Chapter10 Big City UR Policy System
In the process of uncovering the past, one is not infrequently tempted into the Scylla of making too much of what one finds from the past, or the Charybdis of not discovering an important link to the present.
That it was known in 1920 that the nation had become majority urban was due to the statistical reports of the Bureau of the Census. The Bureau of Census started reporting in 1902. The census itself dates from 1789 and since that time, the Department of Commerce had been gathering various scraps of data. As early as 1880, the Census started to measure urban and city growth/composition. In that year a city was first defined as an incorporated area with greater than 8,000 population; in 1880, 22.5% of the nation was urban. Also published in 1880 was a two volume, 1758 page Social Statistics of Cities. In 1910 the eight-year-old Bureau of the Census first identified, defined “the suburb” and demarcated twenty-five “metropolitan districts”[1]. Also, the Bureau created the census tract and separated out rural jurisdictions from urban jurisdiction.
The principal driver for the Census data and for the reporting of urban-related statistics came from the National Conference on City Planning. That entity was concerned, not only with data important to planning, but also to measure the growing impact of urbanization and possible federal involvement in providing urban areas resources needed to cope with its dramatic growth. “Important civic leaders had been converted to the view that conscious rational control of the urban environment was necessary both for a beautiful city and a healthy city. But well-conceived, comprehensive city plans, they argued had to rest upon a bedrock of extensive, accurate, and current information on all facets of urban life.”[2]
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Specific findings of the report[3] include:
- Cities and urbanism had altered traditional social patterns and institutions such as the family, church and even government.
- Urban-based media controlled the nation’s communications and shifted American culture to correspond to urban culture.
- Cities were here to stay. Making “cities livable for human beings in a machine age” not returning to some rural fantasyland was “the central problem of national life in regard to cities”.
- Deficiencies of city/urban life (crime, poverty, insecurity, inequality, vulnerability, pollution, congestion, disorganization and slums) were the price we paid for the failure to develop and implement a national urban plan and policies.
- The failure to treat the city as a ‘unified economic problem” was the product of “urban political disunity”, “underrepresentation of the city in the administrative and political councils of the nation” and the “widespread neglect of cities as major segment of national existence”
I will argue in this and the next several chapters that five distinct but related themes came together in a federal government “primeval policy soup” to produce several policy outputs, programs, which changed the course of Big Cities, but of American economic development. That’s a big deal in our history—an important chapter so to speak. These five themes will themselves be hugely affected by one of the drivers of American economic development, population migration, and exogenous factors as the Depression and World War II that “turn up the heat and bring the soup to a boil” as well as affect who gets to eat the soup. Strained metaphor or not, this policy nexus will be the most important arena in our history for many decades. The reader, however, should be cautioned. This particular policy nexus is not the only thing going on in economic development during these years.
Finally, Depression and War Production required the entry of the federal government into what formerly were state and local policy areas, such as economic development. The sheer importance, as well as the “newness” of new federal roles and programs was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg—the American policy and economic systems were changing. Keynesian macroeconomics, the new global role of the United States, the Cold War, and the New Deal’s social-economic role of the federal government as “safety-net” meant a radical, in the context of the previous American policy system, redistribution of power away from states and localities to the federal government. With all this change going on, the nature, composition and character of local economic development policy systems shifted dramatically. From our perspective, a critical shift was that of the large corporate elites away from local to the federal government, and the consequent readjustment of private sector participation within the local policy system. In particular, many observers will assert that in the vacuum created by the withdrawal of large corporation elites, the local growth coalition assumed a greater prominence.
In the old policy system, local government mattered to corporate elites and in the new system, local governments mattered much less and the now active federal government was critical. In these years and continuing through the early 1970’s the corporate elite shifted their attention away, but did not by any means completely abandon, local matters, but instead became more deeply involved in federal policy-making, using the federal government as a means to influence and channel local policy-making decisions and program direction. In this new arrangement, the impact of the corporate elite was more subtle, indirect—often relying on creating programmatic ideas through research[4], introducing these ideas into governmental policy agendas, and advocating as interest groups to secure approval. For this to work, a new set of organizations had to be devised: policy institutes, foundations, and think tanks. These organizational responses proved incredibly important to the future evolution of American economic development.
That debate continues to this day. Progressive-style economic development is still strongly rooted in community development, housing, personal empowerment, and economic development designed to support the overall community. Privatist economic development continues to stress markets and the role of private firms to provide goods and services desired by individuals and households.
Finally, the Policy World debate in this period can be organized somewhat to enhance understanding for the reader. Essentially, however, one fit into the above categories, the answer to decentralization usually came down to fitting into one of the following three policy positions:
(Plan A) while the central city was clearly under stress, likely in decline (blight/decentralization), there was still much of value resident in the Big Cities. Accordingly, they should be saved, and their primacy reestablished if possible, certainly stabilized. Slum removal and urban renewal would follow.
(Plan B) counter to this a fairly Progressive alternative, the concentrated suburb, planned community, or new towns, would reject the previous approach, believing the central city could not be saved, and likely was a manifestation of a stage in the history of the industrial city. The end-product of this approach was to create “a few good, well-planned, suburbs” within which individuals could raise families and work in harmony with nature—a newly recast garden city;
(Plan C) the third approach is in fact happened over the next half-century: sprawled uncoordinated development driven by Privatist market-driven actors across a dispersed hinterland. By “giving them what they want” at an affordable price, an unplanned decentralization created an alternative lifestyle within which macro economics, demographics and cohort passage through time dictated market demand. As to the central city, its future in the metropolitan hierarchy rested upon finding its niche in the marketplace.
Ironically, in an upside down fashion, each vision shared the centrality of housing and home as a driver of their evolution path. In any scenario, Big Cities were clearly at their crosshairs.
But suburbs are much more than this simple numerical reality. Until recently (a decade or so) most analysis and commentary tended to view the mass of suburban jurisdictions as so many peas in a pod. Little meaningful internal differentiation was made regarding suburbs. One could make an assumption that one suburb is similar to another in form, function, culture and presumably economic development goals and expectations (and policy systems). Today, probably everybody, to some degree, would acknowledge suburbs differ among themselves in many important ways. The first differentiation we wish to tackle is the variation in suburbs across census regions. In this section, we shall deal only with Northeastern and Midwestern suburbanization. These two regions also differed internally in terms of rate, timing and composition of their suburban process, but they did share a common feature: suburbs were based almost exclusively on emigration from an older, historical central city. Most suburban-bound population flows in the postwar period were from the older central city spilling over its periphery into areas beyond its boundaries—today’s first tier suburbs.
This would not be true of most suburbs west of the Mississippi; instant cities also meant instant suburbs that developed alongside, semi-independently and fueled by postwar direct migration from the East unfiltered by central city residence. The South was not characterized by large, first tier central cities (New Orleans was the major exception) and its dominant rural, second-third tier city character did not spin off a suburban exodus similar to that of its Northern “friends”. Southern suburbs grew as much from emigration from its rural hinterland than central city exodus. Northwestern coastal cities came closest to their Eastern forebears, but, although somewhat a hybrid, the lesser rates of black in-migration did not impart a race as well as class-based exodus to the suburban exodus. In the Northeast and Midwest, however, the pick-up in the Great Migration coincided with the postwar white working and middle class suburbanization. That combined with the role and history of the here-to-for dominant, big name central cities created a distinctive regional impact and carved out an image of suburbanization which was wrongfully extended to all the nation’s suburbs.
Dolores Hayden states, “the history (since 1820) of suburban construction can be understood “as the evolution of seven vernacular patterns. Building in borderlands began about 1820. Picturesque enclaves started about 1850 and streetcar builds outs around 1870. Mail order and self-built suburbs arrived in 1900. Mass-produced, urban scale ‘sitcom’ suburbs appeared around 1940. Edge nodes coalesced around 1960. Rural fringes intensified around 1980. All of these patterns survived in the metropolitan areas of 2003” (now 2013) [5]. Post-War II suburbanization was layered on top of four other patterns that had preceded it. By 1945, there were suburbs exceeding one hundred years of age. Kenneth Jackson (and the Census Bureau) noted by 1950 there were already 36 million people living in the nation’s suburbs and that by 1970 the number would exceed 70 million. During the two decades 1950-1970, the nation grew by more than 51 million—74% of which were in the suburbs. By 1970, more people lived in the suburbs than the central cities.[6]
suburbanization into four distinct periods: suburban elitism (1920-1945), suburban homogeneity (1945-1970’s), suburban diversity (1970’s-1990’s), and the current period, suburban dichotomy (post 2000)[7]. Our concern at this point in our story is the first two periods. Hanlon categorizes suburbs based on period of settlement, but she also reviews the distinctive evolution and configuration of suburbs in the four major regions of the nation: North, South, Midwest and West. She also develops a typology of the different types of “inner-ring” suburbs: Elite, Middle Class, Vulnerable, and Ethnic.[8].Hanlon a further rationale to distinguish between the variation in nature, timing, composition and economic development-related consequences of suburbs across the nation.
Suburbs versus the central city came to be one of the defining perspectives of post 1960 economic development literature. These zero-sum dialogues from their postwar get go was seized upon by the American intelligentsia and literati and soon found expression in popular culture as well. The heritage of the postwar suburban homogeneity for economic developers is much more complicated. These suburbs are now the prototypical inner-ring suburbs of the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest (and California) regions. They are the prototypical Rustbelt suburbs (about 33% of all inner-ring suburbs) many now characterized by their deindustrialized economic base. Still other early homogeneous period suburbs have evolved a still vibrant middle class lifestyles in a diverse, sometimes minority-majority population. Others are, in Hanlon’s terms, “vulnerable”. No doubt, these first post-war suburbs are home base for many an EDO today. Once again, we stress variability and suggest to the reader that suburbs, even those of a particular period of suburbanization, ought not to be viewed as a monolithic category.
Suburbanization and Jobs
Several important works of the time, in particular Hoover and Vernon’s Anatomy of a Metropolis (1959)[9] set economists off in a direction they are still traveling. Hoover and Vernon found that by 1956 inner ring suburban employment almost equaled the non-Manhattan central city employment. Sectors mattered. Manhattan held wholesale trade, finance and office jobs in general (65%-69%); manufacturing was spread more or less consistently across Manhattan, the rest of New York City and the inner ring (but not outer ring) suburbs. Retail and consumer services moved heavily to inner ring but Manhattan (and the Central Business District) still maintained a definitive edge. Job to work studies definitive demonstrated the majority of employment work and lived in the same ring. There was virtually no reverse commutes. This suggested that as sectors moved to the inner ring, population would follow.
