Hegemonic Big Cities and the Rising Sunbelt

PART II in Retrospect: ONCE AGAIN WITH FEELING

This chapter marks the end of Part II: the Transition Years. And what a transition it has been. American ED is not what it was in 1929. Much water has passed over the proverbial dam. Looking at the landscape in 1961, the observer at the time had little sense of what lay ahead. By the end of that decade “things” had really changed—and few had a clue why. So what happened during the Transition Years?

The 800-lb gorilla was the federal government had intruded into state and sub-state affairs—economic development was profoundly affected. The most impactful change was noticed at the time, but its long-term implications put to the side in order to acquire or preserve advantages derived from federal policy. Regional change, almost without question, had been set in motion by FDR’s Second Reconstruction, and War Production and Industrial Decentralization created new jurisdictional economic bases almost from scratch. Those policies unleashed huge population shifts between and within regions.

Despite the end of a two/three-generational long hyper-immigration, population migration was on steroids during the Transition Years. The shift of so many overwhelmed the mature and tired western city-building policy systems and installed a new, younger, vibrant, growth-oriented policy system. The South for the first time was seriously fueling its own urbanization and new, modern jurisdictional economic bases. These changes sharpen the South’s “divided mind”, creating an ever-growing schism that, in its good time, would be labeled ‘the New South”. The South was the most discombobulated region by the end of the Transition Years—and economic development was a central policy area in its evolution. And the Big City hegemony was still in change, worried, unsure of the shifting sands of its own evolution.

Part of its confusion lay on the shoulders of the federal government. The impact of war production, and the permanent war that followed WWII’s end, set in motion entirely new industries and sectors in different locations—suburbs and other regions. Population migration flowed into the Big Cities, but they lost the middle class to the rapidly growing suburbs. The class structure of Big City politics and policy-making was shifting in a direction away from chamber-style ED toward community development. During these years suburbs acquired the critical mass necessary to form autonomous and capable policy systems.

To counter this decentralization Big Cities embraced federal Depression programs that created jobs, but also tore up obsolete housing and neighborhoods, now called slums with blight. Just in time for the new migrants from the South to pour in. Public housing, war production housing and slum removal continued tearing up neighborhoods for over a decade. And then the condition of the CBD attracted new players, the local business and real estate community into the fray to rebuild the CBD and nearby neighborhoods. By the time these new players had accessed the federal trough, a new federal program—interstate highways—provided funds for a really serious dig through city neighborhoods in an effort to connect the CBD and the Big City to its sprawling, but hopefully manageable hinterland.

Lost in this shuffle, however, was the real threat behind future Big City decline. It had no name during the Transition Years—we will later call it deindustrialization—but the ticking clock of the profit life cycle. Dominated by its aging and powerful industrial core, its jurisdictional economic bases were seeing evidence of closedowns, runaway plants—still production was robust and jobs seemed so very secure. When an entire industry, a New England agglomeration, began its implosion after the war, it was not at all clear to policy actors what was afoot. An aggressive southern economic development attraction program, the selling of the South, captured their attention and blame. New England’s reaction to southern imperialism began a shadow war, over economic development and new tools and programs, using the federal government as their instrument. In 1961 a proponent of New England’s shadow war was elected President.

There was lots going on within our profession and policy area as well. Amid the turbulence of incipient regional change and federal policies, the juices of competitive urban hierarchies had been set in motion. Uncertainty triggered attraction programs, many of which were more “promotional,” aimed at retaining existing firms rather than attracting new ones. New tools such as the IDB and a robust professionalization of attraction initiatives were hallmarks of the era. So was physical upgrading of tired and blighted neighborhoods, housing and CBDs. Big Cities were old and needed a new physical infrastructure to capture postwar economic opportunities, shifting economic trends and the latest and greatest logistics and process innovations—not to mention retain the economic loyalties of a newly emerging, intra-metropolitan competitive hierarchy.

The struggle between housing/neighborhood advocates and CBD/central city hegemonic advocates had created very serious tensions between community developers and traditional business-oriented, chamber-style ED. The fight seemingly was in Washington, where each had formed their own network of professional associations; but the real split could better be seen at the local level. Community developers lost ground in the last decade of these Transition Years. Symbolically, the fight was between housing authorities and redevelopment agencies—hybrid EDOs developed in these years to implement the respective programs of community developers and CBD business growth-oriented ED. Big Cities pursued different paths of modernization (the subject of this chapter) that further tempered effects of postwar urban physical modernization. Into this chasm one can see deindustrialization’s potential impact as industries and sectors declined, dividing the two wings ever further apart—and making more necessary the “fig leaf” that outside southern aggression and suburbanization were the real culprits of change.

Professionally, there were other important changes that had emerged in these years. First, not noticed except in the South, was the “rise” of more active state EDOs. At war’s end state-level EDOs had been established in most every state. Mostly marketing agencies, a new “cluster” of state-EDOs formed around the IDB—and a fury of court decisions regarding how each state could “make loans to the private sector” set the stage for a 50-state cast of characters, each with a somewhat different set of priorities and customized programs that were congruent with politics and political culture, as arbitrated by its particular administrative/local government structure and judicial interpretation of state constitutions. It’s just beginning, but by the end of the Transition Years seven different state models existed for the IDB—and some weren’t even IDBs, but more state guarantees. We won’t even mention the diversity of state systems for conducting slum clearance/public housing and urban renewal. The role of local government in this mélange was uncertain and varied by state. Programs and strategies called by the same “name” served different goals and constituencies and were implemented using customized structures and processes. Many were authorized, but not really used. By the end of the Transition Years, a remarkable diversity of state/sub-state economic/community development was already apparent—though youthful.

Finally, the maturity and spectacular rise of port authorities in these years provided the first clear-cut picture of a process, a defining characteristic of our policy area that would explode during Part III years. Onionization (and siloization that would follow) pulled economic development’s most powerful EDO into a professional world of its own. With provision of key services and installation/modernization of infrastructure, port authorities, mostly transportation-focused, floated in a limbo-like cloud, involved in and apart from sub-state economic development. Increasingly autonomous and professionally specialized, they would develop their own picket-fence of financing and professional organizations, and separate themselves from others, such as chambers— and mayors.

Moreover, the increased use of new innovations, the Lakewood Plan, and service districts pulled the infrastructure strategy into a new set of EDO-like entities that, whatever else their benefit, were neither fish nor fowl to the ED policy area. Lurking in the wings was another major evolution, the rise of counties in sub-state economic development. More evident in the South and West, counties were often filling the gap left by suburban municipalities unable or unwilling to pursue ED/CD. Were counties a possible regional alternative to integrate the new hinterland sprawl of municipalities and mall, or were they rivals that threatened the hegemony of Big Cities—soon to be legacy cities?

There are more Transition Year changes that will be picked up in Part III, but it is evident the Transition period was critical to understanding the economic/community development that would follow. Part III is very much built on, and reacting to, change introduced in the Transition Years. For that reason this chapter will focus on the implementation of urban renewal across the nation. Using brief case studies of a number of major city urban renewal initiatives, we hope to allow the reader to taste the flavor of what is happening at the street level, at least the city hall level, in sub-state economic development.

Many of the themes and topics mentioned in this introduction ought to be evident. Also, a focus on the last stage of a three-decade set of programs designed to help the poor migrant and immigrant and to revitalize and preserve the primacy of the central city will open the reader up to the diversity and dynamics of program implementation—hopefully shedding in the process some useful light on the Scarlet Letter of our Profession. Less recognized today is the role urban renewal played in regional change—and how it poured the foundation from which our contemporary economic and community development was built—and the policy systems that governed our major cities for decades to follow. The children birthed from our Scarlet Letter grew up to be players, programs and strategies of our contemporary Practitioner and Policy Worlds.

The Big Hinge

Not only was each city different in its own way, but also the reader can see that UR served several gods (purposes or goals). UR ranked high on municipal policy agendas during this era. The future of the old order, the hegemony, seemed in question. In this highly intense policy environment, UR became linked with the viability of policy systems—i.e. elites and voters were willing to toss out old bums and bring in new ones. In the Sunbelt the goals/strategy purposes behind UR were less a counter to destabilizing decentralization than a coming out of a new urban and regional competitive hierarchy—and it too was linked to change in policy systems. UR was driven by population migration, by middle-class “moving up” and inter-regional generational migration. Both led to explosive growth that did not respect jurisdictional boundaries.

UR included a community development approach as well as the more well-known CBD business-led growth coalition. Cities did not have to choose one or the other; most blended the two approaches. Although CBD captured the headlines, neighborhood/housing-based UR also was fairly common. Generally, the two approaches involved different actors and certainly sought different goals. During this era there is a subtle struggle between housing, neighborhood-focused urban renewal and CBD, industrial parks and “eds and meds”-focused UR. A constant was the bureaucratic nature of the strategy that required specialized expertise, a sophisticated planning, legal and project management professional corps that approached change from the top-down. Neighborhoods, for example, may or may not have been involved in the “planning,” but UR was never their strategy of choice. CBD and “eds and meds” UR, however, was quite the reverse.

In the course of its implementation, new EDOs, tools and programs will emerge. Indeed, by the end of the era a second economic development professional association will be born—and a number of new community development associations will dot our professional landscape. Whatever else it may be, UR is a professional “hinge” that closes one door and opens another. UR was the midwife for the birth of contemporary economic and community development. This notion of professional hinge is an important underlying theme (and rationale) behind this chapter. To best understand our contemporary ED/CD a background as to how each wing congealed and evolved is critical. UR connects the pre-contemporary ED/CD to our present-day contemporary approaches. UR may be the Scarlet Letter no one (ED or CD) wishes to be held accountable for, but historically there is no denying their shared parentage.

Finally, as has been mentioned, UR displays a distinctive regional dimension. Big City UR is where the strategy originated, as a response to Big City dynamics, threats and policy actors. Big Cities drove the Washington connection until the 1960s. Western cities took advantage of UR to build modern CBDs congruent with their image of their high-status arrival in the competitive urban hierarchy. Over time (in the seventies) western UR confronted a rising neighborhood movement that wanted its share of the ED/CD pie—but that is a story left for another day and chapter. The South was more complex. Predictably, race played a large role, in a very surprising way; but southern cities did share with the West a need to conduct a “City Beautiful” UR to modernize their downtowns. Some cities, such Pacific coast and Atlanta, overlapped somewhat with Big Cities, but Texan cities in particular predictably put CBD UR on steroids to build downtowns that fit their Texan ambitions. To lend some clarity, each region will be treated in its section. For each region several cities are briefly discussed to offer flavor, examples and observations.

BIG CITY URBAN RENEWAL

An Overview: Big City UR is a Many-Splendored Thing

By 1962 New York, Chicago and Philadelphia (with New Haven in the early lead) captured the most federal bucks—Cleveland, Buffalo and Cincinnati the least. Public housing and neighborhood slum clearance were almost totally dependent on federal monies. CBD-focused redevelopment, often as not, relied on private funds, with federal dollars in a supportive role. Local governments also had to ante up. By the mid/late fifties “eds and meds” and industrial districts entered the picture, as did cultural programs and a surprising number of sports stadia. All shared at least one common purpose: to modernize the central city and enhance its competitive position against the ever-growing suburbs. In some way, and to some degree, every northern and midwestern Big City played the UR game.

Each city developed its specialty or balance among project types. Projects concentrated on what would later be called “gray areas”; low-income, minority areas with limited vitality and more than their fair share of “pathologies”—but still home to those who lived there. A diversity of functions was critical if central cities were to compete effectively. Luxury housing, in particular, countered decentralization; but such housing contrasted starkly with high-rise, mega-public housing complexes, and offered little to those displaced by their construction. Downtown, however, required a middle-class workforce, and removing congestion meant limiting commuters through highways. UR projects ironically yielded increased tax revenues (despite tax abatement). That was faint praise as the slum housing they displaced produced next to nothing.

