Renewal can teach us.
An important sub- theme relevant to this history is to understand how differently the so-called paradigmatic version of urban renewal was actually implemented in municipalities across the nation. Urban Renewal in particular will prove to be a label that describes different programs, strategies and even, for municipalities in non-Big City regions, goals. It turns out, for logical reasons, that many municipalities enacted urban renewal for purposes other than to save the old order-they used it to build the New Order, for instance. Several municipalities did not even use urban renewal—at least if it is inescapably linked to using federal funds. Urban renewal is a bottom-driven economic development strategy; its implementation tells us a lot about the municipal systems that implemented it—much less about the federal government, which as far as urban renewal went, mostly did what it was told by municipal leaders and elected officials.
Surprisingly, for many, while public housing ultimately failed badly, central city urban renewal mostly worked. It did so, however, by hurting a lot people, mostly low-income and minorities, and whatever its success, it simply was grossly inadequate to counter the great shifts of population and economy that were occurring at the time. Nevertheless, the heritage of urban renewal was rebuilt downtowns and strong centers of sub-municipal redevelopment around the so-called “eds and meds”. There was a lag; urban renewal took a decade of more in some cases to work—but for the most part, aged though they now might be, the projects are still around and functioning.
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The Strands within the Age of Urban Renewal
The Six Strands
1928-1942 Developing an Idea
1933-1942 New Deal Slum Clearance and Public Housing
1942-1946 War Production Housing
1947-1974 Neighborhood Public Housing and Slum Clearance
Municipal and Veterans
Post 1949 Public Housing and Slum Clearance
Post 1965 Public Housing
1956-1972 the Interstate
1949-1977 CBD Urban Renewals
Public Housing Renewal post 1950/pre-1970 (Hirsch, Halpern, p75-82 ff)
CBD; Teaford/Metro p46//See ABBOTT article, Downtown Friedman, Fogelson,p.128 AmerUrbPol
GRUEN/CBD/JACOBS/UR/
Industrial Districts in the Fifties—See Policy System Files –Add Teaford
The Classics
Pittsburgh
New York City, Robert Wagner II, Jacobs and Moses, Zipp, Glaeser—Lindsay stopped it
Hartford
Boston
The Variety in Urban Renewal
Goo-Goo Urban Renewal: Philadelphia,
A Failed Policy System: Newark, Wilson: Nine Cities, p45;
Gruen’s Urban Renewal
Rouse Baltimore –Fosler, p. 32;
Chicago’s Urban Renewal by Plan: Fosler, p. 134-35, p.142,
Minneapolis—Fosler, p178, Minneapolis, p161
The UR Critique
Western “Big Cities” Urban Renewal
Sacramento
San Francisco
Los Angeles
Seattle
San Diego
Phoenix
Denver:
Oklahoma City Urban Renewal
Southern Urban Renewal
Interstate Highway Act: Miami, Kansas, Rose and Mohl
Atlanta’s Urban Renewal
Norfolk Newport and Virginia Beach
Atlanta: Housing and Slum Removal
William Hartsfield and the Chamber of Commerce
The Immediate Postwar
Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. (1961-1972)
Southern-Fried Urban Renewal: Norfolk
Local Politics and Urban Renewal
Hinterland, Hierarchy and Housing: Using Other Policy Areas
Texan Cities
Dallas
Houston
San Antonio
Changes in Policy Systems: Varieties Chapter 2 Abbott Metropolitan
Oil Cities—Houston and Oklahoma
New South Cities-Atlanta and Miami and Virginia Beach
Old South Cities: Richmond and Newport, San Antonio
Change in Policy Systems Western “style” Urban Renewal—Abbott, Metropolitan, p. 33ff and p.45
The West & the South in the Age of Urban Renewal:
Western Urban Renewal
Tax Increment Financing: California-Style Urban Renewal
San Francisco
Sacramento
San Diego: A Detailed Case Study
Denver’s Urban Renewal
Seattle Urban Renewal
Portland-Style Urban Renewal
Lessons and Observations on Urban Renewal
Neighborhoods and Growth—Fosler/Portland
Newark—sees Urban Renewal Wilson
The Philadelphia Story (p. 28)
Philadelphia: pre-1965 Age of Urban Renewal
Philadelphia: Urban Renewal Projects
Boston’s Post War Urban Renewal: (p. 33)
The Boston Backdrop
The Transition Years: Mayor Hynes
Boston Tries to Enters the Age of Urban Renewal
It’s Darkest before the Dawn
How Does One Open a Vault? By Seeing the Specter of Disaster
An Independent Mayor, a Professional Urban Renewal Director: Project Goes Forward
The Six Strands within the Age of Urban Renewal
As argued in past chapters the current urban renewal “paradigm” is a collage of activities, programs, actors, strategies, beliefs and (Deborah Stone “ish”) stories, and selected hindsight collapsed into a series of “urban truths” that support various current, often ideological, systems of thought and economic development approaches. In a few broad brush strokes fifty years of our history is collapsed into a few paragraphs and timeless lessons. The last three chapters, however, have broken down the paradigm into program-periods, each with its distinctive set of actors, goals, and effects on the regions and cities of America. From the New Deal thru the Great Society and Nixonian Thermidor (the Age of Urban Renewal) six epochs, or strands, have been discerned. They are:
1928-1942 Developing an Idea
1933-1942 New Deal Slum Clearance and Public Housing
1942-1946 War Production Housing
1947-1974 Neighborhood Public Housing and Slum Clearance
1956-1972 the Interstate
1947- 1974 CBD Urban Renewal
The epochs overlap, and each epoch may have several sub-phases. It is not hard to see how they have been collapsed into a holistic paradigm, but so much is lost when that is done.
