Central Cities post 70’s Suburbanization
In hindsight one can pick the bottom in the stock market; attempting that enterprise in picking the bottom of the urban central city crisis is much more judgmental. Many observers would probably place the central city bottom sometime during the Reagan years when the Federal government pulled back its urban fiscal commitment. For instance, McDonald whom we rely upon greatly asserts unequivocally that “The period of descent came to an end sometime around 1990 in many urban areas”[1]. We, however, believe the bottom for central city economic development was during the late seventies; through we freely admit using economic statistics the bottom was at least a decade later. The 1980’s began the rebuilding of urban America and to our ever romantic and idealist mind…
Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the winter snows.
Lies the seed that with the sun’s love
In the spring becomes the rose.
The particular portions of the central city which were negatively affected by the disruptive external forces are populated by Black and Hispanic peoples who live in high-poverty neighborhoods characterized by older, deterioration-prone housing. These neighborhoods develop “negative effects” such as crime and gangs, poor schools, teenage childbearing, one parent families.
If the numbers are what the numbers are, why do we place our discussion of the central city nadir in the 1970’s? In selecting our reasons we obviously depart from the present day conventional motif of citing population, wealth and job loss and other important quantitative “socio-economic” variables. It is not that we don’t think them helpful to a balanced understanding. Rather we tend to see institutional and political dynamics as being more central to our explanation of the evolution of economic development as a profession and policy area. Also we tend to think of most economic variables as “lagging” behind and being dependent variables.
Central cities (actually “big cities”) are important to the evolution of economic development profession and theory because they were the location in which the development of the Second-Progressive Stream of economic development emerged. Big cities were the restricted members of the newly formed CUED which at that time personified the Second-Progressive Stream. As we consider the seventies as our nadir for the Second Stream we do need to identify those factors responsible for its nadir. In our perspective there are four factors which we associate with the central city nadir: (1) the collapse of the old-style Progressive Coalition; (2) the fiscal and governance crisis; (3) the transformation of the central city into a ward of the State and (4) the failure of central (big) city economic developers to discover and implement an effective short-term Plan B to urban renewal.
As the reader will remember, the elements of the Progressive Coalition (constructed in the late 1940’s) rode on the following four tires: (1) middle class voters, upper middle class and business elite involvement in program design and execution, (2) the input of key professions–the most important of which being planners, and (3) the legitimacy and theoretical justification by academic/think tank entities. The Coalition itself focused upon, and usually was led by, (4) the “independent” mayor/city manager and implemented through a Quasi EDO governed by FIRE sector business and professionals and staffed by development professionals. During the 1970’s all four tires went flat and no one could find the spare.
As argued previously a little appreciated consequence of middle class suburbanization is that the Progressive vote moved to the suburbs and installed Progressive governance (city managers) and the Progressive “business model” government[2]. To replace these lost voters, the only new group on the scene was, by 1970, the very, very mobilized black voter. From the vantage point of the old-style, urban renewal-planner Coalition, this exchange of voting blocs left much to be desired.
Urban renewal, CBD redevelopment and transportation projects (highways and expressways) long staples of Second Stream economic development were very much under attack. OEO War on Poverty and the Model City program created hundreds of neighborhood-based, low-moderate income associations which constituted by the 1970’s the core of black political mobilization. These groups and their leaders had their own demands and their own definitions of what economic development was all about and as we shall discuss shortly, black representatives were elected to city councils, Congress and state legislatures, and eventually would become mayors.
Planners were in a professional flux during the 1970’s. Certainly Jane Jacobs and the reaction to her ideas were fairly disruptive to the dominant planning paradigms. The disaffection of upper middle class and affluent Progressives, usually very close to architect, the arts and planning ideas, was particularly hard-felt.
The events of the middle and late 1960’s had shattered the conventions and consensus of higher education and academia in general. The antiwar movement, civil rights movement, Kent State and the 1971-1972 campus demonstration, if not riots, disrupted and refocused the academic community rather radically. Disciplines and sub-disciplines, such as political science and urban politics, not to mention sociology and even economics splintered–often around what we could label as ideological/political ideas. Domestic-focused neo-conservatives were in their golden period and were moving to Washington to rent offices for new think tanks. Obviously, black intellectuals pushed for black studies and gender-based curriculum.
Urban renewal became the lightning rod for many journalists and academic critiques, some quite powerful, flowed from academia and think tanks. “Let one hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” replaced both “Mr. Chips” (1969) and Paper Chase’s (1973) Professor Kingsfield. Academia and think tanks, formerly a source of consistent support to Progressive ideas and programs, was fragmented and oppositional to business, middle class values and favored in its place social and political change the like of which had inspired the original Progressives Coalition, back at the turn of the century, to Parks, City Beautiful and social reform initiatives intended to ensure that social and political change did not disrupt the free enterprise system and classic liberalism.
Oftentimes the vehicle for neighborhood was a new form of community development corporation (CDC). The self-governed CDC was an outgrowth of the OEO and its purpose was to mobilize the poor and low-moderate income residents of a demarcated geography and to restore/create the vitality, if not prosperity of the area. A number of these organizations were funded by originally by OEO and ultimately latched onto CDBG funding after 1974. Obviously, the new form of CDC differed radically from the pre-1960’s CDC in strategy, purpose and tools. The neo-CDC was a hybrid EDO which in its early years was more Quasi EDO than private. At the present time, many of the neo-CDCs which have survived are probably more private EDOs, albeit heavily dependent on government, usually federal funding.
The community development approach to economic development also found favor at the state level as well as the local. The CDBG, approved in 1974, was passed through the fifty states and in many instances Departments of Community Development were created in its wake. In some instances Departments of “Economic and Community Development” also were formed. To better facilitate liaison with and support of CDBG activities and programs the present day Council of State Community Development Agencies was formed in 1974 to represent state-level Community Development bureaucracies. By 1990 this association considered itself as an active participant in local economic development as well as housing, and community development and liaison with HUD.
Part of the reason for the pervasiveness of the neighborhood approach to local economic development was the rise of black mayors in many central cities throughout the nation.
[1] John F. McDonald, Urban America: Growth, Crisis and Rebirth (Armonk, New York, M.E. Sharpe, 2008) p. xiii.
[2] See Dennis R. Judd, The Politics of American Cities (2nd ED) (Boston, Little, Brown, 1984) pp. 96-111.
Ron W. Coan 