Some cities got off to an early start; others like St. Louis didn’t get going until 1959 (Gateway Arch, Plaza Square Apartments). Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle was the acknowledged leader in CBD redevelopment. NYC pioneered using federal funds for high-rise luxury housing (Kips Bay, Washington Square), and its Lincoln Center (1962) opened the doors for culture, concert halls, museums and luxury housing. Minneapolis (starting in 1958) focused on removing blight in its CBD and a general redevelopment of its waterfront, demolishing older structures and skid rows and replacing them with high-rise apartments, bank headquarters and a Sheraton-Ritz hotel. Cleveland and Boston had a tough time getting started. Cleveland started with the 163-acre Erieview, designed by I.M. Pei: a mix of uses, including high-rise housing, office buildings, parks, shopping malls, residential and luxury housing, and entertainment. Cleveland hoped Erieview would trigger private investment in surrounding areas.

Cities began noticing a suburban “exodus” of jobs and industry—hindsight suggests it was less exodus than closing obsolete, less productive/profitable facilities and moving (to the Sunbelt as well as the suburbs) to modern factories and new markets. Central cities lacked usable space for new facilities; industrial parks met that need; federal money paid two-thirds of the cost. Central city industrial parks, Philadelphia an early pioneer, picked up steam over the two decades. Highway construction opened areas to trucks, and planners liked industrial parks because they were compatible with usebased zoning. One of the largest, Cincinnati’s Kenyon-Barr project, transformed 400 acres into 13 superblocks, each with parking surrounding a light manufacturing core. Restaurants, banks and shopping were also included. Philadelphia’s 2500-acre Eastwick, intended to be a “city within a city”, combined moderate-income housing and shopping centers with industrial development.

There was a raft of neighborhood-related project types. Philadelphia’s high-income Society Hill, St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe and Boston’s Roxbury housing projects were some of the more well known. Several cities preferred housing and neighborhood projects: St. Louis doggedly stuck to its housing rehabilitation strategy; Baltimore, an early leader, backed away and moved to the CBD Charles Center project. The tragedy for public housing initiatives in the Big Cities is that it meant massive complexes full of high-rise units. Pruitt-Igoe competed with Chicago’s Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green as the poster child of mega Le Corbusier, high-rise public housing complexes. They were torn down in later years.

Neighborhood projects, by definition, hit low-income households and minorities, and hardest, in greater numbers than the more sparsely settled CBD projects (destruction of small businesses was always a key issue). From the get-go, these projects generated all kinds of opposition from residents. Displacement, compelled relocation and no alternative housing resulted in moving people from one low-income neighborhood to another—disrupting adjacent neighborhoods, causing flight and neighborhood succession in the process. Later battles concerning school busing inherited the legacy of neighborhood change and fear generated by neighborhood UR. To make matters worse, even moderate-income housing failed to satisfy expectations; suburbanization did not abate, and demand for new central city housing was lackluster.

If some CBD projects left little more than empty lots, neighborhood projects suffered from exceedingly high vacancy rates that threatened any private funding associated with the projects. Many failed. But still new projects came on line, generating more controversy and mixed to poor results. The average Joe lost faith these projects would accomplish desired ends—bond referenda increasingly failed. The second phase of Cleveland’s Erieview project lost its bond referendum. By 1960 lost bond referenda were common in Big Cities: “The euphoria of the 1950s … was waning” (Teaford, 1990, p. 160). It didn’t take Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) to dispel UR as the miracle solution for neighborhood revitalization.

Big Cities were grappling with their own set of problems: “their context,” which combined a surprisingly active progressive business and planning elite; adherents of the physical redevelopment paradigm that confronted for the first time the specter of Big City decline evidenced in unremitting suburbanization, ceaseless in-migration of low-income, predominantly Great Migration blacks with no place to go other than already-devastated slum neighborhoods with obsolete, deteriorated and crammed to the brim housing.

To compound these issues obvious obsolescence, epitomized in loss of downtown retail by new suburban malls, and the actual departure of corporate headquarters to the suburbs and the fear “eds and meds” would follow meant CBD redevelopment competed with neighborhood redevelopment and slum clearance. Off to the side was growing evidence of woes in the jurisdictional economic base’s manufacturing sector that, while still unnamed, was leading to plant shutdowns and relocation. While southern piracy captured its fair share of blame for the last factor, it was also evident that something structural was going on that required local ED involvement. Make no mistake, the context underlying Big City urban renewal was the fear and the reality of decline. That decline, if not alleviated, almost certainly meant an end to Big City primacy of the metropolitan hinterland—it involved, as Jacobs so aptly titled it, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The severity of each of the above issues, as well as the degree of progressivism within the business community, varied from city to city. But a common dichotomy typically manifested itself to some degree in each city as neighborhood redevelopment, housing and slum clearance (community development/planning/public housers/housing authorities) competed with corporate, business and real estate sectors for redevelopment of CBDs and adjoining “gray neighborhoods”. The latter group, often chamber-reliant and led, also assumed responsibility for leading, planning and mostly financing the CBD redevelopment, with the mayor and his administration providing key powers and associated physical support and (federal) financing, mostly through his redevelopment agency. The CBD business nexus also provided support and pressure to target efforts at addressing the “unnamed” structural program through newly created public business assistance EDOs, strategies and programs.

This “struggle, competition and coexistence” of two rival approaches to urban renewal gathered strength through the 1950s and early 1960s. Eventually, the community development approach succumbed to both the ineffectiveness of its strategy and the incredible opposition generated by neighborhood residents—a critical mass of which was generated by the intrusion by state highway departments in tearing up immense swathes of neighborhoods for urban interstate bypasses and highways. The CBD approach continued; but it too, in Part III, will face its own set of problems. That coexistence and struggle between the two wings poured the foundations for a new order, the contemporary Big City economic development system that will begin and develop in the chapters of Part III.

Accordingly, two cities, out of many possible candidates, have been selected to present a flavor and an outline of how our Big Cities responded. Boston is in many ways an outlier, its contemporary image of urban renewal almost the reverse of the one presented in this chapter. Partly its selection is based on the need to understand Boston and Massachusetts generally for the new order developed in Part III: partly because I lived in it and drove a cab through it during those years, but mostly because it demonstrates the internal political and cultural dimensions behind the approval and implementation of UR. UR was not a federal/academic program; it was local, and rested on local roots, judicial cultures and political antics. Philadelphia is more typical (and more innovative), and variations of its themes can be found in most Big Cities—Chicago for instance. It supplements earlier examples of Pittsburgh, NYC and Baltimore, which also provide a flavor.

BOSTON’S URBAN RENEWAL POLICY SYSTEMS

Boston, Ed Logue and Faneuil Hall are synonymous with UR—which is ironic in that UR left a controversial and complicated legacy. UR got off to a relatively late, clumsy and frustrating start that reflected not only the state and the city’s political culture and politics, but also the legacy of its ethnic machine policy system that long had run the city. The role of the state and the city’s business community should be noted—as well as the role of the mayor and his “expert” czar. Boston suffered from intense suburban pressures and noticeable CBD decline, but gravitated toward divisive and fiercely resisted neighborhood/housing UR projects. UR left in its wake an eastern-style progressive policy system headed by long-time mayor Kevin White. White mixed CD and ED strategies/goals typical of future contemporary East Coast policy systems.

The principal lessons from the Boston case study include outlining the transformation of the city’s policy system from ethnic, charismatic mayor/ethnic ward boss to a new charismatic mayor and ethnic machine/boss contemporary policy system. Obviously “we kid,” but that is what happened—from James Curley to White and his so-called “new machine”. We will finish the story in another chapter, but the bitter hostility between business and ethnic politicians, between neighborhood and CBD, the constant involvement of state government in municipal affairs and UR itself—all were expressed within Boston’s UR policy during the Transition Years. It is ironic indeed that Boston today is known for the form of UR (CDB with a “growth coalition” composed of strong mayor, corporate/business leadership and expert/professional management) that “lost” out to neighborhood redevelopment/housing community development—the reaction against which brought White into power at the end of this section.

In this tale one can see that Boston wears its political culture on its sleeve during these years, and how political culture prevented Boston’s political leadership from moving into an alliance with business for a sustained downtown revitalization. Instead, with the exception of the famous Government Center project, Boston’s UR initiatives are out in the neighborhoods or on the edges of its compact, loosely defined downtown—where they had been in the Curley, Tobin and Hynes years. In the past (not now) Boston had a tough time dealing with its CBD, and there have been extended periods when someone threw away the key to the “Vault” and locked its denizens out of the policy system. This is for the most part lost in the smush of today’s UR paradigm.

Charismatic Mayor, Ward-Base Machines = Anti-CBD, Pro-Neighborhood

Boston’s dominant political figure in the first half of the twentieth century was James Michael Curley, the Frank Skeffington of Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 novel The Last Hurrah. First elected mayor in 1914, Curley served four, four-year terms and retired (unwillingly) from the Boston mayoralty in 1951 (with half his last term spent in federal prison). He served as governor and saw several terms in Congress. Curley presided over a decentralized, mostly Irish, ethnic ward-based, city council-dominant machine. He shared power with ward bosses the like of the proverbial Martin Lomasney.

He also fought a bitter war with the city’s business and corporate leadership, pushing the Yankee Protestant Brahmins out into nearby suburbs. The Brahmin elite, however, retained its leading position in Massachusetts state politics. Brahmins dominated the state and CBD, and the machine ran the neighborhoods. The war between the two explains Boston’s CBD decline—why Thomas O’Connor (1993) called Boston a hopeless backwater and McQuade described it as “two cities in one. The first is the Boston of a cultivated Yankee minority … The other Boston lies on the far side of a deep, cold sea of historic hatred and is Irish Boston” (McQuade, 1966, p. 260).

The Massachusetts legislature resisted Boston home rule vigorously, directly controlling much of the city’s day-to-day administrative and policy-making power. Budgetary and fiscal powers, for example, were exercised by the legislature; the city’s civil service system and police administered by the state. Curley and business engaged in a sadly comical war of not picking up the bank president’s garbage and the city not securing buyers for its bonds. Real estate taxes rose to such levels that a 1950 comparison between Boston and 20 other large American cities placed Boston as the most expensive.

Curley left the inner city to wallow in its Puritan self-righteousness while he turned his attention and his municipal favors to those in the “other” Boston who never failed to give him their loyalty—and their votes. While he showered the various neighborhoods with libraries, health units, parks, playgrounds, and bathhouses, he neglected the downtown section of Boston and allowed it to fall into a state of such disrepair than many native Bostonians began to give up all hope of its eventual recovery. (O’Connor, 1993, pp. 12–13)

Pre-1950 UR

The Boston Housing Authority (BHA), established in 1935 and empowered by 1933 Massachusetts enabling legislation, built Ickes New Deal NIRA/PWA housing starting with South Boston’s Old Harbor Village in 1935. The city’s first public housing project opened in 1938 (Vale, 2007). The BHA participated in eight prewar Housing Act projects. Combined with 1937 Housing Act projects, Boston “had the largest number of units per capita built anywhere in the country” and in absolute units was second only to New York City (Bratt and Broadman, 1983, p. 5). Curley and Congressman (later Speaker) John McCormack greased the public housing skids. Public housing was a Depression-era political plum, providing homes and employment. The BHA apparently did not enforce income standards, and housing was a “ward boss’s opportunity,” allowing over-income families (and city employees) to live in public housing (Vale, 2007, p. 193).

Boston also enjoyed its fair share of federal temporary housing during the war; the shipyards in Quincy, for example, required federally funded units and areas were cleared. Immediately after the war, to accommodate returning veterans, Massachusetts passed Chapter 200, a program to build projects for veterans. In short, Boston was aggressive in clearing areas for public housing.

In 1951 a former “hack”, John B. Hynes, ran against Curley—and beat him. Hynes was then mayor for two terms (until 1961). His city council, horribly factionalized, contained any number of potential rivals, and candidates for employment. State government conducted a permanent guerrilla war on their Irish adversaries in city hall. Under the Housing Act of 1949, the BHA launched a second series of neighborhood public housing/slum removal projects. Three major public housing complexes were developed (Columbia Point, Bromley Heath and Mission Hill Extension). All were dense, high-rise, Le Corbusier style.

