Western Policy Systems
When GI’s returned home what they found was not always pleasing. A new demographic cohort, the Greatest Generation, entered political and economic life—their life forged upon Depression and War shaped their world view as well as future expectations. They had their own ideas about the future, and their own aspirations for economic success—and neither reflected their father and grandfather’s images and beliefs. The western home front had changed as well. They left a small city, and returned to an emerging Big City—of the West. The “GI cohort effect” was felt nationwide, but assumed distinctive forms in western municipalities.
Generational change is only part of the postwar policy system story, however. The infusion of so many new people during war years, the injection of new firms and industry sectors in the economic base—combined with the stagnancy of the “old order establishment” demanded new solutions and strategies which were counter to those of the older policy system. A new policy system, with its own goals and values eventually overwhelmed, but not removed entirely the old policy system. This section reveals the shift from one policy system to another. The new policy system, in general, will survive into the mid-Seventies when it too will undergo its version of generational change and rapid new in-migration.
Our policy model places great reliance on political culture as a filtering and definitional driver of ED policy-making; accordingly, in the postwar west, one can watch a political culture coming together, and see its visible effects on ED policy output and goals. Building on this section in future chapters, the history will delve into how these policy system changes produced a version of ED policy different than found in Big Cities, in this period.
The Policy System: Political Leadership and Business Coalitions
It may seem strange to start this discussion with a Washington-based, business-led EDO, the Committee on Economic Development (CED), but corporate America’s new EDO played an important role in immediate postwar western municipal policy systems. Through a network of local chapters, and supported by CED-member branch firms present in the West, influential businessmen advocated a sub-state policy agenda stressed “progress”, modernization/reform of public sector capacity, and railed against corruption, machine bosses, and parochial jurisdictional leadership unfit “to guide their city into the modern age”.
That latter description fit the older, and very tired business leadership that dominated many western cities’ political and economic life. This now third or fourth generation native business leadership, whose family forbearers initially founded and scratched progress and growth out of the western wilderness, had settled into a closed, stagnant, semi-corrupt old boys policy system—favoring limited growth, and little change. That ran counter to growth expectations of the young GI business community and the horde of war year’s residential newcomers.
Electorally-pressured these tired local elites faced another serious threat from new branch firms (many CED members) and their local network of small business supply contracts and jobs. Branch corporate leadership was uncomfortable with tired native business elites that controlled chamber leadership, obstructed their growth plans. Branch business newcomers allied with GI entrepreneurs/startups that pressed hard for municipal growth strategies perceived as favorable to their business prospects. To these young businesspeople, nepotism, no growth, and closed networks that the old business order protected needed to be broken.
Young municipal business reformers remained faithful to the principles/reforms of the old “city efficient” movement which were also cornerstones of the CED approach. “Their immediate goal was often to update antiquated municipal administrations, and provide a fuller range of city services at lower costs. Beyond the classic Progressive goal of efficiency [reform businessmen] hoped to mobilize public and private resources to build the necessary physical facilities for economic growth”. They advocated for a modern, efficient, honest, open city government, a strong annexation program to capture existing or prospective suburbs, a modernized downtown, highways and airports, new port facilities to accommodate America’s international trade and financial leadership, and were concerned with water access and air pollution (Abbott, 1998, p. 39).
Many western cities, including Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and a ton of smaller California cities such as San Jose inherited a postwar sleepy, clubby and mostly closed policy system populated by burnt out, very comfortable, crony patronage, descendants of the original business booster class. If one wanted slow, to no, growth, these were your guys. Things got hot when the soldiers came home and newcomers moved in after the war. “Aspiring entrepreneurs and professionals and prominent business executives sympathetic to the goals of the National Committee on Economic Development (CED) … stood to benefit directly from a growing population and expanding market” (Abbott, 1998, p. 38). Unable to access the closed old city hall policy system, and at odds with its no growth tendencies, they gravitated to, and then transformed, chambers into an instrument of political and ED change. Between 1945 and 1955 these elements combined, conspired, and organized civic action groups—political parties by any name—successfully competed in at-large, nonpartisan elections that saturated western cities.
