Postwar Urban Renewal
Postwar Cities Coping With Change
Housing reform and slum clearance carried over from the 1930’s and early 1940’s. By 1945-46 old crisis had morphed into a spectacularly huge crisis–with immediate electoral consequences. What new catalyst had propelled the old housing crisis into high gear? The intellectuals call it “household formation”; voters and what passes for ordinary people in the 1940’s called it marriage and babies. Anyway, the soldiers had returned from war and one way or another, they formed households. Anyway, the cities needed housing, both apartments and detached homes, badly and fast. Electoral pressures were considerable. Springing into action in this exciting and crisis-filled time, was a coalition composed of the mayor/city manager, salient departments, and business-leaders (and chamber and real estate allies) which strongly resembled the Progressive Coalition described in the last section. In fact, it was.
The tendency, dominant by the late 1950’s with the seeming ineffectiveness of the much heralded “Baltimore Plan”, was instead toward large-scale commercial and non-profit redevelopment projects. This model was pioneered by Pittsburgh’s mayors David Lawrence and later Richardson Dilworth, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and the Pittsburgh Redevelopment Authority.[1] The Allegheny Conference, a public private business “coordinating mechanism for civic action”, a spinoff from the war-era Planning Commission incorporated in 1944, pushed for redevelopment of “Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle” area. The newly elected progressive mayor David Lawrence (1945) embraced the initiative and redeveloped a historic site and rundown railroad yards and warehouses.
urban renewal in the 1950’s was clearly a sub-state innovation, under local leadership and direction[2].
By the early 1940’s advocates of urban redevelopment had come up with an answer [to convert slum clearance to CBD revitalization], at the heart of which was a radical, indeed unprecedented, proposal. Local officials would have to buy the property at fair market value and then sell it at a much lower price, a price so low that private developers could make a profit. As Hugh Potter, president of the Urban League Institute, explained, they would have to bridge the gap between the market value of blighted property, however, inflated, and its ‘actual value for purposes of redevelopment”.[3]
Several municipal approaches departed from housing entirely. For instance, commercial and CBD-based (Pittsburgh, Boston) and many hybrids (New York City, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Chicago)[4]. Other cities were reluctant or unwilling to venture into non-housing areas and instead tried to use housing as a form of neighborhood redevelopment (partly to remediate slums and create a sustainable neighborhood and, partly to retain residents departing to the suburbs) (Baltimore, St Louis, Detroit, and Philadelphia); In essence, within a very few years cities differed on their use of urban renewal. Logically, the coalitions of support in these cities varied by the type of redevelopment program they followed. Redevelopment was morphing into areas far removed from housing and was certainly by the very early fifties becoming an economic development, business development strategy.
It also became apparent in these planning years that another critical obstacle in these urban redevelopment projects was that financing these projects required voter approval in order to issue the traditional mainstay of municipal capital budget finance: the general obligation bond. This meant not only did the voter have to be educated or convinced that such expenditures were necessary, but the practical reality was that each voter in each district-neighborhood of the city should see something they could benefit from. Any post-war economic development agenda could not concentrate only on CBDs and transition zone slum clearance exclusively. Also, other needs, larger regional infrastructure needs such as sewer and air and water pollution control and airports, had to be included in the economic development package. Urban redevelopment needed a helpful hand—and so with hands out, the cities went back to Washington D.C.
Industrial Districts & Corporations: the Path of Least Resistance into economic development
Although few economic developers would scream this from their rooftop, the newly constituted Urban Renewal Administration (URA) within FFHA became home base for non-residential projects. Unconsciously, I suppose, the URA provided context and continuity around which early Big City economic developers slowly oozed into a new way of thinking. Working with their own set of programs, personnel and problems, networking with those in other cities likely facilitated, no doubt, by beer and bourbon, some form of identity jelled; jargon and acronyms followed. Most of all, and I have no proof of this, a way of thinking came from working with a different set of clients—the business corporation and the industrial corporation, rather than with residential real estate developers with whom public housers dealt. This path toward an economic development got a shot in the arm as structural entities, such as a division with a department or redevelopment agency permitted programmatic specialization.