Public housing slum removal proved so controversial and politically unpopular that, after 1954, Hynes shifted into CBD urban renewal (O’Connor, 1993, p. 77). Why? First, maverick anti-machine Hynes abandoned the past BHA policy of ignoring income guidelines. Worse, over-income city employees were forced out of existing public housing. Second, shorn of their corrupt middle-class tendencies, public housing came to be seen as “a dumping ground for those uprooted by [highway and other slum clearance], and they became linked in the public mind to racial conflict and poverty” (Bratt and Broadman, 1983, p. 7).

Highways as a solution to Boston’s decentralization was set on its “path” in 1942 when Washington-based CED planners and Boston’s corporate elite developed, separate from city hall, comprehensive plans to minimize decentralization and revitalize the metro area’s stagnant economy: “There had been a planning competition in 1944, a highway plan in 1948, and a general plan for the city which appeared in 1950” (Mollenkopf, 1983, pp. 142–3). These ideas were incorporated into the eligibility plans required for housing act funds. With perfect timing (1954), Mass DOT approved a new expressway (the Central Artery project) cutting through the city’s length. Earlier, in 1953, another state expressway cut through Boston’s Chinatown, stirring up negative neighborhood reaction.

The Central Artery project uprooted over 900 businesses, prompted vigorous business opposition (“Save Boston Business”) and crystallized neighborhood residents to form a “Save the North End” association (O’Connor, 1993, pp. 77–8). During the 1950s the CBD lost 14,000 downtown jobs and $78 million of downtown-based tax assessments (McQuade, 1966, p. 261).¹ UR-style expressway demolition, displacement and non-relocation inflicted by the state created a nasty legacy for future UR.

Hynes’s CBD-UR “Bulldozer”

John B. Hynes embraced CBD urban renewal as Boston’s salvation. In the switch to the CBD, however, Hynes inadvertently ran afoul of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, initially over tax abatement—gifting to business—more than eminent domain per se. As it persisted through the decade, Hynes’s inability to secure court approval for a hybrid public/private EDO proved his undoing. Hynes’s first opportunity came with a major project proposed by the John Hancock Corporation.

In 1953 the John Hancock Life Insurance Company started negotiations to build a 26-story office building in Copley Square.² This would have been the first major postwar office building in the CBD; it soon became the symbol of Boston’s hope for a viable future. Five years later, however, the project was still hung up over negotiations on tax abatement. The issue was two-fold: the court held a long-standing Puritan belief that private business should not benefit from tax abatement; and the Massachusetts Supreme Court followed that theme by enforcing its equally long-standing series of decision precedents forbidding such benefits. The John Hancock Tower, now 60 stories designed by I.M. Pei, never opened until 1976.

An even worse fiasco involved reconverting a major railroad yard project anchored by Prudential Insurance. That project also was befouled by tax abatement. Tax abatement was critical because Boston’s downtown property tax rates were “far and away the highest of any major city in the U.S. … more than twice as high as in New York [City] and Chicago … Commercial valuations in Boston were very high, frequently above market value.” (McQuade, 1966, p. 262) On its own without a tax deal (1957), Prudential acquired the site and kept the project alive. No sooner had the property been acquired, the Massachusetts Supreme Court outlawed tax abatement for redevelopment. Still, in March 1958 a tentative backdoor abatement agreement was achieved: Democrat Governor Furcolo stepped in, using the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority as an intermediary owner to abate taxes. Prudential, in January 1959, held a ground-breaking ceremony on Boston’s first commercial urban renewal-style project. At this critical juncture the court rejected that solution as well—construction ceased. In 1961 Prudential was a big, quiet hole in downtown Boston.

A Bridge over Troubled Water

The business community was skeptical about Hynes. It needed a bridge-builder and that role was played by Boston College’s new (1953) Dean of Business Administration, Father W. Seavey Joyce. Joyce organized a conference, “Greater Boston’s Business Future”, in May 1954. Attended by over 200 key business elites, the conference touched off a newspaper and informal dialogue on tax abatement and Back Bay development. The “good father” followed up with private conversations and dialogue between private and public leaders, including many of the “right” people (Bill Sullivan, the Boston Patriots owner, Governor Hynes, taxpayer groups, Boston Citizens’ Council, the chair of the First National Bank and the Urban Land crowd). As the dialogue grew more action-oriented, the participants agreed to meet regularly and formulate an action agenda. A public–private advocacy group (the Citizen Seminar Group) resulted (O’Connor, 1993, p. 119).

In October 1954 the group held its first public seminar, at which Hynes put tax assessment, tax abatement and redevelopment on the table. He presented his image of a redeveloped Boston downtown, a new World Trade Center along with the stalled John Hancock and Prudential projects. In early 1955 business leaders traveled to Pittsburgh and met with Mellon, Lawrence and the Allegheny Council. Speakers included Mumford, whose low-rise, anti-skyscraper perspective was warmly appreciated. With grants from the Ford Foundation, the group staffed up a research bureau and a public television series. Under the leadership of Gilbert (president of the Gillette Corporation), the Citizens’ Seminar spun off the research group to become the Boston Bureau of Public Affairs. The Seminar Group heard and endorsed Hynes’s view on how UR should be conducted: “The only way that decay and blight may be uprooted [Hynes asserted] is by a complete physical change in the affected neighborhood or area” (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 157).

At his second inaugural speech (1956), Hynes outlined an aggressive CBD redevelopment plan, including a Boston Common garage and new housing and neighborhood projects by the Buffalo Housing Authority. Hynes acknowledged Boston was facing financial collapse, and that to address looming fiscal disaster the city needed enabling home rule legislation giving it control over its tax base and budget. Senate leader John Powers (Hynes’s defeated mayoral opponent) never agreed to any such package. Hynes’s plans were dead in the water—again.

In the midst of this debacle, the Boston Housing Authority had all it could do coping with public housing and slum rehabilitation projects it was pursuing. The harried and isolated commercial urban renewal program, buried within the BHA, languished. So the Citizens’ Council, Chamber of Commerce and corporate leaders pressed Hynes to set up an independent urban renewal bureaucracy. The city council agreed, and amazingly the state concurred; in September 1957 the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was born.

Late in 1959 Moody’s lowered Boston’s bond rating to Baa, “making Boston, among cities in the United States with over a half million people, the only one assigned this poor rating … the city headed toward the shameful specter of municipal bankruptcy (O’Connor, 1993, p. 147). The prospect of financial default was the final straw. Chaired by Safe Deposit and Trust Company’s Ralph Lowell and CEOs from Forbes, First National Bank, John Hancock, New England Telephone two big-name Boston law firms and the Harvard Business School dean, Boston’s city fathers gathered in a boardroom adjacent to the vault of the Safe Deposit and Trust Company. The “Vault,” otherwise known as the “Boston Coordinating Committee,” was born.

The West End

In the meantime BRA had started working on its first mixed-use urban renewal project: the West End. Noted architect Victor Gruen was retained to plan and design the Charles River Park. Media/Policy World opposition was loud, but residents believed that, like almost everything in Boston, the project would sooner or later implode and they need not worry. BRA proved them wrong, and on December 10, 1959 Hynes announced its initial project, developer and financing.

Slum removal wiped out the entire neighborhood—38 blocks, 41 acres, 9000 residents. An entire low-rent, low-rise, Italian tenement neighborhood was gone—in its place high-rise, high-rent housing for the affluent: “The West End symbolized all that was wrong with city planning in the 1950s … because it bulldozed the homes of poor people and replaced them with an enclave for the wealthy” (O’Connor, 1993, pp. 138–9). Appalled at the heartless way residents—mostly elderly, many refugees or displaced persons from World War II unable to speak English—had been uprooted from modest apartments, the visceral reaction to the West End project paralyzed Hynes/ BRA’s second project, the Government Center-Scollay Square project. It didn’t help that a prominent leader of the New Boston Committee and financial supporter had been named as principal West End developer (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 150), marking the end of UR under Mayor Hynes. His heritage is the Freedom Trail—a tourism masterpiece.

Collins and Logue: The Dynamic Duo

On January 4, 1960 a new mayor was sworn into office. Maverick Democrat John Collins had won an unexpected victory. Collins advocated an even more aggressive redevelopment agenda than Hynes, and he was not associated with the dying Curley policy system. Confined to a wheelchair, Collins conveyed an FDR New Deal image to Boston. BRA stole Ed Logue from New Haven to jump-start the stalled Hynes redevelopment projects and implement his signature campaign theme: “the New Boston”. Set up as BRA czar (also head of the mayor’s office for development, housing and planning), Logue prepared a comprehensive ten-project “Ninety Million Dollar Development Plan” in January 1961. Shortly after, the federal Urban Renewal Administration (URA) approved $30 million, matched by $30 million from the state to implement the plan—the Vault had done its job. Boston reopened stalled projects and commenced slum clearance for CBD and neighborhood housing.

Logue designated the Prudential as ‘blighted”, breaking the logjam over the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s opposition to tax abatement. Prudential started design (using a Le Corbusier-style skyscraper motif) and the project opened early in 1964. Alongside the Prudential, the Hynes Auditorium and the Sheraton 29-story hotel established the site as Boston’s principal civic convention and tourist center. Nearby, in a “contagion of improvement”, the First Church of Christ Scientist received UR funding “that included administration buildings, apartment complexes, merchandise marts, and a seven hundred foot long reflection pool that lit up approaches to Massachusetts Ave and Symphony Hall” (O’Connor, 1993, p. 225). Tufts New England Medical Center also conducted significant redevelopment of a “rundown” neighborhood with Logue’s assistance.

On the seventh day, however, Logue didn’t rest. He turned his attention to the last stalled project: the Scollay Square/Government Center. Whatever its architectural merits (Government Center has been described as the “crate that Faneuil Hall came in”; others asserted its “Mycenaean or Aztec overtones”), Government Center became the symbol of the New Boston—opening the way for development of the waterfront.³

In 1963 Collins was overwhelmingly reelected, carrying 19 of 22 wards. At that point the New Boston and UR was no longer a failure.

The Worm Turns

Scollay Square was bulldozed, and only after intense Brahmin opposition was a key historic building (Sears Crescent) saved; Boston’s working class supported saving the old burlesque hall (the Old Howard), but it was torn down. These were hints of what was to follow when Logue left the CBD and moved UR into Boston’s neighborhoods. Old, working-class neighborhoods with wooden two- or three-story apartments, tenements and single room occupancies (SROs) would not do.

The city’s new program was designed to transform these valuable locations into clusters of attractive and income-producing communities with the kind of shiny new townhouses and modern apartments that would bring middle-class families and well-to-do professionals back to the city. (O’Connor, 1993, p. 226) In these five short years, Boston UR tore down several neighborhoods and started replacing them with middle-class/professional housing, destroying in the process much of the political and social fabric of the city.

After 1963, stressed by the proposed neighborhood projects, the city polarized; class/racial war followed. Community neighborhood organizations formed. Residents demanded involvement in decision-making. Local groups stopped some projects (Southwest Corridor) and opposed and delayed many others. Starting in 1965 and continuing for several years, a series of mostly racial riots burned down sections of the inner city. In 1966 voters elected another mayor, with a new approach to urban governance and a new way to provide development to Boston; it came in the form of a new style of community development.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

When one smushes urban renewal into one large ideological mass, it is easy to lose the real-time reality that UR was an umbrella strategy, not a specific monolithic program that was pursued to “remove Negroes”. Under that umbrella strategy lurked a wide variety of actors, movements, constituencies and goals. Philadelphia is our example to demonstrate the different forms of UR that existed, not only across the Big Cities but also within a single municipality. That allows us to sketch out how, I believe, different wings/approaches within American economic development evolved during these critical Transition Years.

The first task of this case study is to trace the policy system that produced Philadelphia’s UR strategy. It is clearly not identical to that outlined in Boston where Progressive business elites doubled as Irish-hating Yankees. Moreover, one can more easily see how UR itself evolved—in ways that might not fit the smush. In this section one might see the rude beginnings of a new order, our contemporary American ED system, jell and take shape. In particular one can see a division of labor involving Transition-era chambers finding new roles and spinning off new EDOs. It is also possible to see the “governmental” wing of mainstream ED assume form within the mayoral administration—an evolution that involved a break from the community development wing of UR, from the housing authority to the redevelopment agency. This proved unfortunate for public housers and neighborhood physical redevelopers.

