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Policy System Cuts
Critical Factors Affecting UR Implementation
Every Big City has something to teach us. Philadelphia was selected because it offered a range of neighborhood slum clearance approaches, several CBD examples, plus industrial districts, interstate highway slum removal (like Boston) and eds and meds. Its shift from planning to economic development and prescient foresight in its CURA Report make it almost a one stop shopping for Big City pre-1970 urban renewal. Boston, on the other hand, offered a truncated variety of approaches, but vividly demonstrated the importance of policy systems to UR. In Boston the gap between business and political elites contrasts with the “natural” evolution away from a machine. Meddlesome and controlling Massachusetts state government cannot be compared to Pennsylvania which hardly enters into the municipal UR story.
Variety and variation tell the best stories. Our examples suggest important shared characteristics—and different forms and approaches reflecting policy systems and political culture. The first characteristic is urban renewal required profound business and professional involvement. Neighborhood-based urban renewal directly involved real estate firms, but also professionals like architects, planners, and activist progressive citizen-leaders. CBD-focused urban renewal required downtown’s top corporate, finance and professional elites, as well as a healthy dose of professional business leaders. CBD urban renewal was mostly paid for by the private sector. Mayors and neighborhood UR initiatives needed federal subsidy much more.
Secondly, in each case municipal government required some form of home rule-style empowerment from the state—aside from that required for use of tools such as eminent domain and write downs. The city-council, fragmented and poorly developed bureaucracies of machine policy systems were simply not adequate to implement urban renewal effectively. CBD business elites, knowing they needed vital governmental powers and auxiliary support (parking garages and traffic circulation, etc) wanted a strong person who could manage affairs in city hall. This meant a change in policy system for most northern and midwestern Big Cities. Weak mayors became, through “charter” like powers, strong mayors. Bureaucracy mattered as well. While we did not mention Finance, it was important. As demonstrated, mayors created their EDOs, consolidated departments, quasi-public redevelopment agencies, and support nonprofits like PIDC. Business elites, often through chambers, created lots of CBD-focused nonprofits. Economic development Czars emerged and became leading figures in the bureaucratic system. As hinted, planners and planning commissions, essential to UR, were reduced in importance.
As to differences and variety, UR came in many forms and styles. Obviously,, Boston’s Government Center was not a clone of the West End, and Penn Towne was not Penn Center. Even neighborhood slum removal/housing exhibited varying approaches. East Poplar (Penn Town) differed from Society Hill, and North Philadelphia slum removal; not only did the numbers of those dislocated vary, but who was dislocated, and in some instances the humaneness of demolition was better than UR paradigm would admit. It was, however, clearly a nasty, infuriating and dehumanizing experience for those underneath the bulldozer; I share with the UR paradigm the sense of UR’s destruction of lower/working class neighborhoods and there is more than ample evidence that Negroes fared the worst in slum removal—the Second Ghetto was real. The caveat to all that is interstate and highway construction, which usually tore through the length of the city, was the most brutal and insensitive—and probably caused the most dislocation numerically. With exceptions, CBD-focused UR involved fewer dislocations than neighborhood slum clearance for public housing.
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Before Crossing the Western Urban Renewal Trail, Let’s Circle our Wagons
The “thing” about urban renewal in the west is that for the most part[1] it lags urban renewal in the east by almost two decades. Western cities enjoyed the benefits of eastern city experience including the mid-sixties race riots. Most western cities did not need to cope with the effects of intense racial or neighborhood transition as did their eastern counterparts. The eastern cities had carved out urban renewal, and involved the federal government in it, from their own perceived needs, suburbanization dynamics, and policy priorities which matched poorly with those of younger western cities.
Viewed from the city-level, western urban renewal did not develop from the same “roots” as Big City urban renewal (Depression-era housing/planning, decentralization and CBD decline). Rather western cities took advantage of an already existing federal program to accomplish their own specific ends—in the pre-1975 period principally transportation infrastructure and CBD redevelopment. Complicating the picture, some major cities (Dallas and Fort Worth the most prominent) declined to participate in the federal program. By the time western cities got around to serious urban renewal the birth of economic development, the profession, discipline and policy area was pretty much an accomplished fact. The transition from private economic development to governmental which almost silently occurred into the sixties was now fully evident—municipal and even state governments were actively and independently making economic development policy decisions with their own EDOs.