But again, listening to the market/finance needs, physical requirements and learning sector dynamics of their clients was instrumental and led to their tinkering with government-sided revolving loan funds, industrial, science/technology parks, business incubators, and most of all, site location assistance and eventually deal-making. This is what many have called the “second wave” in economic development. Movement started in the middle to late fifties, and continued into the seventies. In the mid-1960 it stopped long enough to organize an economic development professional association, the Council of Urban Economic Development (CUED). Little noticed in this chapter, but dealt with elsewhere, this slow, unheralded progression of housing/planning administrators into government departments plying economic development goods and services came at the expense of the chambers of commerce. Again, little noticed in the following decade certainly, was a movement within economic development away from private EDOs into governmental EDOs. There are several reasons for this, but in this section, I shall concentrate on how urban renewal was a primary force in these movements.
But before there were government-based economic developers, there were planners. Traditional planning tools, urban renewal, suburbanization and comprehensive planning put quite a bit of strain on a very small planning profession. Mel Scott reported in 1949 the American Institute of Planners had only 600 members.[5] Although graduate planning programs were coming on line in the postwar years, it was still unlikely such complex and jurisdictionally-widespread issues as urban redevelopment and suburbanization could be tackled incrementally—requiring, therefore, the hiring of competent but professionally untrained graduates. Graduate planning professionals went to work on comprehensive planning and traditional planning concerns, such as zoning—urban redevelopment was another matter entirely. Non-planners disproportionately filled this growth occupation—supervised by seasoned, experienced planners detached from core planning concerns. During the fifties, experienced planning officials dominated the leadership of urban redevelopment/renewal departments and agencies, but their employees, as far as planning went, were largely blank slates.
The Corporation as Client: How Urban Renewal Enhanced Professional Skills
There’s no escaping that in a capitalistic economy, the principal client for economic development is business and the corporation. If one desired to incorporate the economy into physical planning, necessarily that involved dealing with the private sector. It also should be painfully obvious that urban renewal, contrary to the contemporary paradigm, was not a monolithic program—rather a Dr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll affair—a housing-neighborhood slum removal initiative whose tools (and funding) had been effectively borrowed for altogether different purposes, economic development in its several forms. The original strategy for slum removal, itself bifurcated, to help the low income residents of slum neighborhoods and in so doing halt the population exodus to suburbs had over the years (since 1937) shifted to the former. But, that was not true for the economic development-focused urban renewal.
In large measure because slum removal and public housing offered little evidence to support anything but negative effects (from the central city perspective) on suburbanization. Conversely, the advocates behind commercial/industrial urban renewal viewed the revitalization of the CBD, and secondarily the development of industrial parks, as the more promising target of physical redevelopment intended to reverse or stabilize suburbanization. During the late fifties and early sixties, these dynamics intersected, subtly and silently, to foster the development of a Big City economic development profession.
Directed by planners, staffed by mostly-non planners, urban renewal departments and agencies went face-to-face with the private corporation, commercial, manufacturing, property development firms and the community’s businesses. Up to this point, the chambers had managed this interface—but no longer. In the fifties, quasi-public and governmental entities intruded. They alone had the powers necessary for physical redevelopment, and with federal urban renewal funding, they now had resources independent of the municipal fiscal base. In this atmosphere, governmental economic developers developed an identity based on their clients, and an economic development strategy based on their location, the Big City struggling to overcome suburban decentralization.