The Le Corbusier high-rise public housing spawned so many problems they had to be torn down, and a new federal housing role had to be devised. As bad, Transition-era, neighborhood-based housers using slum removal (to be fair, mostly highway-related slum removal) generated an intent and visceral neighbor counter-reaction that, in its good time, would itself join our contemporary community development system. In short, Philadelphia is a good place to examine the workings of our Scarlet Letter metaphor.

Philadelphia’s UR Background

Politically, with rare interruptions Philadelphia’s state Republican political machine dominated the city’s politics from the Civil War through to 1950. Philadelphia consequently enjoyed an unsavory postwar political reputation as a “corrupt and sleepy, unprogressive city” with limited home rule powers. War production strained Philadelphia’s existing housing, yet in 1944 building permits in a city approaching 3.5 million were for only 160 new units. Housing surveys revealed that one-third of housing units required demolition/substantial rehabilitation.

Why? The 1940 metro population grew by 2 percent; Philadelphia’s declined by 1 percent. The fifties’ metro increase was 14.7 percent, the city’s 7.3 percent—mostly Great Migration newcomers. From 1940 to 1950 the net increase of African-Americans approached 130,000. Over the next decade, 155,000 were added. Steered to inner-ring ghettos, black migrants found employment scarce. From 1948 to 1954, retail business fell by 10.4 percent and manufacturing employment declined by 10.9 percent during the 1950s (Beauregard, 1989, pp. 199–200).

Three-term machine mayor Bernard Samuel had in 1946 taken advantage of state enabling legislation to establish the city’s redevelopment corporation—one of the nation’s first. Samuels was listening to “Young Turk” Progressive housing reformers who sought to empower a strong Planning Commission that vigorously advocated not only for planning but also for CBD redevelopment and neighborhood housing. The first wing, Young Turks (Progressive young reformers styling themselves after La Guardia), began meeting at a restaurant in 1939. Their discussion forums evolved into “the City Policy Committee” which limited membership (yet included women and blacks). The Policy Committee’s true love was planning—next was housing improvement (Lowe, 1967, pp. 320–21). Among their members were two older reformers/politicos, Joseph Clark and his close buddy Richardson Dilworth.

In 1942 the Policy Committee convinced Mayor Samuels and the city council to significantly empower a strong, quasi-autonomous Planning Commission (PHC). The PHC will be a central actor in post-1950 housing and urban renewal. At the urging of Walter Phillips (a prominent member of the Policy Committee), the committee formed a permanent civic association to watchdog and supplement the new city agency: the Citizens’ Council on City Planning. The Citizens’ Council’s first initiative (1947) was to hold an exposition presenting its visual image of what Philadelphia could achieve through planning. The exposition amounted to a call to arms for Philadelphia’s physical redevelopment, from highways to housing—including a visual map of the city’s blight.

An estimated 400,000 walked past its elaborate visual images and maps. Proposed changes included a mall and park around downtown Independence Hall, greenways, pedestrian bridges, a waterfront walk along a marina and other recreational facilities. The CBD was the heart of the New Philadelphia. Working with other old-line Progressive groups (such as Philadelphia’s Bureau of Municipal Research), they lobbied Samuels (1949) to appoint Edmund Bacon (a protégé of a Phillips) first to the Philadelphia Housing Association (PHA), then as executive director of the PHC.

The PHC inherited and commenced planning (1949) for a major neighborhood redevelopment through slum clearance and relocation: the Eastwick Project (outlined above). Eastwick, a racially integrated, rather large neighborhood containing approximately 19,000, mostly home-owning residents, was envisioned by city planners as an area that “low-income blacks … could be relocated to a new planned community” (McKee, 2001, p. 552). Using “open land” or land acquired by eminent domain and cleared by demolition, a second phase, conducted by private real estate developers, would build new suburban-style housing.

The project generated intense backlash from residents, but planning continued and Eastwick became the city’s first post-1949 Housing Act project. Quickly labeled “the nation’s largest urban renewal project in 1958”, eminent domain and slum clearance of most of Eastwick followed. The Korman Company was awarded construction rights for replacement housing (1958), but little was actually built. Most of the cleared land remained empty for decades (McKee, 2001). Having removed most of the original population, Eastwick gained population between 1970 and 1990. Eastwick could have been the poster child for the Second Ghetto.

Business Coalition and Policy System Change

The second wing emanated from the chamber and its “old Main Line” corporate elites. Disgusted with machine scandals, horrific governance, lousy water and economic stagnation, they coalesced in 1948 into the Greater Philadelphia Movement (GPM).⁴ Initially, the GPM consisted of 31 members, who paid to play. Its initial budget was $225,000, which hired staff and consultants to formulate a CBD redevelopment plan, the centerpiece of which was moving a food distribution company (Dock Street Market) out of the downtown and opening up CBD land for redevelopment (Banfield and Wilson, 1967, p. 271). They invited Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Conference on Community Development’s executive director for advice. The GPM’s CBD revitalization approach centered on privately financed offices/headquarters and the removal of physical blight; the public sector provided only accompanying infrastructure and site control.

The GPM allied with reformist Young Turks Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth, won the 1951 election and on January 1, 1952 Clark became Philadelphia’s first “strong mayor”. Planning, led by Bacon, immediately started. Key projects included: the Triangle (blighted mixed-use Center City (CBD) neighborhood; development of Independence Mall by the federal Department of the Interior’s National Park Service; Philadelphia airport (1953) expansion; the Walt Whitman Bridge (Delaware Valley Port Authority); the Penn Town housing project (north of Center City); and the signature project, Penn Center (the city’s first major post-Depression office/retail construction).

Varieties of Urban Renewal

Penn Center, adjacent to city hall, was privately funded and constructed on privately owned land. Bacon, working with the chamber and the Citizens’ Council, devised a plan that made Penn Center “the tangible symbol of a new kind of city” (Lowe, 1967, p. 331). But before construction started a major barrier had to be removed by an “unwilling” private corporation: the Penn Railroad. Penn Railroad owned an unused station/rail yard complex square in the middle of the CBD (the “Chinese Wall”). The wall, running eight blocks separating north from south Philadelphia, was comprised of 16 tracks and a transportation viaduct. Penn Railroad sprang into action only after Mayor Clark threatened to condemn the mess. Construction started in 1954.

Development didn’t always follow Bacon’s plan faithfully. But underground shopping, public spaces at street level, links to the subway system, a pedestrian mall, parking garages and a visually inspiring esplanade from the foot of city hall to the surrounding railroad and subway stations were victories for Bacon. Underneath the mall was a pedestrian concourse offering restaurants, shopping, amusements and a sunken plaza. Office buildings “on stilts” ensured uninterrupted views and maximum sun. Nevertheless, “the city’s role [in Penn Center] was minimal” (Beauregard, 1989, p. 209); using private funds it was not associated with the city’s redevelopment authority.

Left to the city was neighborhood housing/slum clearance. The first such project (1950)—the East Poplar Penn Towne project, managed by the Redevelopment Authority—reflected Bacon’s Planning Commission’s innovative “self-help”, “shelteroriented”, historic, preservation-friendly, humanist Le Corbusier approach. Lest we wax too nostalgically, Bacon made extensive use of the bulldozer as well. Philadelphia’s neighborhood model did not follow the “Baltimore model”. The East Poplar neighborhood approach relied on slum clearance with mixed low-rise and high-rise physical redevelopment combined with substantial rehabilitation of existing units and preservation of old Quaker residences (Lowe, 1967, pp. 333–6). Compared to Boston’s West End, Penn Towne was in another league altogether.

Penn Towne employed a number of innovative methodologies, partnerships and policies—it was integrated. The idea was that “good housing” or spores would stimulate investment in adjacent private properties. Accordingly, the RDA built units in the worst areas of the project—owned by African-Americans. Those displaced, having nowhere to go, doubled up in the closest available units, prompting further deterioration and exodus. The project attracted national attention and favorable comment. It also exceeded budgets and schedules, and produced high vacancy rates. Private investment did not follow. It didn’t stop suburbanization or surrounding neighborhood succession. Bacon and others believed they had to do it better the next time.

Highways

Between 1950 and 1973 Interstate 95 (I-95), a beltway, and several expressways cut through and around Philadelphia. Highways were a significant element in Bacon/GPM comprehensive plans; highways were not forced upon the city or its UR leadership. But I-95 exerted a “dramatic effect”, tearing up areas running through northeastern neighborhoods, connecting to the airport and into the suburbs.

It sliced through many river wards causing the taking and demolition of large numbers of buildings and dividing neighborhoods physically … [cutting] off Center City [the CBD] from the waterfront … By the end of the period, the southeastern portion of the city was a virtual tangle of interstate highways, access roads, and bridge ramps. (Beauregard, 1989, p. 215)

The CBD emerged relatively unscathed; the Schuylkill Expressway, Philadelphia’s first modern highway, bulldozed one neighborhood, linking the CBD to the beltway/I-95. From the get-go, opposition got in the way. As early as 1957 Society Hill’s resistance to highways affected their route. Opposition gathered steam with each freeway and expressway:

The final link in the inner beltway quickly [1964] became emblematic of the sharp contrast between Bacon’s showy center city projects and the deteriorating conditions in the residential neighborhoods beyond … [turning] the Crosstown Expressway proposal … into a flashpoint for Philadelphia’s urban renewal. (Klemek, 2011, p. 134)

Arising out of this opposition came a new generation of lawyer-planners, the rise of citizen activists and newly formed CDOs (Klemek, 2011, pp. 133–6). With signs reading “Fry Bacon”, they protested. Crosstown was stopped, and stopped, and stopped—before it was finally abandoned in 1974.

Society Hill

Society Hill, a rundown, historically significant, low-income neighborhood touching the CBD, captured Dilworth’s interest. Newly elected, he ordered Bacon to plan the project—and started construction on his new $150,000 house in the district. Bacon, long involved in promoting the area, lost control of the project, however, when Albert Greenfield—a politically connected banking-CBD real estate developer (and taxi cab owner)—became City Planning Commission chair. Bacon came within an inch of resigning. In any case, Greenfield truly believed Society Hill was an important cog in downtown revitalization because its high-quality, historically significant housing could attract affluent households to the CBD. Greenfield insisted the project required decisive private sector management to succeed. Dilworth agreed.

So, in 1956 Greenfield incorporated his change-agent, the nonprofit Old Philadelphia Development Corporation (OPDC), with the city’s financial and business elite on its board. OPDC, the direct descendant of today’s Center City Philadelphia and the founder of several key Philadelphia EDOs, drove the Society Hill project from beginning to end. In 1956 OPDC hired John P. Robin (redevelopment chief of Pittsburgh’s Mayor Lawrence’s Gateway Center) as executive director. Formally, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Agency subcontracted with the OPDC to develop the project, but the board dominated policy that included design competitions, demolition, restoration of historic colonial houses, luxury high-rise apartments and three office buildings built by I.M. Pei and NYC’s William Zeckendorf. Urban renewal funds were used.

The project was slow coming together, and groundbreaking for its first phase was in 1961. Like Boston, UR required housing for “a prestige, upper-income … elite taste-setters … the first part of a coordinated set of efforts to revitalize center city as a place to live and work and to provide an image for the whole city’s revitalization” (Lowe, 1967, p. 350). Society Hill, always a controversial use of public funds and a target for architectural and planner criticism, is, however, regarded as one of urban renewal’s more successful projects.

UR Splits ED at its Seams: An Outline of Contemporary Big City ED Emerges

Traditional planning’s chief tool was the comprehensive plan that allowed for coordination and integration of zoning, codes, capital budgets and infrastructure—both CBD and hinterland. It became clear in the fifties that a comprehensive plan was not up to the UR task. Comprehensive plans meant planning with many moving parts, and required lots of expertise and time, great cost and many independent actors, few of which shared common goals—and planners had little actual power to compel behavior. Left unsaid was the outcry that resulting from UR linked to housing and slum clearance. The planning critique was that not enough was being destroyed. The mayor’s critique was that the costs, political and financial, were too high relative to the impact.

