future chapters, had the greatest impact on not only CD but mainstream ED as well.
Riis in the meantime had moved on. He supported a theme espoused by TR that stressed exercise and the outdoor life. In depressed and congested neighborhoods the best place for kids to do this was school playgrounds. Community sports centers followed. By 1902 Riis was advocating each neighborhood utilize its public school in non-educational areas to improve neighborhood quality of life and facilitate personal development (Scott, 1969, p. 72).
Playground/Recreation Movement
Urban planners, notably John Nolen (and also Olmsted Jr.) joined. “Playground” advocates thought the Big City “as a complex of interrelated systems” in which “the arteries of circulation articulated with the larger parks … small playgrounds planned as adjuncts to the schools, the neighborhood parks and larger playgrounds distributed throughout the city” (Scott, 1969, p. 72). The Playground Association of America formed in 1906. Playground/recreation advocates wanted to affect socialization of late childhood/early teens to reduce pathologies of the industrial city, making possible the healthy and productive development of future urban citizens and families. Playgrounds created a physical place where …
Team play [which] required … tempering of individuality to a common goal. This training socialized the child, making the child receptive to the discipline of the work environment, to an efficiently organized polity, to national patriotism, and to civic idealism … providing an alternative to the depraved, socially centrifugal city. The playground supplied the corrective for bad forms of recreation … [that could nurture] the street gang’s primitive civicism (Wilson, 1989, pp. 81-2)
Also, in 1907, the St. Louis City Beautiful Plan centered about neighborhoods, proposing each neighborhood possess a cluster of buildings/functions including a school (including a parochial school), library, park and playground, public bath, church, police and fire station, athletic organizations and settlement house—grouped around a neighborhood downtown-like civic center. That opened up a new level of interest—in the school, not just its playground. Progressive neighborhood community developers wanted a natural entity to serve the change function; the school, they reasoned could serve as a neighborhood center and recreation area “to multiply points of contact between neighborhood residents, to foster neighborhood unity, and promote recognition of common interests on the neighborhood and city level (Melvin, 1987, p. 23).
The school/community center movement got a jump-start in 1907 Rochester (NY) by Edward Ward[x]. Other cities jumped on the bandwagon; in 1916, the National Community Center Association formed. Using recreation to draw in neighborhood residents, and then attempting to “educate” them on civic affairs and change-issues proved ultimately no more effective than the settlement house. Services, recreation or otherwise, did not change people in ways that led to solving underlying pathologies or lead to national social reform. By the end of World War I, social reformers looked at yet another model of neighborhood-based social reform (social unit plan)—to be discussed in a later chapter. In the meantime, City Beautiful provided an umbrella under which playground advocates joined forces with the Parks (and planning) Movement, thus drawing support from wealthy benefactors.
While not without tension, the Parks and Planners included playgrounds into their plans. Both movements sought to alter the socialization of urban residents. Both accepted the paradigm that physical environment (buildings, etc.) could positively affect human behaviors and values useful to preservation of social order. Both accepted the primacy of experts, of planning, and a preference for efficiency. Accordingly, “The City Beautiful advocated neighborhood playfields and was willing to concede a few acres of larger parks to playgrounds, provided the surrender did not involve the destruction of landscape values” (Wilson, 1989, p. 82).
The Pittsburgh Survey: Early Comprehensiveness
The Pittsburgh Survey, a major Russell Sage sociological project in cooperation with local Progressive reformers/business leaders, commenced in 1907 under the direction of Paul Underwood Kellogg. Conducted by at least fifty social science researchers, it was first released in Collier’s magazine (1909), and expanded into six books published between 1909 and 1914[xi]. The Survey reflected the activism of these Progressive years, and was from its start intended to produce an agenda for social and economic reform/legislation. The survey demonstrates the instinctual pillar of CD that individual social change must involve change in a number of “policy areas” more or less simultaneously. Different aspects/needs of each individual interrelate with each other, facilitating or inhibiting change. This is the essence behind CD “comprehensiveness” first evidenced in the settlement movement.
The project was successful because local reformers were able to work together in cooperation with Sage. Politically Pittsburgh enjoyed a rare interlude from Republican machine politics when Democrat George Guthrie, a lawyer and long-term anti-corruption reformer was elected mayor in 1906 (to 1909). Guthrie not only allowed the Survey, but in 1907 achieved a very controversial merger of Allegheny County with the City—the merger was extremely unpopular, but successfully withstood a number of legal challenges. Guthrie also introduced water filtration which considerably reduced Pittsburgh’s typhoid.
The Survey supports my belief growth politics involve coping with the externalities of successful growth. In the case of the Pittsburgh Survey addressing worker conditions, safety, and wage/income distribution, among many other issues were significant. While not immediately apparent, the Pittsburgh Survey was one of the earliest attempts to understand how industrial growth affected people—an early example of workforce and people-focused ED. This is evident from its concluding comments by its Director, Paul Kellogg:
New stock, then, a mixed people, venturesome, country-bred … the potent aftermath of those great changes from household and domestic forms of production to the factory system. As each new peasantry leaves the soil, the history of the industrial revolution is repeated, but the processes are accelerated and the experience of a generation is taken on a jump [all at once]. … In Pittsburgh … Work is organized nationally. The steel center, like the mill town, is not a thing by itself. It is a step in a bigger process managed from without and owned by a multitude of non-resident stockholders. … We have the persistence of small administrative areas and old social institutions, ill-fitted to meet the demands of a great urban and industrial district. … The community and the workshop are at issue (Kellogg, 1909)
Neighborhood Improvement Associations: Bad Boys on the Block
I have left them to last—the bad boys of community development: neighborhood improvement associations (NIA). Rightfully, they should have come first; they are considerably older than settlement houses and school community centers. But they draw from values different than Progressive Era reformers. NIA developed its own set of characteristics, activities, and goals. Whether membership was Privatist or Progressive, neighborhood improvement associations were individualist-Privatist-leaning.
Fischer cites their goals as “enhancement and protection” (Fisher, 1994, p. 79) that include securing public services, uniform/homogenous development, control taxes, protect property values, “better” schools, and quality of life. Their contemporary prodigy includes home owner/condo associations and the variety of neighborhood associations existing across our metropolitan landscape. They are the world of Privatopia. Contemporary economic developers use words like NIMBY; while cities like Portland (OR) build their politics and environmentalism around them. Others see in them bastions of racism. Neighborhood improvement associations have turned out to be a “many-splendored thing”.
Partly their perception as the bad boys of community development arises from who (and where) they are. They are frequently middle or working class, sometimes affluent–not disadvantaged except in their own mind. Moreover, they tended to form on city peripheries, along streetcar lines, in the early suburbs or unincorporated areas. Where social reform community developers placed great value on external activists/experts as staff and funders, neighborhood improvement associations seldom have staff, raise their own funds, and are volunteer-led by residents. While no one has ever accused these associations of being an Athens-like polis, or even a New England Town Meeting, they are undisputedly neighborhood-led and organic.
Like chambers of commerce, NIA can provide services, particularly infrastructure that overlap into ED/CD. They can be important to economic development planning, and in some post-Great Society cities they can be thought of as a mini-city hall or EDOs. More usually, they function as advocates and an interest group—an actor in the ED jurisdictional policy process. In later chapters, their role will be to resist neighborhood change and succession. In so doing they battle Progressive community developers who advance/protect the interests of disadvantaged minorities. Probably a good measure of their bad boy image is derived from this struggle; in the minds of many they are bastions of affluence, parochialism and racism—home to Republicans.
Previous to 1920, neighborhood improvement associations were supportive of municipal annexation as the means by which much-desired infrastructure was obtained for the neighborhood. There is some evidence that the first improvement associations formed as early as the 1860’s, the more defendable date is after 1880. There are excellent case studies of individual city neighborhood improvement associations after that period[xii]. NIA often resisted ethnic political machines, and formed the basis of support for many a businessmen mayor and municipal structural reformer. Some, like Chicago’s Woodlawn Improvement Association (formed in 1882) performed services (keeping sidewalks free of snow). I have no idea how many there were, but I strongly suspect that in the aggregate they equal, maybe exceed, chambers of commerce. The called themselves different names, and their subsequent evolution followed many, many paths.
Schism in African-American Community Development
African-American economic/community development as its own distinctive path within both mainstream economic development and community development. There are many reasons for this, but the central role played by African-Americans in our economic development history, and their position in American history, society, economics and demographics warrant this focus. African-Americans can sail on either Privatist or Progressivism, but the evolution of their political culture appears to have been dramatically shaped by the Great Migration and the experience of Big City ghettos. This first discussion takes us to the first decades of the twentieth century when a schism within African-American economic development occurred. The outcome of that schism as it played out over the twentieth century has led to our lodging African-American economic development in community development. It didn’t start out there, however.
The mainstream” economic development path came first, with the writings, thought and organizations created by Booker T. Washington. Washington was America’s most influential Black intellectual and leader between 1890 and 1915 (when he died). Washington served as political advisor for both Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. He founded the National Business League which was the precursor of black chambers of commerce. As “the first national black spokesmen for economic ‘self-development‘ … [he advocated] ‘black capitalism’ [small business] in the belief that whites would accept blacks as equals only after the latter developed experience and expertise in orthodox business practice” (Harrison, Ghetoo Economic Development, 1974, p. 2). Washington’s ultimate goal was to develop an African-American economic development path that ended in the same place ethnic immigrants were moving toward: assimilation” of blacks into mainstream American economy. This path can be labeled as “integrationist”.
In 1895, Washington negotiated the famous “Atlanta Compromise” calling for individual self-help, a black-relevant version of Horatio Alger that stressed ‘industry, thrift, intelligence and property‘ (his words). For him, education and entrepreneurship was a surer (and safer) path for blacks than challenging either Jim Crow laws or seeking political/civil rights. Washington, born a slave, may (or may not) have reflected the 95% of American blacks who pre-Great Migration lived in the South. His long-term goal was facilitate African-American entry into the American economic mainstream. Once lodged in that mainstream African-Americans could eliminate social inequality and attain civil rights.
Washington, in 1901, formally incorporated and assumed presidency of a newly-formed National Negro Business League. The idea for the League originally may have come from W.E.B Du Bois (then teaching at nearby all-Black Atlanta University). At an 1899 conference, Du Bois presented a report on Negro businesses advocating “Negro Business Men’s Leagues… in every town and hamlet” (Mead, 2014, pp. 152-53). Washington may have appropriated Du Bois’s idea, founding the League “to promote the commercial, agricultural, educational and industrial advancement” of African-Americans”[xiii]. By 1907 320 Negro Business Leagues formed nationwide (Woodward, 1981, p. 366). Leagues allowed African-American businesses to network with white business and membership included not only African-American businessmen, but professionals, academics and even farmers. They are the fore-runner of African-American Chambers of Commerce.
Washington’s rival was fellow Negro Business League founding board member, W. E. B. DuBois. Bu Bois, born and raised in Great Barrington MA, was the first African-American awarded a doctorate (Harvard). At this time he taught history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois initially worked within the confines of the Atlanta Compromise until 1905 when he co-led the famous Niagara Movement that demanded political and civil rights first and above all. In 1909 he co-founded the NAACP to serve as the vehicle for that change. Washington opposed Du Bois and a bitter and divisive series of actions and exchanges cemented a network of competing organizations offering a different path for African-American political and economic development.
Over the following decades Du Bois developed and promoted his approach to community/ economic development. The approach included “black separation, mutual cooperation, worker’s control, and economic planning”. A near-lifelong member of the American Socialist Party, he called his approach “socialism without nationalism”, advocating “Negro cooperative stores [that] would obtain their goods from Negro producers, which would be supplied raw materials from Negro farmers. Intermediate stages of production such as extractive industries and transportation were to be Negro controlled” (Harrison, Ghetoo Economic Development, 1974, p. 2).
As he developed his views on African-American economics, it was evident Du Bois rejected blending African-American economic activities into the larger mainstream American capitalist economy. Opposed to Washington’s integrationist path, Du Bois was a separatist. Moreover, Du Bois’s path was only marginally capitalist. Rather Du Bois stressed his approach rested on African-American “communalism’ that was instilled in African and African-American long-standing culture. Du Bois’ communalism meant “Service to family, clan, community, or nation becomes more than ‘the burden of being my brother’s keeper’. Serving [the community] is motivated not be some abstract code of behavior; rather one serves others to serve oneself” (Harrison, Ghetoo Economic Development, 1974, p. 10). This is not capitalist individualism—or greed for that matter.
Badi Foster later writes that ‘Contrary to the thrust of individualism, communalism holds that self-centeredness will not provide a just social order resulting from antagonistic cooperation [i.e. supply vs. demand, labor vs. owner etc.]. Bennett Harrison , (citing Hampden-Turner (1969, p.83) further asserts “It has been suggested that blacks tend to reject the ‘ideology of economic individualism’ in the belief that whites in positions of economic and political power explicitly use that ideology ‘to dominate poor people and keep them competitively divided‘”. The icing on the communalism as political culture is Du Bois himself later stated “cooperation “represents a revival of African communalism, a ‘tradition of cooperation in the field of economic endeavor [which] is outstanding in Negro cultures everywhere‘” (Harrison , citing Hampden-Turner (1969, p.83).
In the writings and advocacy of these two early intellectual leaders, three important contrasts emerged. Du Bois rejected Washington’s assimilation-path, instead urging separate, Negro-controlled, socialism, not capitalism. Secondly, Washington stressed individual self-achievement, mastering skills and creating wealth within the capitalist economy; entrepreneurism or black small business formation was his principal strategy. Du Bois, however, argued for blacks to “cooperate”, to work together to develop separately from the colonial white economy. Thirdly, Du Bois stressed mutual cooperation should bring benefit to the black community as a whole, not to Washington’s individual entrepreneurs. In effect, Du Bois rejected individual assimilation in favor of a separate community-wide prosperity achieved by cooperative action of its members–separate from that of the outside “white economy.
Lacking a “place”, Du Bois’ ideas sort of floated over African-American economic development thought—until the Great Migration produced cohesive Black communities, lodged in high poverty marginalized residential neighborhoods in Big Cities. At that point, the ghetto provided a context, culture, and a market for his ideas. I am open to the perspective that subsequent to the Great Migration, as blacks settled into hostile economic, political and social competition with whites in the Big Cities of the industrial North and Midwest, many blacks living in depressed neighborhoods, with unresponsive urban governments evolved culturally from values that had sustained Washington. Leaving the South for northern climes, it might be argued, created a ghetto community that shared a new values and identity that reinforced both separateness and communalism.
That is not to say, however, that Washington’s individual economic integrationist path had been rejected. Just the opposite. Future African-Americans could choose between an individualist capitalistic and entrepreneurial economic development path and a separatist, communalist place-based path.
Quo Vadis Community Development
Community Development by the 1920’s housed a goodly number of individuals, reformers and Policy World theoreticians who were concerned with “people” as people, not as individuals important to a political or economic system. In a period when social commentators, reformers and socialists were advocating for the “people’s interest”, community development in the Twenties was arguably at its Progressive Era peak. In particular, linked with the rising planning movement (and their new-found comprehensive plan, zoning, building codes), community developers acquired an entry into the municipal Big City policy system. Surprisingly, they found allies in business and the professions that also share many of their concerns as well as their love of the plan. While new tensions and social problems appeared during the Twenties, the debate within community development was intense, and considerable conceptual innovation, particularly at the neighborhood level left a lasting impact on CD.
If neighborhoods still remained the core unit of CD, the CD umbrella included those who questioned whether city neighborhoods, indeed the industrial city itself, was a location where the working man and the poor should live. Powerful and influential community developers questioned the viability of the industrial city and proposed to wake it a place of work (separate the Privatist jurisdictional economic base) from the residence of those who worked. Seizing upon variations of our earlier discussed garden city, a wing of community developers argued during the Twenties that suburbs were the way to go. The newly emerging regional planning movement was the vehicle chosen to advance that position—later the federal government would be approached for support. That city/suburb dichotomy affected the “housing reform wing” most particularly—where should worker and immigrant housing be built, what should it look like, and who should own it. Housers identified a low income crisis that the Depression would make a first order priority, and the appearance of decentralization presented the opportunity to use housing and neighborhoods as a CD/ED strategy to maintain Big City viability, if not hegemony, over its hinterland—but we will leave that to Part II.
All these “wings” and approaches and separate groups of community developers demonstrates that despite its strength in the Twenties, CD was fragmented, unified tenuously by its common concern with people, disadvantaged, low-income and working class in particular. In the Twenties, the plan, the entry path into policy-making, also tended to be a unifying factor. Otherwise, it was clear during the Twenties that CD included several policy groupings, wings we call them, that despite some overlap in membership steered community development into different, sometimes conflicting, paths. Combined with effects of the Great Migration and the future Depression, this did not auger well for an integrated approach to CD. That again will be picked up in Part II.
In this section, our discussion will distinguish between those community developers that focused on neighborhoods, and those that were primarily interested in suburbs as the strategy to help and house the working and lower classes.
Neighborhoods and the Chicago School
After an initial post-war hyper-immigration (1.2 million in 1920-1921), the immigration spigot was mostly turned off mid-decade. The first immigration adjustment in 1921 imposed a national quota system which drastically reduced immigration; the so-called “open door replaced with a screen door. In 1924 the appropriately titled the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 reduced immigration to about 300,000 per year for the remainder of the decade. As one door closes, however, another frequently opens. Southern Diaspora brought an added dimension to Big City post World War I population growth—racial change.
Southern Diaspora/Great Migration picked up steam after World War I as an estimated six million rural southern migrants moved to cities during the decade (McKelvey, 1968, pp. 37-9). Twenties Southern Diaspora did not affect Big Cities uniformly; migrants followed rail line routes and northern cities not directly connected to salient rail lines attracted fewer southerners (Buffalo, for example). Mostly, industrial cities with expanding employment opportunities (auto) gathered in large numbers; Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York City attracted the most. “Northern cities absorbed during the twenties over 600,000 Negro migrants from the South”…. “By 1930, the nonwhite population of Harlem had reached 164,566, making it the largest community of Negroes in the land” (McKelvey, 1968, p. 39).
Beat-up housing and deteriorated inner city neighborhoods again welcomed new populations. In 1920, inner city housing exhibited noticeable deterioration; such housing, overwhelmingly rental, poorly designed, milked by profit-seeking owners, had simply borne the brunt of overuse and overconsumption. Existing residents moved out to move up without any encouragement from new populations. Neighborhood population movements, suburban or otherwise, escalated as good times meant more households could afford better housing. The movements attracted the interest of the Policy World, notably academics from the Chicago School of Sociology (established 1892) which the second decade of the twentieth century was the nation’s leader in sociology and urban geography.
Robert E. Park personified the Chicago School of Sociology[xiv]. A student of Georg Simmel and John Dewey, a compatriot of William James, a former Harvard professor, and journalist, Park had completed a seven year stint with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute. Park joined with scholars such as Ernest Burgess (his office mate), Homer Hoyt and Louis Wirth. His classic, The City in 1925 revolutionized the neighborhood CD movement. The first Chicago School conceptualized the city as an ecosystem (urban ecological approach) that was characterized by a Darwinian-like competition, between social groups over physical space.
This competition for space produced distinctive geographies, neighborhoods, populated by individuals associated with particular social (usually ethnic and racial) groups. Class and income differences also fueled neighborhood competition, resulting in a hierarchy of neighborhoods. The hierarchy was characterized by differentials in rental and housing prices. Older, usually cheaper, housing constituted the low end of housing-neighborhood hierarchy and poorer groups “filtered” into the oldest housing and wealthy into the newest. Neighborhoods sorted themselves out by class and income.
The city’s neighborhoods “evolved” a pattern of neighborhood succession over time and distance—the furthest out, the periphery, would be the youngest most expensive housing and the home of the affluent. The most central neighborhoods, the home of the poorest were the most distressed. Neighborhood succession argued new housing, destruction of older housing and/or the introduction of additional social, ethnic and racial groups triggered population flows (invasion) from one neighborhood to the next accelerating deterioration of the poorest into slums.
Chicago housing and neighborhood succession seemed to fit the first or “ethnic” ghetto fairly well. From this perspective movement to the periphery was “good”—it represented economic and social success—and that immigrant ethnics were being “assimilated” into society and the economy. At the time, to the extent it was thought about, Afro-Americans it was assumed would assimilate in their turn as immigrants had. That, of course, proved to be faulty thinking; accordingly in a future chapter we will revisit that issue and discuss “the second ghetto”.
Up to and during the Twenties, however, Afro-Americans were submerged in a sea of ethnic neighborhoods. Except for color, “the first wave of black migration moved as family units, or maintained family ties, and placed heavy emphasis on education as the best means for advancement….By the end of the 1920’s, major cities were split between a white and black metropolis divided by a few streets and invisible but real color lines” (Abbott, 1987, pp. 29-30). The second ghetto was in process of forming, but its evolution noticed only by those directly affected by it. During the Twenties some settlement houses and recreation centers, for example, segregated their programs—or would not admit blacks at all (Abbott, 1987, p. 31).
Starting in the twenties, picking up considerable steam in the Depression, ghetto housing rehabilitation became the prime strategy of community development. Social reformers/settlement workers either joined with housing planners or gravitated toward public housing and slum clearance. A few, Mary Simkhovitch for example, remained committed to settlement house style. Daniel Carpenter, Hudson Guild Neighborhood House in New York City also stuck to early concepts well into the 1950’s. The shift away from settlement and “old-style” neighborhood community development is demonstrated in the evolution of Clarence Perry commonly regarded as the “founder” of the modern neighborhood movement.
Planned Neighborhoods: Clarence Arthur Perry
Initially involved with the 1909 Forest Hills Gardens project Perry, an employee of Russell Sage, gravitated into the playground-community center–recreation movement. This movement, active through World War I, formed the Community Center Association, and attached itself to the Chicago School of Sociology and the American Sociological Society The movement urged public schools use their playgrounds for general neighborhood resident use. Perry moved into construction of community centers that served a variety of resident needs including neighborhood meetings, adult education, and recreation. “Every school house [was to be] a community capital, and every community a little democracy” was its public goal (Gillette Jr., 1983). Perry’s 1910 book, Wider Use of the School Plan became the movement’s bible and it was supplemented by additional pamphlets and monographs. Perry described the community center movement as “an extension of the settlement movement” and perceived neighborhoods and neighborhood facilities as linking individuals-residents to the larger community, improving in the process their overall well-being, creating a more effective democracy (Gillette Jr., 1983, p. 423).
Perry was a planner; he arrived on the scene just as cars made their first appearance. His first concern was that children could not travel to playgrounds safely because of traffic. So he developed ideas on how to design neighborhoods to counter an isolation imposed on neighborhoods by wider streets and increased traffic. Using planning designs and concepts, “the Neighborhood Unit: a Scheme For the Arrangement of Family Life Community” was included in the 1929 Regional Plan of New York. His approach became linked in the eyes of many to the Chicago school and neighborhood succession.
Perry’s ideas were compatible with the era’s “physical planning affects behavior paradigm”. The notion that “physical changes in the urban fabric … could improve social life and enhance citizenship” were first found in Charles Horton Cooley (1909) Social Organization. Cooley argued the family, play group, and neighborhood or community group of elders were the three most important factors in the socialization process–he saw neighborhoods as a nursery for “primary ideals”, such as loyalty, truth, service and kindness. Neighborhoods, if planned correctly, could recreate the small town and the virtues associated with small town living within the Big City: “…with its physical demarcation, its planned recreational facilities, its accessible shopping centers, and it’s convenient circulatory system … would furnish the kind of environment where vigorous health, a rich social life, civic efficiency, and a progressive community consciousness would spontaneously develop and permanently flourish” (Gillette Jr., 1983, pp. 425, 427).
Perry’s image of a neighborhood included neighborhood identity, defined its ideal size (5,000-9,000), and fixed the location of services, residences and traffic patterns. For all practical purposes he originated the term: neighborhood unit. The school was in the center and wide, high traffic streets with shopping and commercial on its periphery. Residential streets, often curvilinear, flowed away from the major arteries. Ten per cent of the neighborhood was dedicated to parks and playgrounds. He advocated forming homeowner’s associations. Seized upon by Clarence Stein, Perry’s ideas were later incorporated into Radburn and suburban subdivisions.
Perry fell into disfavor after the Second World War. At that time social reform advocates abandoned the neighborhood concept as “obsolete” (Jesse Steiner, President of National Community Center Association). Revisionists argued that neighborhoods needed to be homogenous–that Depression era neighborhoods had become too heterogeneous and too dense to achieve desired effects. Such Neighborhoods had become “pseudo-neighborhoods”. This issue would later be resolved by accepting neighborhood diversity as replicating America’s diversity—but that reconciliation was thirty years or more in the waiting. Perry eventually returned to favor, embraced by Urban Land in the 1970’s, and New Urbanism in 1990’s.
Community Development and the Regional Plan of New York
In the course of the Twenties a major suburban/central city debate erupted within community development. The debate continued into the 1930’s; the issues raised were never resolved, resulting in a more or less permanent schism within CD on whether suburbs were or were not a legitimate alternative to the central city, and the preferred residential location for worker and middle classes. The crux of the debate, however, focused on the location of manufacturing, the dominant sector, of course in Big City jurisdictional economic bases—and the use of zoning to steer manufacturing to the desired location. The debate revolved around the centerpiece of 1920’s planning, the Regional Plan of New York (RPNY), and its chief protagonists were Lewis Mumford and Russell Sage’s Thomas Adams.
RPNY debate exposed an important division within CD and the significant overlap between comprehensive planning and economic development, its lessons extend beyond that. The RPNY debate was the first major instance Big Cities confronted the increasingly obvious decentralization/suburban issue and its implications for the regional metropolitan landscape. The critical role and relationship of Big Cities (central city) to their suburbs in the shared metropolitan area. That relationship will arguably be the most controversial, long-lasting and divisive discussion, not only our ED history, but in regional planning, urban governance, politics and economics for the entire 20th century.
Suburbs are arguably the most important 20th century physical transformation in metropolitan America. RPNY was likely the first major instance that issues were discussed, relationships posited, strategies devised—and actions taken—in America’s leading metropolitan area and economy. From this history’s perspective, the debate ultimately rested on who was to be the leading geography in the new metropolitan order so obviously being formed– metropolitan “power”. The Big City into the 1920’s was the unquestioned hegemonic leader of its hinterland, economically, politically, and even socially. Was that hegemony to continue in a hinterland full of autonomous, independent suburbs? When one debates the location of manufacturing, the core sector in an industrial era jurisdictional economic base, one certainly establishes the economic hegemony of one geography over another—though it is far from evident the principals in this debate saw the issue in this manner.
The RPNY debate, being the first, did not frame hegemonic questions in ways that address today’s concerns. RPNY was a plan, and planning concepts were central, not power relationships. Instead the debate involved proxies, the use of zoning as an ED tool, the need to eliminate central city “congestion” to allow modernization of manufacturing, and where to create livable working class residential areas. In the 1920’s, however, they were critical factors. In a section above we concluded our jurisdictional economic base discussion with the pessimistic observation that concerns of the economic base were less central to Big City ED strategies and programs than our concern with the “ticking clock” of the industry/sector profit life-cycle. Modernization of industry was the key concern not being addressed. As to working (and lower) class residential areas (called neighborhoods in Big Cities) were a defining feature of CD. Zoning and comprehensive plans were planner hot buttons of the day.
The issues that divided our protagonists were never bridged, and frankly, it is not clear what would have changed if they were. The placement of manufacturing and its role in central city or suburb, the separation of residence from one (the former in suburbs and latter in central city) involved larger powerful elements and groups who did not play a major role in RPNY. What the debate did, however, was to discuss actual future realities before they hit. The debate on “congestion” presages that between .public housers and business “blight” urban renewal advocates two and three decades later. As to whether suburbs had a legitimate role to play in the metro area still lingers.