In these early years, three or four private sector segments loomed large in the development of an economic developer’s identity: the headquarters-anchor corporation, the property developer/site selector, and the manufacturer. In the sixties, commercial/service sector and office redevelopment often combined in a redevelopment project, not very dissimilar from the old City Beautiful civic/convention center project. In short, urban renewal was sufficiently flexible to permit economic developers ample opportunity to deepen their contacts, and constituency—and widen their perspective as to how best serve the needs of their project counterparts. In the sixties, also, urban renewal legislation opened the door for “eds and meds” to qualify for urban renewal funding—bringing into the economic development nexus two of the community’s major non-profit institutions. Urban renewal widened the vistas of economic developers, and provided to them a role and resources essential to its evolution as a profession.
Lost in the housing/redevelopment smoke was urban redevelopments link with planners and planning. Planners had almost disappeared from the Washington Housing Act policy nexus, but planners were integral to urban redevelopment at the local level—even more so than housers. Planners dominated the housing authorities, the “comprehensive plans”, zoning, and land use (setbacks, building area ratios and the like) regulations. Worse, planners occupied the linkage position with the mayor’s office and controlled, for better or worse, the community outreach functions. At the local level, planners enjoyed a well-entrenched constituency (architects, community organizations and groups, and an academic-media Policy World) and was well-regarded by the corporate elites who now had stepped to the urban redevelopment plate. In these early years, economic development-like tools and strategies were silently being experimented within the confines of planning and housing entities.
Planners were at a critical crossroad. The Journal of the American Institute of Planners called the 1949 Housing Act “the most significant event in the development of city planning in the recent history of the United States”. The rationale was quite logical—urban redevelopment, public housing and slum/blight removal was based upon the requirement that city governance must find that a project “conforms to a general plan for the development of the locality as a whole”. [6] If anybody was condemned by “getting what they asked for”, it was planners in 1949. As many planners of the time fully recognized, the comprehensive plan thrust planners into the vortex of slum, blight, and suburbanization”. Also by this point, the implication of these forces on race and the impact of the Great Migration were also beginning to sink into the minds of planners and policy-makers alike. Individual projects would be lost and distorted in the violent tempest striking the cities, and a consensual strategy on how, even if, one should confront or deal with suburbanization and race fragmented the planner and tossed him/her in several directions, almost simultaneously.
The fissures and fragmentation within planning are relevant to this history. If Big City government-based economic development was separating from housing, it was also breaking away from planning as well. The Housing Act of 1949 opened a can of worms at the local level. Slum, blight and new public housing were now open for business. Federal applications needed to be filled out, and to do that required conformity to a ton of federal stipulations, mandates and simple definitions of what was eligible and what was not. Understaffed planning departments would buckle under the weight of things to do—a comprehensive plan involves quite a bit of survey, inventory, data analysis and general information gathering– took time, and predictably, was subject to pressures and potential distortion. The fact that a comprehensive plan touched electoral nerves meant that public officials were watched as these plans were developed and designed.
In 1949, however, time-consuming, complex, controversial comprehensive plans meant that suburbanization continued unchecked, going gang-busters into unplanned, unincorporated areas, and overwhelming suburban policy-makers and planners who had yet not been provided with crucial local powers by state home rule legislation. Suburbs, like Big Cities at the beginning of the Progressive Movement, lacked sufficient capacity to stop sprawl and to negotiate effectively with subdivision/mall developers. Too often these local officials saw this form of economic development thru fiscal and tax prisms only. In this context, the first line of defense was to stop the central city exodus to the extent possible—and a broader definition of urban redevelopment, delinking it from public housing seemed logical if the central city was to reverse those factors (slum and blight) that was driving people out. Urban redevelopment was more than public housing.
Economic developers over the next few years picked up many an ally from planners and housing authorities/commissions. Indeed, when the federal applications were filled out, they were mailed by planning-related departments/ authorities. And, if the check ever came, it would be cashed (and the projects set into motion) by these departments and authorities. Planners were thrust into developing and acquiring economic development skills (and perspective) to ensure project completion. They also needed to find some productive way to engage/work with the private developer and the firms that would hopefully relocated into redeveloped areas.