Each epoch played out differently across America’s four regions—for obvious and not so obvious reasons. Fundamentally, each region was in a “different space” than the other regions: Big northern Cities were not in the same point of urban life cycle as the western cities, nor did the South enjoy the economic base of the North—and neither had really forgiven the other for Civil War. The New Deal pursued different and separate strategies for the West, South and Big Cities. In particular, war production investment catalyzed the South and West, and federal industrial decentralization policies introduced the gazelles of a new economic order throughout the nation. War production in the North and Midwest, however, had a distinctive metropolitan periphery bias. Slum clearance and blight removal had different meaning to cities without deteriorated slum immigrant housing, or who were not on the main paths of the Great Migration. Housing, and public housing, in particular, generated very different responses on the ground level across the nation.
The Interstate, shared across the nation, linked cities in the West, and dug them up in the East, involuntarily transplanting hundreds of thousands. Suburbs had different meaning among regions, and the counter-suburban strategy of the eastern Big Cities melded with an urban hierarchy competition in the West, Southwest and South. Each strand of urban renewal played out differently among the regions, and presented differently in each of our cities. A supposed common strategy, urban renewal, was in real life a servant of many purposes by different actors with different motivations and interests. Examples from each region will be used to further demonstrate the regional variation pertinent to discussion on epochs and strategy/programs.
Because life and time did not stop at the end of the Age of Urban Renewal, the experience and the legacy of the Age of Urban Renewal served as the foundation for future policy systems and economic development initiatives. In that new world that followed the Age of Urban Renewal the heritage, legacy, experience, structures and baggage of urban renewal shaped the future path to be followed in the new age. What had been created, or endured during the Age of Urban Renewal served as a platform on which future decisions were made, and new strategies and tools launched.
Although pulverized by a number of sledgehammer attacks, and seemingly destroyed in the process, urban renewal, perhaps surprisingly, has continued into the present. Simply given a new name, modified and turned around a bit, physical redevelopment was tasked to counter new sets of problems and opportunities. In later chapters, downtown redevelopment, transit-oriented development, waterfronts, festival markets, malls of America, sports stadia, regional airports, and massive civic center complexes will provide vivid testimony that the Age of Urban Renewal still lingers on the stages of sub-state economic development.
In this chapter various city “snapshots” will be presented to show the reader how Age of Urban Renewal initiatives differentially affected regions and individual cities. Urban renewal epochs impacted some cities more than others, leaving behind a different heritage in its wake. Accordingly, the first chapter theme describes individual cities dealt with programs specific to the various epochs. In real life jurisdictional economic development policy systems “bended, folded, and spindled” urban renewal to serve perceived ends.
Epoch-driven urban renewal proved to be a many-splendored concept with vastly different purposes, policy actors, and time sequences—a rose is not a rose in our economic development garden. A second chapter theme concentrates on the last, the sixth epoch—CBD-focused urban renewal—to understand how it evolved over twenty-five years. That strand proved particularly important to understanding what came after the Age. In a later chapter, we will pick up the strands once more and assess how they influenced a new approach to community development. Finally, a third chapter theme, urban renewal and the jurisdictional policy system, will examine the vastly different ways in which CBD-Focused Urban Renewal was handled by various city policy systems.
Inside the CBD-Focused Urban Renewal
The final epoch, CBD-Focused Urban Renewal, has often concentrated on the federal role in its description. When approached from the bottom-up it, federal urban renewal programs tend to be seen in a different light. First, as will be evident, federal money, eligibility, approval procedures and mandates took some while to make them user friendly, and in addition, local governments often took years to secure necessary state and local approvals and program/tool empowerments, along with budgetary appropriations. Frequently, the federal bureaucrats had to figure out how to administer and regulate the program—while under intense scrutiny of the various Congressional delegations that were wired by their local governments into demanding approvals and funding for their initiatives. This was a politicized distributive program—and by the 1960’s Congressional involvement was typical.