Lewis Mumford and the Suburbs
While twenty-first century planning celebrates density as liberating, Lewis Mumford had other ideas. Mumford loved cities and regarded urbanity “as man’s greatest work”; but, he did not believe the industrial city was the best urban form to house humanity. His thought, a continuation of Geddes’ garden city, attacked the scale, density, and human pathologies, he believed were fostered by the Big City. Mumford believed:
The swollen urban conglomerations of his day [were] ‘far removed from the sources of life [and were] expanding without purpose [transforming] living forms into frozen metal’. The metropolis destroyed the individual’s identity and self-esteem; only by dispersing the inhabitants into regional clusters would people find communion with their surroundings and each other. Mumford believed that the giant city was just a temporary phenomenon, a product of the nineteenth century’s great population explosion and unprecedented industrial expansion … the accumulated disadvantages of the big cities promised to make them ‘cemeteries of the dead’ (Gelfand, 1975, pp. 131-2, 131-6).
For Mumford central city revitalization was not possible, that urban redevelopment (slum and blight removal) would provide only temporary relief and would chiefly serve the interests of ‘real estate promoters’ (Beauregard, 1993, p. 78). He did not advocate abandoning the central city; instead he envisioned it as a central employment center encased by a ring of residential areas. His vision was not very different from Wright’s Broadacre City and, in fact, departed dramatically from Howard’s garden city. Mumford’s general idea was to abandon the central city as a residential center, leaving to “house” the economic base of the metropolitan area. Mumford and Clarence Stein joined forces calling the central city as the “city of the dead, advocating instead building “a series of [well-planned] small scale ‘satellite cities’ (Meyers, 1998, p. 293). Between 1923 and 1929, Mumford was instrumental in creating a paradigm that placed the “regional (central) city” within a metropolitan context (Danielson & Doig, 1982).
Prewar American Progressives, like Mumford, advocated against the central city because to them it had become a Privatist paradise. To Mumford, “Cities were being designed by speculators, planners and engineers with little sensitivity to the nature and function of the community as a whole. Traffic and commerce had become the ‘presiding deities’ of the ‘sacred city”. [The] … continuous, building up, tearing down, and re-building, with their steady process of congestion … were motivated by the need to provide opportunities for new investment and additional profits” (Beauregard, 1993, p. 78). Mumford’s solution was metropolitan planning that created planned suburbs built around home and community.
Writing in 1925, Mumford viewed the middle class being driven from the city by Privatists and the effect of their unrestrained profiteering. In an important article, now ignored, “The Fourth Migration” (Mumford, 1925), Mumford outlined “the first migration” described in our second and third chapters. The second led to the rise of the factory towns in the early nineteenth century (internal migration). The third migration, occurring in early twentieth century, transformed the industrial city into a financial center. The fourth migration, an exodus out from cities, is suburbanization. The last migration had been made possible by innovation in communication and transportation technologies (telephone, truck and car, for example). The challenge of the fourth migration was whether to allow it to create new “dinosaur cities” as “destructive and inhumane” as the previous migrations (Stein, 1925).
An alliance of convenience between the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA, founded by Mumford, Clarence Stein et al) and Russell Sage Foundation (led by Thomas Adams, its Director of Plans and Surveys) crystalized. Perry joined this group in 1928. Their agreed-upon agenda/program called for “a rationally planned and zoned [central] city which segregated residential, commercial, and industrial uses, as well as social classes … would be anchored by a concentrated central business district, connected by expressways to concentric, low-density residential and industrial suburban rings ….ordered according to a comprehensive regional plan” (Meyers, 1998). The alliance developed a formal regional plan for the New York metro region, the ten volume Regional Plan of New York (RPNY and its Environs) was published in a series from 1929, continuing, at generational intervals, into recent years (Scott, 1969, pp. 221-27).
Integral to the Regional Plan was the development of two suburbs: Radburn and Hackensack. RPNY acknowledged the inevitability of suburbanization, but attempted to structure decentralization to achieve a rational “order” of social and economic relationships between city and suburb. In these years, the Big City-based planning movement embraced purposes deeply economic development in nature. Segregating uses through zoning, industry and manufacturing, for example, meant determining the location of a Big City economic base. RPNY’s seeming consensus rested upon poorly defined concepts and conflicting purposes. Within it two visons (Mumford’s and Adams) of the new metropolitan order competed. The debate that ensued may well have been the more important debates on the future of economic development in the twentieth century. The differences were so serious they couldn’t be bridged and the two organizations parted ways in 1933. The heritage of this debate, and the failure to devise a bridge across its differences, left open the path to slum clearance, urban renewal, and unrestrained postwar suburbanization.
Fracturing of Progressive economic/community development
The issue that fractured this powerful duopoly was whether the central city remained hegemon in the metropolitan order. As explained earlier, Mumford rejected the Privatist central city—as a residence for workers and the middle class. It was not humane in large measure because “congestion” rendered a satisfying and empowering human existence impossible. He wanted the new metro system to be built around his version of garden city residential suburbs whose inhabitants went to work in the central city (where the manufacturing economic base was located) through a network of highways and other transportation modes that culminated in the commercial center, the CBD. Adams (Russell Sage), however, “sought to rationalize, reinterpret, and reinforce the cultural and economic hegemony of New York City as a regional and national center”. Adams’ general idea was to sustain the central city as “a regional city” surrounded by an interlocking set of small towns and cities that symbiotically enhanced the assets of the other. Mumford wanted “dismemberment of the metropolitan ‘city of the dead in favor of a web of small scale ‘satellite cities’; Adams, conversely, wanted to decentralize manufacturing/ industry to the suburbs and continue the Big City residential function—i.e. contain suburbanization—suburbs would be mini-Big Cities in his image (Meyers, 1998, pp. 292-306).
Adams wanted manufacturing in the suburbs so that it could (1) decentralize to allow for modernization, improved logistical access and productivity enhancements; manufacturing decentralization (2) relieved the Big City of the obligation of being the only location where manufacturing could be located. As some firms left for the suburbs, other firms could seize upon the abandoned land, modernize, install productivity enhancements, and upgrade logistical access. Partial decentralization of industry could allow for central city “congestion” to be reduced—allowing for both manufacturing growth and vastly improved Big City residential neighborhoods. Mumford and Adams supported Perry’s neighborhood principles; Adams wanted to reduce Big City congestion enough to permit their application in the Big City. Mumford believed that was impossible; the dinosaur city was already lost to residential uses and instead satellite suburbs (others would later call them “dormitory suburbs’) were the only alternative.
This debate, very much economic development in nature, was obscured by the Plan’s reliance on zoning as the tool that would segregate land uses and determine where the manufacturing economic base would be located. Less obvious, but even more critical, was the inadequacy of the definition of a key concept, “congestion”, which had become the buzz word of the day, but which, in fact, contained two different concepts of what constituted “congested”. One definition was largely social, i.e. people-based—and from it community development would proceed—and the other more orthodox economic development focused on removing barriers to private firms’ ability to adjust to changes in the firm’s profit cycle[xv].
Mumford’s, satellite suburbs used zoning to stop manufacturing and industry from locating in the suburb; Adams wanted suburban zoning to allow for manufacturing to relocate to the suburb—today’s mixed uses. The two plans for Radburn and Hackensack, reflect that distinction—the former was Mumford’s and the latter, Adams. Having battle over two competing visions of the modern metropolitan landscape, they never resolved these differences. Ironically, Mumford’s definition of congestion would support future central city public housing slum removal (which Mumford, in fact, opposed) and Adams’s definition eventually was included in “blight”, the basis for future urban” renewal.
RPNY Continues on Separate Paths
RPAA/Mumford fell back on his residentially zoned “garden city” and designed suburbs to reflect its principles. They formed a financing corporation, the City Housing Corporation which between 1924 and 1928 constructed two actual suburban garden cities. The first, Sunnyside New York (1924) was located on a 70acre tract within Queen (still largely undeveloped at this point). Sunnyside was intended to emphasize affordable, working class housing, but design and financing costs worked the other way. When completed it was probably as, or more, expensive than conventional subdivisions. John Nolen, a former City Beautiful planner, constructed a similar garden city suburb, Mariemont, near Cincinnati cleverly called “A New Town Built to Produce Local Happiness”, a motto that never quite caught on, but was intended to house workers away from the depressing environments of factories. It suffered the same fate as Sunnyside and would up housing middle class (Abbott, 1987, p. 41).
The more significant 1928 development at Radburn, New Jersey was intended to be a “town for the motor age”, but its timing was terrible. It got caught up with the 1929 stock market collapse and the Depression. The City Housing Corporation went bankrupt; construction terminated, only later being resumed to house conventional middle class residents. The net result was that Radburn received unwanted credit for pioneering the ‘dormitory suburb”—i.e. today’s alleged antecedent of sprawl with its pedestrian-segregated road system and its infamous “townless highway”, an early example of the Parkway. Neither Sunnyside nor Radburn were able to achieve Mumford’s humane metropolis for the working class (Glabb & Brown, 1983, pp. 295-6).
Mumford’s problem was that the “dinosaur city” was much beloved, and evidence for the fourth migration was sketchy until the 1940 census. Also Mumford did not foresee the inevitable counter-response of Big City political and business leadership to “save” their city. Given the embedded power of Big Cities, and the weakness of hinterland suburbia in these years, the Big City was practically guaranteed favored treatment during 1920’s: “much was revealed in the 1930’s, when in the wake of the Great Depression, During the 1930’s through the 1960’s, New York City, dominated by Robert Moses who essentially did what he did, as opposed to following principles of any plan. But, the City survived it all, or vice versa.
An uneasy alliance of architects, social workers, housing reformers, labor unions and construction companies launched a campaign to persuade the federal government to provide funds for slum clearance and low income housing. Their spokesmen argued that … public authority could provide decent housing at reasonable rents for low income tenants”. (Fogelson, 2001, p. 338)
As to Adams, he had achieved his immediate objective with the publishing of the 1929 Plan. His Hackensack suburb was never developed. The zoning plan included in RPNY was adopted, and in later years, because it reduced the amount of land earmarked for industry (to allow for manufacturing decentralization), Adams has been blamed for NYC’s later job loss and industry migration. RPNY has been attacked as having facilitated sprawl. In that both positions in their particular way permitted decentralization, they have been frequently construed as anti-urban, i.e. anti-Big City hegemony.
Wrapping Up CD in the Twenties: CD as a Movement
By this point it is apparent to me that CD was an “umbrella for ‘movements’”. Hovering underneath the CD umbrella were suburbs advocates, neighborhood level reforms, housing reformers, socialists, and social workers and even Privatist faith-based and corporate charity ‘do-gooders’—some of which competed for the membership and the affections of a growing union movement. The term ‘movement’ as used in this history implies a certain level of politicization, even partisanship that influenced how the wings sought to obtain their goals and pursue their initiatives. There was a pronounced tendency to use government, seek alliances with politicians, and, for the lack of a better word, proselytize or advocate on the behalf of a neighborhood, a community or a sub-group, usually a class-based sub-group in these years. Social change of some sort was a visible component of their strategies—if not ultimate goal. Community development at the municipal level was absolutely political in nature, socialist parties and social reform mayors.
This dramatically differentiated community developers from traditional or mainstream economic development. ED tended to avoid politics like the plague. Focusing on infrastructure, companies and the jurisdictional economic base, its adherents typically set apart their political tendencies and worked with whoever to accomplish their purposes. Chambers required their anti-machine members to form civic clubs to secure political victory. They formed nonpartisan municipal research bureaus to work with whoever occupied power in municipal government. Structural reformers sought nonpartisan elections and city managers to take politics out of policy and policy implementation. Infrastructure referendums were not inherently political, and chambers could work out some accommodations with machines. Purely Privatist ED was highly individualist, and while not adverse to influencing or even controlling government so to better accomplish their goals, they typically kept their distance, dealing with intermediaries, HEDOs, and political proxies.
Community Development Turns a Page
The Depression nailed community developers as it did everybody else. A variety of mostly negative factors took the wind out of the settlement and neighborhood wings. While the hitherto dominant CD wings lost momentum, however, an entirely new approach pioneered around the University of Chicago and its adjacent neighborhoods. This new approach, community mobilization (”organizing”) turned out to be a durable and important new wing for community development.
Four factors generated headwinds for CD: (1) maturation (professionalization) of the settlement and community center wings created a CD schism. (2) The emergence of unions captured the loyalty of CD’s native clientele. (3) Federal and state welfare/workforce/employment programs cream-skimmed hot button issue-areas away from CD. 4) The character of neighborhood succession fundamentally shifted—with ethnics inclined, if possible, to periphery movement, and new residents introduced en masse a racial dynamic into the neighborhood-based CD wings—a Second Ghetto was in process. The 800lb gorilla, however, was that another wing, the housers, uniting with planners and marginalized neighborhood community developers, with a certain measure of access into municipal/federal policy-making, formed a coalition that assumed de facto leadership of the approach (see Chapter 11). Housers and their slum removal, new town suburbs, and public housing initiatives took over the spotlight—for almost two generations. If it did not involve housing and slums in some way, it was pushed off to CD’s margins.
Settlement and community center movements had matured. Volunteer settlement workers, replaced by professional social workers operating out of larger bureaucracies, were increasingly viewed by other community developers as “agents of social control”—which was not meant as a compliment. This CD schism helped push social workers into forming their own profession. Social work (case management) professionals worked directly with individuals, separating themselves professionally from the larger and more political ends of CD that pursued larger social goals. Those remaining in non-housing community development, and new adherents attracted to it (this evolution played out over a generation) were concerned with “collections of people”, groups and classes adversely affected by the economy and society. Rather than assist people on a one-by-one basis, CD increasingly focused on two types of “collections of similar people”: (1) those living in a particular place—a low income, immigrant or racial majority neighborhood, or (2) groups with a shared needs in housing, family assistance, or juvenile delinquency, for example. Community development remained focused on people and neighborhoods—but endeavored to empower groups of individuals through programs, social reform and systemic change.
Moving into these new foci CD competed with labor unions and traditional ethnic institutions for the attention of their clientele.
The Chicago Area Project
One of the more obvious weakness of neighborhood-based community development thus far was its dependence on either Progressive volunteers or “experts/professionals” and the gap between them and neighborhood residents. External “do-gooders” could not compete with indigenous organizations like the Catholic Church, the parochial school (the Bells of St Mary syndrome), the ward boss, and newly rising unions. “By far the most troublesome and controversial concept in the history of community-based reform [was community] participation”. The Chicago Area Project (CAP) broke with CD tradition and employed workers from troubled neighborhoods “as a direct challenge to social work professionals, and outside expertise.” (O’Connor, 1999, p. 87).
CAP was the brainchild of Clifford Shaw (Illinois Institute of Juvenile Research) and an old friend, Ernest Burgess (Chicago School of Sociology). At the start (1934), it was an experiment to design a program to prevent juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquency “was receiving growing attention, both in its own right and as a proxy for a broad array of social problems … linked to the debilitating effects of poverty and social marginality” (Halpern, 1995, p. 50). Its chief innovation was it used neighborhood residents as staff and then as project leaders. In addition, instead of competing with local institutions, CAP enlisted their support.
The first of these project/experiments was Chicago’s Southside Russell Square neighborhood. Its direction was provided mostly by a board of affluent residents, a ton of resident volunteers as staff and committee members, and was financed locally—some provided by the local priest who also opened a Boys Club in the church basement. Its chief programmatic tool was “curbside counseling” by former delinquents (actual ex-cons) who had straightened up. It also paid attention to small-scale physical improvements such as using trashcans rather than dumping in streets and backyards, and shrubbery. Despite being one of the worst of juvenile crime-ridden neighborhood in Chicago, the project was a success (it continues to this day)—two other neighborhood projects followed (1938). One of these was the Back of the Yards neighborhood, next to the stockyards and Sinclair’s “The Jungle” slaughterhouses, one of Chicago’s worst. Selected to staff the initiative was a University of Chicago graduate student and CAP “curbside counselor, Saul Alinsky.
Back of the Yards—Reveille for Radicals
Back of the Yards was an old, stable, white, 95% European Catholic working stiff Slavs four square mile area in which 95,000 lived. Attractive to union organizers (CIO) who wanted to unionize its worker residents, Alinsky moved in, watched—and learned from them how to involve the community. In early 1939, he organized the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council and filled it with residents. Allying with Joseph Meegan, the resident director of the neighborhood recreation program, they went door to door to recruit his board and allies. His first major victory brought a local parish priest on board—and the local Catholic bureaucracy joined as well. Although the Church distrusted, hated actually, the “Communist union organizers” Alinsky included both in his organization. From 1939 to the end of the World War, Alinsky engaged in project after project, of all types and descriptions—the key denominator being the Council and residents selected, financed and implemented them. They delivered services, exacted concessions from the City, the Machine, from business, and conducted the only known “shit in” at the Chicago airport (Fisher, 1994, pp. 51-65).
Alinsky/Meegan developed five rules or principles:
(1) Professional organizer is the catalyst for social change.
(2) Primary task is to build a democratic community-based organization open to all members of the community, especially tradition community leaders and institutions.
(3) Goal is to win power because the neighborhood organization is the counter to a neighborhood composed of “the powerless and the unorganized”.
(4) Any tactics necessary should be used—the end justifies the means—and organizations acquire power by winning victories; and
(5) Organization must be pragmatic, flexible, and non-ideological so that it can support any project the neighborhood council pursues (Fisher, 1994, pp. 53-4).
Alinsky had greater ambitions and eventually left to promote community organizing nationwide. He left Meegan (and priests) in charge. Meegan, a sort of godfather and ward boss, served as executive director for nearly fifty years, retiring in 1982. Said and done, Meegan and his successors grew BYNC into a prototype neighborhood-based organization. BYNC persisted through neighborhood succession (Hispanic, mostly) and continues to this day. It is a mature NBO because as Fisher observed “there is a complementary relationship between social movements and community organizing. Local organizing oriented to social change can exist without a movement, but it will not thrive for very long. When a movement develops, however, community organizations often ride the wave of mass support” (Fisher, 1994, pp. 53-4).
Alinsky did not become the Che Guevara of American community development, however. Alinsky’s organic, rooted in neighborhood concerns, organizing was too parochial—often relabeled as “populist”—a bad word in CD land. Alinsky’s approach offered “very little critique of the economic system [that] … perpetuates poverty in the neighborhood …. Alinsky ultimately possessed a strong faith in liberal capitalism ….[and] Alinsky organizing does not question the economic foundation of the existing order or seek to replace the political system that maintains that order; his approach overlooks the possibility that capitalism is not set up to serve the poor and working class and that it is ultimately undemocratic”. (Fisher, 1994, p. 64)
His book, possibly the most read book in community development, had its greatest impact in the aftermath of the Great Society. While he may not have “founded” community organizing, nor was he the first, he was the most visible. What he did do was devise the organizational platform, an EDO for social change, social reform and neighborhood development that would arguably become the cutting edge of modern community development—the community development corporation (CDC).
A community-wide reform organization, an umbrella organization that would provide a forum for mobilizing all the discrete constituencies of the community around common priority problems, identified through democratic processes of discussion, deliberation and voting (Halpern, 1995, p. 54).
The Second Ghetto: a Metaphor for “Turning the Page”
When Arnold R. Hirsch published “Making the Second Ghetto” (Hirsch, 1998) in 1983, he summarized much of the thought that community development had developed to that point, but he also unleashed a torrent of new studies, themes, and concepts that channeled community development thought for several decades. “Making” in that respect served as a platform, a foundation most neighborhood CD approaches incorporated. Hirsch’s Second Ghetto includes the period under discussion in this chapter, but also extends to 1960. The pattern Hirsch outlines, based exclusively on Chicago, has been found to apply in a broad sense, but individual cities (Mohl’s Miami for example) and regional differences—not to mention differences in Hispanic settlement of urban areas—suggest dynamics uncovered by Hirsch are more interesting than the specifics of Chicago—the most segregated city in America in this period.
The book describes many “moving parts” that produced the Second Ghetto. Over the years, the tendency has been to simplify them into the role federal, state and local governments played in Chicago’s postwar segregation. My simplistic take on Hirsch is that he describes how 1930-1960 Chicago reacted to the Great Migration. The discussion centers solely on black migration. The First Ghetto, arguably (it has been differently interpreted) is that area in which African-Americans initially resided (pre-1930 or so). Sheer numbers of migrants forced expansion from the First Ghetto into adjoining white neighborhoods, creating the Second Ghetto. The distinction between the two ghettos seems to be time. The resulting succession of neighborhoods was vastly more complex (and insidious) that the old Chicago School literature would suggest. There were many bad guys; the private sector (downtown elites and real estate especially), and willing governmental dupes were the worst. White ethnics and University of Chicago “liberal” elites did not fare well. It seems whoever was in authority, wealthy, or majority population created the Second Ghetto. The core focus of “Making” was how public policy and individual/corporate actions negatively affected African-Americans and created the Second Ghetto.
Hindsight suggests, at its best, Hirsch depicts a story as it unfolded in an era that has moved on. Written almost a generation after the Great Society, one can see how (anti) urban renewal, its effects and lessons, had become a cornerstone for community development. Decentralization, deindustrialization, suburbanization of poverty, inequality, and the amazing durability of “the Ghetto” despite a rather transformative redirection of redistributive public policy, strongly argue that Hirsch’s Second Ghetto was a “snapshot”, a frozen frame, a single chapter of a story that still is unfolding. The image of racial change and neighborhood succession Hirsch drew, however, served as a policy paradigm of what happen over the next very troubled decades. It has since been “replaced” by works such as Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis (Sugrue, 2005). Starkly said, and certain to generate controversy, Hirsch’s “Making” serves as metaphor for the evolution of community development during and after the New Deal—especially after World War II.
During those years, while an old-style Progressivist era community development withered, without fanfare or conscious planning a new-style community development slowly, almost imperceptibly emerged, built around the dynamics associated with the Second Ghetto. Centering about Blacks, ghettos, inequality, racism, an intense rejection of capitalism and corporate elites, and a distrust of governments that too often served the interests of those private elites, a new-style community development replaced the old-style “preserve the capitalist system, Americanization” of Progressive era Protestant elites. In the process the Second Ghetto paradigm fostered a sort of CD “spatial fix” which transformed suburbs into the enemy of Blacks and central cities–which unless confronted would result in the enforced segregation of Blacks and poor into permanent ghettos. A larger CD “world view” developed. Although this reformulation and generational shift will extend for the next two decades, from this point on I will distinguish between old-style and new-style community development. There was no magic moment that definitively marked this shift and policy transformation, but, arguably, its first visible trace becomes evident in the making of Great Society policy, starting in the middle 1950’s.
Innovation in Community Development
“Men may find God in Nature, but when they look at cities, they are viewing themselves”
Paul Ylvisaker, Life Magazine
While JFK, Senator Douglas, and Arthur Goldberg were trail-blazing a federal path in the direction of Keynesian-economics and people-focused CD, the Ford Foundation and “urban guerillas” innovated disruptive new programs that consciously intended to create an alternate community development path—a paradigm as potentially revolutionary as anything done previously. A “nexus of change” formed between the Policy World and Kennedy political appointees/bureaucrats. By November 1963 that group developed the nucleus/DNA of key concepts that later were encapsulated into the 1964 War on Poverty—the opening economic development salvo of the Great Society. That internal “policy nexus” begins with the Ford Foundation programmatic initiatives which we describe below
Disruption would be guaranteed by convincing the powerful federal government to not only fund the new programs, but apply its political muscle to lure/compel sub-state actors to follow them into this brave new world. Left behind would be the CD housers and neighborhood physical developers who were then engaged in slum clearance, and neighborhood redevelopment around housing. A new dawn in the Age of Community Development was on its “threshold of a dream”.
Community Development’s core concept is that it is people, not business-focused. The new set of Ford Foundation/federal government CD initiatives proved to be extremely disruptive to old-style housing/neighborhood CD, but even more so to the Privatist, state and local oriented mainstream ED. Crossing over several “fault lines” they fostered heavy-duty politicization within our policy area–more than northern hegemony and southern “piracy” were doing. The new CD’s linkage with the federal government was the key to its dramatic entry into our policy area—and the chief ingredient that led to inevitable politicization. The involvement of the federal government in a state and sub-state policy spheres, without the legitimizing threat/reality of war or depression, into a policy area heretofore locally dominant was guaranteed to stir someone’s juices. That it was done with good intentions will only compound the schism.
People-based community development is intended meaningful economic opportunity for all who live within its jurisdictional boundaries. But not all need help equally and CD’s focus has always been on those who most need help the most. In these years (1950’s and 1960’s) despite the overwhelming exuberance of the American economy, culture, military and political power, difficult economic realities—race, unemployment, automation, and poverty will be perceived as structural barriers that inhibit or preclude the disadvantage from seizing economic, political and social opportunity. Breaking through these structural barriers was a role for the federal government—and that has remained a mainstay relationship for a redefined community development.
Woodlawn, Gray Areas, and Mobilization for Youth (MFY)
From the mid-1950’s the Ford Foundation started a series of experimental programs in urban areas across the nation. One of these was the Gray Areas Program, designed and advocated by 33 year old (1955) Paul Ylvisaker. Much has been written about the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas[xvi]. Gray Areas (and Mobilization for Youth) is directly linked to the War on Poverty and much of the Great Society— “Community Action” evolved from both.
Ylvisaker, a Harvard Ph.D., advisor to Philadelphia Mayor Joseph Clark, turned Ivy League faculty, was recruited to the Foundation in 1955 and subsequently developed experimental programs centered about physical urban reforms, such as housing and urban renewal as counters to the metropolitan crisis of the era. By 1960, Ylvisaker, perceiving disruption caused by physical urban redevelopment/housing/slum clearance, had “drifted” into “people problems”, away from brick and mortar and urban governance. Integration of human services and a concern with racial change and race relations were central programmatic concepts (O’Connor, 1966, pp. 600-6).
Shortly before Gray Areas, and completely independent of it, was a shadow movement in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago. Woodlawn was a reaction against the soon-to-be-old style housing/slum removal neighborhood CD. Using tactics and a community organizing CD strategy developed by Saul Alinsky it would serve as model for other neighborhoods and social activists, and a metaphor for us. Drawing from its own roots, no small part of which was resistance to slum removal to create public housing, another CD alternative path was becoming cohesive. That path would insert itself into the political and administrative chaos/vacuum created by the intrusion of the Great Society into local and Big City policy systems. Woodlawn-style community organizing was not an intended feature of Great Society community action, but the two became fused (or confused) for a period of time—and that was all it took. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. First the basics.
Woodlawn
Up until 1948, Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood was white, middle-class, ethnic, originally populated by workers from the 1993 Chicago Exposition. Home for many University of Chicago professors, the neighborhood of nearly 73,000 residents underwent dramatic racial change during the 1950’s. The play “Raisin in the Sun” tells the story of the neighborhood’s first black family. Fearing blight’s impact from nearby Hyde Park neighborhood (Hirsch’s Second Ghetto then in the process of slum removal and neighborhood transition), the University of Chicago urged preemptive housing/slum removal in Woodlawn that triggered its own intense racial transition and widespread arson. An alliance of Black pastors (Arthur Brazier) operating within Alinsky’s umbrella Industrial Areas Foundation (led by his successor (Nicolas von Hoffman—Alexander, cited in this history, is his son) formed their own group (TWO) to resist urban renewal and integrate African-Americans into the Woodlawn neighborhood. In 1960, adopting Alinsky’s community organizing principles TWO worked with von Hoffman in developing a semi-political/economic development strategy that fell clearly into the community mobilization wing of Community Development.
TWO organized actions against local businesses that gouged consumers, attacked overcrowding in neighborhood schools, organized rent strikes—and aggressively fought the University of Chicago’s urban renewal plan—TWO insisted low-income housing be first built on vacant land before any active units were torn down. TWO eventually gained a seat on the Planning Board and stopped further slum removal. While it may have aggressively contested the development of the Second Ghetto, TWO was unable to stop racial transition. Counter-intuitively perhaps, during the 1960’s, Woodlawn lost over one-third its resident population (this is a characteristic of the Second Ghetto). Older neighborhood institutions moved, many to the suburbs. The neighborhood became solidly Black.