As early as 1952, Mayor Clark recognized that Bacon and planning had all they could do to cope with day-to-day UR. So he stoked up the redevelopment agency; its board recruited private sector heavy-hitters and developed an internal long-range planning committee that included prominent planners (Martin Meyerson, for example). In 1956 Clark transferred William Rafsky, his housing coordinator, to be the city’s redevelopment director. Successful UR program implementation required RDA powers, access to both federal urban renewal monies and corporate elites if plans were to be actionable. To improve UR’s effectiveness, Rafsky produced studies that collectively constituted the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) Report.

That report recommended no further slum removal of “Negro housing” until alternative housing could be developed. Efforts to retain manufacturing in the city’s economic base through industrial districts were prioritized. The report reversed Bacon’s “developing spores” strategy, i.e., scattering islands of UR in the “belief” that private investment would fill in between the spores. It didn’t—in fact the reverse occurred. In response, Rafsky proposed to redirect UR to the CBD and concentrate initially on so-called “gray areas” (housing rings adjacent to the CBD). The report called for both public and private investment, and recommended programs such as adult education, enhanced city services, treating family disorganization, delinquency, crime, fair housing and human rights—and poverty. These were the essential features of LBJ’s future Model Cities program, launched a decade later. The report, well-received, went nowhere.

In 1959, however, Philadelphia participated in a federal planning/UR innovation, the 1959 Housing Act’s “community renewal program” (CRP). The CRP encouraged gathering data, observing effects and making adjustments to the project. More than a planning tool, however, the CRP acknowledged issues inherent to UR-style physical redevelopment. It opened up UR to include “social” concerns. Blight no longer meant solely physical deterioration, but was widened to include education, crime, welfare and health (congruent with the Ford Foundation Gray Areas program). By 1963 over a hundred cities participated.

[The CRP] suggested that social action should accompany the clearance or rehabilitation of buildings … yet most planners … had given all too little thought to the relation between social planning and their kind of planning, had only superficial knowledge of the welfare resources of their communities, and made no detailed study of the needs and desires of minority groups and the victims of poverty. (Scott, 1969, p. 598)

UR, under the pressures and realities of municipal level implementation, was bifurcating along Privatist/CBD/business assistance lines, while CD housing physical redevelopment mutated into a comprehensive form of CD. The housing authority managed CD/neighborhoods, and CBD/business programs moved to the RDA and a new set of EDOs and programs that worked with the jurisdictional economic base. So, Rafsky and the redevelopment agency became the lead actors in the CBD and business/eds and meds redevelopment process.

Within the none-too-gentle womb of municipal-level UR, a new corps of economic developers had made their appearance. Rafsky “shared with Logue the distinction of being the first in a new order of municipal officials conspicuously charged with producing teamwork among the agencies concerned with city-building and renewal, including special districts, quasi-public agencies, and even private corporations” (Scott, 1969, pp. 530–31). Pittsburgh was at the parade’s head, but by the mid-1950s (1956) Baltimore’s Mayor D’Alesandro Jr. reorganized planning/UR, centralizing relevant departments, offices and functions in a renewal/housing agency—with a powerful director, Richard L. Steiner. Logue sat in New Haven, and Rafsky in Philly. RDA leadership in UR was strong throughout the East.

CD and ED Work Together under the UR Umbrella

Rafsky involved the RDA with nonprofit institutional redevelopment, now eligible for federal funding. The GI Bill triggered the growth of universities and colleges across the nation, including the University of Pennsylvania. Expansion of facilities and scope of activities logically resulted. By this time such projects were popping up across the nation (NYU, the University of Chicago and later, in Philly, Temple). The question was where? A suburban location was arguably likely (the University of Buffalo, for instance, moved to the suburbs). Philadelphia UR officials were determined not to let that happen. In 1963 RDA partnered with Drexel, the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia General Hospital and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to plan, assemble and establish the University City Science Center (today’s University City) on Schuylkill’s riverbanks.

The RDA partnership included eminent domain of adjoining neighborhoods, use of federal UR monies and state funds to construct key facilities (the research building). Involved in this UR project were three neighborhoods, populated mostly by workingclass African-Americans and Italians. Up to 10,000 residents were eventually displaced. The idea was to create a beautiful “manicured” campus, architecturally au courant, that from a cynic’s viewpoint built an isolated cordon sanitaire from less desirable visual and social influences (Puckett and Lloyd, 2015). The buildings were “pointed” inward, away from the surrounding city. Today, the project is an outstanding success (Penn is the city’s largest single employer), but it took a while—for decades after considerable cleared acreage was used only for parking lots.

Moreover, Philly recognized the existence of the problem with “no name” (deindustrialization). Philadelphia was losing its manufacturing. Between 1951 and 1956 the city lost 74 major companies, nearly 10,000 jobs, with payroll cutbacks affecting nearly 40,000 more (Lowe, 1967, p. 360). One asset the city had plenty of was vacant/unused land. So the city’s Department of Commerce established a nonprofit toacquire and assemble land, install streets and infrastructure, to be marketed and sold to business. Also established was the nation’s first industrial land bank. The corporation that inherited these functions, programs and tools, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), was a partnership with the chamber, which paid half its costs and was governed by a 30-member public/private board, including the mayor. The PIDC still operates, having expanded into tax-exempt financing, lending and a wide variety of business assistance programs. Its loan program commenced in 1961 after voters approved a $10 million general obligation bond to finance a revolving loan fund and add more land to the industrial land bank. After 1965, the Philadelphia UR program included industrial parks (Callowhill Industrial Historical District).

Bacon and the Housing Authority meanwhile turned their attention to the North Philadelphia district adjacent to Center City (called the “Jungle”, mostly occupied by African-Americans and location of later 1964 riots): “The strategy employed was to remove dilapidated buildings in order to create land for new private development and public housing and also to stifle the blighting effect many existing dwellings were having on adjacent properties” (Beauregard, 1989, p. 211). By 1962, 10,126 dwelling units were demolished. North Philadelphia demolition continued until 1980 (totaling 35,196 dwelling units demolished, burned down or abandoned—32 percent of the area). The population fell by 54 percent, becoming exclusively black: “With clearance came numerous high-density public housing projects, but almost no new private construction” (Beauregard, 1989, p. 211).

Many of those displaced in this project were intended to go to the pioneering “new town in town” UR project, Eastwick. No one, however, asked North Philadelphia African-Americans if they wanted to move to Eastwick in south Philadelphia—for the most part they didn’t. Eastwick became a middle-class, predominantly white neighborhood.

Buried beneath the fold were torn-up neighborhoods, demolished by highways and UR that created a new generation of leaders, new organizations and new priorities.

The fight against [slum clearance] drew the neighborhood together and gave residents pride in a distinct community identity. Theirs proved a fierce battle for survival, confronting the urban renewal order directly with a multilevel strategy … These citizens succeeded in driving a wedge, from the bottoms up, into the alliance between planning experts, politicians, and private developers. (Klemek, 2011, pp. 133–6)

Klemek is describing NYC, but the story is typical of our Big Cities. The legacy of UR is that in its ashes rose the phoenix of a new policy system, and a rejuvenated community development approach to our profession—all of which will be duly considered in future chapters.

POSTWAR SUNBELT UR

When utilized in whatever form, western and southern UR served purposes other than, or in addition to, anti-suburbanization. The Sunbelt, its central cities and CBD, willingly or not, existed within a polycentric metro area. Sunbelt hinterland strategy is not a carbon copy of hegemonic Big Cities. Atlanta, San Diego, San Antonio, Boston and Philadelphia are not in the same place at the same time. If we stop and think about it, there is little reason that Sunbelt UR should be identical to Big City UR. The regions differed in regard to key factors such as policy system change, form of government, business/corporate elite culture, preferences for housing/neighborhood, power of planners/plan, character and demographics of population mobility and sensitivity to the urban competitive hierarchy. More than anything, Big City UR was driven by decline—real, felt or imagined. Decentralization was a first-priority urban problem, and UR was the accepted solution: a “way of economic/political life” was on the brink of threatened collapse. Not so in the Sunbelt. The Sunbelt was growing—hugely.

There are several characteristics of Sunbelt urban renewal that leap out to the observer, besides growth and “a different space”. First, there is an incredible internal variation among Sunbelt major cities. For this history that is logical and consistent. There are a variety of political cultures at play in the Sunbelt, many not found in hegemonic Big Cities. Second, despite their common linkage, the Sunbelt South and Sunbelt West are not “in the same place” either—at least in the period we study in this chapter. They share war production population and economic growth to be sure, but not a lot else. Third, UR is mostly a Big City invention, and although it will be quickly adopted by the usual horde of states, the prerequisites for successful implementation are not quite in place.

Most importantly, the acceptance of and willingness to use federal funds is not in place: the consensus underlying UR—a progressively inclined corporate and business elite—is weaker to non-existent in many parts of the Sunbelt. Privatism is simply more evident once one steps out of Big City states. Studies of specific Sunbelt cities are consistent in the dominating presence of business elites, chambers and private investment in Sunbelt UR. Harvey Molotch’s growth coalition finds its strongest support in the Sunbelt during these years (Molotch, 1976). Also, the necessary host of judicial and legislative barriers to tools and programs, clarifying the state role, all needed to be overcome.

There will be a noticeable temporal lag in the Sunbelt’s actual use of UR, whether for neighborhood and housing or CBD. That brings up another major difference, the relative strength of the CBD approach rather than the housing, neighborhood CD approach. There are logical as well as cultural reasons for this. Moreover, population growth implies new residents. Many areas of the Sunbelt are drawing non-Southern Diaspora immigration and generational cohort in-migration. This complicates the approval and eventual use of UR in ways that won’t be apparent until Part III. The bottom line of these differences and distinctions is that UR will follow different goals, varying even within the Sunbelt, than Big Cities. UR served many masters during our late Transition Years.

Simultaneous Suburbanization and “Domeism”: Urban Hierarchy

Polycentric simultaneous suburbanization doesn’t mean Sunbelt central cities didn’t want eastern-style hinterland hegemony—just the opposite. Sunbelt central cities, enjoying an initial advantage, quickly discovered annexation yielded consequences and reactions they couldn’t control. By the early 1960s Sunbelt suburbs were, if anything, more autonomous than their vaunted eastern compatriots. That’s where UR enters the picture. Our Chapter 1 competitive urban hierarchy driver also crowds into that picture. UR will build office buildings, convention centers and a Seattle World’s Fair—shades of Big City 1920s City Beautiful.

Western and southern cities in this decade are reaching scales sufficient to justify Big City rank. Sunbelt cities were not trying to preserve existing urban competitive status, but rather to assert a more prestigious one—one not necessarily based on control over their powerful suburbs which, in fact, are following the same City Beautiful strategy. Journalist Calvin Trillin complained the Sunbelt cities caught an infection of “municipal domeism”—the tendency to focus civic pride on a single project of pharaonic scale. That explains the Astrodome, Kingdome and Superdome, not to mention the DallasFort Worth mega airport. It also explains a lot of convention centers with magnificent hotels. The exuberance of Peachtree is not unique to Atlanta: “In the best tradition of urban boosterism, a successful redevelopment program became a selling point in itself as a symbol of civic unity and modernity” (Abbott, 1981, p. 143). UR was that redevelopment program—for many, perhaps most, sixties Sunbelt cities the primary purpose behind the strategy.

Annexation and infrastructure were primary strategies for most western and southern cities during the 1950s. While eastern cities were lobbying and then implementing the UR of the 1949 Housing Act (and its many amendments), these cities were fishing or catching up with their civil rights. Leaving aside Oklahoma City, Portland, Tulsa and Sacramento, in other Sunbelt ponds downtown UR took off in the early–mid-1960s when it became increasingly obvious that:

1. Annexation could not keep up with growth.
2. Annexation and infrastructure were very expensive and time-consuming.
3. Suburbs were resisting annexation in votes and in the state legislature.

There would be a few annexations in the sixties, but annexation’s day was mostly over in the West.