Over the next decade or so, planners working on the comprehensive plan increasing lived in a world vastly different from planners, often in the same department, implementing programs such as urban redevelopment. In this flux were the soft and unseen undercurrents which carried many individuals into economic development worlds. This is also why the drift into economic development was so unnoticed by the academia and the Policy World; it was a movement of practitioners. Increasingly uncomfortable in a planning/housing environment, they would join in common cause with their boss, the mayor, to find a way out of this bifurcation and practice more purely their new-found profession. But for planners this was a dangerous alternative, yet one most cities would adopt: the redevelopment agency.
As early as 1955, an analysis of fifty-three municipalities showed the end-use of then approved urban renewal projects allowed 21% industrial and railroads, and a further 6% commercial[7].
The redevelopment agency proved to be an excellent vehicle in which an expert-professional, even entrepreneurial staff, sensitive to inner and community politics could be housed. That physical redevelopment projects, including urban renewal projects, developed, polished, indeed required a sophisticated skill set of a cadre of redevelopers located in these powerful agencies. This redevelopment cadre, sensitized to the needs, the mechanisms, and practices of the private sector, could then act as a project intermediary between the private sector and the municipality’s political (and citizen) environment. The intermediary role of this proto-economic developer was certainly a critical factor in the development of the Big City economic development profession.
And the redevelopment agency and its professionalized staff was also useful to those on the other side of the equation—the politician, especially the mayor. “Not infrequently it is good politics for a mayor to make a conspicuous display of appointing a subordinate who is known to be nonpolitical …. In making such an appointment a mayor may publically tie his own hands in order to persuade the public [or the private sector business elites] that matters are going to be decided on wholly nonpolitical grounds … Such individuals are valuable to politicians not only because they are symbolize good-government values, but also—and much more practically—because they are crucial in negotiating settlements with, or obtaining consent from other levels of government [or private sector participation] … Urban renewal and redevelopment and public housing all depend on federal funds, and hence on federal consent.[8]
Banfield and Wilson proceed to support their argument using the City of Hartford’s decision to hire Ralph Taylor, after a national search, as head of its redevelopment agency (and later Edward Logue). Their thought at the time of writing was that the chief benefit was linkage of a professional to the Washington bureaucracy. As observed by William Dumhoff[9], however, Taylor linked and buffered the Mayor to the Chamber of Commerce and Senator Preston Bush both of which had conceptualized Hartford’s first urban renewal project (Oak Street Connector) years previous to 1955). Logue, the son-in-law of the Yale President linked the Mayor to Yale whose participation in a later project was essential. As shall be discussed in our more detailed case study of Hartford’s urban renewal, the redevelopment agency and its two first executive directors were themselves intermediaries with the city’s private and dominating non-profit leadership—the relationship with the federal bureaucrats a secondary sideshow.
The careful reader will no doubt note, as I have argued since the last chapter, that urban redevelopment, ULI-style urban renewal, and federal housing/urban development legislation was a bottom-up driven policy. Federal housing/urban renewal had always been pressed by professional associations, composed of municipal-based policy activists and real estate exchanges/chambers of commerce. The projects that would up being funded by federal dollars (or not) were local projects, generated and advocated by local forces, organizations and institutions. The redevelopment agency and its professional staff was the essential intermediary economic development organization which linked the various relevant local constituencies to necessary governmental powers and the city’s political leader, the mayor. In this complex, but warm and nurturing womb, Big City economic development flourished and matured its professional identifies, supportive constituencies, and skills.