Consequently, most CBD-Focused initiatives during the 1950’s did not involve federal programs—they were financed mostly with private funds, and local/state public private agreements (typically for supportive infrastructure, planning and zoning/code approvals). It was not until after the 1956 Housing Act that federally supported urban renewal initiatives started in volume through the maze of approvals, compliances, and required procedures (approved comprehensive plan, approval of blight, etc.). These jelled into an operating program very late in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. The most serious difficulty was federal urban renewal dollars were linked to housing, and eligibility hinged on designations of blight and substandard housing. CBD-Focused initiative therefore had to include neighborhood housing in order to qualify—even if the housing element was not the primary focus. The successive passage of almost annual housing acts that followed in the 1960’s usually were efforts to strip away housing requirements and make more funds available to non-housing activities.
This exposes the very real war that went on within the urban renewal age between public housers/neighborhood housing and the CBD business growth coalitions that wanted commercial and physical development outside the neighborhoods. By the early 1960’s “eds and meds”, nonprofit institutions entered the fray and their commercial/education/health offices and facilities engendered their own battles with neighborhoods and activists outside of the CBD and its growth coalition. The “spreading” of urban renewal eligibility over the years meant that other actors than downtown real estate interests clamored for federal dollars and extended the number and type of actors involved in the program. In fact, as will be demonstrated, the very earliest applications for urban renewal, Hartford’s Yale-focused Richard Lee/Robert Logue-led pioneering application was, in the shadows, an “eds” project (Dahl’s Who Governs).
From our bottom-up vantage point, it is very apparent that federal money prompted few urban renewal initiatives whose purpose was simply to grab dollars for what they wanted to do anyway. The projects were locally-inspired and driven by mayors, developers, business, Policy World, property-owners and EDOs like chambers and housing/redevelopment agencies. Such projects had a life of their own without federal funds—but usually required local funds which were not available or available through a contested referendum or limited tax revenues. Federal money did not directly go to private users (and there was no “but for” provision), but was used to partly finance the government’s involvement (public parking garages, street repair, planning, parks, etc.) in a private/public deal. The substantial bulk of investment in a typical public/private urban renewal initiative was private—and private money often was used in the earliest, most difficult stages (especially in the early years).
When viewed from the top-down, it might seem that federal money “drove” the local project, our perception is that was rarely the case. To the extent that it provided local government with resources it lacked to engage in a public/private initiative, federal urban renewal dollars did make possible projects that likely would not have materialized in the form they took, at least. Remarkably, more cities than is commonly realized implemented urban renewal projects without federal dollars—consciously choosing to not apply or get involved with federal government. In the Southwest and even southern California federal money played a minimal, to non-existent role in local urban renewal. In essence, one can reasonably make a case that most urban renewal projects were local projects, chiefly privately financed, that used federal money as available—and lobbied hard in Washington to get more and for expanded uses.
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Industrial Districts and Urban Renewal
Ironically in the late forties-early fifties, perhaps the biggest lift to economic development came from the maturation of comprehensive planners, and their realization that different economic sectors had to be understood and treated separately in their plans, and in their zoning ordinances. Once again New York City provided the innovative thrust (also ironically because in terms of zoning, New York City over the previous half-century had mostly resisted zoning innovations). Mayor O’Dwyer (1946-1950) reformed the city’s archaic zoning ordinance after an extensive study/new ordinance/plan proposal by consultant firm Harrison, Ballard and Allen. That firm had formed ten advisory committees composed of different industry sector specialists. Their reports led the way for a plan that created differentiated zoning for the various industry sectors—creating, for example, light industry zone, heavy industry, office/commercial zoning, scientific-technological, and heavy commercial (traffic dependent). Overall eighteen zoning districts were developed in New York City’s new plan[1].
This was picked up on by the National Industrial Zoning Committee[2] which produced a pamphlet in 1951 which proved to be a municipal planner best seller. Setting forth twelve “principles” for industrial for establishing zoning districts for manufacturing and related sectors, planner had dramatically reversed its previous standard of isolated and segregating manufacturing—which in no small measure was prompting ongoing industrial suburban decentralization—planners had finally realized that a viable jurisdictional economic bases included, in varying degrees, all sectors and industries. Zoning had to make room for industry as well as traffic-automotive-dependent retail and office. Even as late as the early fifties, most communities used zoning …
(T)o ban industry from the most desirable districts or to exclude it altogether from a city, [but] public opinion had come to recognize that most communities require a certain amount of industrial development to produce a sound economy. Yet many municipalities still afforded industry little or no protection against encroachment, failed to designate areas served by rail lines and highways for industrial use, and installed streets that cut appropriately situated acreage into sites too small for proper use by large [more horizontal] plants. The industrial park, convenient to necessary transportation, and especially designed to accommodate modern plants, increasingly offered manufacturers the setting the community itself neglected to provide.