A later study by Meyer, Kain, and Wohl (1965)[10] of thirty-nine metropolitan areas estimated that between 1948 and 1958 central city population grew by .2% while the suburbs grew 9.8% per annum (from a much lower base). Central city manufacturing employment fell by .6% and suburban manufacturing employment grew 15% PER YEAR. John F. McDonald worked with the Meyer, Kain and Wohl data and in a subsequent article disclosed his findings that:
The change in location pattern was the result of deaths of firms in the central city, births of firms in the suburbs, employment declines in firms in the city, and growth of firms in the suburbs. Only a relatively small amount of the net change can be explained by the direct relocation of firms from the central city to the suburbs.[11]
What seemed to be driving the key manufacturing trend was that changes in product demand and manufacturing-logistical technologies was incrementally accommodated by firms through expanding production in the suburbs by creating new single-story-spread-out facilities on the cheap, highway accessible land while their land-locked central city facilities produced as much as best they could for as long as profitability could be maintained. This was obviously not sustainable if in some way the central city facility could not find a way to adjust to production and logistical change. As suburban facilities increased production, employment and population growth was sure to follow. Through the fifties and early sixties, the hard truths were evident but hope for recovery still existed (in our view many manufacturing industries were transitioning from State 3 to Stage 4 as well); the bottom would fall out in 1968, according to McDonald[12], when the riots prompted a rush to exit the central city. That is a story for another chapter, however.
One story that we can resume is that of “industrial” parks. One may imagine the postwar period as yet another example of “golden years” for that economic development tool. During the 1940’s and 1950’s industrial parks were chiefly just that—locations for manufacturing firms. The ULI Handbook asserts, “Following World War II, the pace of change quickened and the modern industrial park, as an outgrowth of earlier industrial districts, emerged as the major new trend in industrial development”.[13] They produce a representative list, geographically dispersed of major industrial parks created in this period. What else is one to do; industrial parks, both private (the overwhelming majority) and public went up by the hundreds across the nation—in the suburbs for the most part. As discussed, industrial parks are extremely compatible with planning, zoning and land use by planners (who usually were relied upon in the early suburbs) and so these became arguably the principal element in any unconscious or conscious economic development strategy by suburbs of this period. Industrial parks, however, were in evolution, and in the 1970 and 1980’s, as the national economy was shifting from manufacturing to a service and technology-based economy, the occupants of these business parks changed radically. And that too is a story for another chapter.
Suburban Retail: the Malling of America
There is one last tale to tell concerning suburbanization in this period: the challenge/revolution of suburban retail and the auto unleashed upon the central business district during this period. This opportunities sparked by this phenomenon became fertile ground for a major “revolution” in economic development practice: a relatively new form of public financing which allowed suburban communities to compete for the lucrative retail tax base spiraling by leaps and bounds in the post-1950’s. This was, of course, tax increment financing (TIF). The real glory days of TIF, its golden years, lay in the future—not in this period. But it was during this period that TIF began its diffusion, especially in the West and Midwest. Accordingly, we will discuss TIF in a later chapter also. At this point, however, it is necessary to describe the transformation in retail that confronted the hither-to dominant CBD as the metropolitan shopping district. We are, of course, moving to describe the birth of the “mall” and regional/super shopping facilities.
Christaller’s central place theory was instrumental in explaining the postwar evolution of the retail sector. In hindsight (1967) Berry, for example, looked at the postwar suburban experience and developed a hierarchy of retail trade which he defined as “a distinct step (as in staircase) of centers providing distinct groups of goods and services to a distinct market area”[14].
As one might expect, a generation after this postwar household dispersion to the suburbs had commenced, economists came up with a theoretical explanation. Alonso (1964) and Muth (1969)[15] expressed the central city-suburb location decision as essentially a trade of between “spacious”, i.e. land-consuming residence and access to employment (assumed to be downtown). The basic idea as summarized by McDonald is that:
…households choose to locate at the distance from downtown at which the additional cost of locating one mile further away is just balanced by the saving in housing costs-the marginal cost of distance equals the marginal benefit in housing costs…. The benefit of greater distance is the reduction in the price of housing… Why does the price of land decline with distance from downtown? This happens because commuting costs rise with distance from downtown. If one lives at a greater distance from downtown, one is willing to bid a lesser amount for the land because that land carries a higher commuting cost.
This is the infamous “bid/rent model which, internalized into Christaller’s central place theory, conventional microeconomic theory of efficient allocation of resources, and the question of equity in the distribution of income combined to form a dominant paradigm in urban economics for decades to follow[16].
The hierarchy reflects not only the type of good, but also the size of the establishment in which it is sold; e.g., supermarkets require a larger market area than grocery stores. In addition, establishments are sorted by the size of the center in which they are located, with large establishments selling comparison goods found in ‘higher order’ regional centers and small establishments selling convenience goods found in ‘lower order’ neighborhood or convenience centers.[17]
From this the Urban Land Institute[18] constructed four types of centers each with their own minimum population, radius and driving time:
Type of Center Minimum Population Needed Radius Miles Driving Time
Super-Regional 300,000 or more 12 30 minutes
Regional 150,000 or more 8 20
Community 40,000 to 150,000 3-5 10 to 20
Neighborhood 2,500 to 40,000 1.5 5 to 10
And there we have it: the theory behind the instruction manual for establishing new centers of retail in suburban (and central city) locations. The CBD is, of course, the traditional Super-Regional, a monopoly[19] that was broken after developers in the early fifties launched regional “shopping centers” and then by the end of the fifties, super-regional “malls” across the nation. The automobile, of course, made this all possible.
Suburbs: A Rose is Not a Rose
Large, older cities) are no longer bordered by nondescript settlements that can be
amalgamated without difficulty. A new suburban consciousness has developed, and
residents of outlying areas are now worried about real estate values, educational
quality, and personal safety. On all three counts, they regard cities as inferior.[20]
Call it metropolitan pluralism[21], political fragmentation, multi-nodal nuclei, or sprawl (all largely describe the same phenomenon), suburbanization unleashed not so subtle changes that did affect economic development. Whether intended or not, state legislatures as they enlarged and evolved their economic development footprint through strengthening their array of programs, active promotional and recruitment efforts and their copy-cat emulation (and redefinition) of economic development programs provided not only arrows for suburban economic development quivers–they inspired, maybe in some cases incentivized, the suburbs and smaller cities to construct the quiver itself-the EDO. The simple reality was that suburban legislators had entered the state legislature and suburban voters now elected governors. Their votes no doubt empowered the potential for a viable suburban economic development function.
By the end of the 1960’s, the continuing reversal of status between city and rim had
markedly changed the terms of intra-metropolitan politics and provided support for
suburban victories. Suburban jurisdictions could rely on growing strength of numbers
to win regional or statewide referenda, dominate legislative debates, and intimidate
governors …. With strong leadership and growing fiscal resources, suburbs can indeed
declare independence from each other as well as from the [central] city.[22]
The events occurring in the central city during the middle and late 1960’s further fueled this, probably inevitable, suburban autonomy. Boston’s Louise Day Hicks and court-imposed busing was but an example of the variety of political conflicts which had to clearly demarcate a real, not only perceived suburban-central city distinction. The disarray of central city governance (not only busing and racial unrest, but disruptive labor strikes as well), such as many perceived occurring with New York City mayor John Lindsay and other mayors in other central cities certainly seem to bring out the positive side (stability-consensus-efficiency) of suburban homogeneity. Quite likely, the central city middle class, long the core of Progressive Coalition elections, further shifted central city politics (and state legislative politics as well) in ways not especially favorable to the central city. The era of the “urban crisis”, i.e. the central city crisis was now upon the political agenda and economic developers, like everyone else, had to develop a response.
The arrival of an entirely new set of occupations, revolving around suburban housing and commercial/industrial development were created by, and in turn drove, suburban demographic and economic growth. There was no BAWI incentive-driven, even promotional tax abated culprit that has ever been blamed or praised. The suburban growth core was a new species of builder-developer, but real estate sales and residential banking also were key elements. Ironically, central city-focused academics would soon decry the existence of a central city “growth coalition” when the real growth coalition was, based on housing, mall/shopping centers, and office/industrial parks located in the suburbs. Also, housing, in particular, proved to be an excellent generator of small business and a network of supplier-contractor-logistics and consumer-service sector businesses quickly sprung up. New forms of service and entertainment sectors also appeared, adding fuel to the only somewhat appreciated transition of the national economy from manufacturing to a service sector-driven economy (to be discussed in more detail in the next chapter). Bluntly, one does not need a whole lot of economic development in this environment. By the sixties and certainly seventies, more Americans lived and worked in the suburbs than central cities and the suburbs had arrived as permanent fixtures of the American urban landscape.
Tugwell, an agricultural economist, considered as had been recruited from Columbia University to serve as a key member of FDR’s famous “brain trust”. After leaving FDR‘s administration (1936) Tugwell was appointed Director of the New York City Planning Commission[23] and in 1946 Governor of Puerto Rico—before returning to academia. Initially serving in FDR’s Department of Agriculture, author of his Agricultural Adjustment Act, and then Director of the Soil Conservation Service a godsend to dust bowl communities.
Mumford, especially between 1923 and 1929 was critical to the thinking that underlay the “regional (central city) city” in a metropolitan context. The paradigm created in this period was that “a rationally planned and zoned [central] city which segregated residential, commercial, and industrial uses, as well as social classes … would be anchored by a concentrated central business district, connected by expressways to concentric, low-density residential and industrial suburban rings …. The whole ensemble would be ordered according to a comprehensive regional plan”.[24] This paradigm crystallized from the interaction between the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA, founded by Mumford, Clarence Stein et al. in 1923) and the Russell Sage Foundation (whose lead was Thomas Adams, its Director of Plans and Surveys). This organizational duo inspired the famous Regional Plan of New York (RPNY and its Environs published in a series from 1929, continuing, at generational intervals, to the time of writing[25].
the swollen urban conglomerations of his day [were] ‘far removed from the sources of life [and were] expanding without purpose [transforming] living forms into frozen metal’. The metropolis destroyed the individual’s identity and self-esteem; only by dispersing the inhabitants into regional clusters would people find communion with their surroundings and each other. Mumford believed that the giant city was just a temporary phenomenon, a product of the nineteenth century’s great population explosion and unprecedented industrial expansion …. Now, however, as the country approached the midpoint of the twentieth century … the accumulated disadvantages of the big cities promised to make them ‘cemeteries of the dead’ …. Mumford predicted ‘that even if Robert Moses rebuilt New York from end to end … it would still be a doomed city’.[26]
To be sure, by 1940 the threat of suburbanization did penetrate political agendas and economic development public policy—creating the driver for slum removal and CBD revitalization associated with urban renewal. Depression and war diverted attention away from Mumford’s focus. Indeed, the epitome of anti-Mumford, Robert Moses would actually use quotes from Mumford’s The City to support his position against “organic decentralization” built upon “communal land ownership”.[27] Public housers, home base for Mumford-like thought, split along social welfare (house central city poor) and metropolitan housing (planned communities) lines. Metropolitan planning, the mechanism through which planned suburban communities could be achieved, was a decidedly mixed bag during these years. Supported by the New Deal, such planning found tough going in the Privatist cultural tenor of the times.