The eastern version of urban renewal was carved out precisely in the same years as war production industrial/population migration hit most in-land western cities, providing for the first time a critical mass to establish them as a major city–and which simultaneously fueled their suburban hinterland as well. Forgive the obvious flippancy, but western cities were simply not in “the same place” as eastern cities in 1945 and through the fifties. While many western cities will start planning and talking about urban revitalization during the mid and late fifties, most western states did not pass enabling legislation until the late fifties or even early sixties. Actual projects did not start or become completed until the early to middle sixties—when the Big Cities were reeling from Jane Jacobs, reading Herbert Gans or the Federal Bulldozer, and, by 1965, shocked by the urban riots and a fully unleashed Great Society. Eastern and western urban renewal almost, maybe literally, a generation apart, sprang from different roots, confronted different physical, economic and political environments, and was used for different purposes.
Urban revitalization generally, and urban renewal specifically followed from western city postwar political and governmental developments. Adjusting to the new-found economic and population growth, the postwar years—stretching in some cases to the end of the fifties—meant victory by new business elites over the traditional/native business elites. Often separating themselves from the previously dominant chambers, the new western business leadership created a new set of organizations, both political and economic in order to capture power and control city hall. Once ensconced, the new city efficient-style Progressives embraced charter reform installing their basic infrastructure and upgrading the capacity of their municipal governments. Initially, these Progressive elites made every effort to “manage” growth and their suburban problem, occasionally through metropolitan planning, but always through annexation. By the late 1950’s though, suburbanization had not been effectively managed, and continued population increases propelled many cities to sizes they had never dreamed of—they were carving out a presence in the national media, politics and less noticed, the national economy. It was time for the western urban debutante to “come out”—and urban renewal was the gown to wear for the occasion.
Young cities seem more ostentatious in their policies; eastern cities certainly had been such in the early twentieth century City Beautiful movement. These cities didn’t want to simply modernize, they wanted to make a statement—let the world know they had arrived. In true herd-style, they copied each other and sought to one up other cities. They also wanted to ensure their central city CBD was at least, the first among equals, as their metropolitan political, economic, cultural and entertainment marketplaces. In that their suburbs by the early sixties had sufficient power to constrain annexation and develop autonomous jurisdictional policy systems, the central cities, able to access to federal urban renewal dollars, discovered that urban renewal filled the bill quite nicely—combining both goals of image-making/competitive urban hierarchy and “managing” on a new level the autonomous suburban hinterland. By the late fifties and early sixties, most western cities developed urban renewal programs.
In most southern and western cities, efforts to rebuild and expand the central business district … showed the strengths and weaknesses of businessmen’s government … it involved the use of federal urban renewal program to assist private investment directly by assembling developable land at low cost and indirectly by providing necessary public facilities in downtown areas. In the urban renewal alliance, it was impossible to separate public and private interest, to untangle private real estate booms and surges of public construction, and to differentiate between the goals of bureaucrats and businessmen. … On a broad scale, urban renewal became a tool in intercity rivalries for economic advantage. … The list of common projects also [in addition to abundant office space, business headquarters, and centralize the facilities of regional public administration and finance] included a trade center, a convention-exhibition center [with hotels], and a public university campus.[2]
So western cities entered into the era described by Calvin Trillin as “municipal domeism”, a spreading infection fueled by civic pride “on a single project of pharaonic scale”.[3] Astrodome, followed by the Kingdome, topped by the Superdome; Atlanta Regency-Hyatt/Peachtree Center, Kansas City Crown Center, Los Angeles Center City—and then there was the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport[4]. The reader gets the picture! This is the face of western-style urban renewal. “In the best tradition of urban boosterism, a successful redevelopment program became a selling point in itself as a symbol of civic unity and modernity. New sports arenas and stadiums were intended to confirm the new image of a ‘major league city’.[5] Other noted projects of this period were: El Paso’s Civic and Convention Center (1972), the Phoenix Civic Plaza (1972), Albuquerque Civic Plaza (1972) and the Tucson Community and Civic Center (1971). Interestingly, as several “snapshots” below will demonstrate, the “downtown urban renewal projects” did not necessarily stop with the termination of the federal urban renewal program in 1974. Although academics and commentators decreased usage of the term, the absence of federal funds, in part because other federal programs such as the Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) partially filled the gap, or private, state and local funds were found. Downtown urban renewal by any other name continued through the 1970’s and even into the early 1980’s.