Gray Areas
Borrowing from Raymond Vernon’s “gray belt” which Ylvisaker defined as potential slums pressured by structural shifts in the economy and residential markets—areas that Ylvisaker believed concentrated the disruption induced by physical redevelopment and racial change. Gray areas were neighborhoods where programs should be introduced to “citify our in-migrant populations”. Recognizing pathologies of what Hirsch later called the Second Ghetto, Ylvisaker asserted 1960 gray area neighborhoods could no longer perform the socializing function they had for previous generations of immigrants. For him gray areas were “a wretched form that has lost the saving grace of a noble function [assimilation] … their escape into better jobs and neighborhoods is slowed by the depressed conditions they live in or by the color they were born with … The challenge to the cities was to revitalize the gray areas and ‘perfect the process’ of assimilating and making ‘first class citizens’ of the in-migrants … in one generation” (O’Connor, 1966, p. 606).
Developing several programs, first in housing and then a “Great Cities School Improvement Program” Ford Foundation made grants to several Big Cities to establish “citifying” pilot programs focused on culturally-deprived/disadvantaged in-migrants. These programs attempted to positively impact families, home life, and to coordinate social services these individuals might require. Each grant was constantly evaluated, training workshops were provided, and distinguished experts brought in to assess findings and effectiveness of the grant. After a year or so, Ylvisaker came to the conclusion that if these people-changing programs were to have any effect, social services, schools, and government agencies had to be linked in a common effort that overcame their “guild-ism” (siloization).
Ylvisaker injected this new theme into Gray Areas–not to one policy area, say juvenile delinquency, but to simultaneously involve a slew of policy areas that collectively prevented individual mobility/change—not to “target one institution, but the whole tangled network of agencies responsible for housing, social services, and employment for the poor”. Thus enlarged Gray Areas offered a diversified, but managed, package of services sufficient to the task of personal, family and social change. That is what community developers call “comprehensiveness.” It has evolved into a defining characteristic of the foundation approach to community development.
To receive follow-up grants cities, their mayors, and bureaucracies, had, not only to provide a match, but plan a coordinating process that could innovate as well as implement focused programming. Five cities (Boston—headed by Ed Logue a former Ylvisaker staff member, Oakland, New Haven, Philadelphia and D.C.). Each of these cities devised their own programmatic approach to Gray Areas targets. In each demonstration project, Gray Areas established a community organization to coordinate the programs and link community’s institutions. In that Gray Areas Programs contemplated a systematic “revamping of neighborhood–a reshaping of the entire social and human system”, it is not surprising many agencies and institutions resisted. The “quality and effectiveness of local leadership was also a limitation” (Mossberger, 2010, pp. 63-5). In any case, through coordination of neighborhood bureaucratic initiatives, the cycle of poverty could be broken.
At this point (1963), Gray Areas/Ford Foundation became more complicated and complex. Municipal grantees intermingled Gray Areas’ implementation with grants from U.S. DOL’s Office of Manpower and Training. The overlap was most pronounced with juvenile delinquency grants, one of which being New York City’s Mobilization for Youth (MFY). That offered an opportunity to Ylvisaker and Ford to join efforts with the Kennedy Administration—in this case with the Administration’s evolving, embryonic anti-poverty community action approach being forged in task forces within DOL. There was, however, a shift in approach that Ylvisaker was uncertain of—Gray Areas focused on urban bureaucracies and DOL’s approach focused on people rehabilitation. In DOL’s approach, urban service bureaucracies were to be “coordinated”, not by Ylvisaker’s coordinating agency, but through something called “community action”. Accordingly, it is now helpful to switch to the Mobilization for Youth program so to ground the reader in that approach.
Mobilization for Youth (MFY)
Unlike Gray Areas, MFY was a bottoms-up policy process. It resulted from a grant application developed within the NYC’s Henry Street Settlement House (Helen Hall, its Director), the coordinator for six other neighborhood settlement houses, submitted to the National Institute on Mental Health. The proposal advocated a program to counter juvenile delinquency in these neighborhoods, and was returned to Henry Street for further study and refinement. Two Columbia University professors (Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward) developed a revised application based on their newly-articulated model of the causes of juvenile delinquency (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960).
They asserted a “lack of conventional opportunity alienated inner-city youth from societal norms and pushed them to adopt the norms [often illegal, sometimes violent] of the street and the gang”– “frustrations caused by unequal opportunity structures [found] in poor communities“. At root was gang member’s exclusion from legitimate upward assimilative paths such as education, part-time jobs, and school extra-curricular activities. Henry Street’s original proposal was recast into the model, resubmitted, and eventually approved. The $12 million dollar program commenced in 1961 (Halpern, 1995, pp. 101-2). Most of MFY’s funds and programs went into conventional services, pre/after school programs, youth employment, and some training.
More sophisticated than Ylvisaker’s formulations, MFY was compatible with the Gray Area human service framework, but it ventured into new ground. Instead of coordinating various social and government bureaucracies through a “neighborhood coordinating entity” as did Gray Areas, MFY adopted a more bottoms-up approach that meaningfully involved residents and clients in problem identification and resolution. Adults and parents, for example, were part of the process to address issues with schools. These adults in turn were expected to be more involved with their children, potential candidates for juvenile delinquency (Brager & Purcell, 1967). Bureaucracies, being bureaucracies filled with experts, often had a hard time with this involvement, as did the residents. During program implementation, relationships went “south”, MFY staff got caught in the middle, and tended to support residents (Halpern, 1995, pp. 102-4). Obliquely, the clash of bureaucratic and resident cultures meshed poorly with the Gray Areas approach—even though by this point the Ford Foundation was involved with MFY.
It is at this point (1963) that MFY and Gray Areas “hooked up”—but the arena was not the Ford Foundation, but rather the President’s Commission on Juvenile Delinquency, the Department of Labor, the Bureau of the Budget and a Presidential task force. What had happened is that from separate departments, two key Ford Foundation program directors lobbied federal officials to carry their ideas, and the programs further. The review and decision was one function of the Task Force. This is the critical juncture that took these pioneering, yet rudimentary initiatives, and recast them into “community action” and eventually, the War on Poverty. This policy formulation approach, vastly different from that followed by a more open, legislatively-focused, and decentralized public housing, slum clearance, and urban renewal policy process, hints that foundation-led community development may have alternative policy formulation processes that set it apart from both mainstream economic development, and other wings of community development. That it did in 1963, is evident in the next section.
Looking Backward Through the Looking Glass: Experts and Bureaucratic Bowels
The Task Force deliberations overlapped with a changing ED policy environment reacting against municipal-led urban renewal, public housing, Interstate highway construction, and slum removal/housing demolition, from multiple projects. Felt disproportionately in neighborhoods and ghettos, resulting in destruction of local business, loss of housing units, accelerated neighborhood transition and succession, protests, sit-ins, rent strikes, conflict, even violence, often within schools, were normal events after the early 1950’s. Crime and juvenile delinquency were high visibility policy areas. Active resistance at public meetings against specific urban renewal-highway projects, while not especially impactful, was also commonplace. Jane Jacobs had published in 1961. The so-called melting pot was boiling over and the Second Ghetto in steroidal development while the below policy initiatives were being formulated.
Early 1961, Ford Foundation officials, including Ylvisaker and MFY’s director, David Hunter, approached the new Kennedy administration. David Hackett, an RFK boyhood friend, campaign official and newly-assigned special assistant to the Attorney General[xvii], After being briefed, principally it seems on Gray Areas approach, the President in May 1961 established the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime (PCJD), chaired by the Attorney General, and composed of secretaries of HEW, Labor, and indirectly Budget Bureau’s Kermit Gordon. Hackett was the staff and he recruited Lloyd Ohlin, Sanford Kravitz (a prominent social worker and soon to be Chief of Research and Program Development of OEO’s Community Action Program), and Richard Boone from the Ford Foundation. The staff, referring to themselves as urban guerillas (Vietnam was in vogue), formulated programs, cobbled together funds, and working with Ford (and others) set up programs in selected communities to test further the ideas developing in Gray Areas and MFY (Moynihan, 1969, pp. 63-7).
The delinquency programme operated, then through an unstable alliance of Robert Kennedy’s personal authority with internal department rivalries, and the mutual understanding of a small group of idealistic innovators within the bureaucracy … [it] stressed a new coalition of community leadership … intellectual coherence … a proven theory of social rehabilitation. (Marris & Rein, 1967, p. 135)
If Moynihan (a participant) is correct, PCJD proved to be the “blast furnace” that forged community action and the War on Poverty. Over the next two years, PCJD experimented with pilot programs, joined in closely with Ford Foundation MFY and Gray Areas, and eventually came to several conclusions: (1) the federal government with local governments and private foundations should start programs to attack the problems of youth; (2) bureaucratic siloization and uncoordinated services required new methods and structures if these problems were to be successfully countered and a critical mass of initiatives assembled sufficient to provide individual and neighborhood change; (3) the root cause of these problems was “poverty”, and success required “concentrated resources on attacks on poverty” on a wide variety of policy areas”.
Municipalities, schools, and local nonprofit bureaucracies required having their feet held to the fire of consistent, client-centered program administration—and that was best accomplished by embracing citizens and residents themselves in the process of change. “They wished the poor to be involved in the program, but in the interests of therapy as much as anything else … they wanted those who had the power to do something about the suffering and the poverty”. It was as simple and decent as that” (Moynihan, 1969, p. 70). This was called “community action”. Gray Areas “comprehensiveness” was incorporated into this approach as necessary to provide the scale and power to break the cycle of poverty. Poverty being the root cause, any attack on its symptoms ought to also attack poverty itself.
At this critical juncture, the Civil Rights Movement “turned north”. The August 1963 March on Washington (“I have a dream”) for Jobs and Freedom; economic demands were prominent elements in its agenda. Later active in Chicago and other northern cities, organizations such as the NAACP, CORE, and National Urban League intensified pressure on northern integration efforts and urged hiring of minorities by private companies. The Civil Rights Movement expanded into economic development. In this environment, the policy approach drafted within PCJD appeared in a Council of Economic Advisors staff report, “Program for a Concerted Assault on Poverty” on October 29th, 1963. The next day CEA’s Chair, Walter Heller wrote the cabinet to submit their proposals so they “might be woven into a basic attack on poverty and waste of human resources as part of the 1964 legislative program” (Moynihan, 1969, p. 79).
A month later Hackett’s PCJD proposal was accepted by the Bureau of the Budget—but by then President John Kennedy had assassinated in Dallas.
The Great Society
Upon entering office, LBJ crafted his domestic program. Calling it the Great Society, it was launched in his January 1964 state of the union address. Civil rights were his first priority. In July 1964 Congress approved the Civil Rights Act. In July, LBJ signed the Urban Mass Transportation Act. LBJ’s second priority was his ‘war on poverty” also alluded to in the State of the Union address. In August, 1964 he signed the Equal Opportunity Act into law—“Today for the first time in history of the human race a great nation is able and willing to make a commitment to eradicating poverty among its people”. Less than eight months had elapsed since Kennedy’s death.
War on Poverty
LBJ’s War on Poverty smashed through municipal policy systems like a steamroller. The Equal Opportunity Act was only the first legislation in the War on Poverty. In short order, the 1964 Food Stamp Act, the 1965 Social Security Act (creating Medicare and Medicaid) and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act In no time, it engaging low-income residents in policy change through “community action” implemented and financed by the War’s new CDO, the community action agency (CAA). Within eighteen months nearly 1,000 were established in each decent-sized municipality in the nation. The CAA led the charge for neighborhood-driven policy implementation. Empowered with a host of human, community service and education programs CAA’s potential program arsenal affected nearly every significant neighborhood and city-level institution or agency. CAA itself did not implement these programs; it funded other CDOs and agencies with pass-through federal monies.
Mostly, CAA coordinated local Head Start, VISTA, Upward Bound, community health centers, family planning, and legal aid. The Job Corps and Neighborhood Youth programs were run out DOL and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act out of HEW. In many ways, the CAA story was less these programs and their implementation, than their role in the “community action” empowerment objective. The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO, headed by Sargent Shriver) required CAA’s to create boards of directors (and staff) with the” maximum feasible participation” of neighborhood residents. While the origins of the phrase “maximum feasible participation” (MFP) are still unclear, they wound up in the War on Poverty legislation. The remaking of the community-neighborhood-culture of poverty was not to be engineered from above by bureaucratic rule-making, but from below, by the people in the community. MFP meant action by the community, not for the community. The problems of the community could best be resolved by those within the community who would be empowered to control the institutions of the neighborhood–and the programs financed by the War on Poverty.
MFP meant CAAs “would provide a structure for poor communities to mobilize their own resources on behalf of their residents, and a platform for giving poor people more of a voice in the bureaucratic institutions that shaped their lives” (Halpern, 1995, p. 108)
Whatever else it was supposed to do, MFP unleashed a three year civil war within most CAA’s. Incessant power struggles followed, over who was, or was not, to be on the board, between City Hall and the Board, between the CAA/Board and its constituent institutions (school principals, for example). Some suggested it was better to watch sausage being made than to sit in a board meeting. Schools and City Hall bureaucracies fared the worst. “It became clear that a personal history of hardship and exploitation did not incline a person to be community-minded … Community residents on the board did not necessarily represent the most disenfranchised segments … but rather a narrow set of interests, notably that of families, friends and allies” (Halpern, 1995, p. 110). Moynihan compares CAA internal policy-making to the old machines—concerned with nepotism, services and patronage (Moynihan, 1969). Towards the end of 1966, Congress, prodded by mayors, wanted to rein in CAP, establish order and a measure of accountability. LBJ, after two years of complaints backtracked.
In hindsight OEO set up a direct funding/program link from the federal government to cities and community organizations–bypassing states and city halls. It was the prototype of Johnson’s creative federalism. Creative federalism was a radical departure from FDR’s cooperative federalism. Cooperative federalism, described as “marble cake” federalism, shared federal powers and program implementation with states; there was no direct federal-local grants. Social Security, employment/unemployment assistance, secondary education were excellent examples of cooperative federalism. Johnson’s Creative Federalism, however, ran through categorical grants that bypassed state government and went to selected municipal or community-based recipients (often as not political opponents of mayors and governors). During Johnson’s five years more than 200 new categorical grants were created (Bowman & Kearney, 1999, p. 42). This was the famous “picket fence” (silos) that permitted the federal government to directly fund an eligible recipient, requiring the eligible recipient to follow federal regulations and policy priorities. These grants, often very specific in scope, weakened state and local government and empowered their recipient. Creative federalism lasted until Nixon’s 1974 block grants, which flowed through states, returned to business as usual.
War on Poverty and SBA
The War on Poverty left a lasting impression on SBA. Title IV of the Equal Opportunity Act directed SBA to both “advance the Negro in the business world” and to expand its programs (Bean, 2001, p. 47). Title IV funds, linked to community action programs, and provided resources for lending (Equal Opportunity Loans) to minority business. Title IV also mandated establishing Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) to recruit EOL applicants and provide management assistance. The funds, however, were largely diverted to natural disasters loans (Alaskan earthquake) and satisfy high demand for traditional SBA loans. Only $10 million was spent on EOL. SBA’s “banker culture” allegedly inhibited SBA involvement in OEO and community action. Still, by the end of 1965, SBA had established a SBDC in each of the thirty-five community action-designed cities (Bean, 2001, p. 49).
The 1965 Watts riots intensified SBA’s involvement in the War on Poverty. SBA Director Eugene Foley became the first head of the newly formed EDA (see below). He attempted to merge SBA and EDA, but Congressional opposition ended that idea. Foley (in 1964) recruited volunteer retired business executives and formed them into experimental “chapters” in New England. These chapters offered counseling, mentoring and expertise to small business. The innovation was successful, and he expanded it nation-wide so by 1967 there were 3500 SCORE volunteer and institutionalized within SBA. In 2013, there were 348 SCORE chapters and 13,000 counselors.
After Foley’s departure and an interregnum, the new SBA Director Bernard Boutin conducted a serious reorganized/revitalized SBA’s processes. In particular, he revamped SBIC which had imploded in the 1962 stock market crash. An internal investigation uncovered several scandals, including an organized crime money-laundering scheme. Boutin also secured Congressional legislation permitting SBICs to expand capacity and size—and, to acquire independent expertise for its program implementation. He increased the program’s definition of “small” to include AMC with 30,000 employees. SBIC was “saved”, but its position was precarious and it suffered a roller coaster-like ride for the next decade. SBIC stagnated as private venture firms competed with SBICs.
Following Boutin another short-lived Director, Howard Samuels (1968), launched the Section 8(a) program for minority contractors. SBA had always been authorized to act as an intermediary (prime contracts) between federal departments and small business, but in 1967, a Defense Department innovator urged SBA to use that authority to “set aside” contracts for minority small business. In 1968 SBA accepted the idea and issued 8 prime contracts. The program has subsequently generated its fair share of controversy, but that has not stopped its long-term growth. By 1980 $1 billion in contracts had been issued, and by 1999, nearly $7 billion (Bean, 2001, pp. 143, Appendix B).
Housing Act of 1964
Greatly underappreciated War on Poverty legislation included the Housing Act of 1964, an act intended to “reform”, but preserve and expand urban renewal. By this time, Martin Anderson’s, the Federal Bulldozer had hit the bookshelves, describing in great detail deficiencies in the federal urban renewal program. Resident reaction, Jane Jacobs, Herbert Gans, and anti-Moses sentiment was also pushing back on urban renewal projects. The bloom was indeed off the urban renewal rose. Still, the Housing Act provided $750 million (as opposed to $375 million included in the 1964 Urban Mass Transit Act) for urban renewal. It did, however, shift the program away from large-scale blighted neighborhood slum removal to housing rehabilitation, and preservation, where feasible, of existing units. The act directed municipal planners to pay more attention to resident dislocation.
In its place a modified Baltimore Plan, centered on enforcement of health, sanitary and occupancy codes, was included in eligible costs. By 1967, cities would lose UR eligibility if comprehensive plans did not take into account social costs, and make available loans for resident rehabilitation. Yet, although all conceded that urban renewal disruption was made worse unless alternate public housing were first built, the Act reduced funding for public housing to 37,500 units (from 50,000). Interestingly, LBJ included a “new towns” initiative “with all public services … [and] industry … needed to provide jobs … housing … recreation facilities for moderate and low-income families”. This was intended to provide suburban alternatives to the central city ghetto. The section was noticed by Congressmen from suburban districts—and it was not approved.
The War on Poverty/CAP, however, had a serious effect on social service and planning municipal bureaucracies (Lipsky, 1980). Aside from making life generally miserable for public servants, community action and the rising tide of citizen activism challenged the prevailing physical economic development/planning paradigm. As early as Spring, 1965, Harvey Perloff in a milestone presentation “Common Goals and Linking of Physical and Social Planning” alerted professions to the new world, a world that included social and personal costs associated with programs and plans. There was a need to bring together social and physical planners in a new planning paradigm—the juncture of the two could result in new opportunities that anticipated much of the 1966 Model Cities legislation (Scott, 1969, pp. 606-10). From this point on, planners in particular, debated—and struggled—to reconcile its centrality in urban renewal, highways and suburban subdivision development. Over the following decades, a community development form of planning would evolve—and arguably evolve to become planning’s dominant paradigm (incorporating environmentalism and sustainability).
Whatever else it accomplished, the 1964 War on Poverty elevated the federal government into the dominant actor in Big City sub-state urban and economic development policy-making. Not exactly puppets, Big City mayors (and policy systems) in these years were dancing to music not of their own making. In protest many yanked on Washington’s policy strings and demanded to be heard. Also, the War on Poverty had Kennedy fingerprints (RFK’s) all over it, and LBJ, no later than the 1964 election, was moving in his own direction, with his own people. Post-War on Poverty legislative acts arguably constitute the second phase of the Great Society.
LBJ’s “other” Great Society Legislation
There were five major post-War on Poverty ED-related legislation: the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 (creating HUD), the 1965 Appalachian Regional Development Act, the Public Works and Economic Development Act of 1965 (creating EDA), the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966 (Model Cities), and The Housing Act of 1968. Taken in aggregate, these acts radically altered the sub-state economic development landscape, legitimized the fledgling Community Development redefinition, and was a critically important element in the next decade’s reshaping of Big City policy systems. They also exerted considerable impact on economic development professionalization through EDA’s sponsorship of a new professional association: the Council of Urban Economic Development.
These legislative acts (1) moderate (almost repudiated MFP, for example), but integrate War on Poverty with older mainstream federal economic development; (2) establish a federal home base for future federal Community Development leadership, (3) and (eventually) did the same for mainstream physical/ infrastructure/urban renewal and business assistance economic development. The last provided funding for a new set of public departments and agencies that over the next decade increasingly displaced chambers of commerce from their exalted position as lead agency in municipal economic development.
Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
In August 1965 LBJ signed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 which he described as the “single most important breakthrough in housing policy since the 1920’s”. Four weeks later, separate legislation created a new cabinet department of Housing and Urban Development into which were placed most of the housing agencies mentioned in this history. The legislation greatly expanded financing for most housing programs, and added new rent subsidy for elderly and disabled, provided housing rehabilitation grants to impoverished homeowners, veteran homeowner subsidies, initiated “Section 8”[xviii] housing, provided matching grants to localities to construct water/sewer facilities, community centers, and urban beautification programs in distressed neighborhoods.
Sections calling for more metropolitan planning, especially for water/sewer projects, and further encouragement for formation of metro-wide planning entities, such as Council of Governments, was also included. But even this early, suburban Congressional resistance to low-income housing (and the ill-fated LBJ “New Towns”) led to strong statutes and program innovation—but inadequate funding. Two years of additional funding for urban renewal (at $750 million annually) was also provided. A housing and research entity was also approved—leading in 1968 to the Urban Institute as a private nonprofit.
Appalachian Regional Development Act: the South and Great Society
The 1965 Tennessee Valley Authority Development District Act, the Appalachian Development Act (creating Appalachian Regional Commission and sub-state development districts) and OMB-Cir-A-80 (Aelred & Johnson, 2005, pp. 66-7) continued the Kennedy area-wide strategy. HUD and EDA were also included into this twelve state regional planning and development initiative. For some southerners, the aggregation of these Great Society initiatives represented a first-class economic development assault (Schulman, 1994, p. 186). Reality was more complicated.
The South brought this “assault” upon themselves. A 1960 Conference of Appalachian Governors demanded federal action to address the region’s woes and the Kennedy administration was sympathetic to the issue. Approved in 1962, ARA undertook a review of the region’s problems. By 1963, ARA assembled a joint federal-state commission, composed of representatives of the Appalachian states and federal agencies chaired by Franklin Roosevelt Jr. The Commission’s purpose identified four problem areas: (1) lack of access to, and within, the region; (2) technological inability to efficiently utilize the region’s plentiful natural resources; (3) lack of facilities to control/exploit the abundance of rainfall and channel it for low-cost energy generation; and (4) an inadequately educated and trained workforce. Their called for a coordinated federal-state-local program to address these needs. On April 29th, 1964 LBJ submitted to Congress the Appalachian Redevelopment Act.
The Act provided public works, various ED programs, and above all planning and implementation of a multi-faced area-wide redevelopment program. ARA’s programs were viewed by many Northern/ Midwestern Congressmen/Senators as little more than a redistribution of their money to the South—a South that was stealing their jobs, tax base and manufacturing firms. LBJ’s legislation triggered such opposition that the Great Society steamroller, then in full gear, was not equal to the task. ARA failed.to be approved in 1964. Resubmitted in 1965 the LBJ juggernaut was victorious, authorizing $1.1 billion. In tandem with ARA, Congress also approved the Public Works and Economic Development Act which was also intended to play a significant role in Appalachian development. The twelve states welcomed the legislation as an opportunity.
There are several reasons for this southern openness to federal involvement. ARC was from the get-go effectively controlled by its member states. Each state had a voting member on the Commission and the federal government was restricted to the two votes of Commission co-chairs. Given that ARC’s job activity was to distribute federal largesse, those its activities were acceptable, and log-rolling and back scratching ensured each state’s anticipated its proposed projects received a speedy approval. Secondly, unlike EDA which distributed its dollars on the basis of need, low income and high unemployment, ARC dispersed funds on “growth potential”–as defined by the affected states. Growth areas often were, the state’s more affluent areas. Thirdly, ARC’s programs were compatible with traditional southern priorities: infrastructure (highways, dams) workforce training and enhanced technology capacity. ARC “never interposed federal administrators between southern governments and their citizens, never built a constituency for direct federal intervention as the TVA and [welfare] programs had“. (Schulman, 1994, pp. 186-7).
By funding regional economic development districts throughout the East South Central and South Atlantic census divisions, the federal government created a network of planning, housing, human service, transportation, and economic development regional organizations that were a remarkable, arguably a page-turning departure from past ED state history. Many persist to this day. Over the next fifteen years, ARC program expenditures primarily went to highway construction (estimated 60% of total expenditures). Highways opened up isolated areas of the region and when combined with land stabilization and water drainage programs garnered the bulk of ARC’s funds. ARC was an exception to the CD thrust of Great Society programs. EDA, however, with its stress on formula-defined distressed communities, meshed poorly with ARC’s focus on affluent growth areas; the two clashed. EDA was perceived as a federal intruder and its attempts to establish coordination districts ran into considerable difficulty, especially in Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia where ARC district-led coordination was preferred (Schulman, 1994, p. 188). Confrontation with OEO’s community action programs, however, triggered a lot more controversy and “heat” than EDA.
The 1965 Tennessee Development District Act authorized “creation of development districts to provide ‘the various counties and cities … general and comprehensive planning and development activities’ (and make) the maximum use of federal, state and local programs designed to stimulate economic development[xix]. These ED districts, managed by sub-state EDOs spread throughout the states. In Alabama, a network of regional Planning and Development Councils were initially authorized in 1963 and further empowered by Governor George Wallace in 1969 and 1971. The network continues to play an important role in Alabama’s ED system. Mississippi in 1967, first established the Southern Mississippi Planning and Development District. Subsequent federal prodding to extend the District’s authorizing legislation state-wide bogged down–until the passage of federal 1968 Intergovernmental Cooperation Act’s Circular-A-95. Governor John Bell Williams finally issued Executive Order 81 (July, 1971) designating and renaming the existing ten non-profit corporations as official sub-state regions. Mississippi was one of several states to utilize nonprofit corporations through executive order. To this day Mississippi has neither passed enabling legislation, nor appropriated funding for planning and development district operations[xx]. Instead, Mississippi approved its own, ED legislation, the Mississippi Code of 1972, to implement the ARC’s programs, The 1972 Mississippi Code set up the structural outline of Mississippi’s current state ED system.
Economic Development Administration (EDA)
The 1965 Public Works and Economic Development Act was intended to replace Kennedy’s Area Redevelopment Administration and supplement ARC and TVA. EDA, housed in the Department of Commerce, was the legislation’s engine. EDA ironically evolved into the de facto “home base” for Big (and Small) City EDOs, the go-to agency for local mainstream ED professionals interested in infrastructure, physical/central city redevelopment and business assistance to firms (RLFs). It didn’t start out that way, however. .EDA’s original legislative goals and eligibility criteria, centering on jurisdictional job loss and population decline, focused (Titles III and IV) EDA on rural area-wide economic development.
The EDA mandate was similar to that of the ARA … conceived as a depressed area agency with a rural focus, have a supply-side orientation, contain minor countercyclical provisions, and increase [federal] government’s role in supplying infrastructure to lagging areas[xxi].
Johnson intended EDA to counter the flow of rural population to the central cities–by stimulating the depressed areas through enhanced infrastructure and business development, urban migration could be slowed: “if we ignore people in distressed rural areas we make certain that thousands upon thousands of families will be compelled to move away and go into the great cities. And when they get there, they are going to be concentrated in slums; they are going to live on the edge of poverty[xxii].
EDA grants (50% match required) could be obtained by state or local governments after development of a comprehensive economic development strategy-plan. Eligibility was limited to areas with persistently high unemployment and disproportionate low income population or economic adjustment resulting from “severe changes in economic conditions”. As LBJ wrote “There is little hope of establishing new industry in an area which does not have the public works and development facilities to support industrial growth”. There was no legislative mention of cities and “urban” areas. The muscle in the Act (Titles III and IV) were oriented toward the formation of area-wide economic development districts, with a primary focus in Appalachia.