Scott goes on to observe that the National Industrial Zoning Committee, while supporting industrial parks, advocated a larger concern—that planners integrate the modern economy into their zoning and comprehensive plans—and more importantly develop zoning regulations and standards that did not repress manufacturing innovation by dictating what cannot be allowed, rendering stillborn the development of “unborn industries”, new technologies and improved processes[3]. The Committee had obviously read Schumpeter.
Caveat: Can We Automatically Apply Big Cities UR to Third Tier?
No. There is not a lot of urban renewal era research on cities below 100,000. Indeed, most urban renewal literature focuses on the biggest of the Big Cities—on the East Coast/Great Lakes especially—and Atlanta. What literature as exists[4], however, suggests caution in applying the elevated theoretical and conceptual experiences of Big Cities to the smaller cities of the North and Midwest. First, a great deal of the crisis that urban renewal confronted hinged on the impact of the Great Migration and the rapid pace of suburbanization. Also, smaller cities were less affected by state legislative annexation restrictions frequently limited to the state’s very largest cities (sub-state constitutional classification system). This could cut both ways, however, as Big Cities more often benefited from special powers for redevelopment that did not extend to smaller cities automatically. Home rule charters were harder to come by, and smaller cities usually stuck to the forms of government called for in the municipal classification system. City managers, commissions and weak(er) mayor forms of government were, and still are, more common in smaller cities.
Moreover, the scale of doing business in Big Cities meant that the richest and most powerful—and not infrequently the most Progressive, gravitated to the Big Cities. Professional associations were more common, and its likely their influence more pervasive. These affluent Progressively, planner-oriented reformers were critical to urban renewal in Big Cities, and their relative absence could easily have affected urban renewal policy-making—especially when combined with the absence of a strong mayor form of government. The upper echelon of corporate America, those likely to have been members of the Vault or Greater Philadelphia Movement didn’t often play ball in smaller cities; they left it to their local branch officials—who are a different breed entirely. Chambers, not governments, likely continued to play a larger role in urban renewal era small cities.
Big developers and major insurance companies, the actual builders and financiers of urban renewal projects were also infrequent players in smaller cities. They left that game to local and regional developers; this is likely a more conservative, and less resourceful lot. Finally, while the federal government did make a concerted effort to include smaller cities eligible for urban renewal funds, it would be wise not to overstate small city access to highly competitive, grossly political federal largesse. With no evidence to cite, I also question the impact of modernist, comprehensive planners in smaller city policy processes, which, I suspect, tended more to conservative and traditionalistic motifs. Le Corbusier high towers, throw out the old and bring in the new might seem harder to sell to elected officials and voters in small cities.
Ironically, these corporations and institutions often came equipped with the necessary financial capacity to pursue these projects without urban renewal funding. In many cases, as with the UN Project, the corporate leadership of American business had already determined that they needed to step in to save the Big City from suburbanization. The role of economic developers, therefore, was not simply that of providing urban renewal funds, but included being the interface with planners, political officials and public works departments to supplement and fill in the gaps in what were essentially private projects. CBD revitalization in this era was definitively a public-private partnership, with economic developers at its nexus. More behind the scenes is the role played by large corporations such as Alcoa who invested heavily in eastern city urban renewal projects. Working with national developer, William Zeckendorf (of United Nations fame), Alcoa was a major United Nations investor (70% ownership), Los Angeles Century City (67% ownership) Indianapolis James Whitcomb Riley Center (61%) and tons more (Philadelphia’s Society Hill).[1] While not explored intensively in the urban renewal literature, the nuance of many urban renewal projects reveals a fascinating variety of financial vehicles and instruments and silently demonstrates how urban renewal and redevelopment projects thrust redevelopment agencies and their personnel deep into not only the commercial realty world and local banking, but into the cosmopolitan financial world of large corporations.
The post-1954 Housing Acts unleashed a flood of municipal involvement in Title I-funded projects. William Slayton, the FFHA Commissioner observed “a steady increase from 31 localities at the end of our first fiscal year in 1950, to772 urban renewal projects as of May 31, 1965 (44 of fifty states) … Most of the larger communities undertook urban renewal quite early, but increasingly the smaller communities became involved … At the end of fiscal year 1954, 44 per cent of communities with populations in excess of 100,000; by 1964 this proportion had dropped to 14 per cent, and more than half of the localities had populations of less than 25,000.”[2]
[1] Hubert Kay, “The Industrial Corporation in Urban Renewal”, in James Q. Wilson, Urban Renewal, op. cit, p.285.