The Policy System: Political Leadership, Business Coalitions, Business EDOs and Broadening
Was the business coalition that led western cities into boosterism and urban renewal during the late fifties and sixties identical to that described by Wilson for eastern cities a decade or two earlier? Well, yes—and no. First, in both models, the private sector was the driver behind urban renewal. This was true in 1950 in the East and the 1960’s in the West. The initial difference between the two models was that in the East, the private sector allied closely with the new independent (from machines) “entrepreneurial” strong mayor while this alliance, for the most part did not develop in the West until the 1970’s (and the mayor was often a weaker mayor in a city manager form of government) (Kansas City, San Diego, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City. Los Angeles (weak mayor) and Portland (commission). Seattle, San Francisco and Denver (the latter two city/county) possess a strong mayor form of government—but in both the first decade (the fifties) of urban renewal was pretty much a bust. Albuquerque was a strong mayor as well. This is an important qualification and it is a major reason why there is almost a two-phased urban renewal effort in several cities. It may not be an overstatement to observe that while the business sector pushed hard for urban renewal, it was mayor-dominated political leadership that mostly made it happen.
The more difficult part of this question is if, and how the private sector business leadership differed among each city. There are few studies that permit comparison among cities. Boston’s elite Vault included the highest echelon of Boston’s business community and they had to pay to play. San Diego came close with San Diegans Inc, but Oklahoma City’s “elite cabal” does not compare with the conventional vault-like business leadership. Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Council and San Francisco’s Bay Area Council and SPUR probably was the best example of elite private sector leadership which drove urban renewal, but also other critical regional issues as well. For me at least, the segments of the business community involved in these organizations, corresponds rather poorly to the more common form of business leadership, the so-called growth coalition[6].
Molotch’s (and Fainstein et al) growth coalition usually includes business leaders in finance, real estate, downtown property owners/retailers, newspapers and utilities. These are refugees from the old Real Estate Exchanges who (with the newspapers as an exception, I suppose) never were known for their community statesmen-like motivations. As to a growth coalition chiefly composed of business FIRE executive, I would not totally disagree with this stereotype, except that it is usually carried too far[7]. It is clear to me that this type of business leadership did play an important role in western urban renewal, and as we discussed previously, gradually took over leadership of the Eastern Big City redevelopment agencies during the 1960’s and after. Clarence Stone and his “regime” approach to the business-public policy nexus, while perhaps too flexible, is more able to assess the FIRE business community.
In any case, as Abbott states “Coalitions of downtown businesses and investors therefore took the lead in selling urban renewal programs to city councils and the voters in a number of [western] cities in the years around 1960. In Portland, Tucson, and Richmond, leading businessmen were largely responsible for the revival of urban renewal several years after initial defeats. Typical business coalitions were Downtown Denver Incorporated (1955) and the Downtown Master Plan Committee (1961), the Greater Baltimore Committee (1962), and Downtown Tulsa Unlimited (1955)”[8]. Once again, it is apparent that a new set of private EDOs, apart and away from the Chambers of Commerce, were jump-started into existence in the Age of Urban Renewal. These EDOs despite their anti-suburban strategy were focused on the viability of the CBD, tended to restrict policy-making to real estate and marketing approaches, but did so that economic sustainability was possible. These entities, many of which are operating in the twenty-first century, were also forerunners of a new generation of EDOs which would follow in the 1980’s.
