Was the business coalition that led western cities into boosterism and urban renewal during the late fifties and sixties identical to that described by Wilson for eastern cities a decade or two earlier? Well, yes—and no. First, in both models, the private sector was the driver behind urban renewal. This was true in 1950 in the East and the 1960’s in the West. The initial difference between the two models was that in the East, the private sector allied closely with the new independent (from machines) “entrepreneurial” strong mayor while this alliance, for the most part did not develop in the West until the 1970’s (and the mayor was often a weaker mayor in a city manager form of government) (Kansas City, San Diego, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City. Los Angeles (weak mayor) and Portland (commission). Seattle, San Francisco and Denver (the latter two city/county) possess a strong mayor form of government—but in both the first decade (the fifties) of urban renewal was pretty much a bust. Albuquerque was a strong mayor as well. This is an important qualification and it is a major reason why there is almost a two-phased urban renewal effort in several cities. It may not be an overstatement to observe that while the business sector pushed hard for urban renewal, it was mayor-dominated political leadership that mostly made it happen.
The more difficult part of this question is if, and how the private sector business leadership differed among each city. There are few studies that permit comparison among cities. Boston’s elite Vault included the highest echelon of Boston’s business community and they had to pay to play. San Diego came close with San Diegans Inc, but Oklahoma City’s “elite cabal” does not compare with the conventional vault-like business leadership. Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Council and San Francisco’s Bay Area Council and SPUR probably was the best example of elite private sector leadership which drove urban renewal, but also other critical regional issues as well. For me at least, the segments of the business community involved in these organizations, corresponds rather poorly to the more common form of business leadership, the so-called growth coalition[1].
While it may seem strange to discuss at this point the formation of a national business-led EDO in Washington D.C., I do so to establish at the outset that in these critical years, one was witnessing the initial handoff, a passing of the baton so to speak, from a private sector dominated economic development to a more public sector economic development. The Committee on Economic Development (CED) “represented the commitment of large corporations to strategic planning for continued economic growth”. The CED followed a very embracive economic development agenda indeed; it was deeply involved in both the European Marshall Plan and setting up the postwar international financial system at Bretton Wood, not to mention the Employment Act of 1946. Founded in 1942 by CEOs from Eastman Kodak, Studebaker and Benton & Bowles (advertising), the CED today continues as an impactful leader in economic development policy[2].
CED was the national personification of the American corporate structure which existed at the end of World War II and it reflected the priorities and the approach to economic development of the very largest corporations of America. Abbott describes them as “neo-Progressive” and as far as their agenda applied to state and sub-state economic development they stressed “progress”, the integrity of “the public interest” and they railed against corruption, machine bosses, and or parochial jurisdictional leadership unfit “to guide their city into the modern age”. While many may suspect that the horde of residential newcomers would put serious pressure on the established political traditions and policy systems (which is true), but, the most serious immediate disruptive pressure probably issued from the newcomer corporations which had set up branch plants, and generated supply contracts and jobs which supported a raft of small business formation within the community.
Research is scarce on this topic, but it is my suspicion that the individual city business community of western cities got quite a jolt from this war production growth. The business newcomers potentially complicated the existing chamber leadership and business model. Evidence does support that at least in some cities, newcomers joined the chamber resulting is a polarized business community-with old-timers vaguely, if not consciously, uncomfortable with change and newcomers, younger entrepreneurs and start ups, pressing for even faster and more long-term growth from which they could continue to expand. The large local corporations (banks, utilities and newspapers especially), however, sort of standing above the fray because of their size and centrality, were yet another matter.
In many ways, municipal business reformers remained faithful to the principles and reforms earlier described as “the city efficient”—but their international, national, and local context was different, hugely different. “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 [the reform businessmen] hoped to mobilize public and private resources to build the necessary physical facilities for economic growth”. In a nutshell, they advocated for a rebuilt and modernized downtown, new transportation facilities, especially highways and airports, new port facilities to accommodate America’s new-found international trade and financial leadership, and were concerned with the externalities of American industrial production: water and air pollution.[3]
Equivalently inspired local business reformers who identified with the CED and/or adhered to many of their values and priorities were active in nearly every major city (and second/third tier city) in each region of the nation. To be sure, our Eastern and Mid-Western Big City business reformers often faced entrenched ethnic machines/bosses, exceedingly fragmented electorates not always appreciative of how increased taxes could benefit them, and a large “native” business community. Also, these cities, the home base of the Northeast/Midwest economic and political hegemon were home to the largest of national corporations that had founded the CED itself. They had often institutionalized the Progressive past found in their communities. In this section, therefore, it is useful to keep in mind that an atmosphere of private-public collaboration in policy-making at all levels was quite in vogue. It might also be helpful that such collaboration reflected past Progressive/City Efficient principles and priorities—and should not be simply dismissed as an early manifestation of self-interested, purely profit-motivated growth coalitions.[4]
But in the West these businessmen faced quite the opposite situation. Arriving in communities which had sprung up almost overnight in the war production years, yet another version of ‘instant cities’, young and venturesome businessmen encountered an older business elite whose family forbearers, in many cases, had initially founded and scratched progress and their city out of the western wilderness. Not so the horde of newcomers that infested the exploding communities of the early war years. Many of these newcomer businesses were reformers who had profited from the war production growth. But the old guard was more threatened by the growth and the disruption it caused. Often in control of the Chamber, the old guard defined economic development in a more restrained, less disruptive form or pace. They did not necessarily share the frustration experienced by newcomers by the somewhat inefficient and more personalistic (crony) government that had operated in these jurisdictions over the previous several decades.