Using Phoenix as an example Barry Goldwater, future Senator, broke into politics as Phoenix’s Charter Government’s candidate for 1949 city council. His platform included making “city government more efficient at annexing outlying districts and attracting new industry.” (Findlay, 1992, p. 21) Business neo-progressives took over city halls, installed a growth coalition, and held on for dear life until collapse in the Seventies. Once in power they upgraded and modernized city administration (city manager) form, strengthened planning, budgeting, civil service and fiscal administration, and promoted lean and efficient management to deliver low cost, therefore, low tax city services.
Growth was their middle name, and infrastructure and annexation were their favorite economic development tools. Airports and water, the West being dry, infrastructure were first order priorities as well as highways and streets. Proud of their city, and the growth it was enjoying, these Abbott-labeled neo-progressives took special pride in their downtown, a driver of growth in itself, and a symbol of both metropolitan and regional status and power (Findlay, 1992, p. 31). A succession of annexation initiatives followed. By 1960, 75% of Phoenix residents lived in areas that were suburbs in 1950.
Success in 1950’s neo-progressive led annexation drives sowed seeds of future frustration. During the 1960’s suburban Scottsdale, Tempe, Glendale and Chandler put the kibosh on Phoenix annexation drives. “Mesa boosters energetically pursued both industrial and residential growth. [Mesa] bought up water rights, promoted its downtown, and sought new businesses. Glendale offered a $20,000 bonus to the first citizen that could bring a 100,000 sq. ft. factor to town. Business and civic groups such as the East Valley Partnership, the West Valley Partnership and Phoenix Together gave lip service to regional cooperation, but competed for everything from sports facilities to educational institutions” (Luckingham, 1982, p. 267). New suburbs, such as Del Webb’s Sun City exploited the pervasive demand for suburban lifestyle, On January 1, 1960 Webb opened up six model units for inspection. By the end of the weekend, an estimated 100,000 traipsed through, and nearly 250 homes were sold. After 1961, Phoenix was successful in only one annexation.
So in western city after city these three elements (newcomer voter, CED branch corporate leadership, and young GI entrepreneur reformers) combined into a businessman-led “growth coalition” that rose to power in the late forties and fifties, persisting, with ebbs and flows, through the sixties and early seventies. In some cities these reform movements jelled into more or less formal civic organizations (Phoenix), in others to more erratic political/bureaucratic leadership (Portland). Economic development policy initially focused on annexation/infrastructure/highways/public services to foster growth and consolidate control over their immediate hinterland. Eventually this proved expensive, hard to implement, and generated intense opposition in second-ring suburban communities. At that point their strategy shifted to CBD-focused urban renewal—and highways.
Reform policy systems contained many moving parts that did not always mesh well, or that unleashed new forces, such as public bureaucracies that had their own agendas (economic development and planning the most obvious, but also water authorities and transportation agencies). The coalitions and civic organizations ebbed and flowed as one might expect due to personalities, competing interests and perspectives and normal political wears and tears. Public sector reforms, including budgeting and planning, installing city manager form of governments were one thing, but more problematic electoral reforms (at large versus wards and nonpartisan elections) crippled local political parties, engendering more personalistic and charismatic tendencies that chipped away at the coalition’s effectiveness and stability. They also created a policy gap between city government and the increasingly ethnic/racially homogenous low-income neighborhoods.
In the thirty or so years this coalition dominated western municipal policy systems a number ED strategies, programs and tools were employed. Through the Fifties annexation/infrastructure/public services/transportation (and the tools important to those—bonding, eminent domain, planning) were common. The motivation underlying the strategy reveals a subtle but critical difference from BIG Cities strategies during these periods. Western economic development resembled an earlier movement, the City Beautiful movement, that stressed a “coming of age”, growth, prestige—and a breaking of the colonial shackles accomplished by their forthcoming entrance into a national urban hierarchy. They were not trying to preserve a central city hegemony, but to establish one. They tried to replicate the path Big Cities had followed in earlier decades. They were, after all, trying to become “Big Cities”. The choice, as posed by Carl Abbott, was whether each western city was to “enter the big leagues” or develop into a “sad sack city” (Abbott, 1981, pp. 141-3). East of the Mississippi Big Cities were fighting a totally different battle.