So CBD revitalization was the next best strategy. Its purpose was not to capture suburbs—that battle was now lost—but more to serve as an anchor for a first among equals metropolitan strategy and an assertion to the world that their city had arrived as a first-tier national city, with all the required prerequisites to compete with other Big Cities for jobs and growth. That explains municipal domeism. UR’s competitive purpose was not hidden: in the majority of western cities UR was the strategy used to stabilize the central city’s position in the metro urban hierarchy and as a debutant-style “coming out” for their arrival in the regional and national urban hierarchies (Abbott, 1981, p. Chapter 6).

As early as 1955, Downtown Tulsa Unlimited, a coalition of business leaders, advocated bond referenda approval for a civic center and land clearance for a hospital, community college and apartment and office buildings. By the late 1950s, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland were working on UR projects. Others followed. Western downtowns were less than awe-inspiring, a legacy of “smaller” days. Low rise and interlaced with skid rows and streets unfriendly to cars, most Sunbelt CBDs needed upgrading to house the headquarters of the region’s major corporations—and the facility infrastructure one expected from a Big City. At the time, a criticism within many western cities was that 1960s’ UR was nothing but a City Beautiful waste (Abbott, 2008, p. 192).

Policy System and Political Culture Variation

Sooner or later one gets into trouble speaking about “western” this and “eastern or southern” that. In a history that argues variation is a cornerstone principle, broad strokes undermine our argument. This section breaks down the broad strokes to specific regions and then cities.

In the South, cities were smaller, elites regional, closed and closely bound to the region’s more Privatist cultures. Possessing a “God bless the federal government and keep it far away from us” mentality, UR, decried as socialistic by some, was distrusted by most. Several southern states did not authorize/empower municipalities to use UR until the sixties, Louisiana as late as 1968. Public housing, associated with race/ ethnicity, with a few exceptions didn’t enjoy widespread support in the transitional, segregationist south. ED took a poor second place to desegregation and civil rights during the 1950s and 1960s. The 1965 Voting Rights Act exerted serious effects on southern municipal policy systems, requiring significant electoral changes with serious policy-making implications: replacing at-large with district elections, requiring federal approval of annexations. This was system change in its own right. UR operated within a very crowded and conflict-ridden policy agenda. When desegregation and busing traveled north in the very late 1960s our Big Cities were in “another place” (as will be discussed in Part III).

Western policy systems appeared in several varieties. Pacific Coast Big Cities were older, denser and settled by Yankees, Germans and ethnic and racial groups: progressively inclined but complex, heterogeneous policy systems not dominated by business elites but rather, like San Francisco, characterized by “hyper-pluralism” (DeLeon, 1992); or, in Portland’s case, governed by a commission form of government that found sustained action on public housing or urban renewal difficult. Los Angeles, city, county or growing suburbs like Orange County had weak mayors, strong independent public bureaucracies and overwhelming decentralization into countless suburban communities. Southern California’s settlement pattern produced a policy system, politics and culture that bore little resemblance to that of San Francisco (Wirt, 1974). In California, initiative and referendum policy-making is a central feature of the policy process, whatever the policy system—as are nonpartisan elections. Each Big City ought to be looked at separately.

Non-San Antonio Texan cities that ran in a curved line to San Diego (starting with Houston and including Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Tucson) clearly got the same memo: not to use federal funds for UR, but to conduct a privately led, planned and financed CBD redevelopment program. The outlier, Oklahoma City (related below), must have been left off the distribution list—Salt Lake City got the memo instead. In the cities that got the memo, corporate and business elites generally dominated their policy system. In several instances, their “vault-like” groups directed ED policy effectively through the turmoil of desegregation, and successfully conducted a significantly privatized version of UR, transforming their CBDs (and economic base) in masterful, if undemocratic and non-equalitarian, fashion. In these cities we can see pure, locally driven CBD rebuilding and, in some cases, an integration of new neighborhood and CD groups into the policy system. There is no mistaking any of them for Boston or Philadelphia.

A couple of eastern Big Cities (Pittsburgh and NYC) started their UR before the 1949 Housing Act, and almost every one submitted applications after the 1949 Act. As discussed, that Act was poorly designed, imperfectly administered and required mandates and procedures that prompted the 1954 Act—which first used the term UR and let loose the floodgates. By the late 1950s most eastern cities were in the program in some way. Not so the Sunbelt. There were significant attempts to start CBD projects in many Sunbelt cities, but frequently they were frustrated in some way.

The first major Sunbelt city to start a UR project was Norfolk Virginia in 1955 (see below). By the end of the decade Atlanta, Fresno, Los Angeles, Oakland, Oklahoma City (see below), Sacramento and San Francisco had started their first projects and were in rough symmetry with their eastern counterparts (notice California cities). Between 1960 and 1965 San Antonio, Tacoma and Winston-Salem commenced projects. The vast bulk of Sunbelt cities started between 1966 and 1969: Birmingham, Denver, Little Rock, Nashville, Portland and Tucson (Abbott, 1981, pp. 164–5, Table 6.1). Abbott asserts that the median starting date “for major downtown renewal projects in southern and western cities was 1967, and almost no major land clearance projects for commercial or institutional use were started after 1970” (Abbott, 1981, p. 151).

SUNBELT UR VIGNETTES

To provide flavor and detail, several vignettes of Sunbelt UR are provided below. Each presents a variation in UR implementation throughout the Sunbelt in the Transition Era (actually, because of the Sunbelt UR time lag several extend into the early seventies). Several more well-known examples (San Francisco, Portland and Dallas, for example) are left out in favor of lesser-known examples. The implicit contrast with Boston and Philadelphia and hegemonic Big Cities underscores each as well—UR clearly exhibits regional as well as municipal variation. The first vignette, California/Sacramento, focuses on a major ED tool innovation that arose from California’s UR program: tax increment financing (TIF). It also demonstrates the state’s impact on sub-state UR programs, and shows that states are far from invulnerable to interstate competitive pressures.

The second vignette, Atlanta (the remarkable southern outlier), blazed its own path in confronting early decentralization, and its use of UR resembled northern Big City UR—except that Atlanta’s chamber-dominated ED policy system had more in common with Dallas and Houston than most would care to admit. Norfolk is a more typical southern UR example in that it shows how desegregation and UR became intertwined but still was tied to local elite’s perception of the competitive urban hierarchy. Oklahoma City is in a world of its own. Sharing a policy system common to the southwest, it embraced UR, and federal funds, like none other—making the case that the Oklahoma chamber was the most aggressive and powerful in America at that time. The final vignette, San Diego, San Antonio (the Texan outlier), serves as our link to UR and its Part III evolution in the Sunbelt. The interplay between annexation/UR, business reformers and the rise of ethnic neighborhoods is a dynamic that will be an important element of Part III.

California UR: The Sacramento Plan and Tax Increment Financing

Stripped down to its barest essentials, the federal UR program marked the first time “direct” federal dollars could potentially be available to municipalities (bypassing the state) for non-housing urban physical redevelopment. Federal grants, however, were never “free” money. Mandates, hidden costs, required planning departments and redevelopment agencies, compliance costs and a local “match”—which varied over time. When a city engaged in an UR project, it paid its share of match and expenditures (Foard and Fefferman, 1966). How to raise funds—from taxes, begging the state government or taxpayer bond referendum—was a major concern, the last being an important reason why UR projects stalled. That concern generated a legislative response in California which led to one of our history’s most significant economic development tools: tax increment financing (TIF).⁵ It came out of Sacramento’s attempt to compete with Albany and Nelson Rockefeller’s Empire State Plaza.

In 1945 California authorized the local creation of quasi-government redevelopment authorities (RDAs) “to eliminate blight through development, reconstruction and rehabilitation of residential, commercial, industrial and retail districts”. The 1945 definition of blight was broad, not restricted to housing-related development. After passage of the 1949 Housing Act, lots of cities wanted in on the money. How they could pay their match and expenditures, given voter reluctance to approve bond referenda, prompted the California legislature (1950) to assemble a team of seven experts to recommend financing alternatives for local match. The team, of which Lyle Stewart was an important member,⁶ devised TIF and prepared the necessary legislation. The first step was a state constitutional amendment, which was successfully approved in 1951, followed in 1952 by passage of the nation’s first TIF enabling legislation. The early approval by California and the approval of TIF were key to Californian cities’ early participation in the UR CBD projects.

California linked TIF to areas characterized by “urban blight,” but in its first years only a few communities established redevelopment project areas; most project areas were small—typically 10 acres. Sacramento, however, became the pioneer. In 1950 it commenced its urban renewal involvement by declaring 60 blocks of its downtown blighted. The city embraced TIF and used it throughout the fifties. TIF, as used by Sacramento, was labeled the Sacramento Plan, capturing headlines mostly because it was the critical element of Governor Pat Brown’s “I can build bigger than you” counterpoint to Rockefeller’s 1952 Empire Plaza.⁷

Initially TIF deprived schools and service districts of their property tax receipts and was perceived by many Californians as anti-education. So, in 1972 TIF was “reformed”, required to share receipts with schools and service districts. Again, in 1976, the state legislature required at least 20 percent of TIF revenue from redevelopment areas be set aside for low-mod affordable housing. None of these reforms slowed TIF down. By 1976 there were 226 districts, some exceeding 2000 acres; by 1977 TIF RDAs collected 2 percent of the state-wide property tax (O’Malley, 2012, p. 3).

TIF was slow to diffuse to other states. As of 1968 it had been adopted by only six other states (Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming).⁸ After 1980, however, TIF spread rapidly, eventually approved in some form by 48 states. Something had happened—and that something was California’s Proposition 13.

Atlanta

In the 1930s Atlanta (270,000 residents, 32nd in the nation) entered the Age of Urban Renewal. In 1933 a major downtown property owner, Charles Palmer—hoping to create low-income housing for neighborhood residents adjacent to downtown—attracted business investors to form a “limited-dividend private corporation”. Acquiring New Deal PWA funds from NIRA, Palmer’s corporation constructed the nation’s first slum clearance/public housing project: Techwood Homes (for whites) and University Homes (for African-Americans), the former opening in 1935.

Whatever his private intentions, Palmer sold public housing to the community for reasons other than providing safe, quality housing for low-income disadvantaged residents. Palmer saw public housing as a means by which slums could be replaced and nearby property values protected. In 1938 Palmer was elected chairman of the chamber and, in the same year, successfully founded the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA)— which was largely independent of city government. By 1940 six projects capturing $21 million in federal funds built 4000 public housing units (segregated) and, by 1956, 13 projects (not including Techwood) had been completed. At that point (1956) the AHA ceased building public housing projects, pledging instead to pursue urban redevelopment. By that time, however, the AHA was one of the largest housing authorities in America, so aggressively had it utilized NIRA, the Housing Act and war production housing. As for Palmer, in 1942 he was tapped by FDR to head the federal war production housing program.

Why Atlanta aggressively built public housing needs to be better explained. Atlanta’s political leadership followed a strong and consistent principle to delegate programs where possible to the private sector. Palmer’s AHA was essentially a private EDO. Atlanta’s network of privately led EDOs was held together by its corporate/business community through the chamber (Henson and King, 1982, p. 309). In 1941, for example, the chamber established an autonomous subsidiary, the downtown Central Atlanta Improvement Association (CAP),⁹ led by major property owners: “With CAP, the major players could launch long-term planning and engage in sustained action in support of a comprehensive program of redevelopment” on their initiative and expense (Stone, 1989, p. 16). CAP concentrated on street/parking improvements, railroad viaduct construction and lobbying for downtown infrastructure bond referenda. When the city council delegated management of the Planning Commission to the chamber (1945), Atlanta had effectively privatized planning/economic development. The city did not establish any government body or office to monitor economic development/ planning until 1957.

Mayor Hartsfield and privatized ED and decentralization

In 1937 William Hartsfield, Atlanta’s best-known mayor, was first elected. Hartsfield, no public houser, served until 1961. Through the 1930s Atlanta, through annexation, countered suburban expansion. During the Depression/war (Hartsfield’s first three terms), however, annexation practically ceased—only 3 square miles were annexed. Decentralization did not threaten political or business leaders until the late forties, when too many of Hartsfield’s middle-class electoral coalition left for the burbs, increasing Hartsfield’s dependence on African-Americans. He attempted four times to annex adjacent areas and failed each time. So Hartsfield and the chamber brought in Thomas Reed (National Municipal League), who recommended city–county consolidation—which also came to a dead-end.