New comers were more numerous than the old guard and the new comers were spread throughout the entire business community and its across industry sectors. They saw advantage from continued growth, physical modernization, and economic prosperity. Instead of entrenched ethnic neighborhoods often embittered and divided by years of machine/Progressive competition and discord, western cities were more homogeneous and the overwhelming majority of the electorate was also newly arrived on the local scene—they were in no serious way tied to the past and past ways. In many western cities, rapid war production population growth quickly translated into serious political change in the immediate postwar years.
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)[5].
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[6]). Fortune[7] 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”.[8]
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”.[9]
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.[10] 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[11]. It is clear to me that this type of business leadership did play an important role in western urban renewal, and as we discussed previously, gradually took over leadership of the Eastern Big City redevelopment agencies during the 1960’s and after. Clarence Stone and his “regime” approach to the business-public policy nexus, while perhaps too flexible, is more able to assess the FIRE business community.
In any case, as Abbott states “Coalitions of downtown businesses and investors therefore took the lead in selling urban renewal programs to city councils and the voters in a number of [western] cities in the years around 1960. In Portland, Tucson, and Richmond, leading businessmen were largely responsible for the revival of urban renewal several years after initial defeats. Typical business coalitions were Downtown Denver Incorporated (1955) and the Downtown Master Plan Committee (1961), the Greater Baltimore Committee (1962), and Downtown Tulsa Unlimited (1955)”[12]. Once again, it is apparent that a new set of private EDOs, apart and away from the Chambers of Commerce, were jump-started into existence in the Age of Urban Renewal. These EDOs despite their anti-suburban strategy were focused on the viability of the CBD, tended to restrict policy-making to real estate and marketing approaches, but did so that economic sustainability was possible. These entities, many of which are operating in the twenty-first century, were also forerunners of a new generation of EDOs which would follow in the 1980’s.
What was obvious in the East after the sixties riots and the Great Society was that the fairly closed Big City economic development policy system sort of imploded. This did not happen in the West, by and large, although the San Francisco Yorba Buena project did evidence a serious breakdown in that city’s policy system. The Watts Riot also profoundly altered the context of Los Angeles policy-making. Up to the late 60’s, business groups in western cities, a mixture of elite and growth coalitions, not only led, but effectively closed the economic development policy system—and they pointed it toward our broadly defined urban renewal strategy. The chink in their dominance was the voter refusal to approve bond referendums. Business dominance in a closed economic development policy system did not survive the sixties.
The programs of the Great Society, however, did have an impact—Model City and various neighborhood planning and social service programs created a new set of sub-municipal semi-EDO organizations which incrementally intruded into the semi-closed economic development policy system. The alliance with a charismatic young mayor came at a cost of a enlarged set of actors in that policy system. The western population growth continued, infused to a large degree by a young generational cohort which when settled, thought, and voted, very differently. Challenges to balance economic growth with the environment, historic preservation and quality of life became just as important as low tax, and limited government fiscal issues. The geographic change of focus followed, with urban renewal eventually becoming as concerned with neighborhoods as with the competitiveness of the central business district. Western urban renewal in the 1970’s was seriously different from that of the fifties and sixties.
[1] Harvey Molotch, “the City as Growth Machine”, American Journal of Sociology, 82, (September 1976), pp. 304-332.
[2] See Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., pp. 38-43. See also, Charlie Whitham, “The Committee for Economic Development: Foreign Trade and the Rise of American Corporate Liberalism”, Journal of Contemporary History, 48, (October, 2013), pp. 845-871.
[3] See Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., pp. 39
[4] This perspective puts us at odds from that developed by William Dumhoff.
[5] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., p.111.
[6] 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.
[7] 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.
[8] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op.cit., p. 113.
[9] 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.
[10] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson, the University of Arizona Press, 1998), p. 38.
[11] 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.
[12] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 149.
Ron W. Coan 