In the section below, brief, selected municipal descriptions of policy system change and ED policy provide some “flavor” and depth to this brief overview. The City of Albuquerque serves as a “typical western second-tier city”.
Western and southern cities in this decade are reaching scale sufficient to justify Big City rank. Sunbelt cities were not trying to preserve existing urban competitive status—but to assert a more prestigious one. One not necessarily based on control over their powerful suburbs which, in fact, are following the same City Beautiful strategy. Calvin Trillin complained the Sunbelt cities caught an infection of “municipal domeism”–the tendency to focus civic pride on a single project of pharaonic scale. That explains the Astrodome, Kingdome, and Superdome, not to mention the Dallas-Fort Worth mega airport. It also explains a lot of convention centers with magnificent hotels. The exuberance of Peachtree is not unique to Atlanta. “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” (Abbott, 1981, p. 143). UR was that redevelopment program–for many, perhaps most, Sixties Sunbelt cities the primary purpose behind the strategy.
Annexation and infrastructure were primary strategies for most western and southern cities during the 1950’s. While eastern cities were lobbying and then implementing 1949 Housing Act (and its many amendments) UR, these cities were fishing or catching up with their civil rights. Leaving aside Oklahoma City, Portland, Tulsa, Sacramento, in other Sunbelt ponds, Downtown UR took off in the early-mid 1960’s when it became increasingly obvious that (1) annexation could not keep up with growth; (2) annexation and infrastructure was very expensive and time-consuming; (3) and suburbs were resisting annexation in votes and in the state legislature. There would be a few annexations in the Sixties, but annexation’s day was mostly over in the West.
So CBD revitalization was the next, best strategy. Its purpose was not to capture suburbs —that battle was now lost—but more to serve as an anchor for a first among equals metropolitan strategy, and an assertion to the world that their city had arrived as a first tier national city, with all the required prerequisites to compete with other Big Cities for jobs and growth. That explains “municipal domeism”. UR’s competitive purpose was not hidden: in the majority of western cities UR was the strategy used to stability the central city’s position in the metro urban hierarchy and as a “coming out” debutant-style for their arrival in the regional and national urban hierarchies (Abbott, 1981, p. Chapter 6).
As early as 1955, Downtown Tulsa Unlimited, a coalition of business leaders, advocated bond referenda approval for a civic center, land clearance for a hospital, community college, and apartment and office buildings. By late 1950’s, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland were working on UR projects. Others followed. Western downtowns were less than awe-inspiring, a legacy of “smaller” days. Low rise and interlaced with skid rows and streets unfriendly to cars, most Sunbelt CBDs needed upgrade to house the headquarters of the region’s major corporations—and the facility infrastructure one expected from a Big City. At the time, a criticism within many western cities was 1960’s UR was nothing but a City Beautiful waste (Abbott, 2008, p. 192).
Western Postwar Suburbanization 2014
The easiest jumping off point for discussion on postwar western suburbanization is World War II war production (which caused explosive population growth in a few short years) produced a distinctive physical pattern among western cities—a physical pattern with which postwar western central cities had to confront a t war’s end. The rapid expansion of war production capacity i.e. new factory construction had mostly occurred beyond existing central city boundaries where land was cheap and regulation/time lost was light. The same was true of army bases and airports.