Atlanta’s first postwar crisis was a 1946 business-led highway plan. The Lochner Plan generated intense public and private debate/negotiation within Hartsfield’s coalition. It proposed slum removal to build highways and linked it with affordable new housing—to be available for blacks and whites (in separate neighborhoods). Behind the scenes negotiating between Hartsfield, the business elite and black leadership became the backdrop for public policy-making in Atlanta (Stone, 1989).

A major development was the successful 1947 approval of the Metropolitan Planning Commission (MPC). The MPC was a product of chamber, Greater Atlanta Association, Central Atlanta Improvement Association and other business organizations. They convinced the state legislature to grant the MPC varying powers throughout DeKalb and Fulton counties. Beginning operation in 1950 with shared funding (Atlanta 55 percent, Fulton 37 percent and DeKalb 8 percent), the MPC produced land use, water, transportation and sanitation plans, and set routes for an Atlanta beltway and future expressway system. Later Cobb, Clayton and Gwinnett counties were added.

The chamber in 1949 formed a blue-ribbon “Local Government Commission” to fabricate a long-term solution to decentralization: massive annexation. By this point, suburban counties were resistant to encroachment by the central city. The report which emerged was dubbed “the Plan of Improvement”. Hartsfield and the League of Women Voters climbed on board. The Plan of Improvement attracted sufficient black support not only to win a referendum, but also to achieve two signification ratification victories in the Georgia legislature. The Plan of Improvement was a game-changer for Atlanta: it tripled the size of the city from 37 to 118 square miles and added an estimated 100,000 (most white middle class) to the population.

Hartsfield retired in 1961, replaced by the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Ivan Allen Jr., who defeated Lester Maddox. Allen had supported school desegregation and, in 1961, proposed “an ambitious agenda of redevelopment” for his future administration.¹⁰

Good ol’ boys and UR

Allen’s “Six Point Program”, developed in his capacity as chamber president, called for schools, freeways, urban renewal, an auditorium-coliseum, a stadium, rapid transit— and “Forward Atlanta” (which had been founded by Ivan Allen Sr.). Allen Jr. was part of an informal Vault, a close-knit collection of top corporate CEOs who hung out at the chamber. In effect, his election as mayor fused chamber with city hall—retaining, however, Atlanta’s now-traditional inclusion of African-American leaders in decision-making. Allen left no doubt, however, as expressed in his inaugural address, that:

the first rule of thumb for any of the things that must be done in Atlanta is this: that in any area private enterprise can, and will undertake a project, this must be done … Your city administration will enter the picture only when … private enterprise cannot undertake those services and provide those facilities that Atlanta must have. (Henson and King, 1982, p. 300)

The power behind the informal Vault proved sufficient to overcome the inadequacies of a weak-mayor form of government—especially so in that most funds for its initiatives were from private sources. Except for schools, it was all economic development. The purpose was not to dominate suburbs; but rather economic growth was intended to propel Atlanta into its rightful place in the national competitive urban hierarchy. Under Allen and his chamber allies Atlanta would make “the big push” that would place it as the regional capital of the New South, and a first-tier city in America’s hierarchy. UR played an important, but essentially supportive role, in this big push.

Believing that if Atlanta was to achieve national status it must recruit major league sports, Allen, on the flimsiest handshake with Charles Finley (owner of the Kansas City, later Oakland, Athletics baseball franchise), secured private financing from a major local bank and built a new stadium in just 51 weeks after groundbreaking “on spec” on UR-designated land adjacent to downtown and three highways. When the stadium opened in 1965, Finley was long gone (he didn’t sell the A’s until 1980), but after law suits cleared up the following year, the Milwaukee Braves moved in. Playing alongside the Braves was a new National Football League (NFL) expansion team, the Atlanta Falcons. Two years later the St. Louis basketball team, now the Atlanta Hawks, arrived in town. Whatever its controversy within our profession, Allen and Atlanta demonstrated how vital sports teams and stadia can be to a city competing for a place in the urban hierarchy.

During the sixties, Atlanta privately erected 34 buildings of 15 plus stories. The most grandiose project was the Peachtree Center complex patterned after the Rockefeller Center. Over the next two decades, Peachtree accumulated planner/architectural criticism, but it built the foundation for Atlanta’s future convention and tourist industry. The project anchored what has become a mainstay of Atlanta’s economy, and figured prominently in its 1996 Olympics. The major UR project demolished the huge Buttermilk Bottom residential area and constructed the Civic Center and Auditorium, the Georgia Power Headquarters and the Bedford Pine residential area (which remained largely empty until 1980). A second UR project doubled the size of the Georgia Tech campus and expanded its physical plant greatly. The building boom continued through the 1970s, resulting in a city of nearly 500,000 and a metro area exceeding 2.1 million. An estimated 80–90 percent of the construction financing originated from non-southern sources (Rice, 1983, p. 39). Urban renewal’s role was largely restricted to assembling/ clearing residential slums and transferring land to private elites who built with their own or somebody else’s money.

During Allen’s administration, Atlanta economically and demographically exploded. Without question a “suburbanization simultaneous with CBD revitalization” occurred in the sixties, and would continue into the seventies. Not without issues, central city and suburbs were not engaged in a socio-economic arms race. Working through the Metropolitan Planning Council, the two geographies evolved into a polycentric metropolitan area. The spectacular growth of the central city made this possible. Affluence and growth, apparently, permitted Atlanta to evolve into its present-day metropolis.

Norfolk: Southern-Fried Urban Renewal

Norfolk Virginia is the more typical “southern” Age of UR city. Smaller cities have “smaller” corporate elites, but they are pragmatic—to the point of having slightly progressive tendencies. Important to us is how civil rights/desegregation affected the primacy of economic development in Norfolk’s policy agenda. This is very typical of the South, differentiating it from western cities.

Local politics and public housing

In 1930 Norfolk’s metro exceeded 262,000, with the city home to nearly 130,000 (62nd nationally). With an established naval base, Norfolk’s economy was military and its best period of pre-1940 growth was during World War I. By 1920 the city was split fairly evenly between black and white, but very segregated. Booker T. Washington’s black capitalist approach fostered black-owned small business and leadership (Lewis, 1991). Two annexations recaptured periphery expansion. The Norfolk city council/city manager was controlled by the state–Byrd machine’s local czar, the Clerk of Courts. The city’s business community did not include “large corporation elites” and was composed of local and regional businesses and professionals.

The 1934 Housing Act inspired local business Progressives to advocate for slum removal and public housing. The city manager formed a committee “to make a study of the slum districts of Norfolk with the hope of obtaining federal funds to eliminate them.”¹¹ A 1937 workshop followed from the committee’s report—which inspired the state to approve enabling legislation permitting localities to establish a local housing authority and participate in the federal program (1938). After a 1940 workshop held by the League of Virginia Municipalities, the Norfolk city council approved the Norfolk Housing Authority (NHA) in July 1940. The behind the scenes story was that public housing was driven by businessmen social reformers (like Palmer in Atlanta) who maneuvered the city council to create its “Committee on Slums” to deal with perceived crime. City leaders never embraced public housing per se. Reformers lobbied for three years before capitalizing on Richmond-generated momentum to establish the housing authority.

War years

With the war, a defense housing brouhaha commenced. Norfolk’s civilian population doubled to 259,000 by 1940, rising to 323,000 by 1942 and 365,000 in 1944.¹² Add 128,000 military and this population explosion was a tsunami, impacting severely the lifestyle (and mores) of its residents. Soldiers and sailors going to war inflated prices, fostered prostitution and gambling, trailer parks and incredibly cramped housing. The place was a “delight”; media and military pressures “stole” the housing authority, putting it to work building military-related “projects”. The war made the Navy Department and naval base leadership the most important administrative force in the area—the shore patrol, for example, was the only effective control on sailors.

Aside from public safety and morals, the most crushing problem was housing this mass of people. Remembering the crippling recession that followed World War, I the city council wanted nothing to do with building housing that would become vacant and have to be destroyed at war’s end, crushing tax revenues in the process. The result was a five-year battle between the local political leadership and the Navy Department over housing construction. Congress and the President got involved. The Navy Department in desperation sent our old friend, Robert Moses, down to do a study (1942) and a congressional subcommittee held hearings (1943) to add its two cents. The solution required the Navy to build huge amounts of on-base housing: 10,000 units by the federal Public Housing Department and a further 11,000 units privately built; the housing authority built fewer than 800 units. When the population onslaught became overwhelming in 1944, the city manager left town. The worthless reaction of the machine—its unwillingness to confront war-related problems—generated shame and demands for reform from Norfolk’s business community.

By war’s end that business community coalesced behind the “People’s Ticket”. In June 1946 they swept into office, carrying all but African-American precincts controlled by the machine (Abbott, 1981, pp. 127–8). Included in the People’s Ticket were the housing reformers who led the public housing/housing authority movement. Their first initiative removed machine influence by professionalizing the city’s bureaucracy. Creating a personnel department, a planning department and various other departments, and conducting a national search for a new professional city manager resulted in a policy system change. Included in these reforms was creation of the Norfolk Port Authority, meant to be their EDO.¹³ Taking advantage of Virginia’s 1949 Housing Act, Norfolk expanded the NHA’s scope, renaming it the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority (NRHA). Immediately, the NHA submitted an application for 3428 units of federal public housing that required a 190-acre slum clearance. The NRHA believes their application was the first funded from the 1949 Housing Act.

UR meets school desegregation

And that was that! Following motivations my research has not uncovered, the People’s Ticket struck a deal (1950) with the Byrd machine for machine support of CBD redevelopment. In subsequent elections, a “Harmony Ticket” controlled city council and city politics. The professional city manager resigned in 1952 and Mayor Fred Duckworth ran the city government. Over the next 15 years, the city pursued a vigorous urban renewal program, using federal funds.

In the back of [Duckworth’s] mind was a vision of metropolitan Norfolk as a major financial center able to compete equally with other South Atlantic cities … the development strategy [included] new housing, new business investment, a new airport, a four-year college, new highways, new tunnels—All promised to supplant sour wartime memories with the shining steel and solid concrete of new Norfolk. (Abbott, 1981, p. 129)

School desegregation intruded. Initially, Norfolk followed Byrd machine dictates— bitterly contesting court orders and closing down the school system for part of a year (1959). The city council participated actively in the anti-desegregation resistance. CBS’s  Edward  R.  Murrow  dramatically  reported  Norfolk’s  intransigence,  and  the Progressive business community came back to life. Taking an ad in the main newspaper, “one hundred leading business and professional men” opposed the city’s position and urged compromise to keep the schools open—and desegregated. The schools opened a week later—desegregated. In local historiography the “Committee of 100” is given major credit for resolving the school crisis and pointing Norfolk back towards its primary goal of economic development. The Committee of 100 took over the NRHA, returning it to CBD-focused urban renewal. Enjoying some success electorally in 1959, however, the Byrd machine renegotiated a 1961 equivalent of the Harmony Ticket and maintained its control over the council (Abbott, 1981, pp. 130–31). Again, the core of the deal was Norfolk urban redevelopment.

Before school desegregation hit the agenda, two renewal projects removed (1) a bi-racial working-class neighborhood of 600 families, installing highway access to the CBD; and (2) the wartime sailors’ downtown red-light district. Following school desegregation, subsequent urban renewal initiatives cleared areas for privately financed banking and high-rise office buildings and company headquarters, as well as new municipal buildings, a library and some public housing. Also constructed were luxury apartments and medical buildings associated with a hospital expansion, and a downtown shopping center. During these years “the urban renewal program enjoyed almost complete support as a symbol of a city on the make”. Worth noting is that the same individuals who had pushed for the 1940 housing authority remained in charge of the NRHA in the 1960s. Also noteworthy is that Mayor Duckworth, a unanimous city council and regional newspapers stood behind the program.

In the early sixties, the NRHA launched an “image” program, urging outsiders to create a “vision in Virginia”. The image initiative counteracted negative school desegregation publicity, but also demonstrated to the world that Norfolk had made it. In the later sixties, the NRHA again built middle-class housing downtown, demolishing an African-American neighborhood, to support downtown retail (Abbott, 1981, p. 129).