EDA, as described above, had a rough go in Appalachia. Internally, the agency leadership pursued a strategy to redirect itself away from ARC and rural areas to an urban mission. Between 1967 and 1978, EDA empowered its regional offices and developed close ties with economic developers in each region. Earlier, behind the scenes EDA officials met with urban economic development officials to encourage them to involve themselves with EDA and to support legislatively EDA’s redirection. In fairly short order, Big City economic developers formed a professional association (CUED—see below) and sustained itself with EDA support and financial assistance. With CUED’s close involvement, EDA developed legislative support and a track record in urban economic development. EDA’s central place in urban affairs would take a few years to evolve. A permanent redirection was only achieved by adding Title IX in 1974.
Formation of Council of Urban Economic Development
EDA’s top leadership, assigned its chief of urban projects, Andy Bennett, to develop an urban constituency and a non-rural role for EDA. To this end, EDA through the late 1960’s played the role of godfather for what became the Council of Urban Economic Development (CUED). CUED’s midwife was, Ed de Luca[xxiii], head of Baltimore’s Development Corporation, who in 1966, informally encouraged by Bennett, sent a letter to twenty Big City mayors and their development chiefs (February 10th, 1966) inviting them to Baltimore to brainstorm. The letter’s opening lines, “A few weeks ago you expressed interest in the formation of the ‘HUB CLUB (Kysiak, 1992, p. 4) which we proposed as a concerted effort by cities to combat the loss of industry to suburbs”, exposed the motivation behind this initiative (deindustrialization/suburbanization), and those behind it (big city mayors and their young ED czars).
In 1966, in the midst of what would be five years of central city riots, few had any doubts the exodus of business from central city to suburbs was going to accelerate even more dramatically. Something had to be done. In response to the February 1966 letter, Big City economic developers[xxiv] from fifteen cities arrived in Baltimore all paid for and coordinated by de Luca. There followed a series of meetings (Washington, Pittsburgh and Chicago) over the next year. In April 1967 the “Helping Urban Business Council” (HUB) was officially incorporated in Milwaukee. By that time, additional cities, such as Toledo had joined the group.
Like AEDC in its formative years, HUB restricted its membership to cities over 250,000; in fairly short order the population requirement was reduced to 100,000. By 1967 fifteen cities had joined. HUB’s central mission was to address the “industrial and commercial problems of the central cities, with a major emphasis on industrial development” (Kysiak, 1992, p. 5). In its earliest years the “cult of manufacturing” was an integral strand of HUB’s DNA. The initial laundry list of programmatic priorities included tax incentives, downtown-CBD redevelopment, preserve industrial land, incubators, manpower and ‘negro entrepreneurship’. In 1968, EDA funded a two year grant to HUB (the first of a series of grants through the 1970’s–the first HUD grant came late in the 1970’s) and an Executive Director was hired. By 1969 twenty-one cities joined HUB and its first annual conference was held in Philadelphia. In 1970, executive offices were moved to Philadelphia.
The move to Philly, however, was short-lived as HUB (1) became convinced a strong presence in Washington DC was needed to acquire the Nixon administration’s support for urban, central city involvement; (2) the organization’s name was changed to Council of Urban Economic Development (CUED); and (3) the headquarters with a new Executive Director, founding member Ken Fry from Milwaukee, was moved to DC where it remains to this day. By 1972 CUED had about 150 members, and a second EDA grant. Early CUED priorities were technical assistance to its members (including on site), networking, and above all “making its presence known to Congress” (Kysiak, 1992, p. 6). CUED during the Nixon Administration, however could not access or consistently affect its decision-making while maintaining support of a Democratic Congress.
AEDC during this period also was active–but in a substantially different fashion. In 1964, with headquarters in Boston, the first class of the Industrial Development Institute graduated nineteen economic developers. In 1966 the first issue of its journal, the “AIDC” was published and membership exceeded 1000. In 1967 the first accredited “Basic Industrial Development” course was held at Texas A&M and in 1968 three such courses (intended for American Indians) were held at Arizona State University. In that year, the first survey of member activities and salaries was released (The Industrial Development Practitioner; Profile and Study). AIDC’s crowning achievement in this period, however, was its 1971 establishment of the profession’s first certification program, its first certified developer exam from which 58 developers were certified. In 1973, the headquarters moved to Kansas City (Seal Shelton. & Birkhead, 2001, pp. 28-9).
By 1970 economic development has developed two separate professional organizations. AIDC and CUED were not only separate, they were quite different in their membership, functions and priorities, and in their core mission as a professional association. AEDC continued its inward focus on networking and developing the skills of its members in the practice of their profession, its more open enrollment made it eight times larger than CUED. Its publication tied its membership to economic development and its development of a curriculum for a basic introductory course in economic development, followed by a professional certification program meant that it had developed a body of knowledge reflective of its approach to economic development.
CUED’s priority was to maintain a focus by an activist federal government on economic development. Its technical assistance programs, for the most part, were intended to assist members in developing programs whose purpose was to retain central city manufacturing–firms that were targets of industrial recruitment by AIDC members. Tension between the two was constant. The irony in all this was that both organizations so different in their conception of economic development, and whose inception forty years apart, had developed from leadership provided by the city of Baltimore. The difference in their godfather organizations was quite telling: AIDC (U.S. Chamber of Commerce), CUED (Economic Development Administration).
HUD and Model Cities
It started in the spring of 1964 when LBJ selected Dr. Robert C. Wood (Chapter 14’s conflicted suburbanite) to head a series of task forces intended to generate ideas and programs for federal involvement in urban affairs. Their recommendations produced much of the legislation discussed in the remainder of the Chapter. The influence of these task force members is further enhanced by the subsequent appointment of several, including Wood, to HUD leadership.
By 1966, with riots increasing, Vietnam War polarizing the nation, Civil Rights picking up steam, and obvious disruption triggered by the War on Poverty, LBJ was reluctant to jump headlong into some bold, expensive, hard to digest initiative. Rather, LBJ was inclined toward the Task Force on Urban Problems’ suggestion HUD test a number of ideas, experiment with lots of approaches, by funding each in a “demonstration city”. Given the large number of “demonstrations” evident in most urban areas, the legislation that followed this suggestion was renamed “Model Cities”. Unique to Great Society legislation was the “core strategy concept. (Olken, 1971) Each city by plan had to identify its specific problems, set goals/objectives, and develop its own strategy to achieve these goals. As described, its eligible objectives, following Gray City comprehensiveness, were sufficiently broad to encompass a wide variety of policy areas could be included within a local economic development strategy. Model Cities defined the low-income neighborhood as the level of its investment, so a municipal-wide strategy was not eligible.
The “Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Redevelopment Act of 1966”, was, from our perspective both a consolidation of War on Poverty innovations moderated by the widespread criticism and outright opposition it had engendered. It authorized for five years, but weakened, OEO’s low-income, community action approach; instead there was a decided movement toward “bricks and mortar”. Perloff’s earlier idea, to combine social and physical, best described its approach. Model Cities required its own organizational form, the City Demonstration Agency (CDA) composed of elected officials, representatives of major agencies, and business leaders; CDA actions could be nullified by mayor or city council. Model Cities thus tempered OEO’s MFP community action nexus—and strengthen oversight and mayoral “direction” over program initiatives. CAAs had to make their peace with local government. Many disappeared, others adjusted.
Model Cities cemented “Gray Areas” comprehensiveness into Great Society/HUD-style community development. Title I outlined “an adequate program for a model neighborhood should … expand housing, increase job and income opportunities, reduce dependence on welfare, improve educational facilities and programs, combat disease and ill health, reduce the incidence of crime and delinquency, enhance recreational and cultural opportunities, establish better access between home and jobs, and in general improve living conditions” (Scott, 1969, p. 622). Not surprisingly, critics complained that it “gilded the ghetto”—encouraged separateness, and discouraged assimilation and integration. HUD’s first Cabinet Secretary, Robert C. Weaver argued to the contrary, that through Model City programs ghettos will be the stepping stone to assimilation. “Physical, social and economic planning will be combined to fit the residents of blighted districts to participate more effectively in urban life, and someday to live wherever they can afford the housing costs” (Scott, 1969, pp. 632-3) That was not the last word on that subject.
The second policy thrust of Model Cities was something called “metropolitan development”. In a simple way, metropolitan development brings us back to ultimate causes of nearly all the slum/blight clearance public housing, CBD-urban renewal, Big City economic development, and the Great Society programs—how to counter suburbanization. HUD’s answer in Model Cities was “area-wide planning” redefined into now-required metropolitan plans (Section 204) complete with input from a metropolitan entity (council of government, metropolitan planning group, or area-wide government). If cities (now meaning metro area) didn’t create these entities, no federal money. It worked while it worked—but when Model Cities went away so did many of these entities.
The legislation authorized for cities of all sizes grants to plan and implement comprehensive city demonstration programs to rebuilding or restoring entire sections or neighborhoods of slum and blighted areas by the concentrated and coordinated use of all available federal aids together with local, private and governmental resources. The number of demonstration cities was increased from 75 to 150 (without any increase in funding), testifying again to the almost inevitable “spreading” in economic development; 193 cities submitted applications. Almost immediately urban riots intensified, 71 cities had major riots that year. Responding to pressure, HUD in November awarded its first round of grants to 63 cities and towns (a Big City bias in funding was evident). The identical phenomena occurred in 1968, lots more riots, followed by a second round of funding (Goldfield (Ed), 2007, p. 485).
By this point Congress had approved the Housing Act of 1968, which, if one reads its provisions, ought to have been the capstone of the Great Society. That honor, however, probably goes to Model Cities. In a horrendously polarized election year, Congress overwhelmingly approved it—and then refused to fund much of it.
National Historic Preservation Act of 1966
The Historic Sites, Buildings and Antiquities Act of 1935 marked the formal entry of the federal government in historic preservation. Administered by the Park Service it funneled New Deal funds to combat the Depression through work projects and construction. The effort abated during the War but in 1947 private citizens through the National Council for Historic Sites and Buildings pressed for a more permanent federal role. Its success resulted in Congress in 1949 chartering the National Trust for Historic Preservation (a nonprofit that linked government, the Park Service, and private citizens). The 1966 Historic Preservation Act, however, institutionalized historic preservation by creating the National Registry of Historic Places.
The Act precluded use of tax incentives to demolish historic structures, buildings, and even neighborhoods which could be classified as a historic district (the Fells Point Neighborhood in Baltimore qualified as a historic preservation neighborhood and in 1969 stopped I-83 from going through its neighborhood). Tax incentives for rehabilitation were also authorized. One of the more famous uses of this legislation occurred in 1979 with qualification of Miami Beach Architectural District—the first district entirely composed of 20th century buildings—based on its distinctive Art Deco South Beach architecture. Historic Preservation was further expanded by the 1974 CDBG Act (Goldfield (Ed), 2007, pp. 331-3).
[1] Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Kessinger Publishing, 2004) and the Battle with the Slums (New York, MacMillan, 1895).
[2] William Howe Tolman, Secretary of City Vigilance League of New York, quoted in Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall 1880-1950 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001) p. 323.
[3] The reader should realize the social reformers embraced a belief that the physical environment shaped human behavior. Change the physical environment and one’s behavior is likely to change. This was a far from universally shared belief at this time. The much abused social Darwinists blamed deficiencies in human character, laziness, a propensity to make wrong decisions consistently, even immorality for the deteriorated physical environment and other anti-social propensities. Later some sociologists will depreciate the inevitability of environment’s effects on human behavior and the ability of people to adjust to the environment and form meaningful relationships and individual identity and meaning shared with others. People can choose to remain in bad physical environments simply to continue to live with those one shares identity and meaning with. Social reformers themselves will eventually abandon the determinative impact on physical environment in favor of racial discrimination, later the lack of education, and most recently (2013) inequality. Values and beliefs do matter in economic development. In this book the reader will discover that we have chosen only to discuss the correct values and true beliefs—discarding the others, of course.
[4] Robert Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. pp. 325-327.
[5] Marc A. Weiss, “The Origins and Legacy of Urban Renewal” in Federal Housing Policy and Programs: Past and Present *J. Paul Mitchell, ed., Center for Urban Policy Research, 1985. p. 256.
[6] Ernest J. Bohn, “Housing as a Political Problem”, Law and Contemporary Problems, Volume, Number 2 (March, 1934), pp. 178.
[7] Today the NAREB is known as (since 1974) the National Association of Realtors as is considered a powerful lobby force–as it was in the 1930’s as well.
[8] Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001) p. 227.
[9] See Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. pp. 317-320.
[10] Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. pp. 231-232.
[11] Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. p. 234. BOMA (Buildings Office and Managers Association), founded in 1907, became the first national advocate for action in regards to the stressed downtown areas.
[12] Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. p. 237.
[13] Boyer, op. cit., p. 43.
[14] Jon A. Peterson, “The City Beautiful Movement: Forgotten Origins and Lost Meanings”, Journal of Urban History, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1976, Sage Publications, p. 422.
[15] Peterson, op. cit., p. 422. Peterson observes that many of these New England associations “were anxious to capture the summer trade”–i.e. for those associations the city beautiful was very much a tourism strategy.
[16] Craig Turnbull, An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890-1920: Chicago in the
[i] Winthrop served twelve terms as Governor (never Mayor of Boston which at that time was a town). If Winthrop has an image today, it is as an inflexible, sexless, staunchly conservative Puritan. In his day, however, Winthrop was a moderate authoritarian, not mean-spirited (he warned Roger Williams secretly to get the heck out of Salem, and was criticized for being too lenient with Anne Hutchinson). He outlived five wives, and was father of eight, maybe nine, children–many sadly dying young –as did his first four wives. Upon landing at Logan Airport, think of Winthrop—he owned the land.
[ii] Approved by the Massachusetts General Court in March 1636. Cities were latecomers to New England. New Haven was the first in 1784, Boston, 1822, New Hampshire the 1840’s, and Springfield in 1852. Hartford is a city/town consolidation.
[iii] Moravians, religious refugees, founded settlements exclusively for themselves. They carefully planned their towns, the first being Bethlehem in 1741 Pennsylvania (followed by several other Pennsylvania boroughs) and a second set in North Carolina, the town of Economy in 1753 and Salem in 1766—others followed.
[iv] Unitarianism first appeared in Lithuania and, of all places, Transylvania in the mid-1500’s.Traveling to London, then to New England, it was first preached in Boston’s King Chapel in 1784. Inclined toward Deism (which rejects religion as a source of authority, but asserts through reason and science the existence of a God can be discovered), Unitarianism, from its earliest days, appealed to the wealthy and intellectual. In 1805 Harvard taught its first course in Unitarian theology. As New England Unitarianism evolved, it morphed into “transcendental Unitarianism” (from German liberal theology) associated with Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendental Unitarians stressed the essential goodness of mankind and adopted a more intellectual, semi-secular humanistic approach.
[v] Baltzell’s observation was supported by no less than John Adams who wrote in his Defense of the Constitution: “Go into every village in New England, and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has ever depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most” (Baltzell, p. 170).
[vi] Samuel Eliot Morrison described this elite fusion as the marriage between “the wharf and the waterfall“. In an 1861 novel, Elsie Venner (1861), Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dubbed the new business elite the “Boston Brahmin“. Holmes’s novel characterized this elite as “harmless, inoffensive, and untitled”, with houses by Bulfinch, their monopoly on Beacon Street, humanitarianism, Unitarian faith in the march of their mind, Yankee shrewdness, and New England exclusiveness“. Our description of Puritanism’s evolution is indebted to O’Connor’s, the Hub: From Town to City.
[vii] Quincy, a former Congressman, a strong Federalist and a stolid Brahmin was quite the charismatic personae. Related to John and John Quincy Adams (Abigail’s mother was a Quincy), Quincy devoted his life to politics, subsequently served six terms as Mayor leaving to become President of Harvard for seventeen years.
[viii] The story has it that the “a” was dropped out of Cleveland by a printer who wanted to crowd a sentence into a single line of print.
[ix] Three previous NYC Tenement Housing Acts (1879, 1882, and 1887) is why Riis could follow alongside sanitary inspectors. The most successful restrictive legislation was the 1901 Act.
[x] Rochester was not the first school/community center. That honor probably falls to NYC’s People’s Institute founded by Charles Smith in 1897. It quickly collapsed and reorganized in 1911.
[xi] Topics are: Women and the Trades, Work Accidents and the Law, the Steel Workers, Homestead: the Households of a Mill Town, the Pittsburgh District, and Wage-Earning. Sage followed in 1913 with six other community surveys (Scranton, Atlanta, Topeka, St. Paul, and Springfield IL.
[xii] Patricia Mooney Melvin, “Before the Neighborhood Organization Revolution: Cincinnati ; Alexander von Hoffman, Local Attachments: the Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); John Clayton Thomas, Between Citizen and City (University of Kansas Press, 1986); Robert Fisher & Peter Romanofsky, Community Organization for Urban Social Change: (Greenwood, 1981).
[xiii] The League, based on “black self-assurance and interracial cooperation” operated at least until 1923. http://www.lexisnexis.com/documents/academic/upa_cis/1559_natnegrobusleaguept1.pdf
[xiv] Two different schools of Chicago sociology have developed. In this chapter, of course, the first, in its heyday before the 1940’s is my focus. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie, the City (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1925) is the base for our discussion. Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson’s, City Politics carried that first school perspective into the sixties, extending it to political science. One can argue this approach shifted with Roger S Ahlbrandt, Jr. and James V. Cunningham, A New Public Policy for Neighborhood Preservation (Praeger, 1079) and with Anthony Downs, Neighborhoods and Urban Development (Washington D.C., Brookings Institution Press, 1981) who plugs in an “arbitrage” model to neighborhoods succession.
[xv] Congestion contained two sets of concerns; one was economic and private firm based, the other social and working/middle class people-centered. “The term had been inherited from the housing reformers and patrician planners of an earlier day, and had become, by the time of its adoption by [the RPAA and RPNY] conflated with the notions of ‘blight’, ‘slums’, ‘overcrowding’, ‘concentration’, ‘mobility’, ‘density’, and ‘traffic jams’. The elasticity of the term permitted a great deal of ostensible concord between [Mumford and Adams] [But] … the economic critique of congestion addressed a perceived crisis in the distribution of goods …, grounded in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principle of scientific management, for more efficient location of industry, for reductions in building density, and for improvement in transportation. The social critique of ‘blight’ and ‘slums’ addressed population density, living conditions, health, and the negative social effects of real estate speculation”. Andrew A. Meyers, “Invisible Cities: Lewis Mumford, Thomas Adams, and the Invention of the Regional City, op. cit., p. 295.
[xvi] Alice O’Connor, “Community Action, Urban Reform, and the Fight Against Poverty: the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas Program”, Journal of Urban History, Vol. 22, No. 5, July 1996, pp. 586-625; Robert Halpern, Rebuilding the Inner City, op. cit., pp. 89-101; William Domhoff, the Ford Foundation in the Inner City: Forging an Alliance with Neighborhood Activists”, hrrp://whorulesamerica.net/local/ford_foundation.html (retrieved December 5, 2014).
[xvii] Hunter would be a pall bearer for RFK seven years later.
[xviii] Section 8 of the Community Development Block Grant Act of 1974 renamed the program established in 1965 (Section 236, Leased Housing Program) and greatly expanded it.
[xix] State of Tennessee, Office of Attorney General, Opinion No. 09-126.
[xx] Report #372 to the Mississippi Legislation, January 5, 1998
[xxi] EDA Legislative History, pp. 13-14. file:///C:/Users//Downloads/eda_legislative_history.pdf
[xxii] Quoting LBJ in EDA Legislative History, op. cit. p. 14.
[xxiii] Kysiak a friend of the Curmudgeon, was employed by de Luca and was a valued participant during these early years. We rely on his publication, as well as informal email and conversations. De Luca subsidized the early HUB Club from departmental funds
[xxiv] Drawn from Baltimore, Milwaukee, Jersey City, Chicago and Cleveland–all public sector development officials–accompanied by a representative (Andy Bennett) from EDA.
Riots
The riots began in 1964 triggered by any number of specific events and acts that captured the cumulative inequalities and day-to-day frustrations of living in predominately black, Great Migration central city ghettos. Harlem, Rochester, Jersey City, Elizabeth, and Philadelphia erupted in 1964. Watts rioted with serious loss of life in 1965, becoming the poster child (later shared with Detroit). In 1966 Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, San Francisco experienced significant destruction with the inevitable media exploitation. Tampa, Buffalo, Newark, Detroit blew up in 1967 in what was now an expected and increasingly destructive annual expectation. In 1968 the nation exploded. Fueled by Martin Luther King’s April assassination, and Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June, an estimated 120 cities disintegrated into a cascade of urban violence, destruction, and death. Riots were especially brutal, long-lasting and heart-breaking in Detroit; Baltimore and Washington DC. Residents still remember them with great emotion. To cap it all off, as the Democratic National Convention deliberated, Chicago imploded, and America watched day and night on TV.
Using sociologist Seymour Spilerman definition of race riot, between 1964 and 1971 752 riots occurred with 228 deaths, 12741 injured, 69099 arrested, and 16000 arsons. The peak year was 1968 (289 riots). Forty-four percent of the deaths occurred in just three riots (Detroit, Watts, and Newark) (McDonald, 2008, p. 149). The 1967 federal Kerner Commission reported in March 1968 “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal”. They blamed riots specifically on racial discrimination in employment, education, welfare, housing—and policing–and concluded the riots were anomic, unplanned, rapidly escalating disruptions that hurt overwhelmingly African-Americans. Almost totally, the looting, arson, and disruption was in Black neighborhoods[i]. Subsequent research revealed these neighborhoods between 1960 and 1980 lost one-third of their population—Cleveland’s declined by 65%, but Los Angeles (Watts) lost only 1% (McDonald, 2008, p. 153).
The question of how these riots affected the practice and policy of economic development in the following years is an important background element in the chapters that follow. Neighborhoods needed repair; some demolition/rebuilding did follow. In many cities, however, reconstruction was painfully slow—visible reminders of these years persisted for decades. The effect on people, obviously, was often profound and long-lasting. Suburbanization increased dramatically after the riots—and urban investment plummeted. The shock that hit Big City policy systems was transformative; policy agendas shifted dramatically, as did politics and political leadership.
A final, more subtle, legacy of the riots was their effect on subsequent policy-making political culture. Economic development policy-making can be deeply affected by “stories” (Stone, 2002, pp. 133-4) each policy actor brings into the policy process. The riots, dramatic and destructive as they were, became essential elements of many stories held by policy actors—not to mention the stories prevalent among residents, voters, and tax payers. Almost certainly these stories continue to affect contemporary sub-state economic development policy.
Nixonian Thermidor
Nixon won in 1968–an election in which one candidate (RFK) and Martin Luther King were assassinated. Vietnam War protests and summer riots continued, Chicago’s Democratic convention/riot left the nation stunned, and fearful. Both houses of Congress remained Democrat. Nixon won by a plurality (43.5%), with 301 electoral votes, (Humphrey 43%, 191 electoral), George Wallace’s won five Deep South states with 13.5% of total vote/45 electoral. .Wallace unhinged the southern Democratic Party, triggering a southern state Republican realignment. Republicans won 62% of governorships. Nixon’s 1972 presidential election was a landslide, exceeding Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide
New Federalism
Nixon could have attempted to repudiate the Great Society. He didn’t. With Congress Democratic, Nixon choose to consolidate programs, but, counter-intuitively also extended the federal government into environmental policy, creating EPA (NEPA), OSHA, and 1972 Clean Water Act. As controversial as President Nixon proved to be, this history views his non-Watergate domestic activities as reshaping, even extending, certainly not repudiating, the Great Society. Nixon pressed for a “New Federalism” (Conlan, 1998) restoring the traditional balance between federal and State uprooted by Great Society’s Creative Federalism (Nathan, 2013). New Federalism meant creating ten regional federal councils to coordinate national programs and simplify regulations. Cornerstones of the New Federalism were revenue-sharing and block grants. Nixon’s New Federalism produced a mixed reaction, and a mixed bag of legislation—complicated by a Watergate-troubled presidency in his last two years in office. He resigned, of course in 1974 and Vice-President Ford became President through 1976.
Nixon’s reshaping of federalism directly affected economic development. Creative Federalism rested upon categorical grants bypassing state government to go directly to municipal/community-based recipients. Nixon’s New Federalism (1) combined many categorical grants into one “block” grant which (2) ran through the states and which (3) allowed the states meaningful discretion in its distribution (despite the existence of a formula) and administration (Finegold, 2004). There were three major block grants in the Nixon-Ford years and economic development was caught up in two of them (Housing and Community Development Act and Comprehensive Employment and Training Act).
The 1972 State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act established the core revenue-sharing program, in many ways the heart of Nixon’s New Federalism (Reagan ended it). Revenue-sharing was not important as a funding source for ED; in its first two years, ED received a whopping 2.2% allocation from eligible jurisdictions (Judd, 1984, pp. 344, Table 11-5). The significance of revenue sharing was empowerment of states/localities and a step back by the federal government.
Comprehensive Employment and Training Act
CETA was then and WIA remains today the nation’s cornerstone manpower-skills training-trade adjustment-one stop-youth-workforce program. It funds, at least partially, over five hundred specialized workforce EDOs throughout the nation. CETA interfaced with educational systems, and offered productivity/training for business. Building on the “unemployment-oriented” “Employment Act of 1946), “education-oriented” “G.I. Bill (1958), and Kennedy’s MDTA “structural” unemployment, skills deficiencies and occupational/trade displacement, CETA responded to a structural employment crisis induced by global technological changes, by retraining “dislocated” workers transitioning from one sector to another. CETA evolved into the nation’s answer to deindustrialization (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act A-58, 1977).
Workforce programs such as these are a departure from the traditional, “Go West Young Man” manpower program long practiced in the United States (Clague & Kramer, 1976). Restated that cute expression translates into “get a job somewhere else”. People mobility has been America’s default structural unemployment program, as the Southern Diaspora testifies. All sorts of specific programs existed previous to CETA. Kennedy’s MDTA was contemporary workforce’s pioneer legislation that targeted four objectives: counter labor shortages in key industry sectors, provide opportunities for the unemployed, upgrade labor force skills to render them more competitive, and provide an avenue out of poverty (Levitan & Mangum, 2003). Also, on-the-Job, institutional classroom-based instruction, remedial instruction, curricula design, and some placement were handled through DOL and contracts with local vendors, community agencies and institutions. By 1970 estimates were DOL managed over 10000 such contracts. Between 1962 and 1964, about 100000 workers participated annually.
The 1964 War on Poverty launched the Jobs Corps, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, Operation Mainstream, Adult Basic Education, the Work Experience Program, Public Service and New Careers Program, and through Senator Kennedy’s Special Impact (1966) legislation, the Concentrated Employment Program (CEP). About 65% of those served in these programs were low-income. Another Great Society Program, Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC), started in 1964 but operated by special funding to nonprofit corporations accessible to low-income unemployed African-Americans. The WIN (or Work Incentive Program) operated out of Social Security Administration, providing supportive services such as day care, social and medical assistance, and some skills and job training to those on public assistance. By 1967, an estimated seventeen categorical programs existed in these workforce programs. Among other programs it funded, CEP issued contracts to CAAs to coordinate this mélange of initiatives within their target areas—82 CAAs received these CEP contracts (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act A-58, 1977, pp. 3-5).
DOL fragmentation and coordination were serious concerns; several administrative solutions were attempted, notably CAMPS, the Cooperative Area Manpower Planning System. CAMPS funded states (governors specifically) to set up area-wide planning/advisory committees; in 1970, mayors were funded to do the same. By 1973, over 400 area-wide or local CAMPS committees were in place, each state had a “manpower planning council” and more than 1200 full and part-time positions were funded with CAMPS dollars. In 1972, their composition was mandated and enlarged to include local elected officials, business and labor leaders, and institutions. They “supposedly” were entrusted with making recommendations to chief elected officials on manpower funding and programmatic matters. Mayors and governors became in the process the chief coordinators of this manpower/workforce nexus. Whether any of this worked as was intended is unknown, but one might be skeptical. CAMPS served as the foundation for CETA.