The Businessman and the Mayor—the Redevelopment Agency
Insightful observers of that period, such as Banfield and Wilson[10], could look out their windows, read the daily news, and easily recognize the central role in urban policy-making played by business elites. But some business types were more involved and impactful. Wasting no time, Banfield and Wilson’s first sentence discussing “Businessmen in Politics” defines just who they mean: “Businessmen (meaning here owners and managers of LARGE (emphasis theirs) enterprises”. . I will argue in this section that businessmen from the community’s largest and most influential corporations not only vital members of the CBD urban renewal/redevelopment coalition, often led that policy initiative, and were active participants in the program implementation. I will also argue that by starting elite corporate organizations, these large corporate businessmen also initiated the transition away from chamber-style private economic development to the hybrid quasi-public/private economic development. This shift from chamber to redevelopment agency proved to be particular to the Age of Urban Renewal as it gave way to the more purely governmental economic development of the late sixties and seventies.
In city after city during the fifties, the private sector, usually a major corporation initiating a significant CBD redevelopment project, teamed up with the Mayor and with the urban renewal apparatus, to precipitate (or attempt to precipitate) the redevelopment of the downtown. The opening salvo is usually credited to the Allegheny Council’s Pittsburgh Golden Triangle, Philadelphia’s Penn Center, Rouse and Baltimore’s Charles Street Center, Moses’s Lincoln Center, Boston’s ill-fated John Hancock and Prudential Centers, San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square even the badly-maligned mid-1960’s Pennsylvania Railroad’s Madison Square Garden are some of the better known examples of CBD page-turning development projects initiated in this period.[11]
Many of these successful CBD redevelopment projects occurred previous to the 1954 Housing Act. Others bypassed federal urban renewal funding, although many often partnered with redevelopment agencies and city departments. Post 1949 business elites, in general, did not embrace the housing-neighborhood slum removal element of the federal urban renewal program. Instead a purer downtown revitalization strategy was preferred by elite corporate movements and individual company projects. So ironically, many of the more successful projects constructed during the Age of Urban Renewal were outside the federal urban renewal fabric.
Most of these plans were either designed by, or supported by the large corporate leadership of their municipalities. “After the Second World War, the leading businessmen of most large cities organized themselves to prepare ambitious plans for the redevelopment of the central business districts. The Central Area Committee of Chicago, Civic Progress in St. Louis, the Allegheny Conference in Pittsburgh, the Civic Conference [Vault] in Boston, the Greater Philadelphia Movement—these and many more organizations (San Francisco’s Bay Center) were formed on the same pattern. The business elite of the city met privately, agreed upon more or less comprehensive plans for the redevelopment of the central city, and presented the plans to the press, the politicians, and the public as their contribution to civic welfare”[12].
Elite corporate organizations set themselves apart from the Chambers. According to Banfield and Wilson, these chambers were perceived as acting on behalf of the community’s overall business community—small as well as large businesses. Chambers represented, not just the CBD, or even the central city, but business of all types and sizes over the metropolitan area. The large corporate elite, however. possessed an exclusively downtown, CBD agenda intended to ensure the continued primacy of the central city over the metropolitan area.
These new Conferences or Movements rather saw themselves as “a few big men whose only concern was with the central business district, and who, far from regarding themselves as special interests, insisted they serve the ‘public interest,’ often at considerable sacrifice of private business interests”.[13] In my view, the correspondence with the earlier-described Progressive/Puritan Elect enforcing top-down a platform of reforms intended to achieve a public good common to the entire community is quite remarkable. Once again, it would appear that Progressive business elite had stepped into the municipal policy process to correct abuse and prepare the way for a series of reforms and physical changes necessary to the community’s future.
The Formation of the Post-War Progressive Coalition
One last element of the Age of Urban Renewal coalition needs to be put in place. Thus far in the chapter, the reader has seen us include the wayward housing executives and planners as bureaucratic leaders in the CBD/Central City revitalization strategy, the younger, primarily non-planning staff of the increasing widespread redevelopment (and housing) agencies, themselves governed by private business elites, and in the last section, the development of elite corporate movements and organizations which devised CBD revitalization plans and pursued specific CBD page-turning projects, without or with urban renewal funds. But these elite organizations and projects entered into partnerships with government officials and their bureaucracies—after all governmental powers, such as eminent domain and infrastructure installation were essential to successful project completion. So, it would appear the last piece to be put in place is city government.