What was obvious in the East after the sixties riots and the Great Society was that the fairly closed Big City economic development policy system sort of imploded. This did not happen in the West, by and large, although the San Francisco Yorba Buena project did evidence a serious breakdown in that city’s policy system. The Watts Riot also profoundly altered the context of Los Angeles policy-making. Up to the late 60’s, business groups in western cities, a mixture of elite and growth coalitions, not only led, but effectively closed the economic development policy system—and they pointed it toward our broadly defined urban renewal strategy. The chink in their dominance was the voter refusal to approve bond referendums. Business dominance in a closed economic development policy system did not survive the sixties.
The programs of the Great Society, however, did have an impact—Model City and various neighborhood planning and social service programs created a new set of sub-municipal semi-EDO organizations which incrementally intruded into the semi-closed economic development policy system. The alliance with a charismatic young mayor came at a cost of a enlarged set of actors in that policy system. The western population growth continued, infused to a large degree by a young generational cohort which when settled, thought, and voted, very differently. Challenges to balance economic growth with the environment, historic preservation and quality of life became just as important as low tax, and limited government fiscal issues. The geographic change of focus followed, with urban renewal eventually becoming as concerned with neighborhoods as with the competitiveness of the central business district. Western urban renewal in the 1970’s was seriously different from that of the fifties and sixties.
Western and Southern Suburbanization
Let me be clear about my approach to western suburbs: western suburbs differ from eastern Big City suburbs in several remarkable ways. Suburbs are not mere clones of each other—an important element of this history. To me the uniqueness of Western suburbs is that if I ask the reader to name a suburb of Phoenix, Denver or Los Angeles, I’m likely to get a correct response. Generally, lots of people are aware of western suburbs, if only because they are large—distinctive, and defined on their own terms. I am less sure that I would get a similar quality response if the cities were Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, or even Chicago. With New York City, the answer might be Westchester (county), New Jersey, or Long Island (at least two counties). The identity of eastern suburbs seems to be tied to the central city—less so western suburbs. Why?
The simplest difference is a critical one—each region’s suburbs developed in different time periods reflecting different transportation modes (street car and automobile). So they are not going to look the same. Secondly, western suburbs, as we shall shortly discover, did not necessarily acquire a critical mass by attracting residents from a central city; western suburbs. During the explosive war years especially, western suburbs attracted a ton of first time residents from elsewhere. Few of these newcomers ever spent a day in the central city. Western suburbs could garner residents from eastern suburbs or second/third tier cities. The factories were built in the suburbs and did not move from the central city. All this is quite different than eastern suburbs whose residents were former central city residents. Some western suburbanites never wanted what they perceived as the “mixed blessings” of a congested, older area governed by city elites and long-time residents not at all sympathetic to newcomers. Western suburbs, therefore, grew simultaneously alongside their central cities—with the former attracting fewer residents but residents that consciously chose to live in a suburb.
Thirdly, for the most part western central cities were located at distances considerably far from their nearest competing central city. Eastern metro areas, despite the label of sprawling, are noticeably more compact than the western metros. The clash of close-by competing central city hinterlands did not inhibit a western suburb’s sprawling, horizontal expansion. If anything, greater distances permitted stronger, more autonomous western suburbs to develop. Finally, the typical eastern suburb expanded as affluent classes drove across a central city periphery to acquire a lifestyle, lower taxes and housing reflective of its wealth—leaving behind poorer residents, often newcomers from the Great Migration. Not so with western cities that attracted a previously socialized native population of a particular age, the Depression Years cohort, looking for a job to end Depression-induced poverty. The migration of Afro-Americans to the west was noticeably less than to the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic cities. Hispanic minorities in this postwar era were unevenly distributed, and sometimes settled in greater numbers in the suburbs (Tucson and Albuquerque, for example). The demographics of western and eastern suburbs were somewhat different—maybe less exaggerated would be more precise.