Makeshift housing and related commercial/industrial businesses developed alongside the new facilities. Transportation access and required infrastructure was inherent in new facility construction. Portland’s huge Vanport and Oakland’s San Lorenzo expansions testified to the potential size of these new developments. If deterioration and blight had destroyed the downtown core of most Eastern/Midwestern cities, war production had produced a physical chaos on the borders/peripheries of western cities. “Every metropolis that had experienced a wartime boom … had its hap-hazard trailer camps, strings of tract houses along unpaved streets, and knotted traffic jams at country crossroads. The immediate response was frequently based on the assumption of primacy for the central city”.[1]
County governments were usually rural, without capacity to government and the default to postwar suburban/periphery chaos was central city leadership. In the spirit of if one wants to get out of a hole, the best first step is to stop digging, western cities had to “impose order on suburban chaos by bringing new subdivisions under the control of the central city”—this became a central plank for business urban reformers who came to power in western cities in the postwar era[2]. Western central cities had two tools at their immediate disposal: metropolitan planning (and the provision of infrastructure) and annexation—both contained significant elements of economic development policy and strategy. The degree of use and the effectiveness of each by the individual central cities will provide an early sense of the variation in Progressive and Privatist central city/suburban policy systems.
Policy System and Political Culture Variation
Sooner or later one gets into trouble speaking about western “this”, and eastern or southern “that”. In a history that argues variation is a cornerstone principle, broad strokes undermine our argument. This section breaks down the broad strokes to specific regions and then cities.
In the South, cities were smaller, elites regional, closed, and closely bound to the region’s more Privatist cultures. Possessing a “God bless the federal government and keep it far away from us” mentality, UR, decried as socialistic by some, was distrusted by most. Several southern states did not authorize/empower municipalities to use UR until the Sixties, Louisiana as late as 1968. Public housing—associated with race/ethnicity–with a few exceptions didn’t enjoy widespread support in the transitional segregationist south. ED took a poor second place to desegregation and civil rights during the 1950’s and Sixties. The 1965 Voting Rights Act exerted serious effects on southern municipal policy systems, requiring significant electoral changes with serious policy-making implications (replace at large with district elections, requiring federal approval of annexations)—this was system change in its own right. UR operated within a very crowded and conflict-ridden policy agenda. When desegregation and busing traveled North in the very late 1960’s our Big Cities were in “another place” as shall be discussed in Part III.
Western policy systems appeared in several varieties. Pacific Coast Big Cities were older, denser, and settled by Yankees, Germans, ethnic and racial groups—progressively-inclined—but complex, heterogeneous policy systems not dominated by business elites, but rather like San Francisco characterized by “hyper-pluralism” (DeLeon, 1992), or in Portland’s case governed by a commission form of government that found sustained action on public housing, or urban renewal difficult. Los Angeles, city, county or growing suburbs like Orange County, had weak mayors, strong independent public bureaucracies and overwhelming decentralization into countless suburban communities. Southern California’s settlement pattern produced a policy system, politics, and culture that bore little resemblance to that of San Francisco (Wirt, 1974). In California, initiative and referendum policy-making is a central feature of the policy process, whatever the policy system—as is nonpartisan elections. Each Big City ought to be looked at separately.
Non-San Antonio Texan cities, starting with Houston that ran in a curved line to San Diego (including Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Tucson) clearly got the same memo: not to use federal funds for UR—but to conduct a privately-led, planned and financed CBD redevelopment program. The outlier, Oklahoma City, retold below, must have been left off the distribution list—Salt Lake City got it instead. In the cities that got the memo, corporate and business elites generally dominated their policy system; in several instances, their “vault”-like groups directed ED policy effectively through the turmoil of desegregation and successfully conducted a significantly privatized version of UR, transforming their CBDs (and economic base) in masterful, if undemocratic and non-equalitarian, fashion. In these cities we can see pure locally-driven CBD rebuilding, and, in some case an integration of new neighborhood and CD groups into the policy system. There is no mistaking any of them with Boston or Philadelphia.
A couple of Eastern Big Cities started their UR before the 1949 Housing Act (Pittsburgh and NYC) and almost everyone submitted applications after the 1949 Act. As discussed that Act was poorly designed, imperfectly administered and required mandates and procedures that prompted the 1954 Act—which first used UR as a term and let loose the floodgates. By the late 1950’s most Eastern cities were in the program in some way. Not so the Sunbelt. There were significant attempts to start CBD projects in many Sunbelt cities, but frequently they were frustrated in some way.