Nixon’s Workforce Initiatives: Nixon’s 1969 Manpower Training Act proposed consolidating categorical programs into a “New Federalism” block grant. Winners and losers battled it out in Congress, along with Big Cities that feared they would not fare well competing with suburbs and second tier cities. The legislation was defeated in 1971. A new bill was filed with manpower one of “six special revenue-sharing proposals” in an omnibus multi-policy area bill (Manpower Revenue Sharing Act). Congress, it was said, reacted with hostility and apathy—which seems hard to combine—and so in 1973, the Nixon Administrative carved out a third special manpower bill, based upon existing Presidential authority to oversee on-going programs, and which offered locals a carrot by decentralizing manpower decision-making to the CAMPS planning councils. So we backed into the CETA framework.
Through a formula, about 70% of the appropriation went to the chief elected officials (CLEOs) and governors where CAMPS did not exist for allocation to manpower programs. Nixon’s bold action finally got Congress motivated and compromise produced a final bill that passed in 1973. What emerged was a hybrid block, revenue-sharing, categorical grant omnibus, fairly decentralized, federally-financed workforce system. Most first-level decision-making and allocation of funds (compliant with federal guidelines and objectives du jour) was made by local/state “Prime Sponsors”. Accordingly, would approve Prime Sponsors (the legislation was silent) became the next battleground. Governors wanted in, so did mayors; debate and compromise followed (Davidson, 1974). Congress approved the bill on December 20, 1973; eight days later Nixon signed “the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973 (barely).
So what had tumbled out of this washer/dryer policy-making? Title I (consolidated seventeen categorical grants) created a block grant to “Prime Sponsors” (either state or local government CLEOs) for a variety of manpower tools/programs (training programs, employment services, testing, counseling, placement and supportive services—the whole shebang). There was no required matching. Cities and counties (or consortiums) greater than 100,000 could become Prime Sponsors. The CAMPS planning council was used by CLEOs to operate/administer funds. To receive funds a comprehensive plan had to be approved. The Prime Sponsor determines the mix and allocation to the various eligible alternatives. Funds were allocated among Prime Sponsors through a formula based on (1) previous funding level, (2) number unemployed, and (3) number of low-income (with various set asides at the state level for vocational education and state-level manpower services). The Job Corps survived. With nips and tucks, ebbs and flows, this structural framework endures to the present—through JTPA, WIA and now OWIA.
1974 Housing and Community Development Act
The 1970 Housing and Urban Development Act, a creature of Congress, continued most 1968 Housing Act and Model Cities programs. Model Cities, rent supplements, rental housing (Sections 235/236) and public housing funding increased. One interesting innovation was the Urban Growth and New Communities Act picked up LBJ’s earlier “dream” to build new (suburban) towns, dispersing African-Americans throughout the metro area deconcentrating ghettos. Consensus within black ghettos, however, had moved away from assimilation to separate neighborhoods controlled by residents. The Act created a Community Development Corporation with $500 million to guarantee debt by public and private developers (Smookler, 1975).
Between 1970 and 1973, HUD was hit with a series of major scandals—chiefly involving Section 235 (homeownership)/236 (rental housing). In 1973, an even worse scandal reached into FHA, and several other HUD programs. The poor were sold sub-standard, excessively-priced, over-appraised homes by real estate speculators. Granting FHA insurance to Section 235/236 bordered on fraud, and HUD’s administrative competence was seriously questioned. Nixon announced a moratorium on HUD spending until studies, audits and analysis could be conducted (Sullivan, 1979, pp. 389-91). By 1974, with Nixon leaving office, the stage was set for a fundamental repivot of HUD and the nation’s housing programs. The result was the 1974 CDBG Act, signed by President Ford, taking effect in 1975.
The 1974 Act, built around Nixonian block grant, revenue-sharing and administrative decentralization established the present-day Community Development Block grant, funding it at $7.9 billion. Combining seven categorical grants distributed by formula to eligible grantees (including states, municipalities), the HUD block grant included economic development programs such as historic preservation, revolving loan funds, fair housing, and urban renewal. The key control was the Housing Assistance Plan required of recipients. Decentralization of decision-making and local administrative flexibility were key objectives—as was limiting the role of the federal government in public housing.
The Act pivoted the federal government away from public housing projects and landlord role for the nation’s poor into Section 8 housing. Section 8 provided direct rent subsidy to low-income recipients that covered gaps between rent able to be paid by the recipient and the privately-owned rental unit rate. This pivot from public housing marked the end in CD’s long-standing and controversial CD public houser housing movement. The Age of Urban Renewal and Public Housing was over! Section 8 offered a new tool for Community Development Corporations, who now worked with private developers to construct low-income housing in depressed, low-income neighborhoods—while at the same time permitting, indeed, later requiring, middle-class neighborhoods and suburban communities to house low-income families and individuals. Section 8, with its strengths and weaknesses, continues to this day as the cornerstone housing policy of the nation. CDBG authorized staff/administrative cost reimbursement fostering growth in sub-state CDCs/EDOs.
Historic Preservation Act of 1976
The Act[ii] partnered IRS with the National Park Service to create a historic preservation tax incentive program appropriate to private restoration of historic properties, often in partnership with State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPPOs). The legislation provides public subsidy to properties that are income-producing so long as they are listed on the National Register, and rehabilitated according to Dept. of Interior standards. Since 1976, the Act has levered more than $33 billion private sector investment in over 32000 historic properties, creating about 185000 housing units, of which 75000 are low-moderate (2015) (Ryberg-Webster, 2014).
EDA Changes its Stripes
EDA couldn’t sit still during the Seventies—six legislative acts were approved in the decade. Congress added three new “Titles that established EDA as a home for mainstream urban physical redevelopment and business assistance ED to counter-balance HUD as the home base for Community Development. CUED was no small part of that. Lost to history was an agency formerly dedicated to rural ED. No consensus existed in Congress as to what role the federal government should play in sub-state mainstream business assistance and physical redevelopment. That was really nothing new—with periodic exceptions, the policy area has been conflict-ridden since the National Highway and canal-building days. Many believed the feds could accomplish very little outside of infrastructure (and macro-economic policy), except distort the marketplace. Since FDR, however, Congress (and JFK) had argued for a comprehensive program to combat distress in severely-distressed and depressed areas. The Great Society in 1965 created Economic Development Administration to support, through physical development and infrastructure, the Appalachian Regional Commission’s efforts to reduce rural area-wide poverty and economic distress.
The six legislative acts between 1965 and 1975 refocused EDA away from that function, and moved it into the federal vehicle used to “provide direct assistance to urban areas … address issues confronting communities experiencing sudden and abrupt economic dislocation caused by factory shutdowns, foreign competition, base closures, and disasters … [provide] anti-recessionary [funding]… for public works projects as a means of creating jobs and priming the economic pump” (Boyd, 2011). In hindsight, the “toe-in-the-door” refocusing legislative act was a 1971 EDA amendment, vetoed by Nixon that somehow got included into another legislative bill to extend EDA through 1973. That legislation was approved and signed. Nixon never supported EDA. He usually included some statement with his signing, asserting EDA or its programs did not create jobs for the poor, overlapped with other federal programs, and should spend more effort on rural areas.
The 1971 two-year extension also included a previously vetoed bill creating “special impact areas” as eligible for Title I programs. In fact 25% of EDA’s Title I funding was tied to these areas, defined as areas with large concentration of low-income households, high or abrupt increases in unemployment, such as the closure of a factory—all of which applied to urban, as well as rural areas. The legislation encouraged short-term job-creating projects, as well as EDA’s original goal to produce long-term ED benefit for distressed areas. These additions were included in new legislation extending EDA for two years (until 1976), signed by Nixon because his bill, the Rural and Urban Community Development Revenue Sharing Act, had gotten nowhere. In 1974, Nixon proposed that EDA address needs of local areas affected by natural disasters. Congress agreed and approved the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 that added a new title. The disaster relief initiatives included authorization to capitalizing RLFs to help businesses access capital. This turned out to be one of EDA’s most helpful and utilized programs.
Overriding a Ford veto, Congress in 1976 approved the Public Works Employment Act that enlarged EDA involvement in public works as job-creating projects. In the same year, Congress also passed amendments to EDA’s basic legislation, extending it through 1979, making explicit its ability to operate in urban as well as rural areas. The 1976 amendments liberalized several EDA programs, reducing local match, making eligible private sector costs like interest on loan guarantees, interest-free loans to redevelopment areas (urban renewal) to facilitate land acquisition and redevelopment. They also required newly elected President Carter to convene a White House Conference of Balanced National Growth and Economic Development (held from January 29, 1978 to February 2). The report from that conference called for no new federal programs, rather for more effective government and a “real” partnership among levels of government and the private sector.
Carter was also unable to secure permanent funding for EDA in 1979—he did secure legislation extending it through 1982—but no permanent reauthorization of Congress occurred until 1998. EDA survived on periodic legislation that extended its funding for a few more years. Said and done, it took EDA thirty-three years to achieve permanent status as a federal agency.
SBA
During Nixon years, SBA started its successful Small Business Institute program (SBI-1970) by reaching agreements with four professional organizations to provide counseling to small business. This was quickly extended by 1975 to include over 400 colleges and universities, 20000 students and 8000 firms (Bean, 2001, p. 83). SBI offered education-based expertise from business students and advisors to small companies. In 1996 SBI became independent of SBA, continuing to this day self-funded complete with a Journal and annual conference. Conversely, a Nixonian initiative to transfer the successful SCORE program to ACTION generated a four year struggle with the volunteer-based program, culminating with SCORE’s establishment of its own non-profit in 1975. SCORE would be independent, but coordinated through SBA. Given SBA’s alleged long-standing indifference to SCORE in the long run this may have been a positive.
Great Society
The Great Society, including its Nixonian Thermidor, was a game-changer for sub-state ED—and a revolution for community development. It left a “permanent” legacy in the form of a substantial nexus of federally-funded local CDOs/EDOs operating in most communities/regions in the nation. Literally thousands of workforce (CETA)-related Prime Sponsors, a greatly expanded SBA, and Nixon’s EPA and Clean Water initiatives. Great Society programs fostered emerging government departments/offices through HUD and EDA funding, created networks of regional planning/economic development entities, mostly in the South, but also A-95 and metropolitan clearing houses that fostered regional planning—and, of course the controversial CAP and its successor neighborhood level CDOs. Left behind was Industrial Decentralization.
The physical landscape of American sub-state economic development has never been so dramatically enlarged in so short a time. During these years the federal government injected a programmatic and financial pipeline directly into most American jurisdictions. Buried under this avalanche was classic chamber-based ED. Most ED/CD eyes and grant applications were fixed on Washington. Through block grants the federals had roused (and fed) the State beast and it too took more notice of sub-state ED.
The nearly four decade-old slum clearance, public housing/urban renewal CD/ED strategy-juggernaut intended to preserve Big City metro hegemony was, for all practical purposes, redirected to “softer”, more people-focused neighborhood-based empowerment—and CBD-related revitalization. Public housing was effectively abandoned in favor of neighborhood-based CDO and private housing redevelopment—and individual Section 8 vouchers for privately-owned housing. In its wake, the Great Society had not simply rejuvenated American community development, it actually forged an updated community development that accommodated the Second (and Third) Ghetto. The explosion of CD strategies and tools has added a robustness to the profession it formerly lacked. A Policy World network and an enhanced CD-foundation complex had formed as well.
Of course, the Great Society did not single-handedly “create” Contemporary Economic Development. Rather it was a shotgun whose programmatic discharges flew in any number of directions—from southern sub-state ED policy systems, to Big City inner neighborhoods, periphery suburbs, to the formation of intended and unintended wings of a new contemporary community development. Its short, profound and widely-dispersed disruption—accompanied by the fury, confusion, and dynamic reaction it unleashed revealed to us all the “page of history” was turning. By 1974, American economic development looked very different from what it did a decade earlier.
As for the riots. The Great Society did not “cause” the riots. Big City upheavals had been brewing for some time awaiting a critical mass and a crack in the system. The Great Society knocked down the Big City’s municipal policy system’s house of cards. It cracked open local policy systems and into the gap poured the activism and resentment inspired by unsettling population movements and generational cohort change. It coincided with the loudest civil rights crescendo and the soon-to-be evident implosion of the northern/Midwest hegemony. Timing is everything they say.
<a>POSTWAR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Unlike mainstream business-focused economic development which had congealed around chambers and port authorities, postwar community development seemed more like a herd of cats, each attending to its own business. Within community development there were always wings: settlement houses, housing reformers, recreation and community centers; neighborhood mobilizers, new towns/suburbs, slum clearance, and public housers. Community development lacked a stable core, it was mostly a fluid collection of policy whirlpools—with sympathetic allies such as planners, architects, and Progressive capitalists/managers, who drifted in and out of the disparate CD policy coalitions. If there was anything that functioned as core, a barely adequate one at its best, were foundations and Policy World theorists such as Mumford or Bauer.
Despite its remarkable success in passing the 1937 Housing Act, CD housers pre-1940 timing couldn’t have been worse. They rode a wave of popular enthusiasm generated by a genuine housing crisis in the midst of a Depression. The 1937 Housing Act raised slum clearance, neighborhood renewal and public housing as the preeminent CD strategy. By 1941, however, war production worker housing effectively ended low-income public housing for a decade, while popular opinion shifted to combating the perceived deterioration perceived in Second Ghetto slums. In the ensuing Washington policy stalemate that characterized the 1940’s, CBD-oriented real estate and chamber groups “stole” or “shared” (depending on one’s perspective) neighborhood slum clearance and diverted (over the 1950’s) much of it into CBD/commercial center, “eds and meds” urban renewal. The bitterness fostered in those years between this early “growth coalition” and CD housers/community mobilization activists still remains today. Lost in the mud-slinging was that both sides were desperately attempting to combat suburban decentralization —Alice O’Connor’s “crisis of metropolitanization” (1999, p. 96)).
Neighborhood succession during the Forties and Fifties was an increasingly brutal process. The incredible destruction unleashed by mid-1950’s federal-funded highway construction made it even worse. Ethnics simply moved out to peripheries and suburbs. Migrants from the Great Migration moved in, developing what today is labeled the Second Ghetto. This Second Ghetto presented a very different situation from the First (ethnic immigrant). Alinsky’s CD community organizing approach, for example, was essentially a First Ghetto strategy and it didn’t work well in the Second Ghetto with white organizers mobilizing African-American neighborhoods. White and union community organizers like Alinsky (who had moved from active community organizing in 1942) increasingly found themselves on the outside looking in, using African-Americans as their foot soldiers in an unstable alliance that quickly ended (see Chicago’s Woodlawn). By War’s end, CD neighborhood-focused strategies/wings were facing an almost existential crisis as to how to apply community development to the Second Ghetto.
Solving that existential crisis is essentially what the Ford Foundation, Gray Areas and Cloward and Olin were attempting to do in Chapter 16. Their experimentation produced the War on Poverty and LBJ’s Great Society. Great Migration blacks decidedly fought slum clearance, high-rise public housing, and racial discrimination especially in real estate, often tolerated by City Hall. While Alinsky had avoided partisan community organizing Second Ghetto community mobilization attacked City Hall, real estate developers, universities and whoever was part of the coalition bringing slum clearance to the neighborhood.
Second Ghetto Community organizing had little choice but to sink its roots deep into the political culture, economics and politics of the distressed neighborhood. The resistance and bitterness generated by Second Ghetto neighborhood succession, its reaction against racism and discrimination, and the unifying catalyst of slum clearance dislocation provided a fuel to community organizing that, when linked to a 1960s’ northern civil rights movement, and Great Society community action and maximum feasible participation, fostered new wings of African-American–oriented CD developed.
The 1960’s instability (both policy and political) created by the almost seven years of urban riots also served as an incubator for different community development strategies. For all the controversy associated with Great Society community action and CAAs, community action brought about more “empowerment” than economic growth or social assimilation. CAA’s raft of comprehensive services included local action plans, and in their short three years of effective existence they never really got anything substantial done. CAAs, after all, were advisory and had no power to compel social service, housing, welfare bureaucracies, never mind school systems, to follow CAA direction. Maximum feasible participation set in stone the principle that low-income neighborhood residents possessed an inherent right to participate in matters concerning their individual and community’s life. The wedge CAAs inserted into the heretofore impenetrable urban bureaucracies provided leverage and optimism that community organizers would shortly tap.
In this regard, CAAs “created or fostered scores of new affiliations and organizations—single issue coalitions, tenant organizations, legal services, public interest law firms” (Halpern, 1995, pp. 113–18) that served as vehicles for community mobilization initiatives. As community development entered the 1970’s it encountered a world totally different from that of a decade earlier. Moreover, they had regained their federal partner, able and willing through a federal agency, HUD, to provide resources and support policy advocated by a greatly expanding, mostly Washington-based CD Policy World. No longer did Mainstream economic development enjoy anything close to a monopoly in ED jurisdictional policy-making.
The sections below outline the Community Development renaissance that was the 1970’s and even the Reagan 1980’s. CD was vibrant and true to its heritage exhibited a variety of wings and approaches mostly centered around the neighborhood. Most importantly, an African-American political culture produced new forms of community development to attack the problems of the Second; A new CDO, the Community Development Corporation (CDC) emerged as the CD structure of choice. Community mobilization approaches were popular; their variety and flexibility facilitated their dispersion into the West and the New South—as vehicles for new immigrants to access municipal policy-making. Finally, strategies able to operate within the capitalist economic fabric, mostly housing-focused, were devised to restore as best as possible economic markets amid the collapsing economic base of Big Cities, and the growing economic bases of a resurgent Sunbelt. During this period an emerging Third Ghetto (in which deindustrialization imploded any reasonable hope of employment as a strategy to neighborhood prosperity) almost surreptitiously appeared.
In spite of its remarkable success during these decades, community development could not escape nor overcome its seemingly inherent bias toward forming numerous autonomous streams (wings) that could never quite link themselves together to sustain a single mighty river. In the spirit of mixing metaphors, so prevalent throughout this history, community development remained a herd of individual cats, however professionalized, each following their inner light.
<b>Black Capitalism
In Chapter 6 this history noted a bi-modal African-American economic development policy culture: individual achievement and assimilation into society and the economy (Booker T. Washington) versus separate development/removal of colonialist institutional domination, and community-wide achievement through socialist/community-based enterprise (Du Bois). The King-led civil rights movement mostly conformed to the former, with Du Bois-like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael advocating the latter.
Integration and jobs were the March on Washington’s twin goals, and black capitalism, skills training, and integration into new neighborhoods and schools were King’s principal ED strategies. The Ford Foundation, even Woodlawn’s TWO, and the Kennedy administration’s urban guerilla boutique (War on Poverty) pursued goals congruent with economic, social and political assimilation (Cross, 1969, pp. 136–58). Johnson funded the Job Opportunities in Business Sector (JOBS Program) to train the hard-core unemployed, with the National Alliance of Businessmen locating actual employment opportunities.
Senator Robert Kennedy, after he and Jacob Javits walked through the newly-established Bedford-Stuyvesant CDC neighborhood (1967), submitted legislation to attract corporate elites to locate branch plants in the ghetto (offering tax credits, accelerated depreciation, wage subsidies and training allowances). Hiring of residents, supply/services contracts and stimulation of neighboring service businesses—not to mention occupational training—were hoped-for consequences. Kennedy followed up with additional legislation pledging tax credits, accelerated depreciation and wage subsidies, but the bill languished (Harrison, 1974, p. 16). His rival, President Johnson, sent a letter to 600 large corporations asking them to invest in the ghetto. IBM located a 600-worker plant in Bed-Stuyvesant (Cross, 1969, p. 74). Both claimed credit. In any case, the strategy never took root; the results were poor, and of the few plants that opened, many eventually closed down (Tabb, 1972, pp. 392-9).
More typical of the Sixties were programs supporting development or support of black-owned (51%) businesses. Such programs fell within definitions of “black capitalism” which meant encouraging black-owned startup and profit maximization for existing firms. Federal government programs such as SBA’s almost always pursued “black capitalism” as their formal strategy. In 1969, Nixon established the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) by executive order. In that year that Office, and Census Bureau, conducted the first national survey of minority-owned firms. The survey uncovered over 322,000 MBE firms producing over $10 billion in sales—one half of which were black-owned. OMBE grants helped establish a national network of minority business assistance nonprofits, including National Minority Purchasing Council, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and National Council of LaRaza. SBA in 1969 also renamed and refocused its SBIC program to establish Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Companies (MESBIC) which, while usually white-owned, provided venture capital through purchase of stock in minority-owned firms.
Black capitalist strategy was not only adopted by governments, many examples can be found of local African-American led initiatives, such as Rev. Leon H. Sullivan’s Opportunities Industrialization Center (1964) in Philadelphia. The Center, an employment training program tied to the Rev. Sullivan’s church was funded by his 10-36 plan (parishioners contributed $10 for 36 months). The proceeds established the Zion Non-Profit Charitable Trust; the Trust with endowment support started a number of subsidiary programs, probably the most notable being the Progress Investment Associates which built moderate-income housing. Finally, philanthropies, such as the Taconic Foundation, which founded in 1967 the Cooperative Assistance Fund, a fund capitalized by infusions from nine other foundations, intended to invest in minority business firms. Ford Foundation cooperated with this fund (von Hoffman, 2012, pp. 23-4).
Another example (1968), was Pittsburgh’s Dorothy Mae Richardson and her block club. Originally formed to fight rats and landlords (redundant?) and improve access to housing loans, the club allied with a local bank and together set up an innovative program to make home loans and provide technical assistance to low-income neighborhood residents. They called their new program the Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS)—which by mid-1970 had blossomed into the nationally-renowned NHS Program to be further described later. Other examples of local black capitalist programs include the East Los Angeles Mexican-American Community Union (TELACU), Cleveland’s Hough Area Development Corporation, and Father Louis Gigante’s South East Bronx Community Organization Development Corporation to serve Puerto Ricans. (von Hoffman, 2012, pp. 26-7)
Not without its successes Black Capitalism, however, lost momentum rapidly. In a very short time, it was overwhelmed by a Du Bois-like African-American community development: “community economic development”.
Community Economic Development
Early Great Society/Community Development-related initiatives programs struck a discordant note among many in ghetto and Black neighborhoods. “The rapidly weakening economic and social connections between the minority poor in inner-city neighborhoods and the larger world outside the neighborhoods” shifted over the following years “to a focus on self-reliance, separate development, and community control of public institutions … driven simultaneously by feelings of abandonment and an effort to assert pride and dignity in a distinct identity”. The shift only seemed to worsen the exclusion of the neighborhood (Halpern, 1995, p. 84).
The shift sadly seemed to isolate/separate the neighborhood from racially-mixed neighborhood initiatives/CDOs. But the Second Ghettos, Clark’s Dark Ghetto (Clark, 1965). The timing was terrible as these neighborhoods were literally torn asunder just as soon as new residents arrived. The southern Civil Rights Movement not only raised expectation, but taught how political power could be used for social and political change. Prodded by the urban renewal “Negro removal”, facilitated by Community Action Programs, and triggered by ad hoc events, constant injustice, an increasingly sputtering Big City economy, these “communities within communities” organized and struck at the power arrayed against them–be it Robert Moses, City Hall, bureaucrats, business–whatever. Dark Ghettos resurrected earlier notions about African-American neighborhoods as colonies, and, as Halpern noted, assimilation and black capitalism lost appeal, but more importantly, lost meaning to many—especially the younger generations.
©ommunity economic development reemerged in the mid-1960 out of a growing conviction among a subsequent generation of inner city community leaders that the economic renewal of their communities was of little concern to the private sector or to government. … the goal of integration as a chimera and the American ideals of social and geographic mobility and equal opportunity as irretrievably corrupted … Community economic development thus served at first as a concrete expression … in an old idea in the African-American community, that of separate development … including an insistence on local control of as many social institutions … and self-reliance [as] an affirmation of black identity (Halpern, 1995, p. 128).
Bennett Harrison saw such community economic development as “institution-building”, not merely increasing per capita income or individual achievement. He sees it as “a substantial expansion of black businesses (particularly through cooperative forms of ownership), and large-scale transfer to property to ghetto residents. For him, community economic development involves pre-vocational (remedial) and skill training by these firms—and local control of schools, police and health facilities (Harrison, 1974, p. 13). The distinction to grasp is community economic development can “look like” a black capitalist or traditional housing strategy—its key purpose, however, is not integration and individual entrepreneurial success, but the advancement of a community, and its residents, as a whole.
What did followed from community economic development was its reliance upon the CDC as a flexible structure that could flow with trends, developing needs and entrepreneurial opportunities? In this view, CDCs are not merely bureaucratic structures, however, they are dependent upon a political and resident support for their success and continuity. While CDCs may not follow a “community organizing” path they must create “a solid base of political support within the community … to present a solid front to outside agencies” (Harrison, 1974, p. 22). The infusion of “political support” in a community economic development strategy, however, alters the criteria employed in the “practice” or implementation of programs and tools. This is most vividly expressed in the vast different between mainstream ED business lending, where the company that receives the loan is expected to pay the loan back; loans are made to firms with a reasonable expectation they can do so. This is not necessarily true for “community economic development” lending which is less concerned the loan be repaid than the loan enables entrepreneurism, resilience, community visibility, and a variety of social-psychological and identity factors of benefit to the larger community.
Almost immediately, Great Society programs provided an opportunity for both Du Bois-style community development and for the linkage of community organizing, community organization and an initial proto-type of community economic development. It came in the form of Black Power, Black Pride, and Community Control. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton published Black Power in 1967. Calling for a new generation of Black leaders to represent the community because black interests require the overthrow of “white colonialism”. This new black leadership acquires its legitimation and power from the community itself.
Stressing political independence more than separatism, black power advocates saw this movement as the best guarantee of self-preservation from a hostile society but as a necessary precondition to promoting group interests in such an environment. Social solidarity and community cohesion were prerequisites for success: black people should “consolidate behind their own, so they can bargain from a position of strength”[iii] “Black power ideology asserts that the American culture is pluralistic and that the distinctively black component of that culture in not inferior [Black Pride]. The black perspective is therefore not to be sacrificed on the altar of assimilation, but is something to be preserved and valued”[iv]
Advocates demanded creating “parallel community institutions”. “We must begin to think of the black community as a base of organization to control institutions in that community”[v], making explicit their rejection of experts, bureaucrats and professionals who impart “middle-class biases, unsuitable techniques”[vi] that harmed the community and its residents. Schools were a targeted institution, and teacher unions resisted when politicians like Mayor Lindsey of NYC encouraged decentralized control through community boards. Caught up in the confusion, disruption, and inexperience associated with Great Society/Model City programs, in a riot-torn nation, community control produce few successes, and the new generation of black leaders turned to elective office rather than direct democratic community control.
The Black Power Movement seemingly impacted CD in another manner. The Oakland chapter of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), founded in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, espoused “cultural nationalism” and perceived black neighborhoods as a colony; that chapter evolved into the Black Panther Party. Members of the early Black Panthers enrolled at San Francisco State College two years later, hoping to mobilize black students and raise their consciousness for activism. An incident at the college involving the school newspaper and the Black Student Union led to a strike in December, 1967 that generate turmoil leading to the school’s shutdown. This turmoil triggered the rise of a professor of English (and future Senator), S. I. Hayakawa. Negotiations to reopen the school accepted demands for a new “Black Studies” program which began in Fall, 1969[vii]. This is probably the first official contemporary Black Studies program—by1974 an estimated 120 degree-granting programs existed. Early Black Studies programs involved themselves deeply into community and neighborhood activities, and accordingly during the 1970’s one might construe this involvement as one of the first manifestations of university-led community/economic development.
Community economic development, therefore, as well as other CD approaches, share a common need for a structure sufficiently flexible and suitably empowered to formulate, advocate and implement its strategies, utilize tools, and manage programs. The nonprofit community development corporation (CDC) arrived on the CD scene during the 1960’s and has remained the workhorse organization, CDO, of community development since. Accordingly, it is helpful to step back and examine what has become a cornerstone EDO for most American communities of size.
Community Development Corporation
The explosion of CDCs that followed the Sixties and the huge variety of programs they administer make it impossible to single out of any one as “typical”. In the Sixties, one of the first CDCs to form were associated with a strategy labeled “asset-based development”.