Community Development: Wrap Up and Segue Way
One might wonder if these ideas filtered into physical economic development.[28] Yes, it worked this way: defending a proposed park and recreational system in Birmingham Alabama in 1911 Charles Mulford Robinson argued business attraction was advanced by community development initiatives:
To an increasing degree, the better class of labor chooses its abode, and chooses the city where it secures the most for a given wage. Undoubtedly also opportunities for wholesome recreation increase the efficiency of labor and its contentment. When the offices of the National Cash Register Company,… were asking a city in which to locate anew their plant, one of the first questions asked was regarding the park acreage, its accessibility and the opportunity for recreation.[29]
From these somewhat disjointed beginnings, one can trace the development of our “community development”. I observe, almost instinctively, “community development” developed deep relationships with Policy World of academics, think tanks, and foundations.
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In Chapter 9, we have outlined the first beginnings of urban renewal for the “Eastern” Big Cities. Big City urban renewal, as we define it, had begun during the 1920’s in response to concerns about decentralization, low-income housing, and slums. Urban renewal discussion in these very early years focused mostly on authorization of New Deal federal government financing. Content-wise, urban renewal in the 1920-1950 period was restricted to public housing and in the thirties to slum removal to facilitate public and private housing construction. The discussion concerning commercial revitalization, CBD redevelopment and slum removal (which is more clearly associated with economic development) was frankly off to the side—in the halls of the national capital, and in handful of states (New York especially) for the most part.
If housing was the real focus in these early years, the Age of Urban Renewal become subtly more complicated because during these years there was a major infrastructure upgrade and installation also going on. This was the Age of the Automobile (and truck) as well as Age of Urban Renewal. Freeways, highways, flood and pollution control (American cities in 1945 closely resembled our contemporary image of smog-laden Chinese cities), water and sewer, airports and ports. All this infrastructure affected existing rail lines and terminals, as well as electrical generation and distribution. As states, municipalities, utilities, and EDOs tore up their cities they used the tools (eminent domain) associated with urban renewal, and most often the use of these tools tore up neighborhoods, displaced residents, and in general got people pretty disturbed.
In the mists of history, the disruption became associated with the Age of Urban Renewal–even though much of it was conducted by non-municipal governments and actors (including the federal government after the 1956 Interstate Highway Act). If federal monies were involved, they were not urban renewal dollars and when the two programs overlapped, they often worked at cross-purposes and locked in intergovernmental combat. Still, in the minds of many, the highway, bridge and tunnel construction associated with Robert Moses, not to mention the airport development of La Guardia, have become part of the heritage associated with the Age of Urban Renewal.
The real story thus far is that eminent domain, housing redevelopment agencies, and neighborhood-based slum removal was developed to combat the housing crisis and counter decentralization to suburbs. Planners, housing advocates and mayors were the chief players in this time period; private housing developers were secondary—but the need to catalyze private housing builders through the profit mechanism was imperative if these twin goals were to be achieved. Land costs and site assembly and clearance were the crushing barriers to private sector participation. That was why the Housing Redevelopment Authority would be created, as well as to build high-rise, dense, Le Corbusier-style public housing.
The chapter concerned with the Age of Urban Renewal, however, describes the evolution of physical redevelopment/urban renewal from housing, to neighborhood slum clearance, into new towns, before findings its way into commercial/CBD revitalization—using federal dollars if possible. The goals of these varying endeavors ranged from solving a housing crisis to ensuring the primacy of the central city over its suburban hinterland. There would be a shift in Big City strategy in the later periods of the Age of Urban Renewal, away from neighborhood slum clearance, to combat blight and commercial deterioration and its effect on retail sales and office/management functions that were the base of the central city’s primacy over its suburban hinterland. A sense of urban renewal’s evolution over different periods is necessary so to sensitize the reader as to the different periods included within the Age of Urban Renewal—a sense lost in large measure because in our contemporary era they have all been collapsed into one generalized perception that I call “the urban renewal paradigm”. The contemporary urban renewal paradigm recalls the negative features and consequences of urban renewal, but has stripped away much of what economic developers can usefully learn from that critical period of our history.
The contemporary urban renewal paradigm includes: (1) an unspecified time of origin, but termination in 1974); (2) separates out slum removal for public housing from commercial/CBD redevelopment while including the disruption and poor planning association with infrastructure (especially highways); (3) the destruction of neighborhoods and vibrant, although deteriorated housing/blocks usually homes for Afro-Americans (Negro-removal), minorities and low-income individuals; (4) such projects benefiting chiefly the private sector, downtown business interests and mayors dependent on the private sector for critical electoral resources; (5) and made possible by federal urban renewal dollars without which urban renewal would not have happened; (6) therefore, logically, the Age of Urban Renewal should end with the termination of federal dollars in 1974. Moreover, the contemporary urban paradigm usually includes a Deborah Stone-ish “story” which ought to provide lessons to contemporary economic developers and relevant policy-makers. That “story” is wonderfully described in the opening chapter of Zipp’s Manhattan Projects[30]:
This history explores how the vision of urban renewal formed, how it was put into practice in remaking actual Manhattan places, and how it was undone by the experiences and critiques of those living in the places it left in its wake …. We must see that this transformation was cultural, as much as political, a matter of meaning as much as movements. It was the result of a contest to win the right to determine what this new mode of city-building meant. Was it development? Was it destruction? Or was it something in between, something more complex? … In the postwar years, urban renewal became the object of … a struggle, one that was waged with both facts and feelings, to determine the methods and principles by which cities would be remade.
A major difficulty in defining urban renewal is that the program at birth was defined poorly and generally. The legislative acts refer to terms as slum, public housing, slum removal, blight, relocation, and decent housing. There were few specifics as to what a sub-standard housing unit was and there was no diagnosis of why these terms were prevalent or what had caused them in the first place. All this was left to the federal bureaucrat to make such determinations as required. The practical effect of legislative ambiguity was that all of these concepts were defined by local codes and local enabling legislation. Slum removal, public housing, blight, and decent housing varied according to the definition devised locally. The program was incredibly decentralized. Today these variations and distinctions are lost, but the cost for not appreciating the profoundly flawed non-definitions is considerable. The problem, as Greer[31] demonstrated, is not the decentralization that followed, but rather, the lesson learned that if a problem cannot be provided sufficient definition to allow reasonable implementation, than it should stop there—stillborn. Moreover, the ability to devise a sufficient definition of the problem should not be taken lightly—assembled from ideology or theory. Definitions should be scaled to a level that permits effective and reasonably consistent implementation.
In the paragraphs below, I will build a case that each of these five defining factors did not adequately constitute a reliable, consistent, or useful, element in the definition of what is or is not urban renewal. If so, the reader will better understand why this history is reluctant to endorse the label/term “urban renewal” to characterize the physical redevelopment and provision of infrastructure in urban areas.
First, to me urban renewal is a particular label that was attached to the physical redevelopment and infrastructure economic development strategies during a unspecified period. In fact, time is an important factor when discussing urban renewal. If we consider urban renewal to be private elites empowered with government powers to destroy existing neighborhoods without consent of their residents, then New York passed state legislation to that effect in the 1920’s and projects commenced during the Depression years. These housing-related projects involved the removal of blighted housing in deteriorated neighborhoods—not involve commercial or CBD redevelopment in those years. Slum removal for public housing, however is not generally considered as urban renewal until it is done by private elites for profit. If it is done for public housing than it is not slum removal?
This leaves us to the role of the federal government in defining what is or is not urban renewal. Since the early 1930’s, the New Deal provided financial support to public housing and associated slum removal. But over the course of the thirties the federal government allowed municipalities to use federal funding associated with powers of slum removal and public housing to flow into commercial CBD redevelopment—is that the defining feature of “urban renewal”? it was only in 1949 that such assistance, gingerly at first, flowed into commercial redevelopment. The federal “spigot” was not turned fully on until 1954. Many of Robert Moses’s projects, including Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, and infrastructure-related projects such as tunnels and freeways involved considerable disruption to neighborhoods and are conventionally regarded as examples of urban renewal—but were completed previous to 1949 and without federal monies.
Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, generally acknowledged as the first commercial/CBD-focused urban renewal project, was built before the 1954 Housing Act and relied on private investment. Boston, despite attempts, did not start commercial urban renewal until seven years after federal dollars became available. During the previous decade and a half, several neighborhood-based public housing projects tore up communities and generated sufficient opposition to delay commercial/CBD development. Even more harmful to Boston’s commercial redevelopment was the Massachusetts State DOT highway redevelopment project, which caused more disruption and destruction as any Robert Moses “urban renewal” project would have—except that infrastructure project is usually not considered as urban renewal. There are many other examples. Federal funds often dominate the description of Big City urban renewal projects in this era, but federal funds as a defining factor in what is urban renewal or not simply does not work.
Still, much in the literature defines the end of urban renewal by passage of the 1974 Community Development Block Grant Act which terminated the previous federal urban renewal program—but in its place substituted the beleaguered Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) which funded projects, which in the good old days, fit nicely into the urban renewal paradigm. UDAG continued into the late 1980’s. In short, the federal government did indisputably provide vital funds, assistance to urban renewal, but it also provided such funds to public housing projects, and when federal funds were pulled back, municipal urban renewal-like projects did not stop. Names are changing, new regulations are imposed. What makes federal involvement the key factor in defining what is urban renewal and what is not? Urban renewal for public housing and commercial redevelopment seemingly had a life of their own outside the world of federal involvement. Both continue to this day.
Finally, we are left with the “qui bono” (who benefits) of urban renewal. If one separates public housing projects from commercial and CBD redevelopment, than the latter clearly benefits most directly those business that profit from redevelopment—this is the famous growth coalition. As I understand the contemporary urban renewal paradigm, there is little to no public or community benefit—offset by harm rendered to neighborhoods/residents. Toss in the federal government funding and one has most of the contemporary urban renewal paradigm that we spoke of earlier. Today’s urban renewal paradigm is defined as commercial and CBD redevelopment conducted by business elites, largely for their benefit, through quasi-independent redevelopment agencies allied with mayors seeking electoral advantages—all subsidized by federal urban renewal funds—which disappeared in 1974 ending urban renewal.
Urban Renewal: The Moral Dimension
There is a huge literature[32] lasting almost a half-century concerning the effects on the urban and social fabric that urban renewal wrought—or wreaked. Race, in particular, and the effects of urban renewal/slum clearance on Afro-American neighborhoods—and families—has been incorporated into the definition and description of urban renewal. Race and urban renewal have become synonymous. To a lesser extent, urban renewal has been closely linked to post-war suburbanization/sprawl, and presented as a major factor in the subsequent demise of our Big Central Cities.