[2] William L. Slayton, “The Operation and Achievements of the Urban Renewal Program” in James Q. Wilson (Ed), Urban Renewal, op. cit. p. 203
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Change in Policy Systems Leads to Western “style” Urban Renewal
This multilateral-multi-nucleated Western jurisdictional system also affected the style of urban renewal practiced in the pre-1975 period. In an earlier chapter we discussed several different Eastern approaches to economic development, contrasting for instance the Pittsburgh and Baltimore models. We also conducted a case study demonstrating the power of political culture to affect the timing and politics of urban renewal in Boston and Atlanta.
Our point in all this was to show the variation within the urban renewal period which ultimately reflected its decentralized political coalitions, economic development priorities and distinctive regional values and attitudes. We would therefore suspect, given the West’s new-build, not redevelop, needs and the realities of having to compete with emerging rival suburban population centers, Western urban renewal would also possess its own character and style. Abbott accordingly relates …
… the tendency in Sunbelt glamour cities to focus civic pride on a single project of pharaonic scale. Cities have worked to top the Astrodome with the Kingdome and the Superdome, the Regency-Hyatt in Atlanta with the Crown Center in Kansas City, and Century City in Los Angeles with the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. In a larger perspective the central business core of most sunbelt cities is a concrete dream of the 1950’s realized in the 1960’s and 1970’s by private speculators and government agencies tapping public funds for one downtown project after another. The planners and businessmen who copied each other’s blueprints for massive downtown development were involved in implementing a key element in the program of neoprogressivism in the Sunbelt cities.[5]
This style of urban renewal was a manifestation of “businessman’s government” or what we referred to in earlier discussion as the Progressive Coalition–adapted to Western circumstances (could we dare to label it “cowboy progressivism”?). Instead of serving as a strategy for the central city’s capture of escaping residents and a necessary modernization of obsolete or missing infrastructure and an updating of logistics and transportation technologies, urban renewal in the West was more a return to old-style boosterism (and a need to install essential infrastructure as well). One didn’t build an airport; one built THE airport of all airports.
On the broad scale, urban renewal became a tool in intercity rivalries for economic advantage…. In city after city, the postwar leadership worked to facilitate the construction …of common projects … (such as office space), a trade center, a convention-exhibition center with appended hotels, and a public university campus to train technical and managerial staff for the new white-collar enterprises.
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’.[6]
But this civic booster function was only the first characteristic of Western-style urban renewal. A second function of urban renewal “was to sustain the predominance of established central business districts against the growing challenge of suburban areas”.[7] Although Western suburbs drew populations directly from other areas, not stopping to settle first in the central city and then in later generations “escaping” to a suburb, the dynamic of central city CBD prosperity was shared with the East and Midwest–with the likely distinction that the former did not enjoy the legacy romantic memory of a former “golden age”. In this sense, the Western central city may not house the majority of metropolitan residents, but those residents would hopefully drive to the central city to work and to play. In this sense, the Western central city would assert dominance.
Unlike most Eastern redevelopment agencies, Western redevelopment agencies, on the whole, got off to a rather rough start. Throughout the fifties they were stymied by neighborhood groups (can’t blame Jane Jacobs for that one) and political conservatives, i.e. concerned taxpayers. This apparently was especially true for cities in Texas (“creeping socialism” was how urban renewal was described). Gradually, however, businessmen coalitions, the planning commissions, and, of course, the growth coalition (FIRE) gathered momentum and by the late fifties and throughout the sixties, urban renewal was in its Western heyday (remember, in the East the story in the sixties is urban renewal being challenged–and being blamed for the riots).
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[8] 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.[9]
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”.[10] 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[11]. 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’.[12] 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.
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.
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.
By the end of the 1980’s Orange County, the next county over from Los Angeles county, the suburb of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, had a “downtown larger than San Francisco, and its own suburbs an hour even farther away from central Los Angeles“.[13]
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 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 were 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[14].
A final, but important observation regarding how the war production and population migrations of the war years transformed the western policy systems and policy elites involves sub-state economic development’s relationship with planning. The New Deal war years had brought with it the National Resources Planning Board whose impact was principally on states, requiring them to set up state-wide planning “commissions” (from which many state economic development agencies would evolve in the postwar years), but the NRPB also did exert some influence on sub-state as well. Between 1941 and 1943, the NRPB “Working through its regional offices and through affiliated state planning boards, NRPB staff performed significant background work in inventorying metropolitan resources and defining metropolitan economic structures”. In rare instances they were influential in the establishment of regional metropolitan bodies (Puget Sound Regional Planning Commission and the Salt Lake City Wasatch Front Project, for example)[15].