The post-1960’s CDC explosion and the huge variety of programs they administered make it impossible to single out any one as “typical.” One of the first CDCs to form was associated with an “asset-based development strategy and structure.” The Harlem Commonwealth Council (HCC) formed as a CDC in 1967 with assets of $15 million. HCC included “an office building, a factory manufacturing wood, metal and plastic interiors for supermarkets, an office equipment and furniture company, a data-processing facility, a foundry, a contract construction company, a pharmacy and a sewing/hi-fidelity store” (Harrison, 1974, p. 18). ’s “major purpose is the economic revitalization and on-going vitality of Harlem, enabling residents to actively participate in that vitality” by developing “assets/businesses” to provide employment, services, and quality of life to the neighborhood. (Harrison, 1974, p. 18). The HCC conglomerate is still around (and vibrant) as I write this history. Many may think of CDCs as poor but poverty-stricken, store/church-front nonprofits. The HCC proves the opposite also was true.
Whether HCC was the first, who cares; earlier in 1964 the Ford Foundation made a sizeable grant to the Allegheny Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods (ACTION), founded in 1955 by Mayor David Lawrence and Richard King Mellon (our old urban renewal heroes) to improve city housing. The grant to ACTION was intended as a “proxy for local government, concentrating much more on economic development (than social services), and on residential and commercial building and renewal.” It was, as Domhoff asserts, a “distinction of considerable significance … An attempt to create an organizational structure relatively independent of local government for improving conditions in the inner city” (Domhoff, 2014, p. 7).
In 1965 another Ford grant was made to City Crusade against Poverty to train neighborhood leaders; and in 1966 yet another to the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, intended to unite corporate and neighborhood leaders in an effort to bring sizeable private firms into the ghetto to create jobs (“Jobs to People”). That, of course, was the CDC RFK and Javits funded, discussed earlier in the Black Capitalism section.
From its inception, the CDC was a structure sufficiently flexible to pursue different strategies and operate in different neighborhoods; it could be set up by churches, labor unions, Hispanic neighborhoods, white ethnics and, of course, African-Americans. In Chicago, it funded Shel Trapp’s efforts as well as Gale Cincotta’s—both of which led anti-redlining programs intended to force banks to invest and instill appropriate real estate practices in changing neighborhoods. Within a decade of the Great Society, a national, state and local nonprofit community development network had sprung up—the foundation unit being a neighborhood-based community development corporation[viii].
<quotation>
The first CDC’s were founded primarily by community activists … out of African-American social movements [or] ethnic organizing movements including Latino … many had religious roots … They tended to be large multifaceted organizations with a broad array of programs and large projects … Although many engaged in some form of housing development, they were more oriented to business and work force development than CDCs that began later. (Stoutland, 1999, pp. 196–7)</quotation>
CD’s “comprehensiveness” concept embraces activities/programs from many policy areas as relevant to people-based community development. Schools and education, health and crime, recreation, policing and housing are just a few of the more common. Is a neighborhood housing entity a CDO? Is a CDC mental health clinic a CDO? Is a community nonprofit that operates a Head Start program, a sports league, lead-based paint removal program, a truancy program, a single mothers’ assistance program, a day care center, a furniture factory, a grocery store or an abortion counseling clinic a CDO? For most community developers, the answer to each question is likely yes—so long as it is community-controlled and located within a “distressed” neighborhood.
How is that measured? Chiefly by the number of board members who live in the neighborhood? Community participation has been a longstanding and exceedingly troublesome issue in community development, and a persistent concern in the CD literature. From its get-go with War on Poverty “maximum feasible participation,” it has not gone well. Governance often involves some tenuous imbalance among staff, city hall staff, funders, professionals in divergent disciplines and professions, community leaders, politicians, heads of key neighborhood institutions (often non-resident) and neighborhood residents. Good luck with community control if policy is made by this cattle stampede.
CDCs necessarily must possess one defining characteristic—they must serve a defined neighborhood or neighborhood-like geography (West Side). Their boards can be filled with domineering professionals and silent, even hostile residents; but if they provide people and/or physical or business-relevant services, they fit our bill. However, in this history when such an entity engages in political or social change or electoral–partisan action, they are defined as a “movement”—and move outside our definition of a CDC. Most community mobilization (organizing) organizations are not considered CDCs in this history.
<a>COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN THE SEVENTIES
Community development exploded during the seventies. This history makes a concerted effort to distinguish between wings/movements in that the purposes of each are noticeably different, even though they serve the same low-income/distressed neighborhoods. The first wing combines two “sub-movements”: ACORN (the example discussed below)—labeled as “Neo-Alinsky” to differentiate it from Alinsky-style community organizing also prominent in the seventies. The next wing (Settlement Houses to Neighborhood Services) follows a path initially bushwhacked by social reformer Jane Addams’s settlement house which, post-Great Society, developed into a “comprehensive community services center CDC” often found in racially/ethnically homogenous neighborhoods. The final wing (From Housing/Slum Removal to Neighborhood Revitalization)
might be described as CD-lite in that it follows CD principles, uses CD tools and operates out of a CDC; but it typically pursues pure neighborhood revitalization as perceived by its residents—shorn of any meaningful social change or class consciousness.
<b>Community Organizing: ACORN and National People’s Action
<b>Neo-Alinsky ACORN
Community organizing, as it evolved over the next half-century, is not just knocking on doors and mobilizing a neighborhood to respond to perceived or real threats (highways, redlining, urban renewal). The 1970’s-style Neo-Alinsky community mobilization/organizing wing employs neighborhood-level citizen mobilization as a vehicle to leverage national social, political and economic change. This is not Alinsky-style community organizing. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a neo-Alinsky movement, departs from Alinsky’s pure neighborhood mobilization for neighborhood-level goals in favor of larger, even national objectives. On the other hand, the seventies’ Alinsky iteration, the National People’s Movement (see below) seeks to mobilize neighborhoods for neighborhood change.
Neo-Alinsky: For Fischer, “Neo-Alinsky projects in the 1970’s employed the ideology of the new populism—decentralization, participatory democracy, self-reliance, mistrust of government and corporate institutions, empowering low-income and moderate-income people … connecting [them] with the national political process”. Neo-Alinskyism broke away from its founder’s goals, borrowed from his popularity, but retained much of his style and techniques. Neo-Alinskyism was a social movement, a class-based social movement whose goal was “to develop mass political organizations rooted in neighborhoods, grounded in local concerns, and focused on winning concrete gains. The goal was to advance social and economic democracy, empower people, and challenge power relations within and beyond the neighborhood” (Fisher, 1994, p. 146).
Neo-Alinskyism followed a “majoritarian strategy” geared primarily to the needs of low–moderate-income people. It was not restricted to a single ethnic group, a particular neighborhood or a racial minority. Neo-Alinskyism used local organizing to fuse a national coalition for change at the municipal, state and, especially, national level. In such an overt political context, community organizing, using economic development and other concerns, is viewed as a political movement with a vital local ED/CD agenda, not an EDO. As an earlier example, we could have chosen the Community Services Organization, founded in 1947 to advocate for California Latino civil and economic rights. Future Congressman Edward Roybal, founder of Community Services Community Services Organization, received his training from the Alinsky-Industrial Areas Foundation. The Community Service Organization trained Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
Our poster child for Neo-Alinskyism was ACORN, founded in 1970 in Little Rock Arkansas by Wade Rathke. Rathke got his training from the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). NWRO, founded in 1967, also deviated from Alinsky’s reliance on existing neighborhood institutions (especially churches and unions), emphasizing instead a house-to-house, knock on the door, sit at the kitchen table approach to identify issues (not necessarily neighborhood-level concerns) that could serve to mobilize targeted individuals in participating in a larger class-based movement (Thompson, 2016). “For ACORN the neighborhood was a ‘training ground’ or staging area from which to mount larger campaigns for democracy, equity and justice” (Fisher, 1994, p. 148). Coalitions among neighborhoods, and then cities and states, could be forged to advance issues at higher levels of government, or attacks on corporations. Alinsky opposed any sort of state or national organization as “potentially fascist.”
In 1970 Rathke organized six Little Rock low-income neighborhoods, found an issue (poor people’s access to furniture) and took it up the line to get Governor Winthrop Rockefeller to bring in a furniture warehouse. From that victory ACORN skyrocketed, moving onto school lunch programs, welfare rights, anti-blockbusting, public housing, and even to a ‘Save the City’ campaign. In 1975, ACORN branched across the river to Texas and by 1980 had 25000+ dues-paying members in 19 states. Two years later, ACORN claimed 50000 members in 26 states (Fisher, 1994, p. 152). By that time, ACORN was involved in electoral politics.
No longer a neighborhood-based interest group ACORN over the next thirty years, became a vibrant national, state and local player in elections, using its voter registration and GOTV strengths. Other movement-based groups, Massachusetts Fair Share, Pubic Research Interest Groups, and Philadelphia’s Consumer’s Party followed ACORN’s lead and much of its model.
If ACORN in my eyes is a political movement, not an EDO, one might wonder how it differs from chambers of commerce (or the Committee for Economic Development—CED). It would be hard, indeed, to argue that chambers do not represent class-based interests of the business community, and CED the highest echelons of global capitalism. The nineteenth century struggle against machines in our Big Cities also has to be thought of as class-based, as was the Chamber struggle against FDR’s New Deal. Our answer, probably unsatisfactory to many, is chambers/CED created separate legal entities, such as civic reform clubs, PACs, industrial departments—and after the turn of the century endeavored to corral local partisanship through politically-neutral staff professionalization. None of this was evident in ACORN.
Still, the line can be quite blurred, as evidenced in several western and southwestern postwar business “movements” (Abbott’s neo progressives) that controlled city hall pursuing a mostly ED agenda (Phoenix and San Antonio for example). Even in those instances, despite considerable overlap, chambers were legally and organizationally separate from the political movement organization. Neo-Alinsky community organizing, however, touches a rather raw nerve in that economic/community development not only extends into (local) politics, but engages in activities/strategies that profoundly affect the operation and viability of the local policy system itself. While this history does not attempt to resolve this issue, others are welcome to try. That CD’s Neo-Alinsky movements add a new dimension to CD and maybe ED, however, is obvious.
Alinsky-Style: Not all Seventies community organizers were Neo-Alinsky. On Chicago’s west side Alinsky-trained Shel Trapp and Gale Cincotta mobilized two neighborhoods by harassing real estate agents trying to create panic selling and confronting uncooperative public officials. Joining forces, they formed the West Side Coalition. Together Cincotta and Trapp established a national organization to support local neighborhood-based initiatives.
First, they tapped a local network of financial backers, and then turned to Father Gino Baroni and his National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. Earlier Baroni had convinced the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to create a Campaign for Human Development to organize low-income ethnic and African-American communities. Baroni used his contacts (National Urban Coalition and Center for Community Change) to assist Cincotta to obtain funding for a conference to bring together community activists across the nation (Domhoff, 2014, pp. 9-10). That conference was held in 1972, and attracted 2000 attendees from 74 cities. The conference founded the National People’s Action, a nation-wide organization for neighborhoods. In short order, the National People’s Action founded the National Information and Training Center (NTIC) to train organizers in Alinsky-style actions.
Cincotta’s (Trapp, Baroni) efforts prove that, as early as 1972, whatever the wing, strategy or tool, neighborhood community development was cobbling together resources and national supportive networks that provided money, access and expertise which in turn permitted local CDOs to develop organizational power and impact. The National People Action (which continues to this day) is only one example of many that could be cited. Earlier, this history asserted that by the early 1970’s community development had already “evolved” a national organizational infrastructure composed of everything from “CD trade associations”, financing-networks, to entities that bordered on “movements”. That this CD-complex formed so rapidly, and naturally, almost instinctively, deserves comment. Its contrast to the inner-focused American Economic Development Council, the pre-1968 mainstay of classic mainstream economic development, is quite revealing and suggestive.
The Cincotta, Trapp, Baroni story does not end in 1972 Trapp, hired in 1973 by Chicago’s Catholic Charities to engage in neighborhood organizing, pulled together a coalition of twenty neighborhood groups, called the Metropolitan Area Housing Alliance. Redlining was its first targeted issue. Together with National People’s Action Trapp convinced the Chicago City Council to approve an ordinance requiring banks’ lending in Chicago to publically disclose their mortgage loans and deposits by geographic area. The gap between deposits and where banks made mortgages was quickly exposed. The Illinois state legislature passed similar legislation; by 1975, after lobbying by a network of organizations, Congress approved the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act that made national mortgage lending disclosure by medium and large banks. NTIC did the analysis from the data that followed, and a flood of neighborhood-based groups and formal organizations took advantage of its analysis and applied it to their neighborhoods. The author of this history did this in Buffalo, New York in 1977. The pressure that followed led to Congress passing the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) (Squires, 1992).
CRA proved to be both a strategy and a tool for all CD wings in the decades that followed. Foundations, such as Ford and Charles Stewart Mott, provided financial support to community groups—the latter making over 218 community grants previous to 2002. Much of its success occurred in the 1980’s, but CRA is a platform neighborhood strategy that leverages any number of specific initiatives beyond redlining and community disinvestment. The methodology, analysis; data-driven CD should be considered a CD tool. The strategy can serve different goals, such as ending racial discrimination, ending disinvestment in a neighborhood, leveraging other bank neighborhood involvement, commercial investment or neighborhood branch formation.
A final point concerning Seventies Alinsky-style community organizing was that it was not confined to northern Big Cities, nor was it the exclusive preserve of “Progressive” CDOs. Alinsky community organizing essentially boils down to community-based pressure group politics. It could be used by anyone, for any number of reasons. Fisher asserts that “traditional Alinskyism” was most effective in Mexican-American communities in the southwest and west. In these efforts, the Catholic Church (as it did in Alinsky’s Chicago) played a major role. Alinskyite organizations like COPS in San Antonio, United Neighborhood Organizations in Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Organization in Houston played a vital role in a larger economic development agenda in their communities (Fisher, 1994, p. 147).
During the 1970’s anti-abortion, anti-busing, and even those resisting neighborhood change, adopted community organizing and CDO structures. ROAR (Restore our Alienated Rights) in Boston may be one example of how white middle-income neighborhoods embraced with some success Alinsky’s methods. While “CDOs” of this genre generate bitter reaction within Progressive-leaning, Community Development, it does not temper the reality Neo-Alinsky and Alinsky tools/structures are not exclusively Progressivist and that Privatist versions can exist as well.
From Settlement House to Neighborhood Services
Much of what had happened to political machines happened to settlement house/social worker neighborhood nexus after the Great Society. The New Deal, professionalization, and the Second Ghetto also took their toll (Trolander, 1987). Urban renewal, highways, and immigrant suburbanization were definitely unhelpful. By the 1950’s neighborhood settlement houses were seriously stressed. “Neighborhood-based services did not disappear completely. At least until the late 1950’s most inner city neighborhoods managed to sustain a diverse set of recreational and cultural programs for children and youth, public health nurses … vestiges of street corner social work with gangs … and schools continued to make sporadic efforts” (Halpern, 1995, p. 150). Gray Areas and MDY funded settlement houses to conduct their experiments in contemporary community development—and then the Great Society waltzed into the neighborhood.
Neighborhood racial and ethnic change and the Second Ghetto isolated older settlement houses and furthered the gap social work (and education) professionalism had created. In majority-black neighborhoods, community action’s maximum feasible participation and community control essentially finished the job. CAPs assumed neighborhood service responsibility and it was not long before Head Start became a cornerstone neighborhood services program. In neighborhoods without a CAP, government bureaucracies assumed a greater role in providing services to low-income and underclass—the traditional clientele of the settlement houses. Professionally, government social work paid better than settlement house and clinical social work beat out traditional social work. With government taking over the most desperate, settlement houses restricted their clientele to those who could pay and to those they could help. By the early 1970’s for all practical purposes, CD-related neighborhood services had been taken over by HUD/CDBG funded CDCs.
The neighborhood center of today is very different from the settlement house of the early years. Then a white, female college graduate, without an M.S.W. headed the typical house. She [and staff] probably lived in the settlement house. The surrounding neighborhood was likely to consist of poor whites. Advocacy … [meant] settlement workers speaking on behalf of the poor. In 1986 a black male with an M.S.W. heads the typical settlement house, now called a neighborhood center. He may live out in the suburbs … The center’s clientele is mostly black, and the poor insist to a certain extent to speak for themselves (Trolander, 1987, p. 235).
At this point the provision of former settlement neighborhood services in majority black neighborhoods intersects with both community control and ghetto as colony seeking liberation. In such neighborhoods, neighborhood services became mostly subsumed under “community economic development”.
The poor were no longer underserved per se, but acquired services from a fragmented, hard to fathom, confusing to access “system” that appeared incoherent to the user. “There were more entry points, service sites, categorical programs, and specialized roles” than ever (Halpern, 1995, p. 184). Slipping through the cracks could be catastrophic. On top of inevitable difficulties of proving health, education, police, and social services were the need to coordinate them, evaluate them as an aggregate, and keep track of the unfortunates making their way through the maze. Old-style CD “comprehensiveness” had become redefined into a Gray Areas/MFY coordination nightmare.
Neighborhood service CDCs were related to, or a derivative of, OEO’s War on Poverty. As OEO’s came under attack in LBJ’s later years, it funded an association of CDCs under OEO’s Title VII. That organization, the National Congress for Community Economic Development (NCCED), was helpful in securing support to extend OEO’s existence—but at a cost of restricting membership in NCCED to less than 40 Title VII CDCs. In 1977, NCCED opened up membership. While initially successful, larger more diverse membership generated internal conflicts, membership turnover. Western state Hispanic and Native American groups spun off their own organization. By 1980 NCCED members still lingered about 40 groups. The organization teetered on the edge. In that year, however, Robert Zdenek became president with a mission to expand membership and deal with a variety of CD issues. When Title VII was discontinued, NCCED was instrumental in creating the Office of Community Services Discretionary Fund—a fund which continues to provide financing critical to CDCs.
Over the following decade NCCED helped develop a network of supportive organizations (such as Friends of Rural Development, Coalition for Low-Income Community Development, the Council for Community-Based Development, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and Religious Congregations as Partners). Membership grew to 700-800 organizations. Today it struggles with its role, as a “trade organization” or an advocacy group—linking local CDCs with the vast array of foundations and policy institutes that currently exist. A network of state chapters provides an additional layer of networking and resources. A survey/publication, Against All Odds, published originally in 1989, and updated in 1991 and 1995 describes through case studies accomplishments of CDCs in neighborhood services and neighborhood-level community economic development.
From Housing/Slum Removal to Neighborhood Revitalization
Our last CD neighborhood-based wing emerged from the shadows of UR, Interstate Highways and Sixties suburban-induced Big City neighborhood decline. To me this new neighborhood CDO provided a home for a new generation that in earlier periods might have been CD housers; Thirties neighborhood and recreational planners like Perry, and “lovers of place” that valued their home stomping grounds and were determined to protect and preserve memories of their home. These CDOs are not the homeowners associations of Privatopia, to be found in Chapter 19, nor are they trying to save the world through social change. They want to “revitalize” their neighborhood and preserve its identity for future generations.
These CDOs are “neighborhood organizations that limited their focus to community development in a single low and moderate-income neighborhood and looked skeptically on projects ‘to build new institutions or amass power for external uses … social change or a new political movement”. What they feared most was physical deterioration and neighborhood economic base weakness, often caused by thoughtless actions of outsiders–institutional, government and corporate–against which an unorganized neighborhood could not protect itself (Fisher, 1994, p. 157). They often rejected alliances with neighboring CDOs, and glorified in a Springsteen kind of way their “glory days”—yearning to bring about their return. They defined their relevant sub-municipal competitive hierarchy and tried to increase their standing in it. Such CDOs combined different activities (housing, traditional ED, and neighborhood services) and functions (interest group and social networking) that chambers of commerce performed for the business community.
As an example, the Southeast Baltimore Community Organization (SECO) incorporated in 1970 actually starts in 1966 when the Baltimore City Council approved plans to put in a six lane (Interstate 83), demolishing hundreds of homes in Southeast Baltimore neighborhoods. Close to downtown and waterfront, SE Baltimore housed 95000 second generation white ethnics. It was not a slum, nor predominately low-income—rather working and middle class. Activists, included future Senator Barbara Mikulski (godmother of SECO), formed a loose coalition (SCAR—Southeast Council against the Road). Eventually, I-83 was stopped by qualifying one neighborhood for the Register of Historic Places.
In the course of highway opposition, coalition members shared a variety of issues and concerns, ranging from urban renewal to redlining, a threatened industrial rezoning, declining social services, and lack of new schools. Task forces were formed, research done, and individual projects selected for action—keep a library open or set up a recycling center, for example. In April 1971, with more than 1000 present, 90 neighborhood organizations joined together to create SECO, an umbrella CDO. From the beginning, it was a coalition of block clubs, churches, union locals, ethnic fraternal organizations. When appropriate, SECO used Alinsky tactics, but its hallmark was not to burn bridges with City Hall. SECO focused on issues, not institutions, politicians or enemies. It would work with anyone to solve a problem.
Its first formal program in 1974, was a youth program, but during the seventies it won zoning changes, kept open a public nursing home, got a residentially-friendly traffic pattern approved, secured better city services, housing inspection teams, a school program, a neighborhood health program, and an anti-juvenile delinquency program. Eventually it got a Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) program, and moved into housing development, building hundreds of units, using a housing development subsidiary (SDI). SECO established a community controlled Arts and Crafts company that sold goods made by residential elderly and handicapped, and founded a primary health care facility that served 3000 patients a month. It also founded a neighborhood-based commercial revitalization CDO, the Highlandtown Revitalization Corporation. In 1971 SECO had one paid staff; six years later 41 (Fisher, 1994, pp. 157-61). Probably each Big City (and many second tier) in the north and Midwest formed a CDO similar in style, organization, and activities corresponding to SECO. By Seventies’ end there were hundreds.
These neighborhood CDOs got their start as a “defensive mobilization” against an outside intruder that threatened negative impacts. Once the initial confrontation was over, these informal coalitions followed a number of paths. Many closed up shop; others like SECO started small and built themselves into a neighborhood CD conglomerate, combining activism, services, and neighborhood level mainstream physical, economic and community development. Our assessment is the Seventies were the high point for mainstream, business assistance/ED tools and strategies. Commercial revitalization and asset-based community development (starting factories, stores, businesses as subsidiaries) were hallmarks of this period—less prevalent in future decades.
By the 1980’s more CDOs fixed upon some form of housing development as their core competency. Housing had always been a CD priority, and by this point a considerable body of knowledge, expertise and tools had been assembled. Housing was visible, and with reasonably sophisticated management, investment was easier. Housing was less risky, more predictable, and attracted more and more CDOs into its orbit. The prototype neighborhood housing CDC was the NHS. During the decade, several critical and highly important “tools” and programs developed from individual initiatives in several cities. Each of these tools or programs started from a single initiative and over time evolved, in two cases with profound federal involvement, into a national system able to be tapped into by CDOs, neighborhoods.
NHS: The first started from Pittsburgh’s Central Northside block club led by Dorothy Mae Richardson. Its campaign to obtain housing loans for low-income neighbors attracted local bank and foundation support. A first ever program was founded to provide home loans to non-bankable applicants and provide counseling, technical assistance to sustain homeownership and maintain a quality home. The new program was called Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS). The NHS innovation was picked up on by the Federal Home Loan Bank, and in 1973 FHLB joined with HUD to create a task force whose hope was to take the Pittsburgh experiment nationwide. The task force added a key element, a secondary market, where these low-income mortgages could be sold to investors, as a way of creating a revolving mortgage fund for new mortgages. They launched the program and by 1978 sixty NHS programs had been established. Congressional legislation transformed the task force into the National Reinvestment Corporation (subsequently renamed NeighborWorks America) that branched out into rural communities (its first being in West Rutland, VT). Over the next four decades, NHS expanded to 240 communities.
Community Land Trust: In a similar vein, learning and copying from a diverse variety of international projects/experiments[ix], Ralph Borsodi, Robert Swann and Charles Sherrod, founded the first American “community land trust” (CLT) in 1969, near Albany, Georgia. The goal of New Communities Inc. was to secure good land for future African-American farmers. New Communities purchased a 5000-acre farm, and “platted” it for lease (ground leasing) to homesteads and cooperatives. New Communities operated for about twenty years; in the 1970s about a dozen rural CLTs started.
A CLT is a nonprofit 501© (3) that acquires land in a target area with the intention of retaining control over the land forever. Any asset on the land, a building, can be sold, but the land is only leased to users so long as acceptable to the purposes for which the CLT was incorporated. The CLT retains extensive rights and can preserve quality of structures and enforce compatible uses. In the event of lease default, the CLT can reacquire control. The CLT board of directors is composed of lease holders, neighborhood residents, and institutional representative from entities responsible for the founding and subsequent operation of the CLT. The model was extended into urban areas/neighborhoods as a solution to such problems as affordable housing, gentrification, and displacement. The first urban CLT, the Community Land Cooperative of Cincinnati (1981), dealt with displacement of low-income blacks. Perhaps the most known CLT, founded in the mid-1980s, was an element of Boston’s Dudley Neighborhood Initiative.
South Shore Bank: The last example of a Seventies CD program/tool is Chicago’s South Shore Bank. South Shore Bank is valuable as an example of Seventies CD, but also for its business model that challenged a CD core “principle”. As frequently noted, much of post-Great Society CD is uncomfortable with “capitalism” (for lack of a better word). An important CD explanation for distressed neighborhood decline is disinvestment—by various profit-seeking entities. Bank lending and anti-redlining, as already discussed, were early-on and core post-Great Society CD strategies. Shore Bank demonstrated how capitalism can be used, albeit reshaped a bit, into “community capitalism” (Taub, 1988), to promote neighborhood revitalization.
The reader might be aware Shore Bank commenced operations in 1972—and went into receivership in 2010. A consortium of private and public investors supported a takeover by Urban Partnership Bank—and FDIC picked up 80% of its losses ($347million). The bank has reopened and the multi-city network of “Shore Banks” has been spun off and continues independently. The default caused in part by the 2008 financial collapse, a post-2000 weakness in lending standards, a sustained decline that seems related to post-2000 job losses and declines in household income, and a bit of being “too big for its britches” taking management’s eyes off the ball”. The Bank operated successfully for the better part of three decades; its business model still, in my eyes, constitutes a useful model for future generations.
Community organizing anti-redlining applies pressure through CRA to encourage/require existing bank investment within inner-city neighborhoods. South Shore Bank used a different model—it created “a self-sustaining [bank with an] independent capital base, and the discipline of the profit motive … a bank that could be tough-minded about loans … satisfy bank examiners, make a profit, and still transform an inner city neighborhood without [gentrification]. (Grzywinski, 1991, p. 88) Three knowledgeable concerned professionals blocked the bank’s move to the suburbs in 1972. Shortly after they acquired the Bank. The old South Shore had seriously disinvested in its service area in response to neighborhood and racial transition. The goal of the new owners was to reverse disinvestment so residents could invest in their neighborhood.
Acknowledging neighborhoods “compete for everything—resources, businesses, people, and skills”—a sort of neighborhood competitive hierarchy—they wanted to ensure South Side could compete. To compete, neighborhood deterioration could not be pervasive and extensive—recognizing that distressed neighborhoods are not identical, and that a minimum level of viability was required if neighborhood revitalization was to be achieved. South Shore recognized its most viable asset was its housing stock. Accordingly, they turned to housing rehabilitation encouraging and financing a series of rehabilitation entrepreneurs to restore neighborhood housing.
Using their bank holding company, they set up subsidiaries, including a CDC that bought apartment buildings in targeted areas, and rehabbed them—while funding entrepreneurs to rehab neighboring buildings. The CDO initially rehabbed three buildings and Shore Bank-financed housing rehabbers finished up 17 more. Attracting large foundation investment to finance new acquisitions to rehab, more buildings were tackled. Alongside this strategy, a variety of patient, risk-insensitive deposits, which for the most part paid competitive interest rates, ensured the bank had sufficient capital to both lend, and reserves to satisfy bank examiners. They also recognized that small deposits were too costly, and took steps to ensure their deposits made them profits. They reached outside the neighborhood for socially-conscious investors attracted to their purposes—but they paid competitive interest rates. Their strategy was to reverse disinvestment—but also to restore neighborhood competitiveness. Over the following decades, their model expanded to Cleveland and Detroit. The eventual bank failure, however, suggests a South Shore Bank model alone cannot revitalize a neighborhood, and strongly points to neighborhood’s economic base, its jobs, occupations, and income generation as critical elements of a sustained revitalization.