In many eastern and Midwestern Big Cities political machines or their played out residues were in process of being removed from control of city politics. The timing was very specific to individual cities and had started during the Depression years (La Guardia, for example). Through the forties and into the fifties, the early years of the Age of Urban Renewal, city after city threw off the machine-controlled administrations and replaced them with non-machine “independent” mayors. The overlap of the elite corporate movements and organizations with the electoral coalition of the new reformist mayors is striking.
Ironically, most new mayors were Democrats, a statement which does not reflect the partisanship of the elite corporate leaders. It is in the Age of Urban Renewal that most eastern and Midwestern Big Cities became Democratic strongholds they are to this day.
Antiboss rhetoric had long been a part of city politics, and a loyal corps of middle-class, good-government advocates responded to antiboss rhetoric like Pavlovian dogs salivating at the sound of a dinner bell. Thus attacks on the political machine could galvanize a significant segment of the population, drawing the full forces of the citizen crusaders into the fray. Moreover, revelations of widespread corruption and gross incompetence could even shift working class votes into the reform column[14]
Reinforcing the decline in the significance of political parties and party organizations was the marked drop in Republican electoral strength in urban areas during the 1950’s…At the beginning of 1946 [in Northeast-Midwestern city elections] five of the ten [cities] were Republicans. Moreover, in four of the ten, Republicans controlled the city council….During the late 1940’s and the 1950’s, however, middle-class Republicans moved out of the city and solidly Democratic blacks moved in… Consequently, Republican fortunes nosedived in the major central cities, and most of the major metropolises became one-party towns[15].
In order to win elections maverick, non machine mayoral candidates required the legitimacy, political support, and financial contributions of the city fathers and the business community. Much of the traditional working class vote stayed with opposing machine candidates.
Though the new political leaders …proved attractive to the business community,[the non machine candidates] were not invariably political conservatives or pliant tools of big corporations. Two of the most notable of the postwar breed of mayors, Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis and Joseph Clark of Philadelphia earned a national reputation as quintessential liberals….But the new political leaders did not need to be business spokespersons. Instead, they only had to be able to earn the respect of the business community. In the eyes of the business leaders, they had to appear energetic, honest and able[16].
There was still one loose end: the mayor, independent of the security generated by a political machine, required his/her own bureaucratic and institutional expertise, competent management personnel and policy tools with which to control city hall and deliver services and effective and efficient policy implementation. These came in the form of charter reforms, professional management (especially planning, budgeting, and a loyal “personal” staff[17]. The independent mayor to ensure election and reelection also required his/her identification of a “signature agenda” capable of stirring the interest and addressing the needs of key segments of his/her electoral coalition. Economic development over the last fifty years or so has been a policy area often included in a mayor’s “signature agenda”.
Economic development, which in the Age of Urban Renewal was most commonly defined as urban physical redevelopment or “urban renewal”. Urban renewal was usually the province of the redevelopment agency, but liaison staff in the mayor’s office and, again, in key departments formed the network of day-to-day program implementation, policy formulation, and application submittal. Planners, finance and budget offices, and public works/streets in particular, held a keystone positions In those few large cities with city manager form of government, the planner was a natural.
The takeaway from this is that the reform mayor, having broken away from the machine’s power base, needed to develop his own coalition. Once in office the new mayor was on his own. The city council usually was controlled or heavily impacted by the old political machine–as was the city hall bureaucracy. Thus, thus the new reform mayors needed sustained support of their coalition. In some instances, the new mayors easily came on board with the CBD redevelopment agenda of the elite corporate movement; in other cases he put up with it. Both wanted efficient honest competent government to solve the plethora of issues associated with then contemporary urban crisis. Moreover, the businessmen in politics wanted as little to do with politics, elections, and legislatures as they could get away with. That was the province of the mayor. Match made in heaven or not, the newly mobilized business community, its elite corporate leaders and the independent mayor formed an informal alliance of interests and shared resources. This coalition ebbed and flowed, but persisted well into the 1960’s.