More relevant to our particular interests was the dawning realization (1943) by both state/sub-state and the federal government that when the war was over there could be “hell to pay” as the war-induced spigots were turned off and state and local governments had to “adapt”—whatever that might mean. In 1943, Census Director Hauser grouped metropolitan areas by how well these areas were likely to “hold onto” their wartime growth and which might need federal help (and which seemingly had not benefited from the war[16]). Fortune[17] published a very influential article (November, 1943) outlining the different approaches to linking planning, industrial development and more comprehensive planning issues such as housing et.al. By this time, the immediate crisis of early war migrations had subsided a bit and municipal jurisdictions could begin to “look up” get some perspective on what had happened and where they were now headed. Aside from the obvious disarray created by ad hoc reactions to the crisis, most anticipated the likelihood of an immediate postwar recession, the need for lots of new jobs for returning soldiers and sailors, and the reconversion of war plants/production to peace time products and market demand. The provision of delayed infrastructure, especially transportation and water/sewer, was also obvious as was the reality that much of this need lie in suburban/unincorporated communities.
Unsure of the federal government which by 1944 already seemed to be backing away from its aggressive New Deal policies and programs, municipalities increasingly realized they were largely going to be on their own. It was at this point that the influence of CED and the emergence of neo-Progressive business reformers came together in various public-private groupings to look around and come up with some ideas as to how to proceed. In this atmosphere” “many southern and western cities also established or reorganized their planning agencies in the last years of the war in order to be prepared to make rational decisions on the location of new industrial and residential growth and public investment”.[18]
Planning and economic development were joined at the hip as the bodies/commissions created, mostly by the private sector, and guided/led, mostly by the private sector figured out what was needed for each municipality and their outlying hinterland. At probably no other point in our history thus far was the alternative of a metropolitan-wide, comprehensive planning solution to western/ southern central city/suburban issue more feasible. This was the alternative preferred by Fortune, the Planning Associations, the national CED, and many young, municipal business leaders then engaged in the process.
But it was not to be. The reality was that “the crisis atmosphere” had not gone away, that planners, economic developers, public officials, and business reformers were only in “the eye of the hurricane”—they all knew (by the end of 1944) that the war would likely be over in the next year and a second tsunami would revisit their community. Even if they had desired, local municipal leaders and governments perceived they lacked the resources and capacity needed for comprehensive planning, and the anticipated postwar problems were not expected to arrive with an instruction manual. Still, the postwar policy agenda for southern and western states had been etched: (1) how to preserve and enhance economic growth and (2) how to cope with critical “comprehensive planning-style” issues such as metropolitan land use, transportation and the provision of area-wide infrastructure.
As it turned out, the answer to these questions would define the relationship of western/southern cities and their suburban hinterlands. The next section will provide brief descriptions of several jurisdictions and how they managed the pre-1946 transition to the postwar world and the reader. In the next chapter a section will follow up and describe how western cities acted in this postwar 1950’s. In these discussions, governmental/political capacity, the role of business elites, the pursuit of economic growth, and zero-sum metropolitan planning/suburbanization will figure prominently, and with great variation, in the policy systems of western cities.
For most of the West, indeed the entire Sunbelt, the transition (and subsequent postwar) policy system was led by an “alliance” of local business segments which coalesced into a formal electoral/ policy organization or movement. The first business segment, the previously alluded to CED branch membership (larger business committed to strategic planning and economic growth partnership with government), and the second segment, what Abbott calls “aspiring entrepreneurs and professionals” (who benefited from economic growth), were often newcomers uncommitted to, and unappreciative of, the long-standing locally-dominant business elites.
The two segments came together, informally and formally, starting in the last war years and continuing over the next decade. Having replaced older business elites and business-led machines, these reformers often dominated western city policy systems into the 1970’s. Most importantly for our purposes, while names would change from city to city, the San Jose pattern of business reformers taking over second tier Sunbelt cities through formal political organization and following a policy of aggressive economic development/growth, annexation, and efficient municipal government spread like wildfire. “In Phoenix for example nearly every city council member elected between 1949 and 195 was a nominee of the Charter Government Committee. In Albuquerque, the Citizens Committee controlled city government from 1954 to 1966. In San Antonio, Good Government League nominees won 77 of 81 council races between 1955 and 1971. In Houston the 8F crowd, in Fort Worth the 7th Street Gang, and in San Jose “the Book of the Month Club” … set the agenda for local government. The common product was government that was small, efficient, and largely concerned with orderly growth”.[19]
Both reform segments originally shared membership with the local traditional business community in the jurisdictional Chamber—a duality that potentially compromised the long-standing leadership of chambers in the community’s public policy system. In jurisdictions in which the Chamber was fractured sufficiently, or where the formation of a new formal entity was judged preferable, one can perceive early examples of what will become a national pattern in which the Chamber surrenders leadership over the economic development policy area.[20] In this section, brief snapshots of selected jurisdictions will be presented with emphasis on the timing the organizational vehicles employed. In the next chapter which focuses on the pre-Great Society years, the policy preferences of these reformers will be described and their particular economic development-related activities considered.
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[21]. 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, are 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)”[22]. 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 an 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.
[1] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p. 483.
