Formation of Council of Urban Economic Development
If the 1950’s were the golden years of the Progressive Coalition and urban renewal, each year deeper we proceed into the 1960’s was one more step into hellfire and seeming chaos–which by 1966 still was going to get much worse. Attacks drawn from Martin Anderson’s[1], The Federal Bulldozer exposed an unanticipated reality of urban renewal; because the project was cleared and the land prepared did little to ensure that business development would quickly follow. It was evident to the urban observer that business followed the consumer and workforce and move to brand new facilities in the suburbs. Much of the land cleared by urban renewal projects lay unused for considerable periods of time (sometimes for generations). A central premise of the business development style of urban renewal, that it could stem the outflow to the suburbs, was proving to be unequivocally wrong or at least would take more time than the central city had to spend.
Creativity was required. The Baltimore Development Corporation, founded in 1959, and headed in 1966 by Ed de Luca, inspired informally by the newly formed EDA, sent a letter out to twenty big city mayors and their development chiefs (February 10th, 1966) inviting them to Baltimore to brainstorm. The letter’s opening lines, “A few weeks ago you expressed interest in the formation of the ‘HUB CLUB’ which we proposed as a concerted effort by cities to combat the loss of industry to suburbs”…[2], exposed both the chief motivation behind this initiative (suburbanization). and those who were responsive to it (big city mayors). In 1966, in the midst of what would be five years of central city riots, no one had any doubt that the exodus of business from the central city to the suburbs was going to accelerate even more dramatically. Something had to be done and mayors and their development chiefs began to meet on a semi-regular basis over the next year–all paid for and coordinated by Ed de Luca. A core of new big city economic developers[3] from fifteen cities arrived in Baltimore and there followed a series of meetings across the nation (Washington, Pittsburgh and Chicago) over the next year. In April 1967 the “Helping Urban Business Council was officially incorporated in Milwaukee. By that time, additional cities, such as Toledo had joined the group.
Like AEDC in its formative years, HUB restricted its membership. HUB’s original membership was limited to cities over 250,000, but in fairly short order the population requirement was reduced to allow smaller cities to join (to 100,000). In 1967 fifteen cities joined. HUB’s central mission was to address the “industrial and commercial problems of the central cities, with a major emphasis on industrial development”[4]. Manufacturing would not always be the exclusive target of HUB (or CUED), but in its earliest years it was. The “cult of manufacturing” was an integral strand of HUB’s DNA. The initial laundry list of programmatic priorities included tax incentives, downtown-CBD redevelopment, preserving industrial land, incubators, manpower and ‘negro entrepreneurship’. In 1968, EDA funded a two year grant to HUB (the first of a series of grants that would persist through the 1970’s–the first HUD grants came late in the 1970’s) and an Executive Director was hired. By 1969 twenty-one cities were HUB members and its first annual conference was held in Philadelphia. In 1970, executive offices were moved to Philadelphia also.
The move to Philly, however, was short-lived as HUB (1) became convinced a strong presence in Washington DC was required to acquire the first Nixon administration’s support for urban, central city involvement, (2) the organization’s name was changed to CUED, and (3) the headquarters with a new Executive Director, founding member Ken Fry from Milwaukee was moved to DC where it remains to this day. By 1972 CUED had about 150 members, and a second EDA grant. Early CUED priorities were technical assistance to its members (including on site), networking, and above all “making its presence known to Congress”.[5]
[1] Anderson did not attack urban renewal from a progressive or leftist viewpoint. At the time of publication Anderson was an assistant professor at Columbia (after a stint at MIT); he was a discipline and personal acquaintance of Ayn Rand and then served as Nixon’s 1968 director of policy research in the latter’s Presidential campaign. He served in various roles in the Nixon administration and was allegedly instrumental in ending the military draft and introducing Alan Greenspan to Nixon. He later served in both Reagan and George W Bush’s administration. He retired as a Senior Fellow in the Hoover Institute.
[2] Ronald Kysiak, “A History of CUED” Commentary, Winter, 1992, p.4. Kysiak a friend of the Curmudgeon was employed by de Luca and was a valued participant during these early years. We shall rely on his formal, as well as informal, email, correspondence and conversations throughout this topic area. It is also worth mention that de Luca and his department subsidized the early HUB Club from departmental funds.
[3] Drawn from Baltimore, Milwaukee, Jersey City, Chicago and Cleveland–all public sector development officials–and accompanied by a representative (Andy Bennett) from EDA.
[4] Kysiak, op. cit. p.5.
[5] Kysiak, op. cit. p. 6.
Ron W. Coan 