Having said western suburbs developed in a different time and place than their eastern predecessors, is there such a thing as a distinctive “western suburb” (or for that matter central city as well)? Carl Abbott makes the case that western cities and suburbs were different and characterized by different land use patterns from which they have developed a different central city-suburb relationship. He also argues that the path and pace of suburban development is, in itself, different from the East and Midwest. In broad strokes he states that “Over the last half-century [he writes in 1990], we have slowly come to realize that Western cities can best be understood as characteristic products of twentieth century America …. as clear expressions of new technologies of movement and communication. They cluster straight-forwardly along their highways.”[9]
As Abbott points out, popular and professional consensus in the postwar pre-1960 world often saw western cities as either “the forerunner of the urban world of tomorrow”—or as “God’s own junkyard”, the “non-city”. My sense is Abbott is fundamentally correct—perception of western cities was most affected by one’s reaction to the car and the highway, by preference for density or decentralization. One stresses the individual, the other the community—and that is one of the fundamental distinctions between our Progressivism and Privatism. If so, we should not be surprised that even western cities will exhibit a Progressive and a Privatist version—between northern California/Pacific Northwest and southern California and the southwest—with Denver and the Great Plains somewhere in the middle.
Two introductory observations relevant to our first discussion of western suburbs are that whatever the variant of western suburb/central city evolution, western cities (1) shared the four dynamics mentioned in the first two paragraphs, and (2) these four dynamics usually played out to permit a decentralization of the metropolis [into] multiple independent centers—a multi-centered or multi-nuclear metropolitan area[10]. Western central cities and their suburbs have moved along a different path than their Eastern and Midwestern forbearers. We can observe from western cities from Lubbock Texas, to Las Vegas, to Los Angeles that these cities are built around the automobile which, at root, provides individual control over personal travel. Such cities are linear (sprawled if one must), dominated by commercial strips and a network of shopping centers—each an island in a sea of parking lots.
Taken together, Lubbock, Las Vegas and Los Angeles offer consistent lessons about the form and visual character of most Western cities. They are vernacular environments that have responded to the tastes and demands of middle Americans, with only sporadic and often post facto attention to comprehensive planning and urban design. These ordinary cities are linear rather than centered and hierarchical. The ideal model has no privileged locations comparable to the downtowns of turn-of-the-century American cities or the public centers of historic cities. With the automobile reducing the time and inconvenience of distance, each district has approximate equality of position along the axis or within the grid …. ‘the freeway is totally egalitarian’.[11]
[1] Atlanta is the chief exception, corresponding more to the Eastern model as does San Francisco to a lesser degree.
[2] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit, p. 144. Abbott’s Chapter 6, “The Renewal Era” is probably the best single source for western-style urban renewal. Specific detailed examples of several cities are developed.
[3] Calvin Trillin, “U.S. Journal, Kansas City”, pp. 94-101.
[4] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit, p. 143.
[5] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit, p. 144.
[6] Harvey Molotch, “the City as Growth Machine”, American Journal of Sociology, 82, (September 1976), pp. 304-332.
[7] My professional experience is that real estate business leadership is not known for leaving a dime on the table, or a penny for that matter—but their focus is as much what it takes to make a real estate deal work in the long run (obtain financing and market competitiveness), as simple desire for profits. These individuals can see a larger picture (they are often as involved in the central city as in suburbs), but their comprehensive image/vision is filtered through a real estate prism. Without their competence and leadership few physical development or redevelopment programs conducted by the private sector would be successful. Planners and economic developers tend to be poor developers and construction/property managers. For me, therefore, the evil capitalist profit-seeking Neo-Liberal image of the growth coalition is too severe., often leaving one with no alternative than riding these evil weevils out of the city on a rail after having tarred and feathered them.
[8] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 149.
[9] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., p. 123 and p. 126.
[10] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., pp. 126-127. Abbott correctly advises us that, however, separate the path, western and eastern cities do share many commonalities—that they “converge on the national average”. While this may suggest I speaketh from both sides of my mouth, it is more that western and eastern cities are not night and day, rather more or less. The key take away is the metropolitan hinterland of the two is different, less so the internal landscape and demographics of each suburb and central city. Architectural design and housing style, however can be quite different, of course.
[11] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., pp. 129.
Ron W. Coan 