[2] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p. 484. The National Industrial Zoning Committee (composed of representatives from American Industrial Development Council (economic development) American Institute of Planners, American Railway Development Association, American Society of Civil Engineers, Association of State Planning and Development Agencies, and the Society of Industrial Realtors) drew up twelve principles that a community should observe in reserving space for manufacturing plants. Economic developers, public and private, were involved in this planning reform initiative. The principle was released early in 1951 and by the end of that year a third printing was being distributed to jurisdictions.
[3] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., pp. 484-485. The National Industrial Zoning Committee continued its work by development zoning “performance standards”. It surveyed industrial plants, identified their concerns—thus launching an innovative approach to zoning—and a fertile playground for the evolution of economic development.
[4] Leo Adde, Nine Cities: the Anatomy of Downtown Renewal (Urban Land Institute, Washington, 1969); “Urban Politics and the Vision of a Modern City: Philadelphia and Lancaster after World War II, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. CXXXII, No. 4 (October 2008)
[5] IBID. pp 143-144. Abbott comments that this style of urban renewal was labeled by Calvin Trillin as a spreading infection of municipal ‘domeism”.
[6] Abbott, op. cit. p.144
[7] IBID. p. 145
[8] Atlanta is the chief exception, corresponding more to the Eastern model as does San Francisco to a lesser degree.
[9] 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.
[10] Calvin Trillin, “U.S. Journal, Kansas City”, pp. 94-101.
[11] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit, p. 143.
[12] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit, p. 144.
[13] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. p. 12.
[14] Harvey Molotch, “the City as Growth Machine”, American Journal of Sociology, 82, (September 1976), pp. 304-332.
[15] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., p.111.
[16] The last group included 55 Northern cities and only 11 southern and western cities. Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., p.101.
[17] Fortune supported the perspective of the NRPB, which was in its final days before being defunded, by urging comprehensive regional planning as the mechanism and process by which to confront the issues of adjustment. It was envisioned the federal government would play an active role in these regional planning entities.
[18] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op.cit., p. 113.
[19] Amy Bridges, “Politics and Growth in Sunbelt Cities” in Raymond A. Mohl (Ed) Searching for the Sunbelt: Historical Perspectives on a Region (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1993), p. 91.
[20] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson, the University of Arizona Press, 1998), p. 38.
[21] 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.
[22] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 149.
Urban Renewal Critique
The latter pushback trickled out in publications such as Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers (1962) followed by his second book, The Levittowners (1967)[1]. Gans detailed the devastating effects of urban renewal on what were vibrant working class ethnic and racial neighborhoods which had been misperceived by Progressive planners as ghettos and slums[2]. A genre of literature, the most damaging of which was the “The Federal Bulldozer”[3], found little that was good and productive in the considerable number of urban renewal projects which dotted the central city skyline (or more usually were vacant, undeveloped landscapes). What had come to evolve as Progressive big city economic development went from pedestal to trash heap within a few short years?
But, as bad as all this was, the real sledge hammer in this early sixties period came from Jane Jacobs and her The Death and Life of Great American Cities.[4] Jacob’s critique of “make no small plans” planning was devastating and, it too persists to this day. The “wizard behind the urban renewal curtain” was always the city planning department. Planning provided the theory and the methodology, the sites for slum removal, housing, infrastructure redevelopment. The future hope for central city revitalization itself was based on planning. The confidence in eventually retaining or at least financially retaining, the suburbanite to support the future central city rested on metropolitan planning. And Jacobs simply crushed these theories, methodologies and hopes–for at least several decades. The opening lines of Death and Life … tell it all:
This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding…. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding.[5]
Jacobs, an associate editor of the impactful Architectural Forum (owned by Time Inc), had been a long-time critic of urban renewal and famous work, Death and Life …, was actually a restatement and extension of a number of earlier speeches and publications. Her earlier works more vividly capture the spirit of her message which asserts the informality, the emotion, and the humanness of an unplanned city. She observed that:
the lack of stores in urban redevelopment projects … (that unfavorably contrasted with the previous, now destroyed, shopping streets which were) ‘strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our (rational-based) concept of urban order’. She made the point that shopkeepers were important ‘public characters’ that corner stores function not just as shops but as neighborhood social centers, and that even a vacant stores played a role as storefront clubs and meeting places. The new housing projects, with their massive residential slabs set in parkland, provided no such options. ‘This is a ludicrous situation, and it ought to give planners the shivers,’ she said. She talked about how the chief social space of the inhabitants of a new housing project in East Harlem (where she served as a board member of Union Settlement) was a laundry Room. ‘We wonder if the architect of that project had any idea its heart would be in the basement,’ she observed. ‘And we wonder if the architect had any idea what he was designing when he did that laundry”.