The role of business elites in promoting, advocating, and successfully lobbying for federal, state and local urban renewal legislation, and their involvement in governance, decision-making, and partnership of/with individual municipal redevelopment agencies has become in many quarters a truism of urban renewal. It is a bitter understatement that, simply put, urban renewal as an economic development strategy did not work. In this literature, urban renewal is a stain on our profession, our cities, and our nation. It is ironic, and very sad that the hopeful optimism and (rhetorical) good intentions of those involved led to such despair and bitterness. It is testimony that elites, intellectual as well as financial, poorly understand the other economic classes and proscribe bitter pills for them to swallow. Urban renewal was an elite-generated urban policy; pressure to pursue urban renewal came from not only big corporate elites, but also many smaller ones. It came from mayors who ran on an urban renewal platform and won, and won reelection. It came from policy advocated in real estate, housing, and planning. It was supported, encouraged and glorified by the public media and Policy World of the relevant professions. Urban renewal was never a conspiracy foisted on anybody.
But urban renewal has left us a legacy. A legacy expressed in its symbol: the bulldozer. The symbol associated with urban renewal could have been “the crane”, because over a decade and half after urban renewal the physical infrastructure of most cities did become more modern and functional. It could be argued that when the central cities of east and Midwest stabilized in the 1990’s and gently gentrified in the twenty-first century, that the foundation of revival was the physical landscape put into place during and following the Age of Urban Renewal. That, however, took more time than anticipated and given the legacy of the bulldozer, few were willing to wait.
The bulldozer, it will be argued in the following pages, extruded bi-polar consequences. It tore up people’s lives, their homes, and destroyed much of their social fabric. In that urban renewal was an elite-driven policy, these residents of affected neighborhoods, many black, numerically most were white ethnics; they were seldom asked if they were ok with this. The CBD-downtown, however, in my mind is another matter. As a cab driver, the author drove regularly in Boston’s Scollay Square, but he didn’t see it in quite the same terms as Jacobs or Herbert Gans. It was fun—and it was dangerous. More to the point look at the pictures of Scollay Square before its becoming “the Government Center”. Nobody voluntarily was going to live there, rehabbed or not. If Boston was to retain primacy of its hinterland, it had to go. Central cities to be the primary focal point of their metropolitan area had to be cutting edge and prosperous. The CBD is the visible symbol of that primary. But people did live there—in the CBD and its immediately adjacent neighborhoods.
Contrary to the contemporary urban renewal paradigm, post 1949 urban renewal did require several different forms of relocation assistance—but they were not up to the task at hand (the size of the neighborhoods “renewed” was shockingly large by anyone’s standards) and local officials, and federal officials as well, never demanded any serious evaluation or due diligence in seeing if these standards were adequate or competently administered. The effect was Negro and ethnic removal; it was almost class war, although no one save the residents (and a few Policy World such as Alinsky) saw it as so. I argue that CBD urban renewal over the next two decades proved itself both necessary and worthwhile. I also argue that Big City neighborhood-based urban renewal was cruel, wrong-headed, and dysfunctional as public policy and an economic development strategy. Urban renewal applied to neighborhoods destroyed the neighborhood and put nothing in its place. So today, the contemporary urban renewal paradigm exists, and its core could be summarized in a stanza sung to Lerner & Loewe’s (My Fair Lady) song “The Streets Where You Live”:
Oh, I used to walk down this street before.
But they’ve kicked out the folks I used to meet before.
And the neighborhood
Now is gone for good
There’s no street on the street where I lived.[33]
So here it is urban renewal in its shame and what little glory it can muster. Said and done, at its core urban renewal is a variant of physical redevelopment—a time-honored economic development strategy demonstrated as early as 1825 in Quincy’s Boston[34]. There is no making nice the reality buildings, homes, neighborhoods and human relationships are destroyed, certainly reshaped, in the process. The opposition and bitterness of those affected was inevitable. Physical redevelopment is the nuclear bomb of economic development; we literally destroy a village to save it—except the reality behind physical redevelopment is that the village being destroyed is not being saved. The old village is giving way to a new village, not a better village, but a new village that, if ancient cities teach us anything, will also in their due course be destroyed.
The position taken in this history is whatever the reader may feel, or want, that much of the conventional (semi-ideological) urban renewal literature will be put aside so that we can present an adequate description of the history. Instead, this history will focus on the reality of urban renewal in American economic development policy-making and its contribution to the evolution of our profession.
Our focus throughout this history is to describe the evolution of economic development policy-making and professionalization in terms of strategies and tools, and most, importantly structures such as EDOs and state legislation/involvement. The history tries to demonstrate how the municipal political culture can, and has, affected the shaping and the implementation of economic development strategies/tools. Our examples will, I believe, demonstrate that considerable variation among cities pursuing urban renewal will not only challenge the contemporary urban renewal paradigm, but, more importantly, support the essentials of our model of sub-state economic development policy-making.
In this history, the “Age of Urban Renewal” is a label we cast upon a pivotal period in our professional evolution. In that period, urban renewal was our profession’s principal economic development strategy meant to achieve a certain end—resisting suburbanization through revitalization of the CBD, and, compelled by federal refusal to delink CBD renewal from housing renewal, secondarily through removal of neighborhood slums. As to the “urban renewal” associated with highways and freeways—that was usually conducted by state highway departments, in many cases opposed by the communities affected, but also by municipal leaders.
Urban Renewal was a strategy that defined the arrival of economic development apart from housing and planning as a profession and policy area. It was a strategy that relied upon a earlier structural (the port authority) model to conduct and implement its activities, projects and tools. And so the redevelopment agency—within and around which developed the nucleus of a future, Big City urban economic development profession—will be the womb for a large and vital wing of the contemporary economic development profession.
In the end, whether or not urban renewal achieved its desired ends, or reeked enormous havoc morally and socially will be left to others. In that it obviously did not stop future suburbanization or restore the primacy of the Big Central City, it is hard to say urban renewal was successful. But in terms of our focus in this history, the Age of Urban Renewal marks the clear entry of economic development as a policy area and an independent profession. Lessons gleaned from our collective experience with urban renewal provide support to our model, and lessons to be learned by future practitioners. Equally important, whatever urban renewal did or didn’t do, it did set in motion the individual future travels of most of our contemporary cities.
The Big City Model of Urban Renewal
By the end of this chapter, it should be evident that urban renewal, even within the Big Cities of the North and Midwest, assumed several forms during the Age of Urban Renewal. Moreover, in timing, politics and policy process each city in its own way was different from other Big Cities. In several future chapters urban renewal in southern and western cities will also be reviewed—and, whatever else can be said, the cities in other regions are far from clones of the North/Midwest Big Cities. Having stressed a reality of noticeable diversity in the implementation of urban renewal over the three decades of its existence, is (are) there any shared pattern(s) that can be discerned? I suggest that two core models, with internal variations, can be constructed: the Big City (Eastern/Midwestern) and the Western model. In the next paragraphs, the Big City model will be presented.
To me, urban renewal was a strategic approach which combined several strategies (physical redevelopment and infrastructure), used specific tools (tax abatement/write downs, eminent domain, TIF, bond issuance, and planning) centrally located within an empowered EDO-structure, the redevelopment agency, whose shared public-private governance made key policy and implementation decisions within a larger jurisdictional policy system. In an automobile era, the critical infrastructures were public buildings, streets, freeways, highways, and parking. The ultimate objective, goal, of urban renewal, common to both the Big City and Western models was to counter suburbanization and its threat to the primacy of the central city over its hinterland. The urban renewal response to suburbanization, itself a population migration, was complicated by the effects of a second, Great Migration from the South. From its inspiration to its termination, the policy intention was to end or at least limit suburbanization and to maintain or stabilize the central city’s paramount role over its hinterland. If the reader follows central place theory urban renewal was a program designed to preserve the monocentric urban metropolitan hierarchy. For the most part, it failed.
Following the paradigmatic belief of its day, change in the physical landscape of the central city was the approach utilized. Make the central city more modern, efficient and attractive the exodus of people, jobs and industry could be stemmed, if not halted. For simplicity’s sake, in addition to infrastructure modernization, three geographic areas could be targeted for physical improvement: the central business district, the residential neighborhoods and the industrial districts/parks. In the beginning neighborhoods and housing (slum removal) was dominant, but by 1950 a more pure economic development-related approach focusing on the CBD appeared, and over the following decade became dominant in the Big Cities. Form most of the Age of Urban Renewal, the CBD was the primary area targeted for urban renewal, and the single most important geography relevant to reversing suburbanization and preserving central city primacy.
In a nutshell, Big City the Big City urban renewal strategy intended to counter suburbanization by physically removing the old downtown and adjacent neighborhoods, upgrading its key infrastructure and focusing it to the downtown while rebuilding a new downtown, using a mixture of private construction and public tools (eminent domain, etc.) funded by public-private investment including federal dollars by redevelopment agency whose control and operation were jointly shared to some degree by the public and private sectors. The concentration on the CBD, whether intended or perceived, frequently was a zero-sum relationship with the central city neighborhoods and their residents in that few, if any, fiscal, social, or personal costs associated with physical removal, redevelopment and relocation of residents/housing were addressed in any meaningful way by the agencies and decision-makers associated with urban renewal. In many ways, Big City urban renewal was a brutal and frequently overpowering program that not only invited pushback and resistance, but compelled it. That the program did not have to be so is easily its greatest failure, and will be an important distinction between the Big City and Western City models.
Another key distinction between Western City and Big City urban renewal models is the latter for various reasons to be explained, carried with it the legacy of its creation—that it originated from policy/programs advocated by planners and housing reformers and intended to provide safe, affordable housing for the city’s lower income residents residing in deteriorated housing and slum neighborhoods. Separated, some say stolen away, the program, over a decade, was diverted to revitalize the CBD by a particular segments of business leadership in a coalition with a mayor, mostly independent of party apparatus or machine. The legacy of its linkage with planning, housing and slum removal continued throughout the thirty years.
Cities following the Big City model required a comprehensive plan and often co-linked housing/slum removal with CBD redevelopment. Cities following the Western City model separated the two geographies and urban renewal focused almost totally on the CBD only. Neighborhood renewal programs in these cities did physically remove entire blocks of housing, instead rehabilitating housing and commercial structures where possible. Western cities, because federal regulations and local administrators had learned from earlier Big City experience, included residents and activists into planning, decision-making, and attempted to limit the costs and the burdens associated with their urban renewal programs.
When it is said and done, however, the federal role, while important in financing a portion of urban renewal initiatives, and significantly affecting the implementation of these initiatives, never took control over the “urban renewal ball” from local authorities and public decision-makers. Urban renewal was a locally controlled program, affected by the federal government, but locally motivated and driven. When urban renewal dollars ended in 974, urban redevelopment following the urban renewal strategy did not stop. It just changed its clothes and name. Also, with some limited exceptions, the Big City model was rendered obsolete by the late 1960’s and cities after that time followed hybrids.