Oklahoma City

We introduced chamber CEO Stanley Draper back in Chapter 13. He’s back. Chapter 13 described an Oklahoma City policy system almost totally controlled by a triumvirate: city manager, corporate and media CEO and Draper. In 1948 Oklahoma City’s downtown retail businesses garnered a whopping 75 percent of the metro area retail sales; by 1965 this was down to 11 percent, and 77 downtown businesses closed their doors. True to form, however, Draper had his eye on this eastern UR thing, earmarking it as a possible source of funds for an increasingly deteriorating and declining downtown. School desegregation (the 1954 Brown decision) did not go smoothly in Oklahoma City. But businessmen urged racial moderation so as not to threaten economic and population growth. The disruption temporarily sidelined Draper’s ED program. Early in 1957 Draper sent a delegation to Pittsburgh to study the Golden Triangle project. The delegation apparently liked what they saw, and Draper spent two years securing state passage of UR-enabling legislation (1959).

His first steps (1961) included forming an urban renewal agency and stocking it with proceeds from a $39 million bond issue. Like many western cities in the postwar period, however, the triumvirate’s power over policy was challenged. In 1962 citizens—mostly middle class, professionals and businesspeople—formed the Association for Responsible Government (ARG), recruiting 5000 members. The ARG was concerned with government inefficiency, corruption and independence from the cabal. In 1963 the reformers took over the city council—just in time to deal with Draper’s UR initiative. The city council appointed several non-cabal board members to the Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority (OCURA), sparking a brouhaha between council, Draper and cabal.

For several years the ARG-dominated council sometimes worked with Draper’s cabal, sometimes not, on issues such as school desegregation, reapportionment that favored suburbs, and even directly challenging Draper’s government facility-based economic development program (opposing the FAA facility). Regarding UR, however, the ARG mostly let Draper have his way with OCURA. The Oklahoma City UR plan, drafted by Pei & Associates in 1964, encompassed a huge area. Oklahoma City UR subsequently demolished (without federal funds) nearly the entirety of the downtown and East Side. The chamber in 1966 installed its general council as OCURA’s executive director.

In 1967 the newspaper owner and cabal member E.K. Gaylord, having had enough of LBJ’s Great Society “creeping socialism”, attacked key ARG leaders, alleging their involvement in UR-related city contracts. Whatever its merits, the ensuing scuffle fragmented the ARG, reducing its political influence. While of no consequence to the UR program, UR proved to be a useful pretext for reasserting the cabal’s control over Oklahoma City politics. Returned to power, Oklahoma City’s UR cranked into high gear. To provide working capital Draper’s chamber formed a subsidiary, the Urban Action Foundation (UAF), to not only extend funds and credit to OCURA but also to serve as the chamber’s monitor of program implementation.

Draper’s initial UR project application (1963) proposed extension of the University of Oklahoma’s Medical Center into predominantly black, East Side neighborhoods. Submitted during the last days of the Kennedy administration, the proposal was finally approved by HUD in December 1967. Oklahoma City’s first UR project began in 1968 and involved 30 new or renovated downtown buildings.

urban renewal completely leveled the core of the city to replace the old buildings with modern structures … OCURA funded buildings, streets, parks, heating systems and an underground walkway. By 1980, the Authority had spent some $500 million ($300 million downtown) … and construction of 786 housing units. (Bernard, 1983, p. 230)

Oklahoma City UR persisted through most of the 1970s, picking up steam with a new ally—Patience Latting, the city’s first woman mayor. Independent of Draper and the cabal, Latting pursued on her own initiative, an intense ED strategy:

Through the Latting Years [1973-83] … one word captured … Oklahoma City politics and life. Growth, unchallenged and unquestioned has summarized the desires of most citizens of central Oklahoma. An inscription at the base of a downtown memorial … best expresses the city’s mood: “Passerby—Look about you and ask this question: Where else within a single life span has man built so mightily.” (Bernard, 1983, p. 231)

San Diego

San Diego wound up not accepting federal UR dollars. The Californian city is far from Houston or Dallas; it had a long history of courting federal fortress California dollars, as recounted in several earlier chapters. City business leaders desperately wanted to rebuild its downtown to accommodate its postwar growth. What gives?

Center City initiative

The need for downtown focus was evident enough that the chamber in 1952 spun off the San Diego Downtown Association (SDDA). The SDDA’s purpose was to organize/ coordinate downtown merchants to better compete with suburban malls. Downtown retail sales were SDDA’s benchmark, and virtually all its initiatives (Dollar Days, Recognition Day and Window Display Contests) focused on sales and making downtown a convenient, safe and attractive place to shop. SDDA members (235 in 1955) were primarily tenants with little concern for anything other than immediate cash register sales.

For corporate CEOs and CBD property owners this retail focus would not do the trick of competing with suburban malls. CBD physical redevelopment was for them a prerequisite for CBD revitalization. So SDDA established a committee, headed by a prominent business leader, Joseph Jessop Sr., to develop recommendations. Jessop did not have cooperation from either the city council or the mayor, both of whom did not trust business leaders and were reluctant to violate the area’s low-tax culture by spending money to rehab the downtown. With SDDA more an anchor than a help, in 1958-59 Jessop incorporated a second downtown EDO, San Diegans, Inc. (SDI). SDI pledged to address the “economic health of the entire community [which] rested upon an alive, vigorous, aggressive core area in the heart of the city”. Membership was restricted to key and powerful business leaders “who had the authority to speak on behalf of their organizations without having to report to a superior”. They met five times, prepared a plan of action and contemplated hiring a Chicago-based consultant to study the downtown. The sixth meeting was restricted to those members who “brought their checkbooks” (Reiner, 1990, pp. 1–2). San Diego had started its downtown revitalization (1959). SDI raised the money carry out the plan.

The consultant’s report was reconfigured into SDI’s Centre City initiative. The initiative, stressed an augmented downtown tourist and visitor strategy: it called for a new city hall, convention center and performing arts center cluster as the basis for an application for federal urban renewal funds. Conducting information meetings, traveling to UR projects in Sacramento and Mexico City, prepared the way for a formal UR request to the city council (1960). The first step in the UR application was a formal city plan, which the council agreed to fund in 1961: “Eight months later the City Planning Department unveiled a scale model of Centre City … the pivotal point … was the construction of a Community Concourse composed of a convention hall, a city hall, and a performing arts center” (Reiner, 1990, p. 4). So far, so good.

The city council purchased four CBD blocks and authorized a bond referendum to pay for the project. The referendum failed in 1962 (the fifth time San Diegans voted down a referendum financing a convention center); it also rejected establishing a redevelopment agency, and refused to authorize an application for UR funds. The key issue for voter rejection involved the city’s use of federal funds, which to them meant red tape, inefficient, more expensive and untimely construction of the project, and restrictions on how the money would be spent. This, on top of the traditional unwillingness to raise taxes to pay for the issued bonds, conveyed to voters a sense that urban renewal meant of loss of the city’s ability to control and manage the project. Reacting to the bond initiative’s failure, the city council borrowed from city pension funds, but fell seriously short of raising funds sufficient to proceed. City Centre appeared stillborn (Corso, 1983, pp. 332–3).

At that critical juncture, SDI formed a fundraising committee and raised the additional funds needed for the project to proceed ($1.6 million). SDI gifted the funds to the city on the pledge that construction of City Centre would proceed. Accordingly, construction of a new downtown civic center, Community Concourse, began in 1962. Almost immediately, $38 million of pent-up private CBD building projects broke ground simultaneously with the Centre City project—and the skyline of modern San Diego came into place over the next three years. No request for federal UR funding was ever made. But we have not completed our story.

San Diego UR at the cusp of ED change

Despite an aggressive annexation program (previous to 1965 the city had annexed over 305 square miles) suburbanization was accelerating, while the city grew by leaps and bounds (by the mid-1980s suburbs totaled 1.1 million). In the 1960s a cost-conscious central city voter and city council member was of two minds with aggressive annexation as the city’s chief anti-suburbanization strategy. CBD revitalization, on the policy back-burner with the completion of the City Concourse project, seemed to some a more attractive alternative.

So in 1965 a new business group, San Diegans for Progress through Planned Development, replaced SDI. City Planning came up with a new CBD plan intended for a federal UR application. The re-jiggered plan to fight “blight in deteriorated areas” in and around the downtown was accepted by the city council in 1965, and the whole shebang was resubmitted for voter approval. The voters dutifully and soundly rejected the second urban renewal application and city plan 66,000 to 29,500. In the same referendum, the voters approved a baseball stadium “heavily dependent on federal funds [transportation] to build freeways to the ball park”. Oh well!

Business leaders again regrouped, picked up the city plan and in 1966 submitted it to Mayor Frank Curran, who approved a new referendum—with one deletion. All references to urban renewal and federal funds were removed. The San Diegans for Progress hired a PR firm, developed collateral materials and conducted the campaign. In November 1966, the referendum was approved (Corso, 1983, p. 333).

The next year, subsidized by substantial federal funds ($2 million), San Diego launched a Great Society community planning initiative and hired planners to develop neighborhood plans. At the same time, a Citizens Committee of 100 led by Bea Evenson, a community activist, formed to pursue historic preservation, parks development and cultural enhancement (preserve the 1916 World’s Fair buildings, for example), with great success—almost all of these activities were substantially financed with federal funds. Two points follow:

1. Urban renewal and CBD redevelopment were not the only economic development-related programs ongoing at this time.
2. The community did not reject the use of federal funds per se, but rather was rejecting urban renewal program/funds.

San Diego economic development was in the process of being redefined into something new.

Still the 1967 city plan was a success: it provided a foundation for San Diego’s future growth management planning; but, as a spur to CBD redevelopment, little happened. The Community Concourse/Centre City Project, meant to jump-start CBD redevelopment, petered out after the initial construction burst. The CBD continued along its path of relentless decline. In November 1971, however, a young liberal Republican, Pete Wilson, was elected mayor. A redefined San Diego UR was about to accompany the new policy system he brought into office.

NOTES

1. James Curley ran a scheme whereby each year business obtained one year’s tax abatement (in 1949 that scheme eliminated 11.6 percent of Boston’s entire tax levy). Few records were kept, and those that were found were allegedly written in pencil (McQuade, 1966, p. 262).
2. One of John Hancock’s tenants was to be the American Research and Development Corporation (America’s first venture capital firm, a spinoff from Harvard and MIT) and principal funder of Route 128 firms.
3. The famous Faneuil Hall Rouse Marketplace project was developed in the late 1970s and will be discussed in a later chapter. In 1960 Faneuil Hall was designated a historic landmark, and in 1964 was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
4. In 1973 the Philadelphia Movement merged with the Philadelphia Partnership, becoming the Greater Philadelphia Partnership.

5. TIF authorizes the issue of debt (project bonds) for project improvements in a defined geographic “district” which is secured/collateralized by growth/increase of sales and/or property taxes generated by the project from a base period (the “increment”) over the life of the project bond. It is usually accompanied by property/sales tax abatement/payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT).
6. Colorado-born Stewart was an architect, teaching urban design at the University of Southern California (USC). He moved to Oregon in 1964 and became a major proponent of TIF there (Oregon approved TIF in 1960). See Johnson and Tashman (2002).
7. In 1962 California became the nation’s most populous state, beating out New York.
8. “Learning from Experience: A Primer on Tax Increment Financing”, Fiscal Brief, New York City Independent Budget Office, September, 2002, p. 2.
9. The Central Atlanta Improvement Association (Downtown Improvement District 1955) is today’s Central Atlanta Progress, Atlanta’s private downtown EDO (www.atlantadowntown.com).
10. Allen, owner of an office supply firm and a member of the influential Commerce Club, on his first day in office removed the “white” and “colored” signs from city hall. Allen would be the only major southern politician to speak in favor of LBJ’s 1964 civil rights legislation.
11. History of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, http://www.nrha.us/about/history.
12. IBID.
13. In 1952 the state created the Virginia Port Authority, which took over the facilities of Norfolk, Hampton Roads, Newport News and Virginia Beach.