The first major Sunbelt city to start a UR project (1955) was Norfolk VA (see below). By the end of the decade Atlanta, Fresno, Los Angeles, Oakland, Oklahoma City (see below), Sacramento and San Francisco had started their first project and were in rough symmetry with their eastern counterparts (notice California cities). Between 1960 and 1965 San Antonio, Tacoma, and Winston-Salem commenced projects. The vast bulk of Sunbelt cities started between 1966 and 1969 (Birmingham, Denver, Little Rock, Nashville, Portland and Tucson) (Abbott, 1981, pp. 164-5, Table 6-1). Abbott asserts the median starting date “for major downtown renewal projects in southern and western cities was 1967, and almost no major land clearance projects for commercial or institutional use were started after 1970” (Abbott, 1981, p. 151)
Conclusion: The Western Model of Urban Renewal
Aside from the now predictable diversity of experiences among Western cities urban renewal programs, at least two major departures from the more Eastern Big City model. First, there is a serious time lag going on. We are not talking about the forties or fifties, but rather the late sixties, seventies and even early eighties. The eastern Big City model is clearly losing steam and momentum just when the Western cities are going into high gear. The second obvious departure is the role of federal urban renewal dollars. There is a wide swatch of cities, ranging across the nation–from Houston to San Diego–that not only do not take advantage of federal monies, but consistently reject them. Indeed, most Western cities continue to pursue the urban renewal strategy after the federal program terminated. Are the two differences related? Or are there different things going on such as divergent local political culture?
What is obvious is that both models share their core strategy which is a reaction to suburbanization/ central city primacy, and that the CBD is principal target whose revitalization is pivotal to that strategy’s success. The cities in both models, despite the time periods and use of federal funds, are employing the same strategy and approach (physical redevelopment, infrastructure, and private-public partnership using redevelopment agencies). But, having said that, there are also differences in each of these shared factors. First, many Western cities are not following the anti-suburban strategy exclusively. Cities in the Eastern Big City Model are noticeably more inward-looking—New York City’s urban renewal program is not competing with Chicago’s, for instance. That is not the case with many Western cities where sensitivity to the hierarchy of cities is more obvious. In addition to countering the effects of suburbanization, western cities tend to be also “making a statement” with their CBD urban renewal initiatives. That this is a characteristic of our Privatist political culture may be relevant to consider.
Secondly, Western cities clearly developed simultaneously alongside their suburbs. And the suburbs on their own attracted residents who did not ever pass through the regional central city. The Eastern Big City could claim with some justification that residents were fleeing/being pushed/attracted to cross jurisdictional boundaries, but this is much less the case in Western cities. Western cities are much credited with saving themselves through their aggressive annexation program, but, in the end, that program could not keep up with sustained suburban population growth. The limited success of annexation lured the Western central cities into using a CBD/infrastructure urban renewal strategy. To make matters more different, by the seventies it was somewhat clear to the participants that the suburbs were not going away, that metropolitan government was not a viable next strategy, and that urban renewal ought to discover and/or re-forge a new role for the central city in a multi-nucleated metropolitan area. The typical Eastern Big City individual suburb, while economically formidable and political independent, never reached such sufficient scale or size to create a true multi-nucleated metro area.
Thirdly, the content of Western city urban renewal was both modified from its Eastern Big City experience, and extended to the neighborhoods in a fashion considerably different than that of the fifties and even sixties. Certainly, federal regulatory changes, the sixties’ riots, and the Policy World critique did play a role in the modification, but something else changed. Planners in western cities were more likely to be and work in new young departments, more desirous of working with residents and the community, and more accepting of Jane Jacobs’ make little plans and encourage diversity. The residents and voters of western cities had a different set of values and expectations, and elected different candidates to office. In the midst of the Age of Urban Renewal a generational shift had occurred—a new cohort was on the scene, and they voted and participated more. Respect for the environment and the effects of growth on the quality of life were also major changes. Having said this, the widely dispersed prevalence of a low-tax, limited government political culture dominated the early years of Western urban renewal, and bent, but did not break apart, in the latter years. Indeed, Proposition 13 was western in origin and it became a national movement, culminating in the election of Reagan.