John Kingdon[35]
Five themes came together during the New Deal/War Years and their confluence resulted in perhaps the most critical policy/program to affect Big Cities to this point in time. Urban Renewal not only tremendously influenced the course of Big Cities and their populations, but also, I will argue, caused the formation of an important wing in our economic development profession: Big City economic development. Much of this story will play out in the following chapters, but it is in the Depression and War Years that what I define as urban renewal was formulated (in Washington) and hit the streets in our Big Cities. In Chapter 10, urban renewal will take a second turn, and accordingly lead us into economic development. In this chapter, however, urban renewal will be directed at housing, public housing and slum removal necessary to facilitate this policy initiative.
The five themes in order of appearance are Decentralization, Physical Redevelopment, Housing Reform, Slum Clearance, and last, but far from least, Downtown Blight. The arena for policy formulation is the federal government, and the principal players in this dialogue are the various national professional associations, Congress, and rarely, the President. This chapter’s discussion will take these themes into 1946-1947 or so. Interwoven into these themes will be a hugely important driver of change, the Depression, population migration, and in the 1940’s the shift in policy direction and output caused by World War II and war production/shortages. Midway in this description will be a short discussion of why, and how, the federal government became so deeply involved in this tale.
A Half-Time Review
We are at midpoint in our presentation of urban renewal as an epoch-defining public policy. Up to now (1946 or so), the words “urban renewal” have not penetrated into public discourse or could be found in legislative wording. Nevertheless, we have entered into the Age of Urban Renewal; we did that no later than the Housing Act of 1937 (but more realistically as early as the late twenties). So far, what’s going on? Does it square very well with our supposed contemporary urban renewal paradigm?
It’s fair to say that the historical description presented thus far is both more robust and more nuanced than our conventional memory of this period. Today, in a gross simplification, urban renewal is little more than Negro-removal-neighborhood destruction by a greedy capitalist growth coalition and Moses-like quasi-public redevelopment agencies that failed in its purposes. As gross the simplification might be, there is a lot of truth in it—but there is also a lot that has dropped out of the story. Public housers and real estate interests brought the state, and later federal governments, into the picture starting in the late twenties. By that point both had advocated their version of medium-scale slum removal, an initiative that required the use of focused public powers housed in a structural organization (housing or redevelopment authority). The difference between the two groups was the mission (how to define the purpose (and client) underlying slum removal) and who would “govern” its direction. This dialogue still has a way to go before it will be resolved in the next chapter.
The public housers scored meaningful victories with the Housing Acts of 1934 and 1937. By 1940 or so, nearly every major city in nearly every state had established a housing authority and had entered into neighborhood slum clearance and public housing construction. The real estate version had gone almost nowhere by that date. That changed in the early forties when state legislation pursued aggressively by municipal leaders (La Guardia, for example) and real estate interests authorized business-influenced/controlled neighborhood housing projects using municipal powers. Advocacy for a business responsive structure, the redevelopment agency, gathered steam during the War Years and grew exponentially at war’s end.
By 1942, federal funds for low-income public housing had been zeroed out. HhHousing agencies, instead, were refocused to construct wartime housing for workers of all income levels. In Washington, despite several interesting initiatives and serious in fighting, legislative paralysis or gridlock on this issue prevented the issue from going forward or backward for that matter. Whatever else could be said, no one had a lock on slum removal. States as well as the federal government were serious players with states/municipalities tending to move toward a more business approach and the federal government to a housing/planning approach to slum removal. Gridlock or not, we had indisputably entered into the Age of Urban Renewal.
Aside from completely ignoring the role of public housers in bringing the federal government into the policy area, and being the first to demolish neighborhoods, the paradigm does somewhat distort the different purposes underlying the use of public powers. Public housers wanted to demolish obsolete neighborhood housing on a multi-block scale, but, certainly by the 1940’s the business approach was concentrated on CBD redevelopment, and limited its contact with housing and neighborhoods. The business approach tried unsuccessfully for a decade and a half to delink its approach from housing. Had such delinking been approved it is very unlikely the devastation wrought by future urban renewal would have occurred to the extent it did. Still the paradigm is correct in associating real estate interests with urban renewal policy-making—their involvement is indisputable.
Perhaps the most serious deficiency of our straw man paradigm is that the context, the rationale or reason behind urban renewal, is left out completely. Either the housing or CBD variant of urban renewal dealt with the specter of decentralization. The almost life or death struggle of the central city for mastery of his expanding hinterland is ignored. So too is the intense Policy World debate that accompanied this period. Also ignored, is the overwhelmingly supportive role the media played in cementing a public consensus behind urban renewal as the last best hope for the central city. This last fact will be more evident in the next chapter, but despite the opposition of affected neighborhood residents, the momentum of those opposed to urban renewal did not carry from the newspapers to the policy and media journals of the day.
As is hopefully evident in this chapter, urban renewal took shape in a period of transition. Not only were we in the midst of the Great Depression, but subsequently the nation entered into its greatest war. The shift from the former, to the latter, took much of the wind out of the public housing movement. Professionally, planners were peeling away from a long-standing alliance with housers, and a slowly crystallizing Big City economic development cadre was growing on the outskirts of both professions. As discussed, the structure of American industry was coming to grip with New Deal activism and global supremacy of the United States. In the transition, large corporate elites were losing interest in sub-state issues. Instead, large corporation elites were in process of organizing to deal with the newly prominent federal government.
Large corporation elites served their own interests and perspective, which were surprisingly Progressive; in any case, such elites did not serve as errand boys for real estate developers. As evidenced by the UN example, the crisis of the central city was jointly perceived, and “big money” stepped in for reasons other than market values of downtown property. Finally, within the Big Cities, a transition away from machines to independent, reform-prone mayors was evident—and that provided, on the whole, support to the business approach to urban renewal. The industrial city also was in transition. The rise of decentralization threatened an unrestrained exodus to the old industrial city’s middle and upper classes. The Great Migration, whatever its affect on suburbanization, placed such pressures on already existing slums that they disintegrated into ghettoes, which, as pictured in the time, spread their cancer into adjoining neighborhoods. Urban renewal always was much more than simple greed by a real estate growth coalition. Urban renewal, as shall be presented in the next chapter, was the central city’s best-perceived strategy to deal with suburbanization.
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Decentralization (Suburbanization): the Defining Crisis of the Age of Urban Renewal
Immigration, the Great Migration and migration to the West are probably the best-known examples of American population migration. There is another, suburbanization, called decentralization in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and in the Age of Urban Renewal decentralization was held responsible for the “crisis” of our Big, hegemonic, Cities of the East and Midwest. Decentralization was the problem that slum removal and urban renewal was intended to solve. Neither came close to countering decentralization, and arguably fostered it—but that is no matter at this point in our history. In 2015, we have largely accepted the reality, bitterly in some cases, of most types of population migration, such as the rise of the Sunbelt—but not so the sprawl of the suburbs. Today’s suburbanization remains arguably the most controversial and divisive form of population migration in economic development policy-making (immigration, of course is the other possibility).
It wasn’t always thus, as hopefully the various chapters thus far have observed, suburbs, like the poor, have always been with us, and modern suburbs have thus far been a persistent feature of our nineteenth and especially early twentieth century industrial urban evolution. But in the 1920’s, especially in the 1930’s, the more benign view of “decentralization” which had been dominant up to that time, changed radically and in the 1940’s and 1950’s its consequences seemed to challenge the foundations of the metropolitan hierarchy of cities. Decentralization seemed to overturn the primacy of the central city over its metropolitan hinterlands. The more suburbanization picked up steam, the more the crisis deepened. What began as a simpler program to provide housing to low-income immigrants (and later Great Migration migrants) was transformed into a program to remove slums and stop the flow of central city residents to the suburbs.
During the twenties and throughout the thirties, decentralization came to be regarded as a “disease”. That is the story we tell in this set of sections. The disease motif came to be shared by normally divergent elements within several professions: from housing advocates, to the real estate sector, to the upper reaches of the Policy World/Academia. Each differed on how to treat the disease, but as the reader shall see, in these early years the differences among different professional groupings was minimal—the main points of disagreement being who was the patient/constituency to be treated, and who was to get the sought-after free federal dollars.
Decentralization as a disease perceived the evolution of Big industrial Cities as characterized by decay (a cancer) in the urban core and economic vitality in its periphery. The two were related; the latter caused the former. Decentralization meant the more prosperous classes leaving the confines of the Big City and setting up residence and paying taxes to another jurisdictional unit of government. Those left behind inherited neighborhoods and housing which were older, and, for the most part unsuitable for then modern living. These poor and disenfranchised, and these certainly are years of racial change prompted by the Great Migration, were unable to effectively address or pay for the restoration of these areas and housing units. On top of this, at the peak of its glory, the throne of a Big City’s metropolitan economy, the central business district, was in decline—a decline noticed more by commercial and real estate business elites than the average citizen or resident. Louis Wirth, the leading urban Policy World commentator of the day, expressed all this most concisely: “The depopulation of the core of cities has been accompanied by blight and physical decay, by declining revenue in the face of rising costs, and by civic irresponsibility and the increasing impotence of cities to deal with their problems”.[36]
This quote could have been written in the 1980’s or 1990’s; it was written in 1943—four years before Levittown and the postwar suburban exodus. Core concerns in these early years were either desire by housing reformers to improve the housing of poor residents or, to city policy-makers, financial —“the impact of sprawl on city finances already weakened by depression”[37]—that is what provided the political muscle to make policy. As the thirties unfolded, another dimension, how to fix the engine of central city commercial prosperity—the central business district—competed for attention. All these pressures played out during the crushing years of the Great Depression when cities were close to fiscal bankruptcy and residents were literally economically prostrate.
Battered on all sides, Big Cities were unpleasantly shocked when a muted prosperity returned to the nation between 1938 and 1939. Statistics, when available, indicated that a decade’s unsatisfied housing demand had expressed itself in these two years. A building boom occurred in the four years before Pearl Harbor with 2.3 million units constructed (exceeding that produced during 1929 to 1937 combined). During those years, Americans purchased 12 million new cars, raising the total owned to nearly 30 million. “Fully 81 percent of the [1938-39] housing starts … were for single family units, compared with 60 percent for 1921 to 1930. Rural non-farm units (which included suburban houses in unincorporated areas and small towns under 2,500 population) constituted 35 percent of the new starts as opposed to 21 percent during the twenties”. The 1940 census told the story. The 1930’s “was the decade in which the majority of metropolitan growth occurred for the first time in suburban rings rather than central cities. Individual statistics showed population losses in twenty-seven of the ninety-three American cities with populations over one hundred thousand … all of the losers were located in the Northeast”.[38]
To most urban leaders a better city was a physically rejuvenated city. Rather than sponsor programs that tampered with the metropolitan social structure or redistributed wealth and power, planners, politicians and the business community believed physical changes were the appropriate weapons against blight. Thus, brick, mortar and asphalt constituted the artillery in this initial offensive against the decline of the central cities. A renewed infrastructure would supposedly save the city from blight and limit the inroads of decentralization.[40]
By the 1920’s, second generation immigrants were moving into newer housing/subdivisions at the city’s periphery. The car was increasingly commonplace, and discretionary income was growing. Working and middle class residents extended the periphery further and further out—until, as mentioned earlier, the suburban voter and the state legislature clamped down on annexation. Central city boundaries became fixed in stone; it could no longer chase its periphery-bound middle class. Still t
During these early years housing reformers formed national and state professional associations such as the National Association of Housing Officials (NAHO) in 1933[43].