Its closeness and solidarity waxed and waned, city by city, year by year. Sometimes, the machines just never let go (Newark), but even there urban renewal found a way through the door. A few cities, Buffalo, for example, hardly moved down this path at all. Other cities followed Philadelphia’s path (Mayors Anthony Celebrezze of Cleveland and Raymond Tucker of St Louis). Even the notorious machine driven Chicago elected a reformer, Martin Kennelly for two terms (1947-1955). Several other cities, such as New York (Robert Wagner) and Boston (John Hynes) were hybrids, which on the whole, were not very successful in their reform or urban redevelopment agendas. Several machines produced “reform bosses”, for example Baltimore’s Thomas D’Alessandro, Jr. and Pittsburgh’s David Lawrence.
[1] The best single source for the reader on this period is Jon C. Teaford’s, the Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). See in particular Chapter 3, p. 108: Progress or Decay. We are also very partial to Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff’s, Mega-Projects (Washington DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2003) which is more infrastructure-focused than Teaford. Samuel Zipp’s Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York, Oxford University Press, 2010) presents a very helpful New York City-based evolution of urban renewal and links it to the larger Progressive coalition and its incorporation of what amounts to a revamp of the Pre-War American Dream. Zipp can provide a very detailed sense on the role of the private sector and its involvement and evolution in urban renewal governance. All of these sources, also implicitly deal with our Quasi Redevelopment EDOs. See also Dennis R. Judd, The Politics of American Cities, 2nd Ed, (Boston, Little, Brown, 1984) Chapters 3 and 4)
[2] Teaford agrees “During the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, the federal role was as yet limited, and the physical rehabilitation of the cities depended primarily on state and local resources”, p. 121.
[3] Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown, op. cit. p. 362.
[4] Jon C. Teaford’s, the Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) pp. 105-120.
[5] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p. 467.
[6] Mel Scott, American Planning, op. cit., p. 464.
[7] Ashley A. Foard and Hilbert Fefferman, “Federal Urban Renewal Legislation”, in James Q. Wilson (Ed), Urban Renewal, op. cit., p. 671
[8] Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, City Politics (New York, Vintage Book, Vol-335, 1963), pp. 218-219.
[9] G. William Dumhoff, Who Ruled in Dahl’s New Haven? www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/new_haven.html
[10] Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, City Politics (New York, Vintage Book, Vol-335, 1963), Chapter 18: Businessmen in Politics.
[11] The issue in today’s contemporary paradigm is that this private involvement is believed to be, if not immoral and a perversion of policy-making, at the very least dooms the outputs of those policy decisions to failure and societal injustice. I discussed this issue in an earlier section of this chapter, and feel it necessary to remind the reader that we take no specific opinion on the morality or quality of the process and its decisions—only that one cannot understand economic development in the Age of Urban Renewal without understanding the central role played by business executives from LARGE corporations
[12] Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, City Politics, op. cit., p. 267.
[13] Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, City Politics, op. cit., p. 268. I should note that Banfield and Wilson assert these elite business movements are driven by structural factors, e.g., homogeneous demographics, reformed city government, fragmented or centralized business and government leadership. While not denying these can play a role, I associate each of those factors as being shaped by the community’s or segments of the community (such as large corporate leadership)’s dominant political culture. Banfield and Wilson’s political structural variables, I suggest, are intermediary variables—not independent.
[14] Teaford, op, cit. p. 56
[15] Teaford, op. cit. pp. 62-63.
[16] Teaford, op. cit, pp. 55-56.
[17] Located either in the mayor’s office, distributed in departments, or appointed to serve in independent and quasi-government agencies, such as redevelopment and housing agencies.
Ron W. Coan 