Moreover, the profession of economic development had clearly separated itself from planning and had the benefit of learning from a new academic Policy World, but from older economic developers who saw the pitfalls of the Eastern Big City model. In particular, the primacy of physical redevelopment in economic development was being challenged by economic developers willing to work at the neighborhood level with CDBG programs, to use TIF, or to extend the field into providing direct assistance to firms: lending, incubators, small business formation/ counseling, or upgrading industrial parks (or by the eighties, technology and research centers). These are all facets of the time lag between the two models, to be sure, but time had changed the people and the landscape and the content of the urban renewal programs shifted accordingly.
In that I described the content of the Eastern Big City model as “brutal”, the Western Model, even in its purist Privatist manifestations, was somewhat more forgiving. The bulldozer no longer leveled entire blocks, the highway’s path more sensitively determined, and rehabilitation and commercial revitalization was noticeably impacted by involvement of neighborhood-based and, in the later years, historic preservation EDOs. Planning involved both and residents as well. It might also be mentioned that racial change was less a factor in the West than in Northern/Midwestern cities. Nothing was perfect, no claim is made that all went well, but the application of urban renewal was markedly less “brutal”, and tended to show its kinder and gentler side.
One of the factors that affected the content of Western urban renewal was that the players in the economic development policy process had changed. If nothing else there were lots more of them. The jurisdictional policy process of Eastern Big Cities was way more closed than that of the late seventies western city. The policy process was also different in the West. City Managers, not strong Mayors initially shaped the early years of the Western model. It would seem that city managers in a reformed city, influenced by the city councils’, were more willing to work with an independent private sector-led and financed urban renewal program. The role of the private sector was much more obvious and pronounced. But these early years demonstrated that public governance in city manager systems ultimately rested on the city council, less the mayor—and on having the top echelons of the business community, united and aggressively putting their pocket book where their mouth was. The issue of sufficient government capacity, from time to time, also was evident. In several instances new bureaucracies, including EDOs had to be set up and integrated into the jurisdictional policy process.
The city manager was strongest in carrying out direction from political leadership than in leading it. So with the seventies, the Western model changed abruptly, mostly I suspect from the new generational cohort voting in young, charismatic, dynamic mayors who espoused agendas and programs and were able to provide a more consistent leadership for both the council and the city manager/bureaucracy. The great success of the western model in many cities is directly tied to these new mayors. And it might be added, that there is no mistaking Pete Wilson with Mayor Daley or Abe Beame (to be fair, Kevin White and John Lindsey did make easier comparisons). The role of the state, certainly through the seventies, was less evident—usually confined to highway infrastructure and passage of enabling legislation. It is, however, worth note, that in California and the Northwest (Oregon especially) the state did play a leading role in the use and definition of urban renewal. This was also somewhat true back East.
And when it was said and done, easily forgotten is that the politics of Western urban renewal was the politics of growth; the politics of the Eastern Big City model is the politics of job and population decline. The chasm between the models created by this factor alone is huge. Among other effects of growth politics are less need for a strong federal role, and a need to “manage” growth to conform to generational and voters’ expectations. Finally, I suspect the simple “age” of the Western city, younger—really less than two generations if one considers population size—affected the content of a CBD urban renewal strategy. More important was the placement of infrastructure, highways and airports than wholesale bulldozing of the CBD. What the CBD needed, it seemed, was a good dose of “City Beautiful”-like public buildings, city halls, civic centers, museums, theatres, and above, all, sports stadia and corporate headquarters buildings. When the Eastern Big City urban renewal model shifted to waterfront revitalization and festival markets in the 1980’s, they were, in effect, as much competing with Western cities as with their suburban hinterlands.
[1] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 171.
[2] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 171.
Ron W. Coan 