Into this opening plunged NAREB, and its tumultuous Executive Vice-President Herbert Nelson (who had been deeply involved in the Hoover Conference housing-slum clearance-blight report). The collapse in real estate prices during the Depression riveted the attention of realtors and brought them into the front ranks of city revitalization efforts. The real estate exchange membership was intensely opposed to housing reformers, and though of public housing as nothing less than socialism (although they were ok with slum clearance and FHA mortgage insurance). For the real estate industry, the principal cause of slums was a decentralization that they construed to be the killer angel of the central city. Nelson, in this period, strongly pushed a “model state law helpfully outlining a legal device to rule out adverse uses and effectively plan blighted areas”.[44] Also, they supported “improvement districts” which were their more open-ended version of “planning districts” proposed by housing reformers. Their proposals went nowhere at the federal, state and local levels—adding to their frustration. But, for the first time NAHO and NAREB stood in conflict over future federal legislation. Even at this point, real estate exchanges saw little or no link with slums and slum clearance with housing per se.
The 1937 Housing Act
Early New Deal housing programs, starting with the 1933 Home Owner Loan Act set up the nefarious Home Loan Bank system. The 1934 National Housing Act. The breakout legislation prodded nearly all cities to initiate a sustained commitment to address the housing needs created by the market crash, the Great Depression and first great migration. The story of urban renewal begins with the passage of this act. The 1934 Act created the Federal Housing Administration[45] around which a forum for NAHO and new public housing programs and initiatives could crystallize. Resistance[46] (aside from conservative Congress) to NAHO centralized under Herb Nelson and NAREB. It was not Herb Nelson’s finest hour—he lost badly[47] and the 1937 Housing Act was a “Public Houser” total victory. It also marked the formal birth of the Age of Urban Renewal”.
Passage of the 1937 Housing Act (Wagner-Steagall) was the high water mark of the Progressive housing and slum clearance. “It (Housing Act of 1937) … [created] a long-term housing program … designed to alleviate both the “unsafe and insanitary housing conditions … and the acute shortage of decent safe and sanitary dwellings” for low-income families”. The Act established the U.S. Housing Authority and empowered it to make loans and grants to housing authorities for the purpose of clearing slums and building low-rent housing. The law required a one-for-one demolition to new construction ratio.[48] Accordingly, the 1937 Housing Act prompted a flood of applications from municipalities to states to establish and empower housing authorities, and to approve whatever other powers that made slum clearance and municipal-owned housing possible.
The federal statute provided an opportunity to communities to undertake the elimination and redevelopment phases of a practical slum clearance program. Seizing upon this opportunity, forty-three states enacted enabling legislation authorizing the creation of local housing authorities to carry out community slum clearance and low-rent housing programs. These statutes which authorize the acquisition and clearance of slum areas by the exercise of the power of eminent domain and the construction of low-rent housing, and provide for the exemption of such housing authorities from taxation, were founded constitutionally on the inherent ‘public purpose’ … and have been upheld in thirty-one states and the District of Columbia.[49]
The Aftermath
Several points ought to be made at this point. First, for all practical purposes neighborhood level slum clearance and public housing redevelopment projects began with passage of the 1937 legislation. Such projects in the next several years could be found in nearly every state and in nearly every size city. The tradition powers required for these projects were “housed” in a “housing authority”, a quasi-public municipal level entity whose governance included private sector, housing reformers, and public officials. Most housing authorities started out or quickly became independent of mayoral control.
Secondly, housing authorities, possessing essentially identical powers as future redevelopment agencies, were commonplace by 1940. “Under the Act … local authorities were invited to borrow money through bond issues; with the proceeds they were to acquire sites, clear them, and put up houses. The federal government would enter into ‘contracts’ with local housing authorities … [and] would agree to pay enough money for the interest on the bonds and the amortization of the principal. Operating expenses … would come out of current rents”[50].
The Hoover Administration, anticipating the forthcoming elections and for genuine humane motivations, channeled discussion by these associations into Conferences and Reports. The federal government has considerable resources, but to acquire and manage them adds a new layer to our economic development history.
The Forties: Decentralization Becomes a Crisis: the removal of blight the solution
(T)he commonly identified enemy of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s was ‘blight’. When they spoke of blight, city officials, business leaders, and urban planners meant the process of physical deterioration that destroyed property values and undermined the quality of urban life. Moreover, blight was often referred to as a cancer, an insidious, spreading phenomenon that could kill a city if not removed…[51]
Truman Provides the Muscle to Break the Logjam: the 1949 Housing Act
The previous chapter outlined the earliest development of what will become urban renewal. Already, even in these earliest years, there were many moving parts, conflicting and seriously divergent political, profit and policy differences, and the goals intended to be solved overlapped to some degree, but were also different. The holy grail of federal dollars meant these policy battles were mostly fought in Washington D.C., in the halls of Congress chiefly. But the real story of urban renewal lies on the streets of our cities, how urban renewal evolved, what it actually tried to accomplish, and what actually got done, when, and by whom. Chapter 9 left us roughly at 1945. The next round of federal legislation turned out to be the Housing Act of 1949. In between there was stalemate, abortive legislation, and negotiation among the players involved in this embryonic economic development policy-making. Again, the battle is being fought out in Washington D.C., MOSTLY, but not exclusively.
They were imperiled because at a critical juncture in 1949 the fortunes of the UN Project became entangled with the inability of Congress to approve a new Housing Act, a part of the package of reforms, Harry Truman called the Fair Deal. Truman had embraced urban redevelopment and housing in his package of reforms presented to Congress. He called for a redevelopment program in which the federal government would give grants and loans to local governments to cover the cost of land purchases and write downs and wanted to turn the federal spigot back on for public housing calling for construction of 500,000 units (the first new authorization since 1938). The U.S. Conference of Mayors and the traditional New Deal interest group entourage joined in support—but the Republicans in 1946 won control of both branches of Congress. “Give them hell Harry”, however, came back in the1948 election, not only winning the Presidency but grabbing hold of both houses of Congress. “As it turned out, the Housing Act of 1949 was the only piece of original legislation on Truman’s Fair Deal Agenda that Congress enacted.”[53]
As to the UN Project, in 1949 it nearly went bankrupt. To finish the project, the UN needed a loan of $65 million. It was rejected in Congress at the same time as the negotiated Housing Act was failing for lack of sufficient votes. In a famous cartoon, Washington Post’s Herblock had two depressed bureaucrats, sitting dejectedly on a doorstep of an obviously deteriorated building with a caved-in door, trash all around, a slum-like skyline with the U.S. Capitol in the background. Each bureaucrat, holding their losing legislation in their hands, while one bemoans to the other “Did they fool you on housing too”[54]. Before the end of the year, sufficient votes would be found for both.
The most controversial aspect of the Housing Act was not urban redevelopment, a la urban renewal, but rather public housing. Public housing was in today’s parlance, a wedge issue in 1949—it was a fault line exposing a chasm between the two contending philosophies and political parties. Urban redevelopment, if our previous section is correct, was riding a wave of almost romantic, optimistic hope that the tool for urban redevelopment had been found. Within policy-making circles in Washington, however, the major sticking point was that for a decade and a half, the NAREB/ULI urban redevelopment position had been inseparable from housing, especially out of favor public housing. Legislatively the issue was to bleed housing slum and blight removal powers into programs that today we label economic development. And the 1949 Housing Act accomplished that feat, but just barely.
According to Hoffman, the major contribution of the 1949 Housing Act to urban policy “was the program for urban redevelopment” (Title I). Title I authorized $1 billion 1949 dollars in loans to help cities acquire slums and blighted land for public or private redevelopment. It further allocated $100 million per year for five years for write down grants to cover two-thirds of the difference between the cost of slum land and its reuse value. The one-third local match could be cash or building needed public facilities. The public housers also came away with a victory as well. Existing housing programs were expanded/extended, but Title III restarted defunct public housing (since 1942) construction by authorizing federal loans and grants to build 810,000 new low-rent public housing units over the next six years—a drop in the bucket if the real goal was to address the nation’ 1949 housing crisis. The critical failing of the Act, however, was that federal involvement in slum and blight removal was predicated on public housing construction—urban redevelopment, whatever that meant, was tied at the hip to a public housing project. Stuyvesant-type projects might be eligible, but certainly not a UN Project (or a Pittsburgh Golden Triangle project).
The CED, discussed in the previous chapter, according to Domhoff played an important role in shaping the Housing Act to benefit the local real estate growth coalitions. Working through Vermont Senator Flanders[55], a past CED trustee, Domhoff asserts that three critical amendments (the most critical being authorization of the leasing of federally-funded cleared land to private developers) were inserted into the legislation. The effect of these amendments was to empower the local growth coalitions which then intensified their advocacy and support of urban renewal and the creation of redevelopment agencies—and in the end permitting the local growth coalition to grossly benefit from their destructive urban renewal projects[56]. This history is not in the least convinced that amendments introduced by a former CED trustee, then senator, intensified involvement by local real estate interests (which this chapter has argued had been evolving for nearly fifteen years previous), and that the CED was therefore behind advancement of local growth coalitions in the various cities of America. Nevertheless, this has become one strand in the current contemporary urban renewal paradigm.
In these years, the evil which one way or another drove city residents out to suburbs was given a name:
Whether decentralization caused blight, or vice versa[57] (this was a contested issue during the forties) the two were linked. Blight was primarily physical obsolescence, not social or political, not even racial change in neighborhoods. Blight was obsolescence, spreading like a cancer from the CBD outward. Blight was simply age– deterioration in the physical and structural foundations of the city. Blight caused human misery and drove residents from the city.
Although often used interchangeably in popular literature, the terms slum and blight came to have distinctly different meanings for the professional groups concerned with the urban environment. Slums connoted poor housing conditions and all the attendant social evils; blight on the other hand had economic significance. To say that a district was blighted was to mean the area was unprofitable, both to private investors and the municipal government. Housing in such sections could be in reasonably good shape, or there might not be any housing at all; commercial and industrial districts could be blighted too. [Indeed]… slums with their overcrowding and low upkeep usually returned handsome dividends to property owners, [but] blighted areas were by definition a drain on individual and official pocketbooks.[58]
By the late thirties and early forties, Mayors had lost much of their enthusiasm for slum removal for public housing. Instead, they urged planners to do something about blight and its spread to counter the disturbing statistics that were increasingly evident to the naked eye and made manifest by the 1940 census. The solutions that followed were varied, ranging from “smoke” (pollution) control, correction of polluted water resources to modernization of the city infrastructure and physical landscape or as Teaford put it: “… physical rejuvenation and reconstruction. The tonic that could revive the aging central cities had to include a healthy dose of new highway and sewer construction, the building of better housing and more modern commercial structures, and the elimination of environmental pollution”[59].