CDFI: The Bank’s mission was amplified in the summer of 1992 when a guy named Clinton visited on his way to the White House. He pledged, if elected, to fund 100 South Shore Banks (and 1000 microenterprise centers). A coalition of CD loan funds, banks and credit unions, microenterprise lenders, community venture funds and CDCs thought this was an idea worth living up to, so they formed the CDFI Coalition[x] in the same year. Clinton (July 1993) submitted to Congress legislation that, among other features, established an agency, the CDFI Fund. The bill passed in 1994; the Agency was located in the Department of Treasury. Community Development Financial Institutions fund is a federal market-based approach to support financial institutions in economically disadvantaged communities. Its goal is to inject capital into neighborhoods lacking sustained access to (residential/commercial) investment capital[xi].
The Third Ghetto
The Third Ghetto is a story principally told from the Community Development perspective. Mainstream ED historically has been less focused on neighborhoods and people-based CD issues and Mainstream’s role has more frequently been categorized as being in opposition to the Third Ghetto, or at least indifferent. The growth coalition that supported the CBD/eds and meds physical revitalization (the last phase urban renewal) is often confused with the local real estate sector which played a prominent role in the Second Ghetto’s formation. The Third Ghetto was a logical evolution of Hirsch’s Second Ghetto, and so the story below starts in the 1940’s by presenting the development of what could be (and is) the Second Ghetto but proceeds into the Sixties/Seventies when deindustrialization and jobs—affecting the potential for either assimilation or community economic development to succeed–makes its appearance on the ED/CD policy landscape. The entry of deindustrialization into neighborhood community development politics/strategy is the defining characteristic of the Third Ghetto. That will be developed in this section.
Deindustrialization, as interpreted through our Chapter One model, centers on the jurisdictional economic base and the particular mix of industries and sectors it contains. The jurisdictional economic base thus far has been principally the concern of Mainstream ED, however. Our industry/sector profit life cycle is the central dynamic of deindustrialization in that it outlines the general process and rationale of how industries and sectors evolve. Big Cities grew from their industrial backbone, manufacturing, and that is what deindustrialization is meant to describe: the decline in manufacturing. While the disease struck manufacturing firms across the nation, the South and West had developed through the federal government industrial decentralization and war production initiatives a newer set of “gazelle” manufacturing industries—many of which retained considerable viability during the formation of the Third Ghetto—indeed that is spectacularly true if one considers technology manufacturing, computer chips and computers, for example as gray-area manufacturing sectors. If so, deindustrialization was much more intense and central to the Big Cities—playing perhaps the chief role in the implosion of the Big City hegemony. That means during this period (1940-1995 or so) the impact of deindustrialization was much more critical to Big Cities, to Blacks, rather than Asians and even Hispanics. Western and Southern Third Ghettos were somewhat different and will be treated separately in a later section.
A final note concerning the deindustrialization’s evolution as relevant to Big Cities is that it manifested itself at different times and intensity among the Big Cities. No one pushed a button and all manufacturing sectors/industries declined simultaneously. Sectors evolved at their own pace, coped with their particular logistics, markets, and technology changes—not to mention oligarchy which favored those cities where oligarchic leaders were located—and deindustrialized followed that sporadic and uneven development. Massachusetts and New England textiles led the pack, of course, and basic materials, coal mining and then steel and chemicals their own timetable. Railroads were an early consolidator and their consolidation greatly impacted the Big City economic base. Since Big Cities agglomerated around different manufacturing sectors, decline in any single agglomeration did not necessarily affect all Big Cities equally, or at the same time. In that Detroit/Michigan, (and Great Lakes) home base for manufacturing’s greatest agglomeration, the auto industry (also, it might be added the so-called “arsenal of democracy” during the War) was especially vulnerable to deindustrialization’s effects. By the 1980’s foreign competition entered the picture and deindustrialization became very complex indeed.
Big City Third Ghettos developed their own patterns, policy systems, ED/CD strategies and politics because of the legacy and configuration of their former manufacturing hegemony, locations in the pathways of Southern Diaspora/Great Migration, character of their WWII war production, role in blazing physical community development (slum clearance, public housing, even planning), mix of ethnic groups and cultures, the especially disruptive installation of freeways and highways, and the gradual entry of the third global competitive hierarchy. Their eventual entry into 21st Century Contemporary ED reflected the process and the coping with change that characterized the Transition Era—thereby preserving not only regional variation, but state and location variation as well.
In any case, this section’s initial discussion of the Third Ghetto fleshes out, and overlaps with the transition from old-style community development to post-War on Poverty community development. It also presents the mechanics of how neighborhoods became a prime unit of Big City ED and reveals how neighborhoods entered into Big City policy systems, bringing about a serious change in Big City policy systems through the 1970’s and 1980’s. The reader might notice the emphasis on Big Cities, what are the formerly hegemonic large cities of the East Coast and Midwest/Great Lakes because their evolution in this period centered chiefly around their integration of new migrants from the Southern Diaspora and Great Migration—principally the latter. Unleashed mostly by WWII war production at least two, sometimes three (Puerto Rican) new political cultures (Scots-Irish/Deep South and African-American) assumed greater prominence in the now imploding Big City policy systems.
Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996, 2005)
Sugrue in the initial paragraphs, from his forward in 2005 edition offers a different look at why and how northern hegemonic cities declined—it is much more “radicalized/hardened” that his original 1996 Chapter one—identity politics has done more than creep into his argument.
(2005) The Origins of the Urban Crisis “explains the transformation of American cities—through a case study of Detroit—as the result of a combination of three forces that occurred simultaneously …. First, was the flight of jobs, particularly the relatively well-paying, secure and mostly unionized industrial jobs that dominated the postwar urban economy. Second was the persistence of workplace discrimination …. The third was intractable racial segregation in housing, segregation that led to the uneven distribution of power and resources in metropolitan areas, leaving some places behind while others thrived …. Origins uncovered a largely hidden, forgotten history of actions by policy-makers, large corporations, small businesses (particularly realtors) and ordinary citizens that created and reinforced racial and class inequities, and perpetuated the political marginalization of African-Americans”. (p. xviii). Sugrue attacks what he views as a contemporary paradigm that characterized the urban transformation “as normal market forces”, “that blacks and whites live apart because of personal choice”, their “unemployment and poverty are the fault of poor people and the deviant attitudes and behaviors … the lack of work ethic … breakdown of traditional nuclear family” [the primacy of racial differences in culture]. Excepting Hirsch, Sugrue criticizes white [scholars of whiteness] scholars who “paid little attention to the material origins and political and economic advantages of whiteness”—that allowed whites “to create racial hierarchies that shaped housing patterns, workforce practices, private investment, and the public policies that reinforced them” (xx). If so Origins is an early example of “identity politics”, that stresses victimization and oppression by insensitive if not hostile majority oppressors. See footnote 9, xxviii)
Sugrue advances what he believes describes all large American cities in that period, but in our perspective his argument applies best, indeed may be limited to, hegemonic Big Cities and Pacific Coast cities—those impacted by the Great Migration. He asserts racial inequality is at its core, a political problem (xviii) that played out when “new forms of capital mobility [deindustrialization and suburbanization] combined with deficiencies of New Deal “liberalism” which had empowered civil rights of blacks, and their own geographic mobility, left in place and incorporated “race-based inequalities” in the day-to-day American life. (xix). These race-based inequalities allowed nonwhites to resist racial change, inhibited urban policy systems from incorporating the new arrivals into policy-making, indeed actively participated in resisting both their integration into the city and segregated them into ghettos where blacks were unable to protect and defend themselves—institutionalizing racial and political inequality into a geography. Sugrue does include deindustrialization [congruent with our third global competitive hierarchy] and suburbanization (which he describes in terms congruent with Harvey’s capitalist and nonwhite racial spatial fix.) they are secondary forces to his political institutionalization of racial inequalities into ghetto geographies.
In his original, while unsympathetic, he seems much less distressed concerning capitalism’s role in Detroit’s plight, and limits its role by asserting that race, residence and work all combined to produce the northern Big City ghetto. Nevertheless, deindustrialization is included in his analysis and that qualifies Sugrue for Third Ghetto status.
(1996) “Why the transformation of Detroit and other major Northern cities from [pre-1940] magnets of opportunity to reservations for the poor? What was it that turned America’s former industrial centers [and arsenals of democracy] into economic backwaters, abandoned by manufacturers? …. What explains the emergence of persistent, concentrated racialized poverty in Rust Belt cities? (p. 4) … the origins of the urban crisis are much earlier … its roots deeper, more tangled, and perhaps more intractable. No one social program or policy, no single force, whether housing segregation, social welfare programs or policy, or deindustrialization, could have driven Detroit and other cities like it from their positions of economic and political dominance; there is no simple explanation for the inequality and marginality that beset the urban poor. It is only through the complex and interwoven histories of race, residence, and work in the postwar era that the state of today’s cities and their impoverished residents can be fully understood and confronted. … I argue that the coincidence and mutual reinforcement, or race, economics and politics in a particular historical moment [1940’s to 1960’s] set the stage for the fiscal, social, and economic crises that confront urban America today. “capitalism generates economic inequality, and that African Americas have disproportionately borne the impact of that equality” (p. 5)
He cites Schumpeter and creative destruction as the dynamic that propelled capitalism (5-6) and concludes that “Northern industrial cities like Detroit were overwhelmed by the combination of racial strife and economic restructuring”. (p. 6)
“Racism oversimplifies what was a complicated and multifaceted reality (p.8) … (A)ssumptions about racial difference were nourished by a newly assertive whiteness, born of the ardent desire of the ‘not-as-yet-white ethnics’ … to move into the American mainstream. To be fully American was to be white. … In the postwar city, blackness and whiteness assumed a spatial definition. The physical state of American neighborhoods and white neighborhoods in Detroit reinforced perceptions of race. The completeness of racial segregation made ghettoization seem inevitable, natural consequences of profound racial differences. The barriers that kept blacks confined to racially isolated deteriorating inner-city neighborhoods were largely invisible to white Detroiters (p. 9). White perceptions of black neighborhoods provided seemingly irrefutable confirmation of African American inferiority and set the terms of debates over the inclusion of African Americans in the city’s housing and labor markets. (p.9)
The emphasis of structural forces [race, residence and work] should not obscure the role of human agency and contingency in the city’s development…. The shape of the postwar city, I contend, is the result of political and economic decisions, of choices made and not made, by various institutions, groups and individuals. Industrial location is not sole the result of technological imperatives; it is the result of corporate policies to minimize union strength, to avoid taxes, and to exploit new markets. Racially segregated neighborhoods are not alone the foreordained consequence of American racial prejudice, rather they are the result of the actions of the federal and local governments, real estate agents, [unions], individual homebuyers and sellers, and community organizations (p. 11).… Black Detroiters were far less powerful than employers, white workers and homeowners, and the federal government as actors shaping the social and economic geography of Detroit. They were not, however, powerless (p. 12).
Demise of public housing and slum clearance and Rise of UR: Sugrue’s Detroit
As Big Cities filled up with WWII War Production Great Migration migrants, the issue of where they would live was inescapable. As all know, the black newcomer moved into Big City neighborhoods already black or with substantial black elements. In 1943 Detroit, FPHA and the Detroit Housing Commission “built hundreds of permanent public housing units and thousands of temporary units in barracks-like wooden structure and Quonset hut-type buildings throughout the city” (Sugrue, pp. 69-70).
The Eight Mile and Wyoming neighborhoods had been a major location for public housing in the New Deal era. For better or worse, it became the location of blacks to become homeowners, in so doing provided a “separate but equal” middle class neighborhood. In 1943, some 1,500 units were proposed for vacant land in the solidly black Eight Mile neighborhood. The UAW, CIO, and many leading African-American leaders and activists, as well as many private real estate developers seeking to acquire public housing contracts or build single-family subdivisions supported the Eight Mile initiative. The Robert Brooks Homes (600 temporary units) and a torrent of single-family FHA mortgaged homes resulted. Over 1,500 single-family units were built so by 1960 over 88% of the neighborhood housing was owner-occupied. Detroit’s leading citizen CDO advocating public housing and planning, the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council (CHCP), called the initiative “a laboratory in city planning” and FHA a showcase initiative (p.71 Sugrue). It is this tension in federal policy, public housing, and FHA mortgage lending that made possible separate, discriminatory, homeownership and concentrated public housing for blacks in neighborhoods such as Eight Mile—preserving separate white-dominated neighborhoods—replicated in Big Cities that constitutes an important element in Sugrue’s Second Ghetto model. CBD-focused UR played no appreciable role in this.
By 1950 blacks jumped over the so-called Eight Mile neighborhood boundary “dividing wall” and entered into white neighborhoods (p. 71). Although some of the 1920’s Auto Alley (Barrow, 2015), and much of WWII new factories and jobs were located in suburban locations (the massive Ford Rouge complex–Dearborn’s Detroit Arsenal). By 1944 a few dozen, of an estimated 12,000 black Rouge Plant workers, lived in Dearborn (p.76, Sugrue), so the Federal Public Housing Authority (FPHA) attempted to build up to 1,000 public housing units in Dearborn. NIMBY erupted, saturated with anti-Negro racism, produced a coalition of white homeowners, Southern Diaspora migrants, and Ford itself that supported the City Council’s decision to approve an anti-public housing resolution—effectively ending the attempt to house WWII black workers in Dearborn—the ground zero of War Production era worker housing.
The rapid and disruptive population shifts, ongoing for a generation, now accelerated by war production resulted in a horrible four-day racial riot in June 1943. Six thousand federal troops were required to restore order. Thirty-five were killed (twenty-four black), $27 million (in 2015 dollars) in destruction mostly in black Paradise Valley neighborhood, four hundred thirty-five injured. In 1941, Detroit had less than 150,000 blacks (almost 10%). On top of this an estimated 400,000 new white Southern Diaspora (about 350,000) and (50,000) black Great Migration emigres settled in Detroit between 1941 and 1943. If Detroit had been just a bit away from a housing crisis, this onslaught swept away any resemblance of a normal housing market. New Deal and War Production housing was caught in the middle as were the war production firms that had to learn how to manage a bi-racial workforce—frequent strikes and workplace fights had erupted in the months preceding. Detroit public and private housing was segregated, openly and legally. Whatever course of events would have evolved regarding housing, neighborhoods, and racial change, war production housing had transformed Detroit into the ground zero for the hegemonic Big Cities. For Detroit, there never was any looking back.
Sugrue does not deal with the flood of worker housing in that two-year period. He mentions the 1943 riot sporadically and tangentially, until the last chapter when he compares it to the July 1967 riot. The role played by 1941-1943 war production does not figure as a major cause for Detroit’s housing crisis or a driver of his Third Ghetto. For us, it is the defining force that pushed Detroit down the path toward Sugrue’s “urban crisis. Without doubt, it divided the two races, and the memory of the 1943 riot laced the 1940’s and 1950’s aftermath.
In desperation, Federal war production housing turned to vacant land within Big City boundaries to locate segregated worker housing and public housing for blacks. Much of the white Southern Diaspora headed for suburbs. Inner city black neighborhoods were seemingly too concentrated to accommodate many black workers, and Great Migration migrants and most vacant areas were within/alongside largely white residential neighborhoods. The resulting struggle between the two groups produced what Sugrue calls “the most contentious political issue of the 1940’s and early 1950’s”. “Federal agencies responsible for wartime housing and city agencies responsible for implementing urban policy, the City Plan Commission and the Detroit Housing Commission faced a political conundrum regarding public housing” (p. 72)
The fate of public housing construction in white areas rested in the hands of a range of well-funded, well-connected, and well-organized opponents. Opponents of racial integration challenged public housing on the grounds that it would foster the indiscriminate mixing of races. Suburban governments concerned with homogeneity, refused to allow construction of public housing …. Real estate developers and business groups opposed government-built projects as ‘creeping socialism’ …. And Detroit’s elected officials were increasingly reluctant to support projects that met with vociferous opposition from their white working-class and middle-class constituents. (p.72)
The periphery area chosen in late 1944 was Oakwood, with over 83% single-family homes, nearly 65% owner-occupied by “relatively poor and marginal working-class” “children of immigrants from Poland, Hungary and Italy”. A FHA/DHC proposal to house 300 single-family black-occupied homes generated by March 1945 a firestorm of opposition from its residents at its first public hearing. The comments and themes unleashed from the audience, if mentioned at all in today’s politically correct atmosphere, would send many readers to a “safe room” never to be seen again. Sugrue observed that public housing had become linked to “negro housing”, and all the pathologies and misperceptions attached thereto.
Still public housing advocates and planners pushed on with the 1946 City Planning Commission’s Master Plan for Detroit. Embraced by liberal New Deal Mayor Jefferies and later in 1949 by Democratic mayoral candidate (UAW activist, former public housing director, and New Deal enthusiast) the plan called twelve new public housing projects: four large inner city slum clearance (three in heavily black neighborhoods) and eight in vacant, periphery sites, “all but one in predominately white neighborhoods” (p.81). From that point (post 1946 to 1949 election) on “negro invasion into white neighborhoods” became the top policy issue in Detroit. Enter, the City Treasurer, Albert Cobo a former corporate executive lent by his employer to city hall, a strong fiscal conservative Republican.
Cobo (Rep) elected in 1949 ran on an anti-Negro neighborhood invasion, anti-public housing platform that called for restricted public housing in single-family dominated (white) neighborhoods. During his three administration (he died in 1957 in the third) he shifted Detroit to a business-driven CBD UR, p.84, Detroit public housing, as compared to other northern cities, was always employed to a lesser extent (between 1937 and 1955 only 8,155 public housing units were built, p. 86—five percent of Chicago’s population were residents of public housing). Accordingly, while public housing pre-1960 slum clearance was relatively less relied upon compared to other Big Cities, Great Migration migrants were more impactful and for the most part piled into a few concentrated black neighborhoods. [Also, worth note is the white Southern Diaspora poured large numbers of white southerners into Detroit and its suburbs. The infusion of Scots-Irish did little to temper the volatile pro-homogeneity, anti-racial inclinations of southern European white ethnics already living and working in Detroit–Me].
Neighborhood succession into white neighborhoods was heavily resisted by organized white homeowner groups. P. 209. This could not last forever, and the 1946 Detroit Master Plan and its subsequent politicization created such a backlash Cobo was victorious. A key element in his winning coalition were white neighborhood improvement associations, particularly in neighborhoods identified by the Detroit master plan as sites for black public housing (p. 82). His victory, whatever else it meant, limited greatly the further use of public housing—confining it to already concentrated housing where the impact of any slum removal meant serious hurt to black residents. As quoted by Sugrue Cobo pledged “It will not be the purpose of the administration to scatter public housing projects throughout the city … I WILL NOT APPROVE Federal Housing Projects in the outlying single homes areas” (p. 84).
Cobo seized control of the Housing Commission, filling it with private real estate leaders. While the City Planning Commission resisted, supported by the Federal Public Housing Authority, black public housing under Cobo was restricted solely to inner city black neighborhoods (p. 85). Detroit was 18th of the top 25 largest cities in ratio of low-rent starts to all housing starts (p.86). During his administration, Cobo’s Housing Commission continued its rigid racially segregationist public and private housing residency policy (p. 87). That Great Migration did not cease during the 1950’s and 1960’s created the backdrop for what, arguably, was the most racially intense/divided Big City by the 1970’s. This produced as an abrupt shift from public housing to CBD-focused urban renewal as found in any Big City. Interestingly, aside from a few brief mentions (see pp. 47-48), Sugrue does not describe Cobo’s or the two subsequent mayors’ (Marini and Cavanaugh) [http://www.detroits-great-rebellion.com/Urban-Renewal.html]. CBD urban renewal programs—nor does he focus on post-1956 federally-driven highway construction. That is even more interesting in that Cobo eliminated the ten private/public Detroit streetcar lines and launched his own freeway construction program which inevitably tore up both inner-city and periphery neighborhoods. http://www.metrotimes.com/catch-all/archives/2014/08/30/detroit-mayor-albert-cobo-the-man-his-plan-and-canals.
Sugrue instead moves onto Cobo’s metaphoric successor, maverick city councilman Thomas Poindexter. Poindexter’s populism ranged from anti-big business (in Detroit), law and order, anti-income tax, the John Birch Society, and in 1963 expressed sympathy to segregationist George Wallace. In the debates on public housing, neighborhood homogeneity, blockbusting and open housing, Poindexter was a visible and vocal Detroit activist. Founding the Greater Detroit Homeowners Council (1962) to battle racial integration and preserve white neighborhood homogeneity, he later testified before Strom Thurmond’s Senate committee on the effects of neighborhood racial change. He won his city council seat in 1964, the ‘Homeowner’s Champion” (p.209-210). His rise and prominence in Detroit’s anti-Progressive community development movement provided the most striking example (along with Boston’s anti-busing movement) of modern Big City non-Progressive neighborhood organizations. To Sugrue Poindexter and the (white) Homeowners’ Movement fashioned “a politics of defensive localism that focused on threats to property and neighborhood. They directed their political energy toward the two groups they believed were the agents of change: blacks and their liberal allies” (p. 210).
Between 1943 and 1965 Sugrue claims Detroit whites founded at least 192 “grassroots” neighborhood associations (p. 211). Hit by suburbanization most white Detroit neighborhoods were mixtures of ethnic nationalities (mostly Catholic working class) and southern Diaspora migrants (Sugrue argues their role in Detroit’s racial antagonism has been overplayed) who tied themselves together by stressing Americanization and their white race. Neighborhood improvement associations were not new to Detroit, subdivision developers had (like condo builders today, transferred to them responsibility for key functions helpful to neighborhood vitality (zoning violations, enforcing building restrictions, better public services, welcome committees, block parties, community cleanup and recreation—and, of course, restrictive covenants (p. 212).
With WWII and FHA mortgages, Detroit’s homeownership (and subdivisions) increased dramatically as worker prosperity permitted the achievement of homeownership, a key element in the American Dream. Home ownership also meant self-achievement and was a visible example of economic assimilation. Rightly or wrongly racial change and neighborhood succession was perceived as a threat to all that good stuff, and to the shared identity of the neighborhood and its residents. As already described, resistance to the “Negro invasion” was institutionalized into Detroit’s politics and policy agenda by 1950.
Invasion threatened not only identity, shared homogeneity, but also family investment and working class neighborhoods were bitter fighters. To them the grossly dense black neighborhoods, consumed by a never-ending influx of Great Migration migrants, was a “ghetto … the antithesis of their tightly-knit orderly communities. They noticed the striking class differences between blacks and whites …Wherever blacks lived, whites believed, neighborhoods inevitably deteriorated” (pp. 216-7). Sugrue believes “neighborhood groups responded to the threat of ‘invasion’ with such urgency because of the extraordinary speed to racial change. Most blocks in changing neighborhoods went from being all-white to predominately black in three or four years. They also reacted viscerally against the tactics of blockbusting real estate brokers, whose activities fueled their desperation” (p. 216). Neighborhood succession, racial change, and “homeowners’ rights versus civil rights” (p. 218ff) arguably became Detroit’s central political theme with which its policy system had to cope. Neighborhoods has entered into Big City CD—and ED—fifteen years earlier than the War on Poverty. Other than contesting federal urban renewal funds in Washington, Mainstream ED stayed away from this backdrop to Big City urban politics and change.
Mainstream ED’s primary business actor were its top corporate leadership, individuals who reflected the CED perspective for the most part, and were focused on CBD, eds and meds, and highways–urban revitalization/ aka modernization and refunctioning. They were most concerned with maintaining the primacy of the central city in the contest with suburbs. They worked though chambers, and formed new entities such as Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Council, Chicago’s Plan 21 and Philadelphia’s mélange of private redevelopment agencies. That was not the business constituency that tended to play in the housing, slum clearance, and neighborhood succession (Second and Third Ghetto formation).
Small business and the community’s fragmented local real estate sector struggled against professionals attracted to public housing, planning, slum clearance and the community development movement as had evolved since the 1920’s and New Deal. Into this mix community activists/ ethnic and racial leaders of both Progressive (African-American) and Privatist Homeowners Associations. Excepting Mayor Cobo, their principal focus was the city council and the host of bureaucratic agencies, especially Housing Redevelopment and Planning, and various commissions relevant to the debate. In this contest, the undefined and troublesome word “populist” frequently appears. In the community development world, populist usually means the “other guy”; the “other guy” can be pretty nasty, ruled by beliefs and emotions not always moral or democratic.
To his credit, I believe Sugrue maintains a reasonable balance for a community developer; he is open to the honorable economic and social motivations of the “other guy” (white homeowner associations), less so their leadership, but also does not, compared to some, “go after” the local real estate industry—which, frankly is hard to defend in this period. He hardly mentions the business elements playing ball with Mainstream ED. They are not relevant to the housing and neighborhood dimension of his Third Ghetto. Nevertheless, Sugrue does his job in outlining the negative and impactful role played by the local real estate industry (blockbusting, redlining, and their sometimes close association with white homeowners’ neighborhood organizations.
The Cobo administration incorporated the neighborhood politics that had exploded in the New Deal, WWII and post-1943 racial riot. While he also shifted Detroit into the Mainstream ED CBD/highway urban renewal, he figures in Sugrue’s ascendancy of white homeowner/neighborhood associations which became a prominent feature of Detroit’s politics forever after. Community development, more precisely a struggle between Privatist CD and Progressive CD (an awkward alliance of the New Deal public housing/slum clearance wing and African Americans, leaders, activists, churches, and advocate nonprofits). The media, as always, played its divisive role. During Cob’s administration, they struggled over union-sponsored housing integrated housing (Schoolcroft Garden), the definition of restrictive covenants, zoning and planning decisions and “Interracial citizen commissions” (called by different names in other Big Cities (Human Relations, Open Housing, etc.) but in Detroit the Mayor’s Interracial Committee. The struggle often turned violent, over 200 incidents in white neighborhoods were reported, the incredible stories amassed by black pioneers into white neighborhoods constitute an infamous chapter of Detroit’s history, but are testimony to the profound schism that had developed.
After Cobo the struggle continued, until it seemingly came to a head in 1963. In that year competing codes and visions of neighborhood, homeowner, and civil rights became expressed in two legislative initiatives that eventually became referendum bills in late 1964. The Homeowners Right Ordinance (preserving neighborhood homogeneity, i.e. segregated neighborhoods) battled against the Fair Neighborhood Practices Ordinance (sharply curtailing racial discrimination in housing and regulating some of the worst real estate abuses). By that time a new liberal Progressive Mayor, Jerome Cavanagh presided. The Homeowners Alliance won 55-45%. Predictably the vote followed racial lines, losing 4-1 in black wards. Detroit was long since racially divided before the 1964 War on Poverty. The referendum, it might be noted, never took effect; a Wayne County District Court declared it unconstitutional in 1965.
However, profound, bitter, divisive and prolonged this Privatist and Progressive community development neighborhood-base housing and homeowner struggle was, in hindsight there was always fated to end with African-Americans moving into formerly white neighborhoods. The dynamics of neighborhood succession favor the invading groups. Whether neighborhoods were “defended” or indefensible, the suburban alternative, the logic and pricing of older homes, the dying out of the original population, dynamics of real estate industry—whatever—sooner or later led to the majority groups moving into homes formerly owned by a past majority group. In Detroit’s case the pace and tipping point probably came with the 1967 riot.
followed by the 1960’s riots (Detroit’s being ranked as probably the most destructive) developed into the cornerstone of Detroit’s 1960’s and 1970’s urban politics and policy agenda—a battle fought in neighborhoods as well as city elective offices.
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Interestingly during this period, Boston James Michael Curley (?), Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, NYC’s Moses and Bed Sky-UN, Philadelphia and the reformers and demise of machine, and Portland Seattle and San Jose, not to mention Phoenix and Miami were doing their thing. Nowhere in America had race and public housing reached such epic levels in the urban policy arena than Detroit. One could argue, if it had been more pervasive than this is the dramatic conflict between Progressivism and Privatism in urban renewal—except UR was not the driving issue, it was the derivative in Detroit. Sugrue argues the situation in Detroit describes the “origins of the urban crisis”, it does sort of—but not because the nation’s cities resembled Detroit or its political culture or policy systems. Detroit’s extremes allow us to see the divisions, existing in all cities but submerged, and their consequences vividly. Cobo and Edwards were our two ships fighting, but the entrance of a third ship, the black political culture in embryo added fuel to the fire.