(as described by Witold Rybczynski[6])
Jacobs loved lively streets. She espoused what she labeled as her “ubiquitous principle”: “the need of cities for an intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially”[7] This principle is described by Rybczynski:
“She extolled density, complexity, and diversity, and pointed out the advantages of narrow streets, short blocks, mixtures of old and new buildings, and mixtures of commercial, cultural, and residential uses”. She contrasted this with planned urban renewal projects which were “spacious, park-like, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery”.[8]
Jacobs critique contained error and misjudgment[9] as well as being apt and sound. Her critique, however, was effective, devastating and long-lasting precisely because it was real and genuine–not an obtuse scholastic, statistically driven and logically proved argument. Jacobs “turned a page” in the evolution of modern city planning and she provided more than theoretical ammunition to the anti-urban renewal elements. She also drove a wedge into the Progressive Coalition and perhaps indirectly inspired a group of embryonic economic developers to seek a different approach to job creation in our urban centers.
The second wedge driven into the heart of the Progressive Coalition was Robert Caro’s, The Power Broker[10]. The book exposed the unchecked evils of the functionally-powerful independent redevelopment agency and discredited the most famous economic developer of his day, Robert Moses. Moses was to be forced out of office in 1968 (at an incredible age of 80; he was to die in 1981 at 92, leaving Edward Logue as the foremost urban renewal guru). Caro perfectly captured the anti-authoritarian trends of our current era, and he demolished Moses as a man, human being, and a master planner-builder.
The Power Broker correctly focused on the reality that politics, power, and consensus of elites (the Progressive Coalition) had both transformed and modernized New York City (and New York State as well) and in many ways had also destroyed it. In particular, Moses’s love of the car, highway, parkway, and freeway (he did not drive and may not have had a license) drew the most criticism and the congestion he unleashed, has been cities as his most enduring negative legacy–next to the destruction of entire neighborhoods, the Diaspora of their residents, and the frustration and bitterness which engendered the riots which were then winding down.
Urban renewal which had evolved from housing and slum clearance in the middle and late 1940’s to business and central business district development/redevelopment by the late 1950’s was under very serious attack from all sides by the early and middle 1960’s. The War and Poverty and Great Society, although creating EDA, had also set up HUD, ARPC, and community controlled-federally funded OEO and Model Cities programs smack dab in the urban renewal agency’s doorstep. The so-called bulldozer for Negro removal was effectively stymied by organized and federally-supported residents of those very neighborhoods who were prime candidates for urban redevelopment. What’s more, the intelligentsia and upper and upper middle class blue bloods, key elements in the Progressive Coalition, had developed several minds about the effectiveness and the consequences of urban redevelopment. Mayors, the lynchpin behind the evolution of urban renewal, were under attack governmentally and electorally, and their bureaucrats, especially the planners, were transformed into street-level firefighters.
[1] Herbert J. Gans, the Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York, the Free Press, 1962); and the Levittowners (New York, Columbia University Press, 1967); Interestingly, the Levittowners was not all that critical of that now famous initial suburban subdivision, but without doubt, the Urban Villagers was heart-breaking.
[2] Clark, Dark Ghetto op. cit.
[3] Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962 (Cambridge, the MIT Press, 1964).
[4] Jane Jacobs, the Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, Vintage, 1961). We will develop the ideas of both authors and how they affected the theory and practice of economic development in subsequent sections of this chapter as the full impact of their observations was most felt a few years later.
[5] IBID. p. 3.
[6] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities (New York, Scribner, 2010), pp. 52-53. This particular set of comments and statements by Jacobs was detailed in a 1956 Harvard seminar, long before Death and Life. It does capture wonderfully the spirit of her subsequent critique, and her (and Rybczynski) visceral love of the irrational that provides meaning to our lives. The Curmudgeon finds especially fascinating her description of small business people and contrasts it to the prevailing rational, cold-blooded 2013 small business consensus that will be discussed in a later chapter of this book. Jacobs understood that small business is about people, their dreams, and their daily joys and miseries–not their brute numbers and their impact on national job creation. It seems to the Curmudgeon that a true proponent of small business would argue from Jacob’s heart.
[7] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (New York, Vintage Books, 1961), p. 14.
[8] IBID, p. 55 quoted from Jane Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” Fortune, April 1958, p. 133.
[9] IBID. pp. 60-66. Rybczynski employs Lewis Mumford (a contemporary and former friend of Jacobs) critique drawn from Mumford’s: Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies” (New Yorker, 1963). While both Jacobs and Mumford despised Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, Mumford was an advocate for Howard’s Garden City and the suburbs which drew Jacob’s ire. Mumford observed that “high-density housing, pedestrian-filled streets, and a mixture of economic activities” were not sufficient in real life to inhibit crime and deterioration. Mumford was also not willing to throw all of city planning into the trash can.
[10] Originally published in the New Yorker after Moses had been forced from office, The Power Broker received the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Robert Caro, The Power Broker, (New York Vintage, 1975)
Ron W. Coan 