At this point, the Building Owner & Management Association (BOMA had, for its own reasons became interested in slum removal policy. It did so after results from the 1940 census presented evidence that the pace of decentralization had picked up significantly. In July 1940 an editorial from Business Week, for example, commented, “Until perhaps five years ago, the problems of decentralization were undetected by all but specialists in urban planning. Since then the number of individuals and organizations aware of the danger has multiplied”.[60]
Decentralization, Downtown Obsolescence and Downtown Business Associations
In cities across the nation building owners and managers reacted, and took action to counter decentralization and the litany of other issues that affected downtown properties. (I)ncreasingly [they advocated] “to convince the authorities to eradicate the blighted areas surrounding the central business district, replace them with middle-and upper middle class neighborhoods, and thereby create a vast new market for downtown goods and services”.[61] BOMA (and the CBD) had been drawn into neighborhood slum clearance by the late thirties and early forties.
Starting in the late 1930’s, however, the downtown business interests began to change their mind about slum clearance (if not low-income housing). What brought about this change was not the Housing Act of 1937, for whose passage they had done virtually nothing, but the growing concern about decentralization. By then they realized that the central business district’s worst problems, especially its declining property values, slumping retail sales, and high vacancy rates were mainly the product of decentralization, not of the depression.[62]
The Metropolitan Commission to Redevelopment Authority
In practical terms, the NAREB 1941 Report and its “metropolitan commissions” proposed a redesigned housing authority, stripped of its housing mission and replaced with its blight-removing “write down” function, and governed by a board of directors appointed by the mayors and which included significant private sector membership—the core of what we will later called an urban renewal or redevelopment agency. The report delinked slum clearance from an exclusive focus on deteriorated housing, cast away deteriorated housing as the definition of a slum, and turned urban redevelopment toward blight resolution away from high-rise public housing. This 1941 NAREB report constitutes the first clear proposal that lead to development of an economic development-oriented urban renewal structure.
Despite its obvious success such legislation, while it accommodated significant private involvement, departed significantly from NAREB’s 1941 Report. ULI and NAREB criticized this legislation on the grounds they were housing, not redevelopment acts … [and] discouraged the participation of private enterprise. Because of this criticism, the later enabling acts (and before long the great majority of them) took a different approach. The approach NAREB/ULI preferred required
urban redevelopment is turned over to a public agency, an arm of the local government, delinked from housing and entrusted with a new mission the removal of blight. Their redevelopment agency was empowered to take land, clear it, and sell (lease) it. in whole or in part, to private firms (the write down) or public bodies, this in line with the city master plan, would rebuild the cleared sites for their ‘best and highest use?[63]
ULI in 1946 produced a report that clearly pressed states and localities to approve the ULI/NAREB form of redevelopment legislation. The 1946 ULI typology of state/municipal redevelopment legislation (developed by Seward Mott), entitled “Principles to be Incorporated in State Redevelopment Acts” recommended Type III redevelopment agency as the best form to attack blight:
Type I: (ten already in existence by 1946) were deficient in that they were limited to housing, retained control of finished product and allowed less room or opportunity for private initiative;
Type II: (Tennessee and Arkansas) were exclusively housing redevelopment agencies, were concerned with relocation and allowed NO room for private corporations;
Type III: (advocated by ULI and adopted by the majority of states by 1949) authorized the creation of an local urban redevelopment agency, governed by private citizens, separate from the housing authority, under local municipal control, and the cleared land could be reused for any purpose in accordance with an approved comprehensive plan and with the objective of securing the highest and best use of the area.[64]
Business interests gave $150,000 in seed capital to the Pittsburgh Redevelopment Authority. The Indianapolis City Council earmarked ten cents per $100 dollars of assessed value for urban redevelopment. The Milwaukee city council appropriated $1 million; and shortly after the voters approved two bond issues—one for $ 2.5 million, the other for $3.5 million. The voters also approved a $ 2 million bond issue in Providence, a $ 5 million bond issue in Baltimore, a $15 million dollar bond issue in Chicago—to which the state legislature added $11 million[65].
It must be stressed that whatever the type of redevelopment agency created before 1949 was not eligible for federal Housing Act-related funds. Funding for new public housing had ended in 1942.
Most of the older central cities acted promptly to implement the state laws. By 1948 Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh had created redevelopment authorities guided by leaders from the business community with a heavy representation from the real estate and building industries… In 1949, Minneapolis levied a special property tax … to finance the survey, planning and acquisition of land for redevelopment. Meanwhile, Detroit’s city council had appropriated $ 1 million from general tax revenues for land purchases …. Responding to this flurry of activity at the state and local level… the proceedings of the American Society of Planning Officials included in a report optimistically entitled “Urban Redevelopment is Under Way”[66]
The Early Promise of Urban Physical Regeneration
One of the first beneficiaries of New York’s 1940 legislation was Met-Life, which started its planning, and financing in cooperation with Mayor La Guardia and Robert Moses to redevelop Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. The fact that federal dollars played NO role in Moses’s post-1940 redevelopment projects, and that urban renewal had not yet even been defined as a strategy, never mind achieved any sort of policy approval, have not inhibited Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village and the United Nations as being prototypical urban renewal projects. Both were built before the 1949 Housing Act.
Stuyvesant Town would invade and displace the Manhattan street grid that had been virtually inviolable since 1811. Clearance and construction on this unprecedented project began soon after the close of World War II. Stuyvesant Town welcomed its first families in August 1947 and was finished and fully occupied less than two years later, on June 1st, 1949[67].
While the obvious first lesson is that real estate business makes no donations for good causes, ever, the prime movers behind this project are quite evident and unmistakable. An important distinction needs to be made at this point; the contemporary urban renewal paradigm labels the private sector role as, in Zipp’s previous words, “downtown business interests” (and Bernard Friedan and Lynne Sagalyn in Downtown, Inc) refer to them as “downtown boosters”)[68]. John and Nelson Rockefeller (and in the case of Stuyvesant, Met Life the then largest corporation in America), are simply not just downtown interests. In Pittsburgh, Richard Mellon (Chair and President of Mellon Bank and listed among the ten richest Americans of that day) and the newly forming Committee for Economic Development (CED) are not mere downtown business—they are the leading corporate leaders of America. These men were the proverbial “big money”, the “city fathers”, and the bedrock of American capitalism. It was this sliver of the business community that first put its money and power behind urban redevelopment as a national strategy for ameliorating decline of the nation’s central cities—not the Chamber, real estate exchanges, Merchant Associations, or even the ULI and NAREB—it was America’s 1945 “one per cent”.
This segment of the business community recognized, before Levittown ever put up a for sale sign, that the central cities were in trouble. The word used at the time was blight, but blight conveyed more meaning to the one per cent and to the average citizen, businessperson and political leader than a cluster of deteriorated buildings settled by low-income, African-American, or Puerto Rican minorities it is reduced to in today’s literature. Blight possessed an emotional underside as well—a “story” as Deborah Stone would call it. To be sure, as Friedan and Sagalan point out, local governments, as late as the middle fifties, “raised two-thirds of their own source resources, with property taxes alone accounting for half the total. And the largest taxpayer in most cities was the central business district, which typically supplied a fourth or more of local revenue”.[69]
Sure, there was a hard-nosed fiscal core motivating central city urban redevelopment, but there was also an attachment to the City, to its heritage, and to its power and primacy—and the City was clearly in trouble of such scale that the “Big Boys” had to play if the situation was to be controlled and indeed saved. At this point in time, the UN, indisputably the most powerful symbol existing in the 1945 of a new and hopeful FUTURE, a new start from a devastating World War, represented the potential power (and critical importance) of urban redevelopment.
[1] The data for these observations were taken from Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, op. cit., pp. 72-82.
[2] Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, op. cit. p. 77.
[3] Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, op. cit. p. 92.
[4] This flowed from success enjoyed by municipal research bureau. Federal level think tanks/ policy institutes mirrored the character exhibited by the municipal research bureau a generation earlier. The continuity of approach (planning, research, and experts/academia) suggests “one percenter”-corporate elites value these approaches over time.
[5] Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth (New York, Vintage Books, 2003), p.4
[6] Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 283; this data is further confirmed by McDonald in his chapter “Suburbanization: 1950-1970”, op. cit. pp. 85-104.
[7] Bernadette Hanlon, Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2010), pp. 13-27.
[8] Hanlon, pp 114- 131
[9] Edgar Hoover and Raymond Vernon, Anatomy of a Metropolis: The Changing Distribution of People and Jobs within the New York Metropolitan Region (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1959) and Raymond Vernon, Metropolis 1985(Garden City, New York, Doubleday Anchor, 1963).
[10] John Meyer, John Kain, and Martin Wohl, The Urban Transportation Problem (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1965)
[11] John F. McDonald, Employment, Location and Industrial Land Use in Metropolitan Chicago (Champaign, Illinois, Stipes Publishing, 1984). McDonald nicely summarizes this book in his Urban America: Growth, Crisis and Rebirth, op. cit. pp. 95-97.
[12] McDonald, Urban America, op. cit. p. 97.
[13] Michael D. Beyard, Business and Industrial Park Development Handbook (Washington D.C., The Urban Land Institute, 1988) p. 18.
[14] Brian Berry, Geography of Market Centers and Retail Distribution (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1967) p.20.
[15]William Alonso, Location and Land Use (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1964) and Richard Muth, Cities and Housing (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969). Indirectly, through a foundation entitled Resources for the Future this work was funded by the Ford Foundation
[16] See McDonald, Urban Economics, op. cit. pp. 205-206. See his Chapter 12, “New Urban Scholarship” for a readable outlining of the historiography of urban economics in the last half of the twentieth century.
[17] Susan Handy, “A Cycle of Dependence: Automobiles, Accessibility, and the Evolution of the Transportation and Retail Hierarchies”, Reprinted from Berkeley Planning Journal (Vol. 89 (1993) by the University of California Transportation Center, University of California at Berkeley
[18] Urban Land Institute, Shopping Center Development Handbook, (2nd Ed) (Washington D.C., Urban Land Institute, 1985)
[19] Homer Hoyt observed that in 1920 ninety per cent of retail sales were in the CBD. By 1937, Proudfoot looking at 37 cities found that the CBD made about 40% of total sales and neighborhood centers another 40%–retail had already decentralized before the Second World War but as Proudfoot described the CBD was still “the retail heart of the city”. Homer Hoyt, “The Changing Principles of Land Economics” Technical Bulletin No 60, Washington D.C., the Urban Land Institute; and Malcolm Proudfoot, Intra City Business Census Statistics for Philadelphia, PA, Washington D.C., U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, 1937) p. 1 and p. 3
[20] Jackson, op.cit. p. 276.