That Cobo was Coleman Young turned inside out, only demonstrates the durability of the cultural conflict and its effect of urban policy systems and policy. —a very interesting use of white-dominated neighborhood organizations in the 1940-1960—compare to Chicago. The issue at hand is the flow of Slum Clearance-UR policy is uneven and varied. Some cities emphasized on phase or program more than others, and some demonstrated more or less consistent use/nonuse of one program target than others. The chief variables which account for these variations include policy system/actor relevant, demographics and local factors including size/resources, and political culture. Finally, through Sugrue one sees how Hirsch’s initial Big City (Chicago) dealt with its Great Migration effects, his Second Ghetto, was carried over to Detroit—retaining its primary focus on African-Americans as the lens defining and analyzing community development and neighborhoods.
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Reagan Era Community Development
When last we left community development, it was “hitting on all cylinders”; the approach had exploded achieving almost near equal status with mainstream ED. And along came the municipal fiscal crisis, property tax rebellions and Reagan! The federal pullback from sub-state ED hit CD hard. The reliance of local CD actors/EDOs on the federal government was more than HUD cutbacks, it was psychological abandonment from an entity viewed as more than a close friend. To maintain momentum Community Development and CDCs had to make new friends and develop new revenues. Riding on a train in late 1979, Ford Foundation executive Mitchell Sviridoff was challenged by a board member with how he would help local CDCs survive if he had $25 million dollars available. A year later, he and former Bed-Stuy CEO, then Ford Foundation president, formed a national CDO whose purpose was to assist CDCs. The new CDO was flush with $ 9.3 million in grants from Ford and six major corporations. Within four years the initial seed money had grown to $70 million from 250 corporations. (Hoffman, 2012, p. 27). Today known as LISC, Local Initiatives Support Corporation provides grants and technical assistance to CDCs.
In the Eighties community organizers had to tone down mobilization. Citizen activism and volunteerism redirected itself from social justice, economic empowerment, and political change, to confronting specific doable, local problems. Krumholz later observed “what began in the early ‘70s as a group of grass-roots activist organizations, very strident in style and confrontational in expression, has been transformed into a set of enormously competent community development corporations that are now doing economic development, housing, and commercial development” (Fisher, 1994, p. 182). Social change took a back seat to touchable change in the community.
CD enjoyed by the nineties a mixture of maturity, success, and complexity—at the expense of exuberance and wild-eyed commitment. It is beyond the capacity of this history to detail the literally hundreds of major initiatives conducted over the last two decades of the twentieth century—even the very important ones such as the Harlem Children’s Initiative. A listing of the types of activities engaged, ranging from import substitution, welfare rights, development rights, housing and food cooperatives and tons more (Simon, 2001) would strain reader’s eyes and dull their sensitivity to the enormous effort and intensity of commitment to bring about change in distressed neighborhoods and their residents. But the tide of change, the critical mass had not yet been achieved.
The targets of neighborhood revitalization constantly moving—new residents, new immigration—and the inability of American capitalism to provide work for low-income residents of color (Wilson, 1996). In some neighborhoods, the infamous “tipping point” had been crossed, in others affluent new residents appeared—precipitating gentrification and displacement. In other areas new inflows, mostly immigrant, invaded hitherto predominately homogeneous Black neighborhoods, with unsettling consequences. The majority of folk in Watts, for example, were Hispanic, no longer African-American. CDCs had to cope with “diversity” in addition to preaching it.
Two examples of influential Reagan year projects testify to the innovation unleashed, and the change in the CDC movement’s direction: NYC’s Brownsville Nehemiah neighborhood renewal and Boston’s Dudley Street Neighborhood initiative. As the decade ‘s end drew near, frustration with conventional, housing-based comprehensive CD’s pace and results suggested some further experimentation and pilot programs should be attempted. Perhaps, a community development “big push” might be answer. So a new CD initiative was tried: the CCI–the Sandtown case study.
Nehemiah and Dudley
Nehemiah was as remarkable as controversial. Nehemiah was an offspring of an Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) founded by “himself” in 1940 Chicago. IAF evolved after his death in 1972. Under new leadership IAF evolved into a national network of neighborhood-level community organizing initiatives. By the Reagan years IAF comprised 28 local initiatives, mostly in the Southwest, centered on “colonias” (suburbs populated by poor Mexican-Americans), and allied with local churches, congregations, and existing neighborhood institutions. Unlike ACORN, IAF had to be invited in, and its message was often religious in tone—with IAF’s leadership asserting “the [Catholic] Church as the one institution in society with the potential to work positively for the empowerment of the people” (Fisher, 1994, pp. 192-6). East Brooklyn’s Congregations (EBC) spun off from IAF. Nehemiah was both an Alinsky community empowerment organizing initiative and what proved to be a significant faith-based initiative (Vidal, 2001, p. 9).
East Brooklyn was one of the most devastated of NYC’s predominately minority neighborhoods. After over 100 “kitchen-table” house and public meetings that drew thousands, EBC incorporated in 1981 around a plan to demolish over 300 houses—the first of its controversial decisions was to reject rehabilitation and press ahead for large scale demolition. Named after the biblical prophet sent by Cyrus the Great to rebuild destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple, the Catholic bishop, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island joined the initiative. When additional land became available and Mayor Koch agreed to provide city resources for infrastructure and write-downs, the Nehemiah initiative expanded. It hired I. D. Robbins as its general manager and his revamped plan produced two more controversies. Robbins (1) embraced the Levittown model of mass- housing construction—(2) and its scale of housing demolition matched UR projects. Shades of slum clearance!
The idea was to construct affordable houses for existing residents. That didn’t work out; it took at least working class incomes to purchase a new home–not affordable for all displaced residents. The scale and housing style, many thought, created “suburbs in the city”. The first phase (1100 units) started in 1983, the second (1100 units) 1987, the third (700 units) in 1996, and a recent 2009 bi-phased initiative for 1500 units completed the construction thus far (4500 units). The townhouses, modest, architecturally detestable, and low-priced, have always enjoyed waiting lists—and stable ownership. The New York Times reported that less than a dozen original homeowners went into Great Recession foreclosure[xii].
Nehemiah inspired many imitators nationally, including Sandtown in Baltimore (see below), and later a HUD Nehemiah Opportunity down-payment assistance program between 1987 and 1991. While much-maligned, Nehemiah proved that community development could make slum clearance, Levittown, and reasonably affordable housing construction work on a scale that moved the needle. Another lesson from Nehemiah is that in these tough times, housing proved itself to be a sustainable focus for a CDC, causing awkwardness from some CD advocates who prefer social change/justice and personal empowerment. Nevertheless, housing remains to this day as the most common activity of CDCs.
Dudley Street: Located on the borders of Boston’s Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods, the mile and one-half block Dudley Street initiative provides insight into the complexities of neighborhood revitalization. Dudley’s diverse population (40% African-American, 30 % Hispanic, 20% Cape Verdean, and 10% white) lived in a neighborhood that included 4 million sq. ft. of vacant, weed-filled lots and lacked the elements of a viable residential area (no supermarkets, commercial storefronts boarded up, lots of abandoned cars, and three closed landfills the proud recipients of continued illegal dumping). Almost 1500 residents were on a substance abuse program waiting lists.
In 1984 the Riley Foundation “pulled together” 30 community agencies to formulate a neighborhood plan (Halpern, 1995, p. 203). The “Plan” was introduced to neighborhood residents at a public meeting—and promptly rejected—mostly because residents were not involved in its development. In response, a CDC (DSNI) was devised with membership and governance composed of residents, agency leadership, businesses, and neighborhood institutions and churches (during this period about 1800 resident members). Between 1984 and 1987, DSNI successfully tackled a number of problems that built confidence, capacity, and credibility. Vacant lots were cleaned up, abandoned cars towed, a public landfill closed, new street signs and lights, and an MBTA rail stop to downtown was installed. The rationale was to build resident confidence so more complex issues could be tackled.
A second planning campaign in 1987 produced a five year plan that included land use modifications, housing, jobs, youth/community service programs, public safety and environmental cleanup. The plan coined the now-famous “urban village” metaphor. The overall goal was to revitalize all the elements necessary for a successful neighborhood (i.e. comprehensiveness). New and rehabilitated housing were anchors. To secure land for housing, DSNI board and staff decided piecemeal land acquisition simply would not work. The land was owned by over 130 individuals and entities. City agency eminent domain seemed the answer, but DSNI and residents alike feared once condemned, they would lose control over the property to the city agency. The solution was for DSNI itself to be empowered to exercise eminent domain. It took a while, but in 1992, DSNI acquired authority to condemn 30 acres of land (Dudley Triangle). Ford Foundation provided funds and construction of low rise owner-occupied homes followed. DSNI, which still prospers, afterward evolved into a full-fledged multi-service CDC conducting numerous programs congruent with the traditional CD “comprehensiveness”.
Issues in Neighborhood Community Development
By 2005, the number of CDCs was estimated around 4600[xiii]. As CDCs evolved, they engaged in more complex activities involving greater planning and sophisticated execution. Tension between resident control, involvement in governance, and CDC accountability to the neighborhood became evident—it remains so today. Given the goals and gestalt associated with community development, this concern cannot be dismissed as a mere Michel’s iron law of oligarchy—it presents an almost existential concern. In order to get things done, too much may have to be sacrificed. Dudley Street initiatives, plans, innovative activities and housing construction made apparent a persistent concern about “who” made decisions. Ideally, of course, a CDC should be governed by neighborhood residents, businesses and institutions, but residents do not always have the interest, and frankly capacity, to be effective decision-makers.
All too frequently, agency and foundation officials were the drivers behind DSNI and its initiatives. The gap between resident involvement and bureaucratic (staff) leadership of activities was troublesome and initiatives were frequently “staff driven when [they] began, and it took skill and willpower by staff and the directors to make even moderate levels of participation feasible and to carry programs through. The balance of resident versus professional control … remains in question, and it is not clear what should have been expected … resident control tends to diminish as more professional staff are hired and the organization becomes dependent on external funders” (Ferguson & Stoutland, 1999, pp. 51-2). At one point a “leadership academy” was established to teach residents the necessary skills (Halpern, 1995, p. 204). The problem was not specific to DSNI, but common to some degree to CDCs (Hopkins & Ferris (Eds), 2015, pp. 15-9).
Comprehensive Community-Building Initiatives Movement (CCI)
After a decade of Reagan-Bush, foundations believed the time had come to develop an approach that combined private financing with Policy World professional/policy expertise to fill gaps that prevented neighborhood CDCs from achieving comprehensive neighborhood revitalization. In the first half of the 1990s several initiatives experimented by supporting projects. Today these projects are collectively referred to as Comprehensive Community Initiatives (CCI). CCI formally developed into a coherent approach in the early 1990’s and continues to this day.
Four core CCI goals tie this approach to a CD tradition that started with the nineteenth century settlement house: (1) change in neighborhoods (place) and residents (people); (2) comprehensiveness or change in a number of program policy areas (housing, education, health care, social services, jobs, and in recent years environmental sustainability) to achieve a critical mass; (3) a rational, plan-driven process devised and implemented by a network/alliances/partnerships of “experts” and research; and (4) resident/community empowerment, self-government, capacity-building, and achievement accomplished through involvement and direction provided to outside experts, professionals and change agents.
Two additional characteristics are especially relevant to the “foundation approach” are (1) funding is based on philanthropy and corporate donations, and (2) that each individual project is both an experiment and a knowledge-base for formulation of future (and better) initiatives. A practical consequence of CCI is a network of alliances and partnerships with foundations, service providers, NGOs, think tans (both local and national) that were involved in CCI initiatives. In later years the Living Cities-National Community Development Initiative (backed by 20 foundations and financial institutions) in 23 cities was a prominent example of CCI approach. Indeed, Hope VI and Clinton’s approach to EZ community-based implementation tied into early CCI mentality. Over the last two plus decades it is estimated $1 billion in philanthropic dollars were invested in its initiatives, an investment that leveraged $10 billion in federal government and local financing (Kubisch et al., 2010, p. 8).
LISC (above) provided the model and inspiration for CCI and the various sub-initiatives. A powerful catalyst for CCI was the founding by James Rouse and his wife of the Enterprise Foundation (EF) in 1982. EF intended to serve as a national platform for community economic development initiatives. Its core competence was low-mod affordable housing, but comprehensiveness was also a key goal in Rouse‘s approach. EF set up its own neighborhood-based CDO (Community-Building in Partnerships (CBP) to act as its organizational change agent. Rouse, long associated with Baltimore’s ED, would be the force behind the below Sandtown case study— he died during its implementation.
Sandtown in the next section is a case study of one of CCI’s very first experiments. It failed—badly in my opinion. The spring, 2015 Baltimore riots resulting from the death of Freddie Gray, a Sandtown/ Gilmore Project resident, was not, of course, caused by the 1990 decade-long CBP/CCI revitalization initiative, but it demonstrates how little that first experiment altered the neighborhood’s path. Sandtown was chosen as a case study not to suggest CCI cannot work—much evaluation and learning has followed from it and other projects. CCI today is not in the same place as it was in the 1990s. Rather Sandtown illustrates what have proven to be chronic issues which CCI has struggled to overcome. If history can teach lessons, then Sandtown must be a teachable case study.
Sandtown
Sandtown is a 72 block neighborhood with 10000 residents in West Baltimore, a neighborhood association with HBO’s “The Wire”. For several generations Sandtown had been among the most deteriorated and troubled of Baltimore’s neighborhoods. Just plug in terrible statistics stereotypical of distressed areas. Half its residents were unemployed, it suffered four times the nation’s infant mortality rate, and in 1987 (and today) high drug addiction rates—and crime. Earlier it had been a working class black neighborhood that produced success stores like Cab Calloway, Billie Holliday and Thurgood Marshall.
Our Sandtown-Winchester story begins with Kurt Schmoke, present day President of the University of Baltimore, Rhodes Scholar, Harvard and Yale grad, former Howard University Dean of Law, and Baltimore’s first African-American mayor (1987-1999) (Stoker, 2015). Schmoke forged an alliance with BUILD, a Westside church-based coalition affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (see above). BUILD advocated a program to push Nehemiah-style homeownership: “the Sandtown-Winchester 600” (600 abandoned brick row houses). By 1989 BUILD & Schmoke amassed over $20 million in federal, state, city, foundation and church funds to implement Sandtown-Winchester 600. The initial phase, the Gilmor Project (227 row houses) was identified. BUILD needed a developer, however, and formally in 1990 James Rouse and his Enterprise Fund stepped into the Sandtown story.
Rouse’s EF, joined with BUILD/Schmoke to establish the Sandtown-Winchester Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI). NTI attacked a comprehensive set of neighborhood problems–i.e. “broken systems” such as schools, health care, jobs, safety, and housing. EF set up NTI to organize and lead residential and institutional participation because it believed no local CDO or anchor institution could be used–although long-standing Sandtown CDOs existed. I note the absence of the private sector.
EF also forged alliances with other foundations, such as Rockefeller, Kellogg and Anne E. Casey. Professional staff assembled, residential board and staff participation recruited, and studies of various types were conducted. Several other organizations and local alliances were formed to flesh out the “comprehensiveness”. Between 1994 and 1998) at least eight corporations and five “consortiums” were formed–one of which, the “Transformation Consortium” included eighteen organizations. In addition seven other organizations (for example, AmeriCorps operated the jobs component) who either ran programs within EF/CPB network or in some way connected to programs. This does not include local entities such as the City, BUILD, Baltimore School System, the Urban League, universities or HUD (Halpern, 1995, pp. 208-13). Evidently, comprehensiveness invited large doses of bureaucracy.
Comprehensiveness was always a problem. Educational initiatives, faithful to the Boston Compact required close working relationships with a non-involved private sector, and an exceedingly troubled Baltimore school system. Other program areas, lead paint for example, operated at the margins of neighborhood priorities. Anti-drug efforts got off to a late start and were mostly limited to referrals–which makes for easy statistics but little impact. Anti-crime and Police Department-related programs were virtually non-existent. Initiatives leveraged public funds, and private foundation involvement, however. The Anne E. Casey Evaluation (2000) states $70 million “new funds were committed … by federal programs such as Healthy Start and Empowerment Zone. Foundations such as Aspen, Kellogg, the Habitat for Humanity, Anne E. Casey, Abner, Annenberg, Rockefeller, Walter Jones, Urban Institute, and NY Community Trust were involved in activities/initiatives.
Where in all this was the BUILD Nehemiah housing project? After Phase 1 of the Nehemiah Project was completed, BUILD separated itself from EF and NTI, remaining involved in the Empowerment Zone, but dropping its name from CBP literature. EF moved into large-scale “Sandtown-Winchester” scattered site, substantial rehab housing, intended for owner-occupied, but eventually because of the high cost became mostly rental. Little momentum was generated behind the housing. Nevertheless, between Nehemiah and the other housing initiatives approximately 1,000 new units were constructed and another 2,000 rehabbed–out of about 4,300 units in the two neighborhoods.
Local political leaders, activists, and media interviews observed NTI leadership was perceived as both political (loyal to the Mayor) and not especially attuned to residents–the age-old perception was NTI was more adept with bankers and bureaucrats than with its client population. At the beginning, the Mayor appointed a task force to lead the CBP planning process. Local comment asserts that two successive CEOs were the mayor’s picks, the last, and a mayoral appointee whose performance at CBP was not favorably received by residents. The Mayor brought in all sorts of other goodies, including a Federal Empowerment Zone (2000) to Sandtown, followed by a later New Markets Tax Credit project.
When the Mayor left office in 1999, NTI lost its thrust. The new mayor, Martin O’Malley had other priorities, and embraced mainstream economic development strategies (business assistance, attraction, & tourism). Police, crime, and anti-drug programs were his signature neighborhood initiatives. They are today blamed for the Freddie Gray riots. NTI closed up shop. No critical mass was ever achieved and the neighborhood downward spiral was not stopped. Said and done, over the existence of CBP lots of public and private funding went into Sandtown–$60 million from Rouse alone. Lacking a comprehensive audit it is impossible to determine how much actually was spent. Over the course of EF/CBP’s NTI project, the various participating entities likely spent several hundred million (pre-2000) dollars.
Footnotes
[i] National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968)
[ii] http://www.achp.gov/docs/BRAC/Federal_Historic_Preservation_Tax_Incentives_Program-June_06.pdf
[iii] Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power (New York, Random House, 1967), p. 44
[iv] Clarence Stone, Robert Whelan, and William Murin, Urban Policy and Politics, (Englewood Cliffs NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1979), p. 118
[v] Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power, op. cit., p. 166
[vi] Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power, op. cit., p. 166
[vii] Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); the citation for degree-seeking programs was Maulana Ron Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies (4th Ed) (Timbuktu, Mali, University of Sankore Press, 2010)
[viii] For an excellent case study of the evolution of Boston’s CDCs see Karl Seidman, Tunney Lee,Elise Selinger, “From Urban Renewal to Affordable Housing Production System: Boston Mayors and the Evolution of Community Development Corporations in Boston”, CDC Ecosystem Paper SeidmanSelinger Final with Bibliography April 2016 (002) Mel King Institute, www.melkinginstitute.org
[ix] Including UK’s Garden City, Gramdan villages in India, Moshav land owned by Israel’s Jewish National Fund.
[x] https://www.cdfifund.gov/Pages/default.aspx
[xi] http://www.cdfi.org/about-cdfi-coalition/history/
[xii] Jim Dwyer, “In a Sea of Foreclosure, an Island of Calm”, NYT, Sept 26, 2008.
[xiii] “Reaching New Heights: Trends and Achievements of Community-based Development Organizations”. (Washington D.C., NCCED, 2005).
Deleted Two Paragraphs.
Footnotes
[1] Winthrop served twelve terms as Governor (never Mayor of Boston which at that time was a town). If Winthrop has an image today, it is as an inflexible, sexless, staunchly conservative Puritan. In his day, however, Winthrop was a moderate authoritarian, not mean-spirited (he warned Roger Williams secretly to get the heck out of Salem, and was criticized for being too lenient with Anne Hutchinson). He outlived five wives, and was father of eight, maybe nine, children–many sadly dying young –as did his first four wives. Upon landing at Logan Airport, think of Winthrop—he owned the land.
[1] Approved by the Massachusetts General Court in March 1636. Cities were latecomers to New England. New Haven was the first in 1784, Boston, 1822, New Hampshire the 1840’s, and Springfield in 1852. Hartford is a city/town consolidation.
[1] Moravians, religious refugees, founded settlements exclusively for themselves. They carefully planned their towns, the first being Bethlehem in 1741 Pennsylvania (followed by several other Pennsylvania boroughs) and a second set in North Carolina, the town of Economy in 1753 and Salem in 1766—others followed.
[1] Unitarianism first appeared in Lithuania and, of all places, Transylvania in the mid-1500’s.Traveling to London, then to New England, it was first preached in Boston’s King Chapel in 1784. Inclined toward Deism (which rejects religion as a source of authority, but asserts through reason and science the existence of a God can be discovered), Unitarianism, from its earliest days, appealed to the wealthy and intellectual. In 1805 Harvard taught its first course in Unitarian theology. As New England Unitarianism evolved, it morphed into “transcendental Unitarianism” (from German liberal theology) associated with Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendental Unitarians stressed the essential goodness of mankind and adopted a more intellectual, semi-secular humanistic approach.
[1] Baltzell’s observation was supported by no less than John Adams who wrote in his Defense of the Constitution: “Go into every village in New England, and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has ever depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most” (Baltzell, p. 170).
[1] Samuel Eliot Morrison described this elite fusion as the marriage between “the wharf and the waterfall“. In an 1861 novel, Elsie Venner (1861), Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dubbed the new business elite the “Boston Brahmin“. Holmes’s novel characterized this elite as “harmless, inoffensive, and untitled”, with houses by Bulfinch, their monopoly on Beacon Street, humanitarianism, Unitarian faith in the march of their mind, Yankee shrewdness, and New England exclusiveness“. Our description of Puritanism’s evolution is indebted to O’Connor’s, the Hub: From Town to City.
[1] Quincy, a former Congressman, a strong Federalist and a stolid Brahmin was quite the charismatic personae. Related to John and John Quincy Adams (Abigail’s mother was a Quincy), Quincy devoted his life to politics, subsequently served six terms as Mayor leaving to become President of Harvard for seventeen years.
[1] The story has it that the “a” was dropped out of Cleveland by a printer who wanted to crowd a sentence into a single line of print.
[1] Three previous NYC Tenement Housing Acts (1879, 1882, and 1887) is why Riis could follow alongside sanitary inspectors. The most successful restrictive legislation was the 1901 Act.
[1] Rochester was not the first school/community center. That honor probably falls to NYC’s People’s Institute founded by Charles Smith in 1897. It quickly collapsed and reorganized in 1911.
[1] Topics are: Women and the Trades, Work Accidents and the Law, the Steel Workers, Homestead: the Households of a Mill Town, the Pittsburgh District, and Wage-Earning. Sage followed in 1913 with six other community surveys (Scranton, Atlanta, Topeka, St. Paul, and Springfield IL.
[1] Patricia Mooney Melvin, “Before the Neighborhood Organization Revolution: Cincinnati ; Alexander von Hoffman, Local Attachments: the Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); John Clayton Thomas, Between Citizen and City (University of Kansas Press, 1986); Robert Fisher & Peter Romanofsky, Community Organization for Urban Social Change: (Greenwood, 1981).
[1] The League, based on “black self-assurance and interracial cooperation” operated at least until 1923. http://www.lexisnexis.com/documents/academic/upa_cis/1559_natnegrobusleaguept1.pdf
[1] Two different schools of Chicago sociology have developed. In this chapter, of course, the first, in its heyday before the 1940’s is my focus. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie, the City (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1925) is the base for our discussion. Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson’s, City Politics carried that first school perspective into the sixties, extending it to political science. One can argue this approach shifted with Roger S Ahlbrandt, Jr. and James V. Cunningham, A New Public Policy for Neighborhood Preservation (Praeger, 1079) and with Anthony Downs, Neighborhoods and Urban Development (Washington D.C., Brookings Institution Press, 1981) who plugs in an “arbitrage” model to neighborhoods succession.
[1] Congestion contained two sets of concerns; one was economic and private firm based, the other social and working/middle class people-centered. “The term had been inherited from the housing reformers and patrician planners of an earlier day, and had become, by the time of its adoption by [the RPAA and RPNY] conflated with the notions of ‘blight’, ‘slums’, ‘overcrowding’, ‘concentration’, ‘mobility’, ‘density’, and ‘traffic jams’. The elasticity of the term permitted a great deal of ostensible concord between [Mumford and Adams] [But] … the economic critique of congestion addressed a perceived crisis in the distribution of goods …, grounded in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principle of scientific management, for more efficient location of industry, for reductions in building density, and for improvement in transportation. The social critique of ‘blight’ and ‘slums’ addressed population density, living conditions, health, and the negative social effects of real estate speculation”. Andrew A. Meyers, “Invisible Cities: Lewis Mumford, Thomas Adams, and the Invention of the Regional City, op. cit., p. 295.
[1] Alice O’Connor, “Community Action, Urban Reform, and the Fight Against Poverty: the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas Program”, Journal of Urban History, Vol. 22, No. 5, July 1996, pp. 586-625; Robert Halpern, Rebuilding the Inner City, op. cit., pp. 89-101; William Domhoff, the Ford Foundation in the Inner City: Forging an Alliance with Neighborhood Activists”, hrrp://whorulesamerica.net/local/ford_foundation.html (retrieved December 5, 2014).
[1] Hunter would be a pall bearer for RFK seven years later.
[1] Section 8 of the Community Development Block Grant Act of 1974 renamed the program established in 1965 (Section 236, Leased Housing Program) and greatly expanded it.
[1] State of Tennessee, Office of Attorney General, Opinion No. 09-126.
[1] Report #372 to the Mississippi Legislation, January 5, 1998
[1] EDA Legislative History, pp. 13-14. file:///C:/Users//Downloads/eda_legislative_history.pdf
[1] Quoting LBJ in EDA Legislative History, op. cit. p. 14.
[1] Kysiak a friend of the Curmudgeon, was employed by de Luca and was a valued participant during these early years. We rely on his publication, as well as informal email and conversations. De Luca subsidized the early HUB Club from departmental funds
[1] Drawn from Baltimore, Milwaukee, Jersey City, Chicago and Cleveland–all public sector development officials–accompanied by a representative (Andy Bennett) from EDA.
[1] National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968)
[1] http://www.achp.gov/docs/BRAC/Federal_Historic_Preservation_Tax_Incentives_Program-June_06.pdf
[1] Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power (New York, Random House, 1967), p. 44
[1] Clarence Stone, Robert Whelan, and William Murin, Urban Policy and Politics, (Englewood Cliffs NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1979), p. 118
[1] Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power, op. cit., p. 166
[1] Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power, op. cit., p. 166
[1] Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); the citation for degree-seeking programs was Maulana Ron Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies (4th Ed) (Timbuktu, Mali, University of Sankore Press, 2010)
[1] For an excellent case study of the evolution of Boston’s CDCs see Karl Seidman, Tunney Lee,Elise Selinger, “From Urban Renewal to Affordable Housing Production System: Boston Mayors and the Evolution of Community Development Corporations in Boston”, CDC Ecosystem Paper SeidmanSelinger Final with Bibliography April 2016 (002) Mel King Institute, www.melkinginstitute.org
[1] Including UK’s Garden City, Gramdan villages in India, Moshav land owned by Israel’s Jewish National Fund.
[1] https://www.cdfifund.gov/Pages/default.aspx
[1] http://www.cdfi.org/about-cdfi-coalition/history/
[1] Jim Dwyer, “In a Sea of Foreclosure, an Island of Calm”, NYT, Sept 26, 2008.
[1] “Reaching New Heights: Trends and Achievements of Community-based Development Organizations”. (Washington D.C., NCCED, 2005).
Ron W. Coan 