[21] See Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p.184. Metropolitan pluralism “implies the existence of both a variety of political actors and a variety of separable issues”. For Abbott the “main political actors are the central city and the suburban governments that have rapidly been developing independent economic and political resources that enable them to treat the central city as a peer”. “Political lineups tend to shift from issue to issue”.
[22] See Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 183.
[23] He was La Guardia’s first Planning Commission director and Tugwell’s first master plan initiative was gutted by the much-loved Robert Moses.
[24] Andrew A. Meyers, “Invisible Cities: Lewis Mumford, Thomas Adams, and the Invention of the Regional City, 1923-1929”, Business and Economic History, Volume 27, Number 2 (Winter, 1998), pp. 292-306.
[25] See Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., pp. 221-227 “Conflicting Conceptions of Regionalism”. Scott provides a great deal more context and depth to our general comments, but I believe reflects both the role regional planning focused upon decentralization and how/why Adams, in particular, broke with Mumford and Stein.
[26] Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, op. cit. p. 132. We rely heavily on Gelfand, pp.131-136.
[27] Philip J. Funigiello, the Challenge to Urban Liberalism: Federal-City Relations during World War II (Knoxville, Tennessee University Press, 1978), p. 206.
[28] Joseph L. Arnold, “The Neighborhood and City Hall: The Origin of Neighborhood Improvement Associations in Baltimore, 1880-1911”, Journal of Urban History, Vol. 6, (November 1979), pp. 3-30; Patricia M. Melvin, the Organic City: Urban Definition and Neighborhood Organization, 1880-1920 (Lexington, University of Kentucky Press)
[29] M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, op. cit. p. 36.
[30] Samuel Zipp Manhattan Projects: the Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York, Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 6; Zipp also states (p. 8) that urban renewal “was shorthand for an entire ideal and practice of spatial transformation that employed characteristic aesthetic forms—modern architecture [Le Corbusier] and superblock urban planning—to sweep away the nineteenth century grid.
[31] Scott Greer, Urban Renewal and American Cities: the Dilemma of Democratic Intervention (Center for Metropolitan Studies, Northwestern) (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965); see Chapter 1 and Chapter 8.
[32] Marc A. Weiss, “The Origins and Legacy of Urban Renewal” in Pierre Clavel et al.(Eds) Urban and Regional Planning in an Age of Austerity (New York, Pergamon Press (1980); D. Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983); Kevin Fox Gotham, “A City Without Slums: Urban Renewal and Downtown Revitalization in Kansas City Missouri”, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 60, Number 1 (January, 2001)
[33] Unabashedly stolen from Bernard J. Frieden and Lynne B. Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc: How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1991), p. 46.
[34] Heinrich Schliemann in excavating ancient Troy discovered more than eleven layers of that city’s development; Jericho has more.
[35] John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies (
[36] Louis Wirth, “the Urban Community” in W. F. Ogburn (Ed), American Society in Wartime (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1943), p. 64.
[37] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 168.
[38] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., pp. 169-170.
[39] While social reformers believed physical environment shaped human behavior. This belief was not universally shared at this time. The much-abused social Darwinists blamed deficiencies in human character, laziness, a propensity to make wrong decisions consistently, even immorality for the deteriorated physical environment and other anti-social propensities. Later some sociologists will depreciate the inevitability of environment’s effects on human behavior and the ability of people to adjust to the environment and form meaningful relationships and individual identity and meaning shared with others. People can choose to remain in bad physical environments simply to continue to live with those one shares identity and meaning with. Social reformers themselves will eventually abandon the determinative impact on physical environment in favor of racial discrimination, and later the lack of education, and most recently (2013) inequality.
[40] Jon C. Teaford, the Rough Road to Renaissance, op. cit. p. 26.
[41] Before the New Deal, housing reform consisted of three prongs: (1) prevent builders from constructing new tenements that “were as bad as the old ones”. New York City’s Tenement House Law of 1901 and planners building codes limiting building heights and lot sizes, banning rear tenement apartments, and requiring larger rooms, metal fire escapes, bigger windows, sink and toilets are all examples of this element of housing reform; (2) devising building designs for new tenements that could be built at costs sufficiently low to make a profit so that “the proper housing of the great masses of working people can be furnished on a satisfactory commercial basis”. To this end several reformers set up corporations to build such housing in neighborhoods at the city periphery and even suburbs; (3) “Expedite the working class from the tenement houses in the center (of the city) to single family homes on the periphery—and into homeownership”; Robert Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. pp. 325-327.
[42] The Hoover report brings forth some interesting observations regarding the future housing, slum clearance and blight policy debate. If the Hoover report had been formalized into legislation, it would have been remarkably close to what emerged from the policy process in 1949 and 1954. Given the nearly twenty-year gap needed to achieve legislative approval, the Hoover report, obviously, was “ahead of its times”. The sides had crystallized early—but the national level position contrasted greatly with the lack of consensus at the municipal level. While NAREB membership, more or less, may have been on board, the local business community coalition behind these issues did not exist in 1932—the business link with municipal government regarding housing and slums had yet to be forged.
[43] In 1953 NAHO allowed redevelopment officials to join, changing its name to National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials (NAHRO).
[44] Herbert Nelson, Urban Housing and Land Use, Law and Contemporary Problems, Volume 1, 1934
[45] Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, op. cit. p. 123. The FHA affected municipalities and generated local reaction. Federal aid was linked to reporting and surveys that necessitated that local governments deal with issues uncovered. The FHA, concerned about property values, “refused to insure mortgages in built up old urban areas because they were considered poor economic risks; consequently half of Detroit’s districts and one-third of Chicago’s were ruled ineligible for this type of federal aid”.
[46]Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, op. cit. p. 123. Accused even in this period of fostering decentralization, the FHA defended itself: “Decentralization is not a policy, it is a reality—and it is impossible for us to change this trend as it is to change the desire of birds to migrate to a more suitable location.”
[47]Critical to Nelson’s defeat was that elements of the local business community had not yet focused on slum clearance and housing projects to any great extent. Fogelson asserts, for instance, that “the downtown businessmen and property owners were not (at this point) involved in the battle over slum clearance” and that “Slum clearance was not on the agenda of the local downtown businessmen’s associations or the National Association of Building Owners and Managers (BOMA). Nor was low-income housing”.[47] Gelfand through the back door agrees that housing-slum clearance matters were the concern of, and were led by, the Real Exchange Bureaus (the developer community especially). In many cities slum clearance and housing replacement project in 1937 enjoyed serious private sector support, sometimes leadership. In short, the local business community was fractionalized and mostly uninvolved with this issue in 1937.
[48] Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. p. 340.
[49] Philip H. Hill, “Recent Slum Clearance and Urban Redevelopment Laws”, 9, Wash. & Lee L. Rev 173 (1952), Volume 9, Issue 2, p. 175. He records that Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming did not approve such legislation and, of course, Hawaii and Alaska were not yet states. By 1964, every state had approved at least one public housing authority (see Lawrence M. Friedman, “Public Housing and the Poor: an Overview”, 54, CAL. L. Rev. 642 (1966), Volume 54, Issue 2, p.642, footnote 7).
[50] Lawrence M. Friedman, “Public Housing and the Poor: an Overview”, 54, CAL. L. Rev. 642 (1966), Volume 54, Issue 2, p.648.
[51]Jon C. Teaford, the Rough Road to Urban Renaissance, op. cit. p. 11.
[52] (1) From the “policy world” in the form of a December 1941 booklet, “Urban Redevelopment and Housing—A Plan for Post-War” by two economists, Alvin H. Hansen and Guy Greer. Hansen & Greer dovetailed pretty much with the NAREB report of 1941, but departed on one point significantly arguing that federal assistance should be grants, not loans (as NAREB wanted); (2) the “Federal Urban Redevelopment Act” (the Bettman Bill) which was introduced in the Senate on April 1943. The bill contemplated a cabinet level federal agency to engage in “urban planning” and coordinating the federal role in federal grants-in-aid and city re-building. It would have required a federally approved metropolitan wide comprehensive master plan for each big city. Two months later, at the request of the NAREB-ULI Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY) introduced the “Neighborhood Development Act”. The Wagner bill was subtitled “an encouragement to enterprise bill” and restricted the role of the federal government to “the absolute minimum of direct federal supervision”; (3) a 1945 Committee report by a potential Presidential candidate and de facto leader of the Republican Party, Robert Taft and a housing-urban redevelopment bill introduced by Senator Wagner from New York. For excellent, detail treatment of this period and the description of the process see: Mark I. Gelfand, “A Nation of Cities: the Federal Government and Urban America 1933-1965 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1975), and Philip J. Funigiello, The Challenge to Urban Liberalism: Federal-City Relations during World War II (Knoxville, Tennessee University Press, 1978).
[53] Alexander von Hoffman, “A Study in Contradictions”, op. cit., p. 309.
[54] Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects, op. cit., pp. 68.
[55] Flanders would later introduce the censure motion against Joseph McCarthy. He had been since 1933 a member of FDR’s Business Advisory Council, a former President of the New England Council (our first multi-state regional economic development agency), and a 1942 founding member of CED. On CED he prepared recommendations to create the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and served, previous to his election as senator, as President of the Boston Federal Reserve Board and was instrumental in the creation of the Boston Port Authority. Flanders was a founding member of Georges Doriot’s American Research and Development Corporation, America’s first known venture capital corporation and the funder of much of Route 128’s start ups.
[56] G. William Domhoff, the Myth of Liberal Ascendancy, op. cit., pp. 77-80.
[57]Mark I. Gelfand, a Nation of Cities, op. cit. p. 123. Accused even in this period of fostering decentralization, the FHA defended itself: “Decentralization is not a policy, it is a reality—and it is impossible for us to change this trend as it is to change the desire of birds to migrate to a more suitable location.”
[58] Mark I. Gelfand, a Nation of Cities, op. cit. p. 109.
[59] Jon C. Teaford, the Rough Road to Urban Renaissance, op. cit., p. 12.
[60] “Rebuilding Our Cities”, 566, July 6, 1940, Business Week, p. 39
[61] Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. p. 237.
[62] Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. p. 342.
[63] Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit., pp. 364-365.
[64] Marc A. Weiss, “The Origins and Legacy of Urban Renewal” in Federal Housing Policy and Programs: Past and Present, Paul Mitchell (Ed), Center for Urban Policy Research, 1985. pp. 260-261
[65] Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. p. 366.
[66] Jon C. Teaford, A Rough Road To Renaissance, op. cit., . p. 106.
[67] Samuel P. Zipp, Manhattan Projects, op. cit, p.74.
[68] Bernard J. Friedan and Lynne B. Sagalyn, Downtown Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1989), p. 16.
[69] Bernard J. Friedan and Lynne B. Sagalyn, Downtown Inc., op. cit., p. 17.
Ron W. Coan 